My family of 4 and I stayed in this apartment for 12 days. The apartment is just like the pictures, with a great location in a good building, the arrival process was easy and everything was clean when we arrived.
The problems we had were with the management. They have 2 security cameras installed in the apartment, one pointed towards the hallway that leads to the bedrooms and the second one pointed to the living room / dining room / entrance to the kitchen. Since we are a small family and rented the entire apartment (we were not sharing it with other travelers) and it made us uncomfortable we asked the managers about it and they said they disconnected the cameras and nobody would watch us or record us. However we saw the infrared lights of the security cameras go off a few times at night on different days, which is normally an indication that someone has started watching. For this reason we had to make sure everyone was “camera ready” before leaving the bedrooms in the morning, or when going to the kitchen for a glass of water at night. It made us quite uncomfortable. If you don’t like for third parties to watch or record your family in their intimacy this is not an Airbnb for you.
The second problem happened after leaving. The manager sent us a list of items they claim we broke with pictures telling us they would send us a quote to replace the items. One was a green glass jar that was a decoration with a chipped/cracked border which was already damaged when we arrived and we had to remove it and put it somewhere else so my children wouldn’t hurt themselves if they touched it. The second item was the hose of the vacuum which was a little bit deformed by what seemed to be heat. I used the vacuum during my stay and the first time I used it I was surprised to find it was stored with the hose in a double knot, when I undid it I saw the deformed part so it was already in that state when we arrived. Regardless it still worked fine despite the deformed hose, I used it through the stay. They also sent us pictures of someone’s hands going through our garbage and pulling out two tiny face towels stained with chocolate. We did stain them but I was surprised they would go through the trash after we left and send us pictures of their findings. They also claimed they had to get a couch professionally cleaned after a small chocolate cookie stain. Considering we paid a €280 cleaning fee which seems quite excessive, getting told we needed to pay extra for a simple cookie stain on a couch that can be removed easily by anyone with laundry detergent and a sponge seemed like a money grab. We told the management we didn’t break these items, but we could pay for the tiny face towels and the couch cleaning fee if it was necessary provided they give us a receipt… and they wrote back telling us they had confirmed all the broken items were done by us. This is, again, impossible since we did not break any of those items.
All in all, the place itself was nice, but considering we paid more than what a 5 star hotel would cost in the area per night to stay there, we were expecting politeness and tact on the part of the management, certainly weren’t expecting them to lie about the security cameras being disconnected, them going through our garbage, accusing us of breaking things we didn’t break and telling us we needed to pay an extra cleaning fee on top of the €280 we had already given them for a simple cookie stain. So again, I would advice you to find another nice airbnb managed by a different company when you go to Madrid.