Great place to stay, but poor experience overall. Within minutes of arriving from a round-the-world flight with small children, I received two contradictory messages firstly saying our house hadn't been cleaned and so we weren't able to check in, and then another saying we could check in immediately. When I called the number provided, I was put through to a call centre in Portugal and dealt with a variety of different customer service staff who clarified the house wasn't ready, and we would have to wait 3 hours before we could check in. Pretty frustrating.
When we eventually arrived at the house, the poor cleaner was still there and was rushing to clean up. She left dirty laundry to be collected and informed us we could expect the clean laundry to arrive shortly. She did a pretty good job of cleaning up but we couldn't help feeling she'd done a rush job.
Also, whilst it was disclosed in the information, it was annoying to have to walk 15 minutes to an off license to collect the key (somewhere else in the spiel it mentioned a lock box so that was confusing). Thankfully, our cleaner left us her key and said we could just use that, and then return that to the off license. But this added stress to the journey - had we arrived and not been able to check in, my family and all our luggage would have been sat on the pavement for 30 minutes whilst I ran to the shop.
Once we had checked in, we discovered there was no hot water. This lead to another back and forth with the call centre, who suggested we wouldn't be able to get this fixed until the following day because "the owner is asleep in Hong Kong". Yet another frustration. Eventually, after several phone calls to the Portuguese call centre, I was given instructions to make my way into the basement to reset the boiler.
Later that day, we received an email telling us we would receive a 15% discount off one night of our stay - to be honest, I found this quite patronising and would rather they hadn't bothered (it wasn't enough to cover the numerous international phone calls I'd had to make from my Australian phone to their Portuguese call centre!).
After all these frustrations had been ironed out, we had a great stay - the house is lovely. Fantastic location, all the mod cons you could expect. So, we really can't fault the place itself.
However, the great thing about AirBNB is staying in someone else's home—I've always felt really well looked after. But that experience is lost when you deal with a property management company. I won't ever book an AirBNB again unless I feel confident I'm dealing directly with the owners.