Pestana Vintage Porto Hotel

This hotel occupies a prime spot on the bank of the Douro river. There is a welcoming atmosphere and the hotel is situated near to many bard and restaurants. Rooms are modern and well appointed with a walk in shower that has good water pressure. The whole hotel is clean and the level of service is high. The onsite restaurant offers both a buffet breakfast as well as a small selection of items to order. The evening meals are very steak orientated and sides have to be ordered as extras. There are also many restaurants nearby offering a good range of items.

The location is next to the lake. It is a beautiful view. Breakfast is delicious, one of the best I have had. Service is excellent I loved staying at Pestana

Wonderful views from our outside dining spot. Oliveria our server was gracious and friendly. He was attentive to our table and very kind. Our breakfast was delicious and we all felt very spoiled.

Great hotel and staff. We included breakfast with our stay and it was worth it. Olivera took very good care of us! The hotel is located in the perfect spot to sightsee or just sit and relax and watch the world go by. The staff that work at the hotel and restaurants are some of the best we’ve experienced while traveling.

My wife and I stayed in Room 206 (Vintage Grand View Balcony) for 3 nights in June. The hotel is in a great location, centrally located on the riverfront, and within walking distance of several of the points of interest we wanted to see: Luís I Bridge & Gaia, meeting point for a Douro Valley tour, Barrica restaurant, the Santa Catarina shopping district, and a stop on the hop-on / hop-off bus tour. The room was mostly nice. I was initially concerned about noise, being on the second floor, but very little noise could be heard with the windows closed, with the exception of a river boat cruise that docks nearby around 10pm each night with very loud music blaring as it approached and then people disembarked. Being on the second floor enabled us to see the pedestrians and boats without having to go to the windows, which was nice. We didn't hear any noise from adjacent rooms (we typically prefer top floors so that we don't have noise from above). The bathroom lighting was rather dim, making it challenging to shave or apply makeup. The problem we found with closing the windows in the room is that the HVAC system does not work very well. No matter how I set the thermostat in the room, the temperature would not go below 74 F when the windows were closed (I'm not even sure the thermostat worked). It was not hot out, so leaving the windows open helped cool down the room (a riverfront room facing south, so it heated up during the day), but being on the 2nd floor, we were asked to close the windows at night - and when we were away - due to security risk. When we left the windows open one night - since the HVAC system wasn't doing a good job of cooling the room - we got a phone call from the front desk asking us to close them. When I went down to the front desk, they clarified that we were not actually required to close the windows, but it was recommended. We found the best solution to cooling the room at night was to open the window in the bathroom and one of the windows in the front. Aside from the loud riverboat docking each night, it was generally pretty quiet outside after 10:15pm, so things worked out with open windows. There was nightly musical entertainment on the riverfront, just east of the hotel, which we could listen to from our room. The music stopped each night by 10pm (maybe 9pm), so it was not intrusive to our sleep. The same performers seemed to play at the same time each night. We had a good dinner at the Rib Porto restaurant the first night, with an outdoor table from which we could watch the pedestrians strolling the riverfront and boats returning from sunset river cruise. The breakfast buffet was also good, though it was a bit confusing how to order coffee and eggs. One of the interesting twists I hadn't seen elsewhere was separate containers containing the different ingredients often found in granola, enabling guests to assemble a granola bowl with only the ingredients they like. I was surprised to see a 10% gratuity automatically added to the Rib bill (which I could have crossed out). When I ate at Barrica restaurant the next night, there was also gentle, explicit encouragement to leave a tip, and there was a tip added to the bill in the hotel we stayed in Lisbon the following night. I had heard that - unlike in the US - tipping was optional, and never expected, in Portugal and Spain (since they pay servers a living wage), but perhaps that's changing. The hotel extends across several buildings along the waterfront, and while there are some features in common across some rooms, there are some features unique to each building (e.g., the window frames). I was having a hard time making sense of some of the photos posted by others on TripAdvisors until I arrived and saw all the buildings.