We stayed at Short Lets Malta for 3 night in February. Overall, the place itself was great. It was immaculately clean, nicely furnished and really well equipped. The location was great as well – just a short walk down a hill to Silema.
Victoria was very helpful when we checked in. She texted us before we arrived to arrange a time, and then came to greet us outside the property and showed us round. She also gave us directions and recommendations for local restaurants.
However, we did have a few issues with the hot tub during our stay, which was incredibly frustrating as the reason we chose this property was because we wanted to go exploring during the day and relax in the hot tub in the evening. On the first night the hot tub was unbearably hot – we could not put a foot in it, let alone sit in the tub. We texted Victoria for help and she said to leave the cover off for an hour or two, so we did. After a couple of hours, the hot tub was what I’d call bearable (it was still slightly too hot), but we could sit in it for a few minutes at a time, but you’d definitely need a break and at the end we all came out looking like lobsters.
On the second night, the hot tub was perfect, but by the third night it was luke warm – essentially too cold to sit in. I texted Victoria when we got home at 7pm to tell her that it was too cold and she said “sorry it takes time to heat they came to check it this morning and it was fine so probably in the next 2hrs should be fine”. Not only were we frustrated that the hot tub wasn’t useable on our last night, but we were also a bit irritated that someone had been in the apartment without our prior knowledge or approval. An hour later we texted again and all we got was “they told me it takes time to heat up” and “I’m trying to call somebody but unfortunately it’s a bit late” – by this point it was 8pm.
We don’t know much about hot tubs, but to us, it seemed that someone had clearly pre-heated the hot tub to a ridiculously-hot temperature before we arrived and then turned off the heat, in the hopes that it would last the weekend. We explained this to Victoria on our last night and asked if there was a way we could turn it back on. She just replied: “you can’t do it yourself”, which was incredibly unhelpful and rude, so we stopped communicating and gave up.
Overall, the apartment itself is great and was very reasonably priced. And for that reason I would recommend it for any big groups wanting somewhere to stay in Malta (I would just warn guests that the beds have something plastic under the sheets which is a bit uncomfortable). However, I would caution anyone looking to rent this property because they want a hot tub. Unfortunately, we had a lot of problems with it and the service we received as a result of these problems was very poor. Sadly, we won’t use Short Lets Malta again despite everything else being great.