Pão De Açúcar – Vintage Bumper Car Hotel

“Great stay”

We had a wonderful stay in Pao do Acucar hotel: the room was very clean and quiet, very comfortable bed, great decoration in the corridors and stairs, very welcoming and helpful staff and great location to discover Porto. We definitely recommend this hotel.

“Worth staying for the beautiful Art Deco staircase alone. Great value”

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… more

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.

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“Almost a nice place to stay.”

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, whi… more

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.

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