Luxury living in Rio de Janeiro

19 Apr

So you’ve decided to travel to Rio de Janeiro and enjoy the famous beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana. Sure you could get yourself a hotel or an apartment in the inner city, but isn’t beaches what Rio is all about? Besides, the city has a reputation of serious safety issues, so you don’t want to stay just anywhere. Sure there are other beaches, but who would go to Rio and stay in the suburbs? Besides, most hotels are in the city anyways.

So you start looking at the accommodation prices through the internet. You start feeling poor. The pricing is pretty wild: an apartment without a balcony costs 200 dollars/night, but yet you could get an apartment with a private pool for 260 dollars. The odd thing is that most rental agencies don’t publish their prices on their webpages. You can get them only by asking. And our guess is that the price depends on who’s asking…

Since there’s not that much difference between an apartment with a pool and without a pool in the building you start thinking, maybe I should just invest in a pool. We have a baby on board after all, and it would be so much nicer and easier to take him swimming in a pool instead of the big waves of the ocean.

You consider the safety issues (again, with the baby you don’t want to live in a dodgy neighborhood) and research shows that Ipanema (or Leblon) would be the safest neighborhoods, unless you want to try some of the flashier suburbs further up the coast. So you decide to stay in Ipanema: you would have wanted that anyways, since there’s a song about it and everything 🙂

Anything in Ipanema area and with a pool in the building seems to go by the name on “Luxury Flat”. There is an avid rental scene, but you have heard wild stories about it: some guy rented an apartment in Rio through the internet and once he got there he found out that the address didn’t exist.

We considered our options of spending part of our holiday just looking for an apartment and opted to take the risk buy renting the apartment in advance, even though we had to pay 30% of the rent before even having seen the flat. This seems to be the name of the game in any apartment rental company in Rio.

At least the apartment was in the address that it was supposed to be and the keys were left at the doorman (we had expected someone to be there to meet us and show us the apartment, but she showed up the day after our arrival…)

So what do you get for 240 dollars per night in Ipanema? In our case a very nice view on the Ipanema beach from the 15th floor and also a great view on the Jesus statue, though if it wasn’t even advertised. There is a maid service 3 times per week. A friendly doorman. Of course the apartment is smaller than it looks in the pictures. It’s clean and decorated nicely, but from cheap materials that deteriorate fast.

We stayed in two different apartments in this same building. In the other the balcony of the 19th floor was plastic and so weak that leaning against it bent it dangerously. The lamps of the living room and dining area weren’t working.

In the other the door handles are fixed in odd positions, facing up or down (a couple of them also facing where they should…). Our bedroom door couldn’t be closed, because when you push the handle inside, the handle outside that is facing wring direction, moves and blocks the door… The inside handle falls off  every time you turn it, as does the handle of the front door. The door of the other bath room doesn’t close at all. In the other bathroom you don’t get any hot water to the shower. In the other bathroom you do get hot water, but the plumming doesn’t work so you can spend maximum 5 minutes in the shower to avoid flooding. After that you have to wait at least 30 minutes for the water level to lower before the next person can take a shower… Consequently there is bad moist damage in the walls around the bathrooms. The kitchen has only 1 shampagne glass and 2 tea spoons. Odd, if you think that the apartment is supposed to be equipped for 4 people.

You’d kind of think that for 240 dollars per night you’d get better quality than that, wouldn’t you?

The worst discovery was that there’s no pool after all: the pool area has been under construction for over 3 months now, but the rental agency still advertises a pool, sauna and gym in the building. And prices the apartment accordingly. When we asked for a compensation for this, they refused to give any. I was ready to rise to the barricades, refuse to pay the rest of the rent and take my stuff to a hotel with a pool, but my travel companions told me I was being a party pooper and accused for spoiling the holiday mood. So we stayed. It’s the Finnish way of doing things: if you’ve been treated wrongly, don’t fuss about it. Just don’t go there / buy that / eat there anymore. As if most people would go to Rio more than once in their life time anyways… This is probably why the rental agencies can offer poor quality: there will always be new people coming and after one visit they won’t be seen again, no matter how good your service has been. So why to bother?

I guess we should feel lucky that the apartment actually existed in the first place and looked more or less like in the pictures. But I think if there ever will be a next time, we should opt for a hotel…

2 Responses to “Luxury living in Rio de Janeiro”

  1. Dance Fitness & Travel April 22, 2011 at 1:36 am #

    The agency we used was called Rentals Rio (http://www.rentalsrio.com/). They also went by another name in the internet, I think it was Rio Holidays. The only thing that really worked was the cleaning, everything else was more or less dodgy. They had an active customer service until they had your credit card number, after that that Mr. Flavio was not too interested. Nobody was at the apartment upon our arrival to explain us how things worked: they had just left us a key at the doorman. Nobody also came to check us out, even though they had said that somebody would and sent us an email confirming it in the morning of the day we were supposed to leave. We got no compensation for the lack of pool facilities that were one of key features we had been looking for in an apartment. I would not recommend anybody using their services.

  2. Dance Fitness & Travel April 22, 2011 at 1:40 am #

    We had a bad experience in Rio, but in Buenos Aires everything worked great with the local rental agency, ByT Argentina! I can highly recommend their service: http://www.bytargentina.com/

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