While the location was great (many amazing restaurants and bars in the immediate vicinity and attractions such as the Reina Sofia and Parque de El Retiro), we had many complaints about the apartment. First, the check-in process was stressful. I was supposed to receive a phone number beforehand to open the unit door once I had arrived, but even with plenty of notice given to the hosts, they were not responding to my messages requesting the phone number. They gave it to me once I called them. Once inside the building it was difficult to find the apartment because none of the unit doors except for ours had numbers on them. The lock/keys situation was also an issue. In case of a fire, it was dangerous that we needed to use the keys to unlock the door to the exit both the unit and the building. Checking out was also a hassle, as we left one person in the unit to check out. He had to go downstairs, unlock and prop open the door, and go back upstairs to return the key to the apartment.
As for the building and apartment, there was construction happening which caused the entire building to be dusty and the lobby smelled strongly of solder. There was also a loud knocking noise on our bedroom wall one evening. There was one AC unit in the living room and our bedrooms didn’t receive proper circulation, so it was very warm when sleeping at night. We were hesitant to open the windows because there was a strong sewage smell outside that would seep into the apartment. There were also many scuffs on the walls that could easily be cleaned or painted over, and while the apartment itself was clean, they made the rooms look trashy. One of the rooms had a loud vibration every 2 minutes which kept my mom from sleeping one night. She relocated to the couch in the living room, which made the buzzing even worse. We think it was coming from the AC. The bathrooms were also a problem, as two of us are relatively tall (over 6ft) and our knees would touch the wall while sitting on the toilet. The showers had nowhere to rest shower gel/shampoo, so we had to put them on the floor. And because of the small size of the shower, I would literally turn off the water by accident when bending down to pick up the soap! I could go on, but these were the main issues we had with our reservation. I am surprised we didn’t see more warnings about the quality of this place from previous reviews.