TL;DR
BEWARE! Stay away from Alaska Redfish Lodge and do not…read moreconduct any business with the owner Steven F Stuber. The place is messy, unorganized. The lodge is quite a 10 min walk to the river. The common area had flies and smelled like dead fish. Steven is an emotionally unstable person ready to snap at any moment.
Full Story:
We booked two nights stay for 2 adults, 2 kids, and 1 infant on Friday evening to go to Sterling for some fishing on a weekend Saturday-Monday. Our full booking price was about $320 ($129 per night plus fees) which we thought was odd as the Airbnb calendar showed $89. Anyway, we booked it and got all the confirmation information. Approximately at 1 AM we get an email from Steven the owner saying he is fully booked and unable to honor the reservation. We called Steven in the morning to clear things up as the reservation was already confirmed. He started blaming Airbnb for not honoring the blocked out dates saying this happens once in a while and there is no way he can give us a cabin on these dates and that he didn't want to lose his "Super host" status on Airbnb. We asked to cancel, he convinced us to continue with the reservation and that we would get a good deal.
I had a bad feeling about it but felt bad for him and agreed to his offer.
We moved the dates from Saturday to Sunday-Tuesday. It was inconvenient for us as kids are in school but we said we can manage and adjust our schedule. He asked us to move our date to just one night and refund the difference, in his system he would block out two nights for us. Our new total was going to be $94 for two nights. Not bad.
He was very friendly on the phone and kept reiterating that he is willing to go far and beyond to make us whole. He also stated that he usually does not let five people stay and is willing to make an exception for us. This was very odd as we put five people in AirBnB and did not conceal the baby. I told him I am planning to do a lot of fishing. He said he will give me all the gear and even upgrade us to a bigger cabin that has a full-size refrigerator, and a loft area. We were excited!
We get there on Sunday at 3:50 PM, check-in was at 3. The lovely cleaning lady which is potentially his wife, not sure, asked us if we were checking in. She said that we are staying in cabin 7 and that it was not ready for us. We thought that was odd as I expected that Steven would make our experience great as he promised. We said we can wait 30 minutes for the room to be cleaned up.
I called Steven just in case he had told me that we are staying in cabin 8 and that he would make it to the property at ~5:30. We go to the cabin the lady said the keys were inside, I spend five minutes looking for the key, could not find it. She said she can bring it to us and she did. I started looking for the wifi password, could not find it anywhere on the wall. The lady did not know the password. I had to text Steven and he gave it to me over text. I thought it was odd that it's not printed in most normal places. There was no welcome package or welcome tour at all. Oh well. The wifi did not work inside cabin 8 but did barely work right outside. The TV did not have Netflix or cable even though it was connected. The knives in the kitchen were dirty, otherwise, the room was decent. It was NOT the room that Steven had promised us that had a loft with a full-size fridge, but I did not bother to call him as he seemed to be in a bad mood.
We went to the playground, it had a very strong smell of pigsty as there was one behind it, the common area had a full trashcan of beercans and the fire pit was all covered in flies. It was pretty disgusting. I did a little fishing and we came back. I made a mental note that the experience so far was a bit odd. No welcoming, confusion with the keys, no wifi password printed, no TV and smelly, and dirty common area.
Steven had returned at this point but did not bother to greet us. We did not feel welcome at all. I asked the lady if she can call Steven over as I had questions around processing my fish. She said he was upstairs but did not want to call him over. I thought it was odd, she instructed us to call him on his cell instead. He came out, I had asked him to use the coolers as he promised he said I could. He had combative body language but was answering all my questions.
He told me to process the fish and leave it on the cooler pointing to it. He had instructed me to write my name on it and leave the tag. I did, he IMMEDIATELY said "What are you doing?!" is this your cooler?! I said it's empty and you pointed to it, he goes oh ok I wanted to make sure it was not someone else's. Mmm okay.
the review got cut off here's the rest: https://gist.github.com/lpizzle/c5361eeecf94d79bb64102bd869ed998