There’s a particular kind of good week that only an apartment gives you.
Coffee in a kitchen you can actually cook in. Laundry done on a Tuesday because you wanted to travel carry-on only. A window that opens onto a street where people live rather than one that’s hermetically sealed. All of the reasons you booked an apartment instead of a hotel room.
That week is the point. Everything below exists to protect it.
Because here’s the thing about a rental: you find out for sure what you’ve got after you’ve arrived. And there’s a short window, right at the start, when anything that isn’t right is easy to fix, the host is still awake and still glad to hear from you, and nobody’s stay has been spoiled yet.
That window is about ten minutes long. Spend it, and the rest of the week belongs to you.
We learned this in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The apartment looked great. But my ten-minute check turned up a lot of lights that didn’t work and a lot of sockets that were dead. It’s the sort of thing you don’t notice while you’re admiring the view, and very much notice at nine at night.
This is the after-you-arrive half. If you haven’t booked yet, the before-you-book half is in my free guide How to Spot a Bad Airbnb Listing Before You Book, which is where I’d start.
If someone hands you the keys, let them help
Before anything else, it matters how you’re checking in.
If a host or a manager meets you there, you’ve got the easiest version of this. A good host will walk you around and show you all of it unprompted: how the shower works, which switch does what, the trick with the front door, where the trash goes. That’s just what a good host does.
If they don’t offer, just ask. “Could you show me how everything works before you go?” is a completely normal question and I’ve never had a host mind. They’d far rather spend five minutes now than get a message at eleven at night.
If it’s self check-in, all of this is yours to do. Which is fine. It’s ten minutes and you can do it with your coat still on.
Is this the apartment you booked?
Start here, because everything else depends on it.
Open the listing on your phone and stand in the living room with it. Same furniture, same layout, same view out of the same window?
Rentals do get quietly swapped. A host with several units in one building puts you in a different one, or the photos are of the nicest apartment in the block and yours isn’t it. Sometimes there’s a perfectly good reason and they meant to tell you.
Check the unit number against your booking too. If it’s different that’s not automatically a problem, but it’s automatically a question, and it’s a much easier one to ask now than after you’ve hung up your clothes.
Run the water, all of it
Turn the shower on and leave it running while you do everything else in this article.
You’re checking four things and only one of them is instant: how’s the water pressure, does hot water arrive, how long does it take, and does it keep coming. A shower that gives you a trickle, or that runs hot for four minutes and then goes cold, is something you’d far rather learn now than on day two with shampoo in your hair.
And sometimes the fix is as simple as a switch. “Turn on the water heater using the switch in the bathroom” or “flip the fuse labeled hot water” solves this more often than you’d think.
While that’s running, turn on the kitchen tap and both bathroom taps. Flush the toilet. Have a quick look under the sink for anything damp, because finding a leak now beats finding it when the floor is soaking.
Make it a habit and you stop thinking about it, which is the whole idea.
Test the internet properly, not by looking at the bars
“Wifi included” tells you a network exists. It doesn’t tell you it works.
Connect, then run an actual speed test, standing where you’d really use it. The sofa and the bedroom are frequently different numbers from three feet from the router.
Look at the upload speed, not just the download. Everybody quotes the download figure, but a video call runs on upload, and that’s the one that turns you into a frozen face on a screen. If you’re going to work from here, or call home, or send photos to the family, that’s the number that decides whether this apartment can do it.
If it’s poor, say so now. There’s often a second network, or the router’s been moved, or a reset fixes it. All five-minute jobs, and all of them only happen if you ask.
Check the things you chose this place for
Everybody books a rental for a reason. There were features that made you pick this one over the others.
The washing machine. The kitchen you were going to cook in. The balcony. The desk. The air conditioning. The bath.
Go and confirm they’re there and they work. This is the highest-value check in the article, because it’s the one whose absence actually changes your week rather than annoying you.
“Equipped kitchen” can mean a kettle and one saucepan. A washing machine can be present and broken. Air conditioning can be a unit on the wall that hasn’t run since 2019. None of that is malice, it’s just that the listing was written by somebody who wanted you to book it.
Find it working and you’ve confirmed the reason you came. Find it not working on the first evening and there’s usually still something a host can do.
Look at the bed, and open a window
Listings are vaguest exactly where it matters most.
“Sleeps four” is a claim about how many bodies fit, not about beds. Two beds can turn out to be two singles pushed together with a ridge down the middle, or a sofa bed nobody mentioned. Sit on the mattress. Look at the pillows, because a place can be lovely and still hand you four flat squares of foam.
Then open a window for thirty seconds and listen.
Photographs are silent. A bar downstairs, a road you couldn’t see from the balcony shot, a construction site next door, church bells or a mosque with an enthusiastic schedule, an air conditioning unit mounted outside the bedroom. None of it shows up in a listing and all of it shows up at six in the morning.
Noise is the one where finding out on night one genuinely changes things. A host can often move you, or has a fan, or knows the bells stop at eight. And I travel with wax earplugs precisely because some of this isn’t fixable and I’d rather solve it in ten seconds than lie there resenting a church.
