The apartment is just right for one person. The bedroom is spacious, though so full of furniture that I hardly had space for my luggage. The air conditioner is in the living room so it took a quite a while to cool down the bedroom and bathroom. However, I can’t recommend staying there, as the check-in/check-out process was difficult and that really out a damper on the experience, as I was on edge any time I got a message from the host. I absolutely played a part in the messiness of check-in because my flight was delayed by multiple hours and I wasn’t able to give the host a heads up. That said, my flight didn’t impact check-out a week later — that was also messy due to the host’s poor communication. In short, I understand that the host wanted to offer added convenience to me by asking my arrival and departure times, but things would be much simpler if the host just stuck with her published check-in and check-out times.
The listing says that check-in is at 3pm. About 3 weeks before I arrived, the host asked when I would likely arrive, and given my morning flight arrival time, I said 11am. She said I could pick up keys at the flat at noon. Two days before I arrived, she changed this to “after 12:30.” On the day of arrival (while I was in flight but she probably thought I was in Madrid), she changed it to pickup from noon to 1pm.
With my flight being late, I contacted her as soon as possible after landing - just before 1pm to let her know I would need more time. She said I had to go to a nearby bookstore to pick up keys and if I couldn’t be there by 2pm, it would be a problem. Of course I was going as fast as possible, but I can’t rush baggage claim, so I told her I wouldn’t make it by 2pm. She told me she was paying someone to wait for me and it was a big mess, so I needed to go to another neighborhood to pick up keys from the cleaning lady, since the other option was to wait until 6pm to get keys at the bookstore (which I could not do with luggage in tow). Even after I apologized for my lateness and coordinated with the cleaning lady via WhatsApp to get the keys in a different neighborhood, the host sent me yet another message about how I had caused a disaster.
The day before checkout (almost a week later), the host contacted me to say that I needed to coordinate getting “my” keys from the bookstore. When I told her I didn’t understand, she asked if there was a problem and told me that I was supposed to have returned keys to the cleaning lady ASAP and should have gotten “my” keys from the bookstore already. Mind you, the host never mentioned this for 6 days (despite stating that she had said this from the beginning), nor did the cleaning lady, who had my phone number. “Now to solve another problem,” the host said. Ultimately, she said I could just leave the keys in her mailbox. She had asked when I would leave. The published checkout time is 11am, so I said I’d leave sometime 10:45/11am. At 10:57, the interior doorbell rang and a different cleaning lady arrived. I let her in but was suspicious so I contacted the host because this person had not used a key to enter the flat. When I contacted the host, she harped on the fact that I said I would be gone then, despite me clarifying that I contacted her to ensure her home was safe, not to complain, as I was on my way out of the door.