Vila Baleira Resort — Hotel in Porto Santo

Starting with the sleeping area Not bad, but clearly not up to the standard of a 4 star hotel. The room is spacious and if you are lucky enough to have a sea view (which only half of the rooms do) it is a little more comfortable.

There is no double bed, but each room has a single bed that can be pushed together. The mattress is ok.

The AC is erratic, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and it's a very old sistem, noisy and with few options (ON or OFF), no regulation fans for example.

The bathroom is OK, lots of signs of use but in working order. Sometimes hot water takes time to arrive.

Towels are very old.

Lift is old and very slow, be patient.

The lady who looks after the room is very nice.

The FOOD From my point of view the food is terrible! All the tematic nights are just for show off. Overall it is canteen food with little care and no cooking skills.

There are mainly pork, bacon, sausages and chicken grilled (by the hundreds) with palm oil without salt and pepper. Sometimes it is just boiled meat.

You have to eat dry rice, frozen potatoes, boiled vegetables and overcooked pasta.

All the special dishes are badly prepared.

FISH, no option... Perch for 3 days, 1 time salmon, the grilled sardines are very dry. The codfish is not codfish. It is "paloco" (a very tasteless, chipper option).

SALAD, very good option. Mainly fresh, many options of sauce, vegetables and special spices to enhance the salad. I end up having salad every day for lunch and dinner (after trying the other terrible dishes) and it was OK.

Breakfast is OK. Various options, fruit, egg, pancakes, cereals,... The bred is very good. Pastery is not good, overcooked very small and always seems to be 3 days old. The juices could be improved, based on concentrated juice and water. But compared to the other meal the breakfast is wonderful (ahah).

There are 2 restaurants The Atlantic and the Dunas. The Dunas restaurant is supposed to be an upscale version of the Atlantic restaurant. It is not!

DRINKS The cocktails I asked for at the Dunas bar were correct. Obviously made with a cheap brand of alcohol, but still OK. The problem is that they run out of some ingredients like menthe and cane sugar, so I basically ended up drinking gin. I was running out of options halfway through the week.

All the drinks they offer at the front desk of each restaurant for each thematic night are very bad.

The Navegador bar is noisy and they don't know how to make cocktails.

In general, the hotel and restaurant staff look overworked and underpaid!

ANIMATION As nice as they can be, this is not animation. 2 stretching classes during the day 1 or 2 games the rest of the day.

The night animations are poorly done. They have no equipment, no animation team and probably no freedom to change. The shows are made up of bad playback karaoke music, bad videos and flashy drakqueen costumes.

SWIMMING POOL AND BEACH Nothing to say, I like the place, the swimming pool is good, big enough and the beach is really nice.

In general, I know I cannot expect everything to be perfect for the price I paid, it was a cheap holiday on a beautiful island.

But I am disappointed with the hotel...

The hotel is far from a 4 star hotel and needs renovation asap. 1 - The food was bad, 90% of the workers at the restaurant barely spoke portuguese and always replied with a bad attitude when we asked for something. We had to request every single day for small spoons at breakfast for the kids to eat cereals and at some point they even replied they didn’t have any. 2 - at the room, we had water coming from the bath to inside of the bedroom for 4 days and it was only fixed when I mentioned the reclamation book, instead of enjoying our vacation we were worried for 4 days about shower time because we didn’t have enough towels for everyone as they were on the floor to stop the water… 3 - there’s no map of the hotel or schedule of the hotel activities 4 - we had cockroaches in front of our door daily 5 - the bar on the beach doesn’t have a WC and to go to the toilet you need to walk more than 5 min and go inside the restaurant near the pool. 6 - also at the beach bar they announce that we can buy icecreams or bola de berlim - which are not included in the all inclusive - and then they only had 2 or 3 which almost all the kids didn’t like (Solero, etc…). 7 - there are no shadows in the beach and we had to pay between between 25-35€ per day for a combo. 8 - positive: the beach is absolutely amazing and animation team is super nice, cheers to Júlio and Madalena! My kids also loved the girls...

Great beach with golden sand and great sea short behind the hotel pool. The temperature is like I prefer it: warm and not burning hot with a slight wind This hotel is the right place if you want to relax, all inclusive eat and drink, but the restaurant is nothing for a silent candlelight dinner and it's the first hotel I came across with two different levels of "all inclusive" With the low level blue belt all inclusive you only get the cheap gin, the cheap whisky , the house wine in a glas and not the better wine in a bottle in a cooler and no name ice cream. The sun beds and umbrellas are for free at the pool, on the beach I would have to pay euro 20 per day with our level of all inclusive Even the hotel is big we never had problems to find a place at the pool or on the beach. The pool is a little bit small and not deep filled with sea water The hotel has an indoor pool as well but we never used it The rooms are good, we had one room with two separated two bed rooms with nice view to the west and part of the sea Each room has tv with international channels, even German tv The quality of wifi is ok During the last two weeks of July most of the guests were from Portugal with young kids of all ages with parents and grandparents followed by guests from nordic countries The hotel is 50 minutes walk away from centre It's possible to hike, walk or rent a...