Heating, cooling, and how they’re controlled
Find the thermostat or the remote before you need it, and make sure you can work it.
This sounds trivial right up until you’re somewhere cold at eleven at night, with a heating system labeled in a language you don’t read and a host who’s gone to bed.
European heating in particular can be genuinely unintuitive. Radiator valves, a boiler on a timer, a switch in a cupboard that has to be on before anything else does anything.
Photograph it before you touch anything
Same habit as a rental car, and the same two minutes.
Walk through with your phone and photograph each room, then anything already wrong. The scuffed floor, the cracked tile, the stain on the sofa arm, the chip in the counter.
This isn’t about expecting a fight, and you almost certainly won’t have one. It’s that a deposit question weeks later is settled by whoever has evidence, and the arriving guest is the only person in the whole transaction who can create it.
Two minutes buys you a conversation that never becomes your word against theirs.
Ask the day-one questions now
There’s a short list I always ask on day one, if the host hasn’t already made it clear in messages or in the house or apartment manual.
- Where does the trash go, and is there a collection day
- What do I do if I lose the key
- Is there a trick to the shower, the oven, the washer, the front door
- What’s the current wifi password if I couldn’t log in during my check
- Is there anything about the building I should know
That last one earns its place. Hosts often volunteer something genuinely useful: the lift’s out this week, there’s work going on next door, the neighbor works nights.
The other ten minutes
Everything above is about the apartment. There’s a second pass that’s about you, and it’s a completely different list.
It’s the one for a ground-floor apartment, a late arrival on your own, or the place that’s lovely and something still feels slightly off. Entry points, the way out, and whether the room is as it should be.
That one is Safety Checklist 02 in The Smart Woman’s Guide to Safer Travel, and it runs inside the same ten minutes. It’s $19.99 and it’s an instant download.
This article gets you an apartment that works. That checklist gets you one you can relax in.
If something isn’t right
Most of what you find in ten minutes is small, and most hosts fix small things quickly, because they want the same good week you do. Message them through the platform rather than by text, calmly and specifically, and say when you’d like it sorted out. Keeping it in the platform costs you nothing and leaves a record nobody has to reconstruct later.
In that Mostar apartment, the host did everything he could. He called in an electrician. But the fix needed parts that were days away, so Airbnb rebooked us into a different apartment.
That worked because we did it in the right order. If a stay is genuinely unlivable, the platform can move you, refund you or cover somewhere else, but there’s a sequence to it, and people who get it backwards end up paying for their own replacement apartment. The exact order is in The No-Regrets Guide to Booking Airbnbs the Right Way, in a box, because it’s the one thing I’d most want you to know before you ever need it.
The best ten minutes is the one where nothing’s wrong
Most of my arrivals are uneventful. I walk in, run the checks out of habit, everything works, and I unpack. Mostar is memorable precisely because it’s rare, and it’s rare because of what happens months earlier, when I’m still choosing.
That part is a system too, and it’s the one that decides which apartment you walk into. How to read a set of photos for what they’re not showing you. How to search reviews for the words that give a place away. How to tell whether a rental is even allowed to be there. And when something does go wrong, the order to do things in, which is the difference between the platform sorting it out and you paying for your own replacement apartment.
The No-Regrets Guide to Booking Airbnbs the Right Way is that whole system, all ten steps of it, built over hundreds of stays and written from both sides because we rent out an Airbnb of our own.
The bottom line
Ten minutes, before the suitcase opens.
Is it the right place. Does the water run hot. Is the internet good enough for what you actually need. Is the thing you came for really here. Photograph it.
Then unpack properly, put your coffee on in the morning, and don’t think about any of it again, which is the entire point of booking an apartment in the first place.
What I unpack to make a place feel like mine, including the folding kettle that makes that coffee possible, is in How to Make a Hotel Room or Airbnb Feel Like Home.
Frequently asked questions
Isn’t this a lot for a three-night stay? It’s shorter for three nights. Run the shower, test the wifi, check the one thing you came for, take your photos. Two minutes. The full version earns its keep on longer stays and anywhere you’re going to cook, work or do laundry.
What if I’ve already unpacked and then find something? Say so anyway, through the platform. Later’s weaker than straight away, but it’s far stronger than at checkout, and stronger again than saving it for the review.
Should I message the host or call? Message, on the platform, every time. Call as well if you like, but the written record is what counts if it ever needs to go further.
The place is fine but not what I pictured. Is that worth raising? If it affects why you booked it, yes. There’s a real difference between not as described and not as I imagined, and hosts respond much better to the first one put specifically: the listing said a washing machine and there isn’t one, rather than the apartment’s disappointing.
What if the host doesn’t reply? Message once through the platform so there’s a record, then use the platform’s own help channel. Don’t let it sit for days.
Do I really need to photograph everything? Only if you’d like your deposit back without a discussion. Same logic as a rental car, same two minutes.
Is any of this about safety? No, deliberately. This is the does-it-work pass. The safety one is a separate list, and it’s Safety Checklist 02 in The Smart Woman’s Guide to Safer Travel.
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