Senior couple (not Spanish speaking) looking for rental apartments in Malaga and Seville, but concerned about specific area of each city, amenities in apt., while avoiding disappointments when arriving. Successfully used VRBO and Airbnb in the U.S. but nervous about use in foreign country due to potential communication issues in the process. Are there travel agents that have access to same or similar rental listings that are familiar with the areas? Of course, it is understood that agents are entitled to a fee for such service. Thanks!
Posted by
4961 posts
Unless you are looking for a long term rental, I would stick to what you know. I have never had any problems, though I like to stick to Booking.com for everything. Everybody just uses Google Translate when needed. Contactless check in is becoming very popular, you upload your passport and get a code for checkin, easy peasy.
Posted by
Central Indiana
272 posts
We rented an apartment close to the cathedral in Malaga from Solaga. The listing was in English and the agent who met us at the apartment spoke English. If that helps…
Posted by
New Zealand
85 posts
I’ve stayed in over 20 Airbnb's in Seville. Some as recently as February this year. All have been successful.
We prefer Airbnb’s whereby we are met by the owner/operators. This is just our personal preference. Having said that we checked in remotely to some Airbnb’s on our recent trip and they all worked out okay.
If you are interested in some recommendations, please let me know.
Posted by
West Coast
71 posts
The AirBnB app for iPhone (and probably for android) as well as the website has a chat function that will for the most part successfully translate what the host writes in Spanish to English. I've had to use an online spanish to english tool to translate some words correctly.
Using the app is super helpful when entering the country without an international phone/texting service--just connect to a wifi network and communicate away!
We have used prepurchased data only e-SIMs for Spain and EU which allow us to use our phones for internet connectivity while away from wifi. It was cheaper than adding international service through our cell provider. The downside is that we were not able to do texting but iMessaging worked fine. We also were able to receive calls to our regular numbers without roaming charges. A lot of folks in the EU are on WhatsApp so we did messaging to hosts and others via WhatsApp. I didn't feel comfortable doing calls to potentially non-English speaking folks, but it is easy to do calls via WhatsApp.
If the host does not speak English, one can use something like Google translate to communicate in person.