Buktotruth
Google
Short version: incredibly over priced for what it is. Plenty of other high end hotels nearby with better locations, better rooms, and better service.||||Pros: The views really are fantastic. Sitting at breakfast overlooking the city is lovely. That’s it though, no other real pros.||||Cons: Let me start by saying that my wife and I stayed for 6 nights in the "Royal Suite with View: for about 600 euro/night. This was our anniversary so we wanted to splurge on something nice. It’s not our first higher end hotel, so we have plenty to compare to.||||We arrive early from our redeye into Lisbon and went to the hotel to check in and leave our bags. Our room wasn’t ready (that’s fine) so we left our bags with the porter and went to explore the city. We returned in the later afternoon and our room was ready, but no bags. I tried calling the front desk but the phone system was both confusing (dial 400 for reception…information burried in the welcome book and nowhere near the phone) and garbled (couldn’t understand anything that was said). So I headed to reception and asked for our bags to be brought up. They said they would be up shortly but then proceeded to ask what our bags looked like. This raised a red flag for me and I aske to be taken to the storeroom to identify our bags and take them up. They hemmed and hawed that I should just wait and then I got a bit firmer and explained that I woudln’t just wait, that I needed our bags now. At this point they admited that they lost the bags. They had no idea if they were still on the property or not. Thankfully, my wife and I put our laptops in the bags and I could use “find my” to see that they were somewhere on property. About an hour later, they were found in a different room (after a room by room search by the staff). As you can imagine, we were relieved but incredibly concerned that if they couldn’t even get the bags to the right place, what else would go wrong. This was a good foreshadowing of all the other (admitadly smaller) service failures to follow. I was angry enough with this that I asked to have one night of our stay comped. The front desk clerk said he woudl make it happen but had to run it by his manager first (fair enough). Turns out, he couldn’t make it happen and they offered us two complimentary 45 minutes massages at the spa. We accepted because there wasn’t much else to do at that point.||||The room we were in was large, but very poorly laid out. The bathroom is on the opposite side of the suite from the bedroom with two steps leading down to it…making for a very questionable journey to use the toilet at night. The room was on the top floor so the ceilings were angled in…fine in principle, but as a taller person, I was routinely making sure I didn’t bang my head when accessing the closets and when using the shower. And the shower was a death trap with incredibly slippery marble on the floor to get in. Looks nice, but isn’t functional. I don’t personally watch TV when in a hotel, but if you do, I don’t know how you would do so since there is no seating in front of the TV. Just a table with two dining chairs. One small annoyance was that the nightstand lights were connected so you couldn’t turn just one off…you had to either have both nightstand lights on or none…something really odd and annoying if one person wants to stay up later than the other. Just overal a very mediocre space given the cost||||We had the bed & breakfast option and the breakfast was very mediocre. The made to order eggs/omelettes were small and watery and the buffet was what I would expect at a low-end hotel, not a higher end location like this. ||||The pool was. nice, but it wasn’t heated and even in the middle of the hot day, the water was ice cold. It was really there for decoration and not to swim in. We saw no one use it our entire stay||||The spa was nice enough, but something is wrong with their sewage system and the entrance to spa reaks of sewage. It’s fine when inside, but what a terrible way to enter a relaxing space.||||Let’s move on to the gym. The property has, according to the website, a gym. To say that they have one is stretching the imagination. The photo on the website makes it look small but big enough to get a work out in. In reality, you can barely fit a single person in the gym space. I couldn’t imagine having two people work out at the same time. It’s simply not possible.||||Midway through our trip we had some laundry done by the hotel. We had to ask 3 times to have it picked up from outside of our room. By 5pm the next day, it still wasn’t ready, but we were heading out so we stopped at the front desk to ask about it. They had it there ready to go which was great and they said that they would immediatly bring it up to our room. We returend to the hotel around 10pm and there was no laundry in our room. I went back down to the front desk and the clerk there looked at me and immediately said soemthing like “oh yah, I forgot to bring up your laundry, sorry, here you go.” On its own this wouldn’t be a huge issue, but it is just characteristic of the overal lack of service quality from everyone we interacted with. ||||Location: the hotel is at the top of a very steep hill, nothing unusual for Lisbon. The problem is that we expected to use the fenicular that goes from the lower main tourist area up to the hotel. Turns out, that fenicular has been closed for a long time (even before the tragic funicular accident) but no one informed us. This makes the location very inconvenient as you have to constantly walk up and down a very steep and long hill to get anywhere. There are limited public transit options near the hotel itself (at the top of the hill) so you are stuck with Ubers everywhere. Not ideal at all.||||In sum, if you can’t tell, we were not satisfied at all with our stay. I would highly recommend you to stay anywhere other than here. We passed by so many lovely looking hotels in much better locations and with, what I later learned, similar or better price points. Do yourself a favor and avoid the Torel Palace Lisbon.
