Casa Abades Arcos de la Frontera

Ok to stay for a night or max 2, and only in the summer: the strong reason we booked the stay was for the terrace, but in late march and especially if it rains it is unusable (no cover deck or protection from the wind). Then what you end up with is living in a basement: few very small windows, very little natural light, on the ground floor, no view or open area. It might be ok during the hot summer months but in late march it was not worthy, it in fact felt very humid. Also, the floor and the sofa looked like they have missed some rounds of vacuum cleaning: all our socks bottom ended up being full of dust and really dirty unless we were walking indoors with our shoes on. Also the comms with the host felt a bot dry and mostly template messages for check in and key codes.

Floor was a little gritty and hot tub bottom could have been cleaner. To be fair though, there is construction going on across the street so lots of dust is flying around.

Please note we visited at the end of June and I have waited to place this review to see if either the owner or booking.com would offer some fair compensation - they have not. Communication from both parties was exceptionally poor, very delayed or non-existent. Neither seemed to care that our experience was incredibly bad. - Pool is not as described on booking.com, it only has about 30cm depth of water, it is VERY small in size and is dangerous as there are no barriers around the pool so if you were to trip or slip you would fall 6m to the street below. - The owner did not disclose, until one hour before we arrived that the parking is 20 min from the property and you cannot get near to the property with a car to drop things off. - It was 40 degrees and the cold Aircon did not work at all - We found cockroaches on the roof terrace - One of the pool towels had what looked like vomit on it - When approached with our concerns within our first hour of arrival around 1730 the owner disregarded us and told us we must take up our complaints with Booking.com. We did and did not receive a response until 8pm and were told that if we left immediately we would get a full refund...we were a long way from our home town with 2 tired children and no alternative accommodation, so this was not possible. We said that we would leave the following day and that a 3 day, rather than 4 day, refund would be acceptable. Both booking.com and the owner after this point provided the most horrendous customer service I have EVER experienced. I spent many hours emailing different people explaining the same issues over and over again. In the end the best compensation that came out of it was a 25€ voucher from Booking.com which quite frankly was an insult and a joke - we rebooked another apartment through Airbnb and received excellent customer care from both the site and the hosts of the property. It will be an extremely long time before I use Booking.com again, if ever at all.