Palacio Estoril

This was our second stay in this hotel and we enjoyed it just as much as our first. The breakfast has a wide range of choice and we extended that by trying the full range of egg based dishes. The bar in the hotel is stylish and old world, and the staff could not do enough to make our stay memorable, whether at breakfast, at the front desks or at the front door. Our room, a Classic Double, was a little smaller than the room we had enjoyed last year, and definitely felt cramped.

This is a hotel that aspires to be a "luxury" hotel but, unfortunately, it falls significantly short of the "luxury", "five star" and (despite its misleading name) "palace" categories, by any standards. The hotel is quite large and in a good location. The breakfast buffet offers quite a bit of choice. And many of the hotel staff are reasonably friendly and helpful. What lets this place down, however, is its poor and badly maintained facilities and, in some cases, very poor customer service. The building is extremely poorly insulated, so that not only room doors make a loud noise when you close and open them, but the walls are so thin you can hear everything happening on the other side (people talking, trolleys rolling, TV sets playing, children screaming, staff arguing, etc.). We stayed there in February when the hotel was half-empty and it was impossible to relax, imagine what it must be like in the summer! The furniture and fittings throughout the rooms and communal areas are either "tired" or completely worn out. Carpets in the breakfast room have holes in them, armchairs in the bedrooms and suites have holes in the tapestry, chairs have holes in their fake leather and are uncomfortable through being completely worn out, pillow cases in the rooms are not ironed, towels in the spa are worn out, and the list goes on (see photos attached). Superior double rooms overlooking the swimming pool have a nice view but feel very very crammed, especially the bathroom, where the bathtub is almost stuck onto the toilet which is almost stuck onto the washbasin. By the way, there are plastic curtains in the bathtub and blankets on the beds (instead of duvets), it feels like being back in the 70s!!! There are no coffee or tea-making facilities in the rooms, not even in the suites. The spa and indoor swimming pool are in a completely separate building which is quite a way from the hotel. To get there you have to walk through a long corridor to the end of the hotel, take the lift down, go through an underground passage, take the lift up again and then follow the (not so clearly indicated) sings. Also, every time you do all that you have to go through the main lobby of the hotel where the lifts are situated, so there are people with wet hair in their bathrobes and flip-flops dripping water all over the main hotel lobby! Similarly, there are people in flip-flops or in socks (without shoes!) walking around in the breakfast area. Pretty appalling and definitely not five-star in any way. Last but not least, the hotel pretends to be pet-friendly but it is exactly the opposite. It charges a ???75 (yes, SEVENTY FIVE EURO) fee per pet PER NIGHT, a fee which is hidden because it does not appear anywhere on its website. In return, it offers absolutely nothing except for a worn-out under-sized poor-quality cushion for your pet and a one-euro plastic bowl for water and food. What's worse, the 75 euros do not even give your pet the right to exist: upon arrival, we were told by a very unpleasant and patronising concierge that our extremely well-behaved, completely silent and clean small dog "could only go from the entrance straight to the room and back to the exit" and that it wasn't supposed to wait with us in the lobby on leash. So this is a hotel that demands ???75 per night per pet and expects the domestic animal to be completely invisible throughout its stay. Absolutely pathetic. Having stayed at the Four Seasons-Ritz in Lisbon right before going to Estoril, we saw immediately the difference between a true five-star establishment (The Four Seasons-Ritz, which provides FANTASTIC facilities and customer service to people and their pets at no extra charge) and a mediocre, provincial, three-star luxury-wannabe establishment (Palacio Estoril Hotel). I am sorry but, based on my experience, I cannot in good conscience recommend the Palacio Estoril Hotel.