Great location, beautiful renovated and spacious apartment – cool old building with high ceilings and 4 huge windows opening to a wrap-around balcony right in a fabulous narrow pedestrian street off La Rambla. Nice bathroom, spacious and an elevator + 2 TVs, well-appointed kitchen with washer & dryer and well outfitted. The bedroom has tons of closet space , poor host communication and however a personal touch is sorely missing here. Read on.
THE “APP”! As everyone says it’s real pain. And we witnessed many other guest frustrations!
Two days before arrival, we were requested to provide our info, including passport etc. Which is fine, but we had to do it 3 times on 2 different platforms. It is very confusing way the company communicates, we had 9 emails instructing us to use the app or the internet site.
There were way too many messages and going back and forward, it was super frustrating and that was just getting the app installed and registering which we did over and over again.
The address of the apartment uses cute names of sites around Barcelona. So our apartment was in fact “el barri gotic” We had no idea that was the apartment and not part of the street or address. In the building elevator floor “0” is the lobby and P is the principal floor, not parking and floor 1 is 2 floor above those.
Our contact told us to the go level 1, which we pressed floor 1, which was not our suite since it was really P???. So we then physically walked up to 2, then 3 then looked on the lobby level before finally finding out there was a floor P that was not parking and in actual fact was the “principal level” or in our world floor 1? This all happened after it took us 30 min to figure out how to use the app to get in. We got in the first main door super easy but were stuck in the hallway between it and the 2nd entry door as we could not get the app to work.
We had no idea the 2nd door needed you to physically touch the pad with your phone. Especially since the first door just needed you to be close to it and it opened through Bluetooth. To be fair they sent a video, but watching it 2 days before we arrived while we are on vacation means we can’t remember what they put in it.
Then we had to figure out how to get the app on my wife’s Of course, you must remember the password issued! so more screwing around and we finally figured it all out. Once you have it figured out, it sot of works – sometimes it takes 2-3 trys to get in your door as the app is somewhat flaky.
My point is that Ola Living has it set up so their life is easy but at the expense of their guests.
Though I love the design and plan of the apartment, especially the ceilings which are either beautifully painted or a coffered and painted, really lovely and it’s super spacious, there isn’t a rug, or a picture on the wall, or anything.
So the apartment has no soul. Even a hotel room will have a picture on the wall. It’s very cold inside. There are 2 shelving units with 6 shelves completely bare. The kitchen is had nice appliances and a tons empty cupboards.
I think I should have made more effort to find a ‘real’ Airbnb, with personal homey touches, some salt and pepper and a bottle of water in the kitchen, it is so nice when someone greets you and cares about your experience on your vacation. It’s part of the great Airbnb experience. Everything OLA living does is to make their lives easier in managing their business and is nothing about your experience or ease.