Vila Gale Lagos

Before I begin, a quick tip when reading TripAdvisor reviews: I tend to ignore most of the glowing 5-star reviews and head straight for the average ones. They usually give you a much more realistic picture of what a hotel is actually like.

Anyway, here’s my experience.

Pros

The rooms are nice, clean and serviced regularly. The beds are quite hard, although obviously that comes down to personal preference.

Unfortunately, that’s about where the positives end.

Cons

Reception / Welcome

The welcome was surprisingly poor. No smiles, no real greeting, no “welcome to our hotel”, no welcome drink — just a very matter-of-fact check-in.

First impressions matter in hospitality, and ours wasn’t good.

Rooms / Cost Cutting

While the rooms are clean, the cost cutting becomes obvious very quickly.

There’s no tea or coffee in the room — something you’d expect as standard even in budget hotels such as Travelodge.

No dressing gowns.

No body lotion — again, something we’ve found standard in virtually every decent hotel we’ve stayed in. Instead, they promote expensive toiletries from some unheard-of brand in reception that you can buy yourself.

I was half surprised they still provided soap and toilet paper.

It all gives the impression of a hotel where someone has gone through the guest experience with a spreadsheet and removed anything they could get away with.

Pool

The pool itself is fine, but there simply aren’t enough umbrellas. Unless you manage to get one of the better spots close to the pool, you’re left baking in the sun.

For a hotel in the Algarve in summer, providing adequate shade really shouldn’t be an afterthought.

Location

There’s virtually nothing immediately around the hotel apart from a petrol station next door.

The beach isn’t particularly convenient either. You need to cross the road and then walk another 5–10 minutes to reach it.

The old town, to be fair, is brilliant and well worth visiting, but it’s roughly a 30–40 minute walk. Walking back in the evening also means passing an area where groups of homeless people with dogs congregate, which we found intimidating.

Food

Average and fairly basic.

We went B&B so can’t comment on the evening meal and surroundings/service but at breakfast, bizarrely, only small plates seemed to be available, making it unnecessarily awkward to eat a normal meal without food falling off the edges. Why a hotel would deliberately make something as basic as eating your breakfast more difficult is beyond me.

Overall

This could be a very nice hotel, which is what makes it more disappointing.

The overriding impression is that the proprietors have stripped away all those small touches that make a hotel stay feel comfortable, welcoming and memorable, leaving the experience pared back to the bare minimum.

Clean rooms alone don’t make a good hotel.

It feels less like hospitality and more like cost control.

Location was good, breakfast great choice of food, bacon and sausages where a bit cold, room was adequate good view. Pool bar food over priced alcohol was quite expensive 5.60 for sagress two and three euros cheaper everywhere else unless you where visiting for the day it was 20% cheaper for food and drink which is quite unfair as I paid nearly two thousand euros for a week also I was over charged by 10 euros my daughter and my niece where also over charged at the pool bar Summary nice room ,great pool ,food ok, service very slow , put weekly activities in room prior to arriving for night entertainment and child activities.