B&B Smeraldo Airport

We felt trapped in what seemed like a prison. The bars were fixed on the windows and on the door to the fire escape stairs, so from the third-floor bedroom we'd have had to jump out the window if there was a fire. I couldn't find a single good thing to say about the apartment. The polished photos and blog on the official sites don't show the truth. They must be years old. We were never meant to stay there in the first place. We'd booked another apartment through Expedia in Oct 2017, and had stayed in that one in 2016. Just an hour after landing in Bergamo at 6.20pm, its owner sent me a text, without any explanation, saying, "I need to give you another apartment". We were shocked, tired, hungry, and travel-weary, in a foreign country where we didn't speak the language. Late in the evening, we felt we had no choice but to go along with it. If there was a genuine problem with the original apartment, I expected at least a place on a par with it, or better. The replacement couldn't have been further from that. As soon as we walked in, we wanted to turn around and catch the next plane home. The woman who let us down and the owner of this apartment didn't even come to meet us. The man who let us in didn't speak English, so we couldn't explain our many complaints. The place was dirty, dated, gloomy, and dangerous, with basic holiday-apartment items missing: a shower curtain, toilet rolls, shower gel, bath mat, tea towels, dish cloths, an iron, and more. It clearly hadn't been cleaned in a long time. Kitchen cupboards had out-of-date, half-used greasy bottles and jars of who knows what, plus a half bag of congealed sugar stuck to a shelf. The dishes, cutlery, and pans were just as bad, a grubby, stained, worn-out mismatch that we couldn't and wouldn't use to cook or eat. There wasn't even a kettle, tea, or coffee to make a hot drink. The bathroom was a joke. We had to shower in the bathtub without a curtain. When we complained repeatedly, we were told, "that's the way it is just let water go on the floor- the made will clean it up". They really thought it was acceptable for a group of pensioners to shower that way and wade through soapy puddles whenever we needed the bathroom. We never saw the maid once. We had to take towels from the landing below, put them in the bath and spread them on the floor because we weren't willing to risk our safety. The wet towels were still there when we came back in the evening. The bedding was old, tatty, and torn. The paintwork was dirty and there was dust everywhere. The sofas were grubby, uncomfortable, and past their best. A travel cot was stuck in the middle of the living room, and the cupboards and drawers were full of junk and personal things. Then on the second night we found out the original apartment was occupied by someone else, even though we'd been told we couldn't stay there because "there was a huge problem with the bathroom". Think I need to write another negative review!