I would have loved to give this place 5 stars. It has a perfect location in Lisbon, no matter why you happen to be there. We were visiting friends who live there and really appreciated being in a neighborhood where the hordes of tourists rarely venture. Even so, it has easy access to a lot of tourist sites by public transportation or inexpensive rideshare. This neighborhood really has everything you could want—supermarkets, a beautiful park where you can have coffee or drinks until late at night in a cafe, excellent restaurants, a kitchen store, wine and cheese shop, a spa, you name it, it’s probably there. On rainy days you can go to the cinema at the local shopping center and see first-run movies in English for less than $8 per person. I could go on and on, this is really a wonderful neighborhood to stay in. The apartment itself is just off a main street but there is little street noise heard at night as the bedrooms are at the back of the building. The beds are good, there’s a good shower and the kitchen appliances (dishwasher, washer, coffeemaker, etc) were all fine. The whole place was very clean. And there was a ton of storage for clothes.A few little things could be improved: no hooks or racks for bath towels ( the one rack in the bathroom was in (!!!) the shower and not securely attached ). There wasn’t any salt, pepper, oil or vinegar when we arrived and only enough coffee for one day even though we were booked there for 12 days. There were no cleaning products except for some dishwashing liquid. We requested a change of sheets after the first week and they were never provided. However, in general, Rent Experience were pretty responsive when we made requests. A loose toilet seat was repaired the next day, for example.
Here’s why we can’t give the place 5 stars: the upstairs neighbors. We are not particularly sensitive to noise—after the first day, the airplanes overhead didn’t bother us, nor did the garbage trucks at night— that’’s just city living. But on three or four occasions, the people upstairs made so much noise, shouting, arguing(?), dragging furniture across the room above our bedroom, till 2 or 3 in the morning, that it really made it impossible to sleep. There us a city ordinance against noise after 10 pm and Rent Experience suggested we call the police or call RE directly if it happened again (and it did) but only if we called them “the normal way” and not through Whatsapp or Messenger. Our US phone plan doesn’t allow those dIrect calls. As a result, we were subjected to this same noise throughout most of the night on multiple occasions. This is unacceptable and needs to be addressed directly by Rent Experience before the next guests have to suffer through the same sleepless nights.