This is a pretty long and negative story, so I’ll start off with the one positive aspect of this apartment
Positive: great location, green leafy and safe suburb, great for sitting in for 3 hours while waiting to check in
Negative: the rental company who runs the check in promised to meet at the apartment at 3pm. I waited outside the apartment until 3:30, called the person who I was communicating with about the checkin, who apologised and said they would be there in 10-15 minutes. Annoying, but no problem if that was genuine. By 4:30 (and after a few more “just another 10-15 minutes” responses), I tried calling the rental agency (SH Barcelona) who said they were trying to locate the correct keys for the apartment, and would call me back in half an hour. It seemed like they knew the situation, they were just not communicating with me about it, if they had have told me “it will be at least two hours wait for the keys” that would have been ok. By 5:30 they hadn’t called me back, so I called SH Barcelona again, whose phone lines were all busy. After calling again at 6pm, I got a notification that my reservation had been cancelled. AirBnB called me to say “the host had a police emergency at the apartment” which (if true) must have happened the day or days before we were supposed to check in, because we were outside the apartment for 3 hours and there were no police there at all. I don’t mind if the reservation gets cancelled for legitimate reasons, but it was the fact I received no message from the host or call back from SH Barcelona about the entire situation that really annoyed me.
I would be extremely cautious about booking any properties with this host or provider.
Luckily we were able to find accomodation with a separate AirBnB, place which was a miracle in Barcelona on a Friday night.