The apartment was very nice and well represented by the the photos. It was large modern, spacious and open plan, and the balcony was very luxurious. We all thought it was a good choice.
However, we were very disappointed for a number of reasons, which with the exception of a crane in our view, will either never occur again, or can be solved easily.
NO ACCESS: On arrival the hosts phone number didn't work and we hadn't received any final information about which apartment it was in the complex. It took us almost an hour and a half of running around the entire complex late at night in terrible colds winds before we found the key holder - by luck and Google phone lookup! Half of us spent most of this time contacting AirBnb and making other arrangements (the AirBNB staff were great!). This was a really terrible problem to have on our first evening and sadly we missed the whole night and managed to salvage parts of it by finding a late fast food bar.
Apparently, the final email of instructions hadn't reached us because the host was in Thailand. The hosts phone was pre-pay and that made it expensive to receive incoming calls and was not configured for roaming internationally. The host said this has never happened before in the 8 years they had been renting.
BUILDING WORKS IN VIEW: As I have explained, this was a nice format apartment, with the key feature being a great balcony. However, on our first morning we rushed to open the curtains and found a massive crane stretched level with our balcony directly in our view (I have photos). This was very disappointing indeed, especially since we had chosen this apartment over others for the view.
SMALL DETAILS: We paid around 80 Euro for having minimal heat during our 5 day stay. This was a profit for the host so please keep that in mind. In the summer this will be air conditioning costs I suspect, and in the winter heating. We had an exceptionally cold week for Malta, and in fairness, Maltese houses are not built to combat the cold. The front door lock was so hard to open, 2 of my party couldn’t open the door without me. We also were suspicious of some of the cleaning, having found crisps in the couch, and two duvet covers had suspicious smells.