Maverick Suites at 402 Columbus Ave

Blue bikes are right in front of the apartment, and we had no complaints about cleaning. The location is great and the cutlery was good, which kept me from rating the place lower, but the price is too high to make those things enough. Our room code didn't match the one we were given. The bathroom is shared with everyone along the corridor, and its code didn't match our room either. The fridge was set wrong and acted more like a freezer, plus it was really noisy at night. The Wi-Fi often rejected us when we returned to the room and the signal could be weak.

The neighborhood was nice and convenient, with a parking garage five minutes away and the Royale about a 15-minute walk. But the room itself was in rough shape. The furniture was old, creaky, and falling apart, like a college dorm, and there were old nails sticking out of the brick beside the bed. The pillows were awful, even though there were five. The listing said complimentary water, but there wasn't any. The extra blanket was a movers blanket. The bathroom fan was loud, the walls were thin, and a gap above the door let us hear the whole floor. Earplugs were provided. I booked the deluxe suite and can only imagine the others. It was cold, too. They had a space heater, but it didn't help unless you stood right in front of it because the ceilings are high. The built-in AC/heating unit was broken. I wouldn't have booked if I knew this was an AirBnB. We arrived at 3:40 and another guest let us in. We asked where the front desk was, and that's when we learned they had booked on Airbnb and found the number to call posted in the hall. It would've been hard to see if that guest hadn't let us in. I never received the pre-check-in email I was supposed to get. The concierge texted me a link, then we waited for the code to work at the 4 o'clock check-in time. The front door code worked after five minutes, but the suite code didn't. We called back, got another code that still failed, and were told someone would come help before the concierge hung up. Twelve minutes later, they called again and gave us a code that worked.

The location was great, but that was about it. The rooms were clean enough, though clearly very old. Nobody had made it clear that our bathroom was across the communal hall rather than in our room. The aircon was loud and the Wi-Fi slow. Check-in was absolutely terrible. The door code we got was wrong, and it took about three hours to get the correct one. We also needed a different code for our separate bathroom. A couple arriving at the same time had the exact same problem, and we ended up asking a stranger on the street to call the host and sort it out.

No elevator, so keep the floor in mind when choosing a room. The place was clean and quiet, with a bathroom in the room and a mini kitchen. Great communication, and the location felt safe, was easy to get around on foot, and wasn't too far from train lines. We rented through airbnb and would highly recommend it.