This was a really unfortunate experience. The apartment is beautiful and the location is great, but the check-in procedure was horrible and communication with the host was very difficult. It should be noted that this listing is not from an individual person but rather a corporation with listings all over Portugal. For check-in, I was asked to come into LovelyStay's office which is over a kilometer away from the Airbnb's location. At first, I thought "oh, maybe they'll provide some transportation to the Airbnb, and someone will tell us a bit about the area and walk us through the Airbnb" but no, they gave us the keys, some instructions for checkout and sent us on our way. So now with all of our bags we needed to make it back to the location, which you cannot drive up to as the street is walking, which would have been fine except during the move we dropped the keys they had just handed us (since we had to juggle them with our luggage) and were now locked out of the Airbnb.
Here is where the Airbnb is run by a corporation and not an individual comes into play in a horrible way. I immediately tried to call and after navigating through a robo-directory to select the reason for my call and the city of my stay I had to sit on hold, and I stayed on hold as I was never transferred through to a human being. We were stuck outside on the street with all of our bags, scouring the street for the keys for more than thirty minutes. I messaged LovelyStay through the application to tell them that we were locked outside and needed help and they didn't respond. Luckily we were able to find the keys in between some cobblestones near a drain more than a block away from the apartment. I only got a response from lovelyStay after messaging them to let them know that we had found the keys.
The inside of the Airbnb was clean however, the lights were unplugged throughout the apartment, which made me feel like some actually hadn't prepared the place for our stay. The icing on the cake was that there was no listing anywhere in the apartment for the wifi or password, which lead me to need to message and wait around again for a response from LovelyStay. It would have been near impossible to do the check-in here without a working phone plan with access to data.
All in all a horrendous check-in experience created by a company that doesn't care other than to make money off of homes that should belong to and be managed by locals.