With a rental price like this we believe to have had the right to expect the location to have been absolutely first class. Although our contact person was always very friendly and relatively quick in responding to our questions or remarks, our experience was that this is - in principle - a nice but heavily overrated apartment with many things being broken or simply neglected. A clear sign that this is an apartment mostly operated from a distance and delegated to junior onsite representatives and cleaning staff. The sun-awnings outside at the terrace were ripped in the corners, the sun screen or garden umbrella outside taken apart and unusable, the cussions of the garden furniture were really filthy and - like the bedlinen of one of the double bedrooms - had many cigarette burning holes in them. Really very unpleasant. One of the main locks of the two sliding doors connecting the livingroom area to the garden was broken, which practically mend that - apart from lowereing the electric light plastic rolling shades - there was no real way to safely lock the apartment towards the garden either while being away or while being asleep at night. In a huge city like Barcelona, especially in the area of Bajos, we did not feel safe about this at all. We did ask for it to be repaired but were advised to just close the plastic electric shades. An easy but not very safe solution. Slightly patronising too.
The nicely designed apartment has two floors and are connected by a spiral case. Sadly, this place is so poorly isolated or so badly sound proofed that one can hear every step, breath or move taken by everone and in every room. Very thin and cheap paperwalls.
The other issue that really caused some dark clouds over our stay was that from the balcony of a higher apartment ( rented through the same agency ) various cigarette ends, cigarette boxes, cups, saucers were thrown down onto our terrace. We understand that this was something that the rental agency could not be held directly responsible for, but when reported and asked ( we even sent some photos through the airbnb app) we were told that the misbehaving guests received a written warning. With all due respect, after all the other remarks and things having gone wrong or not fully being taken care about, we felt that the owner or at least a senior manager should have come to the location and speak with these misbehaving guests personally. We don’t think it’s appropriate in situations like this for the owner or rental representative to just email to the misbehaving guests and even ask the well-behaving guests to please keep the owner informed if anything else happens again. Sorry, but we think that that’s way too easy. We kindlt asked for the terrace to be cleaned of cigarette ends and broken cups/saucers but absolutely nothing happened or no one showed up. Also, the frontdoor to the main interior staircase was always unlocked, which also gave a sense of unsafeness, particularly in this part of the city.
In short, we weren’t very impressed by the state and condition of the place. On a positive notes, once you get the airco to work it really works well!
As generally optimistic and frequent Airbnb clients we really don’t like complaining but in this instance we were simply very disappointed. The apartment is offered for a far too high a price and we really wished to have been helped better or perhaps be offered compensation for some of the disappointing aspects described and communicated.