All in all, this place was great and we enjoyed our time there. Communication and responsiveness, however, were seriously lacking, which led to a really unpleasant night of lost sleep for us, which is why I am giving a qualified review.
First the good: great central location, just as pictured in the photos, spotlessly clean, brand new construction so everything is in perfect condition, very spacious. The place is generally very quiet, though we could hear the music from the shoe store on the ground floor (directly underneath the apartment) at all hours that the store was open - fortunately, they closed at about 10:00 pm.
But the bad: this host does everything remotely, so we never actually met a human being face-to-face and we felt ignored during an actual emergency. The person who was communicating with us was not the listed host (Lourenco) but someone named Mafalda. We had some difficulty getting into the building and the apartment with the door codes, but frankly I take responsibility for a lot of that as I missed a message that had some instructions in it and I was very jet-lagged having just arrived on a delayed overnight flight from the US.
Once inside everything seemed fine until 9:00 that night, when the fire alarm in the entire four or five story building went off. We didn't detect any actual fire on the floor we were on, but of course evacuated the building nonetheless.
We gathered outside with other guests in the building and assumed that someone - host, landlord, fire department - would come to investigate the alarm and let us know if it was safe to return to the apartment. No one arrived. We texted our hosts (we all seemed to have the same corporate host) and got no response. We attempted to call the local phone number we had for the host, and got no answer. We called the local emergency number and were shocked to be told that they wouldn't be coming to check on the alarm. At this point my husband and I walked down the street to talk to a police officer who we could see nearby, who told us he would call the fire department and get someone to come. By the time we returned to the building several minutes later, the alarm had been silenced and the other guests had returned inside.
If that had been the end of the event, I probably wouldn't be writing this long description, but the situation worsened from there. Sometime on the middle of the night, it became uncomfortably hot in the apartment and we discovered that the air conditioning had stopped operating. We opened the windows to get some fresh air, but Lisbon is a noisy city at all hours, and with the windows open it was far from restful. Then, at 3:00 a.m. the fire alarm resumed. We again evacuated the building and stood on the street with the other guests trying to figure out what to do. Ignoring the alarm, in addition to being potentially unsafe, was also impossible as it was piercingly loud. At this point I learned that one of the guests - who is a fire fighter in Canada - had located the panel and silenced the alarm the first time it went off. He, or someone else, eventually did the same after about a half hour of the alarm ringing. Hoping we might then get some sleep, we were distraught when the alarm again went off within the next hour and continued to sound for several minutes before it was again silenced, again presumably by a guest.
During this time I (and other guests) repeatedly messaged our hosts and got no response. We didn't hear from Malfada until four hours after our last message to him, saying that "the company that manages the condo" was going to come and address the air conditioning problem. During that following day, there were workers in the building and by the time we returned that evening the air conditioning was working. There were no further alarms during our four day stay, thankfully.
Having had no further communication from anyone, not even confirming that the problems had been addressed, I asked Malfada if they intended to compensate us for our lost night of sleep. He responded that "sometimes issues happen with houses and buildings . . . things that can happen to anyone. We took action immediately and those issues were solved the morning after . . . again issues from the building, not from our apartment." He went on to say that, because they had allowed us to check in early, they did not intended to compensate us for the disruption and that they "don't understand why you're asking for it."
I find this response frankly fairly insulting and certainly not displaying an interest in the concerns of the guests. As a landlord myself, I am very familiar with the fact that things outside of anyone's control occur, but as an owner I am the one who has the duty to fix them. As guests in an Airbnb, we had zero control over the situation, and no ability to even fix the acute problem of an alarm which prevented us from sleeping - not to mention that we could not be certain that the building was actually safe. While I empathize with the idea that it was someone else's job to fix it, my suggestion would be that Malfada (or whoever is the actual host) would then take that up with the building owner, since that is who they have a relationship with. In the end, we lost most of a night of sleep after a very long and tiring journey and it was a serious damper on our stay that I think deserved a modicum of concern and compensation.