This is a hard review to write, as we liked the space and the host!
The good: The apartment is great, and just as it appears in the photos! The view of the ocean is lovely, the space was clean and worked wonderfully for our family. We loved the balcony, and the easy access to the beach and pools. Martha was responsive, friendly, and helpful.
Onsite, Marcelo welcomed us and was pretty responsive (he was a bit late meeting us, and his "I'll be there in 10 minutes" was more like half an hour, but we appreciated the cultural and language differences.). His English wasn't great and neither is our Spanish, but we enjoyed the communication. And, if there had been no major issues that required good communication, this would have all been just fine.
The unfortunate: On our 2nd of 3 days, the plumbing in the bathroom backed up (after normal use - not our fault or the hosts!) and flooded the bathroom and bathtub so badly that we had to be moved to another apartment for the night. Marcelo was very frustrated and blamed us for the problem. He angrily showed us a couple of other spaces we could stay, which didn't have enough beds, and (eventually) he reluctantly agreed we could move a cot from our initial space to the new one. We moved all of our things (food, bedding, etc) upstairs to another unit. All of this (waiting for Marcelo, waiting for the plumber, waiting to find out where we could stay) took about half a day out of our 2.5 day stay. He repeatedly told us we could not move back to Martha's apartment until the bathroom was fixed and the whole apartment cleaned. We stated we didn't need the whole place cleaned, just the bathroom! After we moved, we asked if we could just stay in the new apartment, but were told we needed to move back and that Martha would call us at 11am to let us know. At 10:30am, we were all packed up and ready to move, so we could get to the beach. After some confusion about which apartment we'd wanted to stay in, etc., Martha let us the cleaners would actually need a few extra hours, but we could leave our things in a corner. We then encountered Marcelo in the elevator, and he angrily told us we could not get back into our apartment until 1pm. I tried to explain that we had literally just gotten off the phone with Martha and that we were going to leave our things in the corner. He repeatedly yelled "no! no!" and batted my daughter's hand away from the correct elevator button. When we arrived at the lobby he repeated that we needed to wait two more hours, and then left. Unsure what to do, we texted Martha what had happened and she confirmed we could stick with the plan. So, we finished moving our things back into the original apartment. Later, Martha arrived onsite and was very apologetic and kind, and helped me finish moving our last things.
We truly understood that Marcelo was frustrated and that the language barriers had led to some miscommunication, and were very disappointed about how things had gone. Unfortunately, all of this trouble, challenging communication, and moving back and forth cost us a significant amount of time on a very short trip, not to mention the stress of being yelled at for a problem that was not our fault. Our requests that the host consider a partial refund were ignored. In summary, bad luck happens and the plumbing problem was certainly not the host's fault! But, being a good host is all in how you respond to problems. I am sure that 98% of the time this is a great place to stay and Martha is a lovely host!! However, the extent to which we were left to fend for ourselves and not compensated at all for the trouble leaves me unable to recommend this place as highly as it otherwise deserves.