Pao de Acucar Hotel

Hotel is centrally located, right off the main square. In a walking distance to all the main attractions and train station. Hotel is clean and simple, featuring bumper car memorabilia. Our room was spacious (deluxe) but simple. Noteworthy excellent shower! Breakfast is simple and plentiful

We chose this hotel because we wanted a room for three, myself and wife, plus her adult daughter, and this quirky hotel had a room which was actually divided into two rooms with a shared bathroom. That was a great arrangement for us. The hotel is in a very central place with many local restaurants. Did I say "quirky"? The hotel has treasures ranging from dodgem cars to antiques on every floor with an emphasis on the 1950's. Clean rooms, good buffet breakfast, and the most delightful spiral staircase to look down, though the lifts save you the effort.

I am not sure how this hotel has so many good reviews on booking sights, they must pay to have the bad ones removed. The only three things that are acceptable about this hotel is that it is clean, has hot water, and a good location. The staff is downright inhospitable and rude from arrival and checkout, we live in Portugal part time and have never encountered such bad service. . The beds are hard, additional blankets besides sheets are used, old, itchy wool blankets. Hardly any towels. The main issue is that we had an upgraded room with a balcony and the metal window shades did not work. It was like we were locked in a prison with no light or air. When I asked the front desk if they could fix, the night clerk told me they knew it was broken when we checked in and it couldn’t be fixed because it was the weekend. I asked to move but no rooms available, the next day they begrudgingly said I could move but to a downgraded room, on a floor that the rooms are old and not remodeled. With no apologies or even acknowledging that they lied and gave us a room that they knew was broken. No compensation was offered for the downgrade. We stayed in the room just to keep the nicer shower. I have traveled extensively throughout Europe and this is a tourist trap. There are so many excellent choices. This business should lose its rating to protect other travelers.

The interior of the building is stunning, centred around a beautiful and well preserved Art Deco staircase. The 'vintage bumper car' theme is a little surreal and eccentric, but there were some great artefacts - well worth getting the lift to the top floor and walking down the full staircase. Staff were very helpful and pleasant and spoke excellent English. The 9 Euro breakfast was a fairly standard hotel breakfast, but included great quality pastilles de nata! My room was small, rather dated and a bit scruffy, but was immaculately clean and the bed and pillows were comfy.

Much about this hotel was very good. The building itself is a splendid Art Deco creation, with a wonderful staircase, and the owners have filled it with pieces of retro furniture (including dodgems and fragments of vintage cars). Our room had a slighty retro feel too, with dark brown furniture, which we liked, but was also tidy, clean and comfortable, with air conditioning. The situation is good: it takes about 10-15 minutes to walk downhill into the centre. But there is a "but": everyone was most polite to us, but we somehow felt a bit "processed", rather than looked after, and we missed a personal touch. Perhaps breakfast sums it up. As we checked in, we were told, politely but firmly, that they "needed" to know when we would be having breakfast each day during our stay. We weren't quite sure, and guessed a time (in fact we did need to modify it from time to time, but it turned out that people were quite ok about this, if we told them the night before). Then, when we turned up at breakfast, there was a rope across the entrance. We had to wait until one of the staff came over, checked our room number, and then allowed us in. It's true that the breakfast room is not very large (and, actually, it took a while to work out how to find everything), but I just felt that this could have been handled in a more friendly manner - for example, to ask "what time would you like breakfast?" puts one in a better temper than "we need to know when you want breakfast." Would I therefore recommend this hotel as a place to stay? Not at the moment, I regret to say. But I hope that a friendlier atmosphere might be cultivated there.