I had a similar (bad) adventure on Booking.com - dirt, crawlies, so I packed and went somewhere else. Booking.com didn't do anything about refunding "oh we contacted the host and he said nah" so I called the credit card company who refunded me the transaction. Lesson learned. From then on I check Booking.com for locations then compare the offers on hotel sites and lo, often they're cheaper when booked directly. And renting directly from people, that's left to you folks more adventurous than me.
This is the reason we stick to the same hotel chains we know that are good whenever we can; cannot really go wrong with higher tier french chains (not only in France; we used them in India, China, Thailand as well).
We often find that all in all the prices are not so different from airbnbs but with a lot more risk; so when you think about it, a E1200 airbnb for a month (which is hard to find in lisbon, by the way) vs a E1500 hotel, I would always pick the hotel; daily cleaning, breakfast included (usually so much I don't need anything further) and easy to cancel, extend or completely just get my money back or get relocated (especially when using the same chain like Accor).
I had awful experiences with booking.com and very good experiences with hotels.com. More than once, they rebooked us in far nicer and more expensive hotels after complaining. I found our favourite hotel that way; our booked hotel was overbooked and pretty crappy; the staff was nasty about it; one call and we got put up in a hotel 5x the price for the same number of days (2 weeks) instead swiftly and at their cost. More or less in the middle of a paradise.
