Salgados Palace

There are many unfair reviews online in my opinion so please think of my review as objective and unbiased. This hotel is amazing if you are a family with young kids as I am. If you’re looking for a romantic retreat with your partner this is not the hotel for you - you should probably book the Salgados Village next door which has far fewer children and a more adult feel. For families this hotel is ideal, there are kids everywhere, irrespective of language they will find other kids to play with. The hotel chain is popular with the Portuguese so depending on the time of the year they will be in the majority during your stay. There are lots of things for the kids to do during the day including the Kids Club, they even host a little disco in the evenings for the kids. The four pools are large and clean, 2 are super shallow and perfect for the kids, the other two are normal depth but again you’ll find kids in all of them with no exclusivity for adults. You will never feel the kids are unwelcome anywhere, if they’re very young and eat quite messily, it is expected, albeit uncomfortable for you as a parent to experience in public. The rooms are clean, and well maintained. The staff are kind and helpful despite working very long and busy days. The music at the pool is great and keeps spirits high. There is an excellent train service to the beach and the driver has the music to match his happy spirit. Cocktails are goood - frozen daiquiri’s and caipirinha’s are a must!

Room size for family of 4 (2 kids under 4) is tight but manageable. Would be great if baths were available in the rooms for kids but again manageable. 5th floor restaurant food is good but the kids menu choice isn’t really appropriate for kids and could do with revising to more kid-friendly options and child-friendly booking slots for the comfort of families and those without who don’t want the “joy” of my kids and their chaos! Not sure if the Village hotel pools and kids club can be used by the Palace customers - would be good to know.

We loved everything, the food is really good, and having a 1 year old we always had unsalted food good for her. Our 6 year old also loved the food, as did we. The bed was really confortable, and the pillows felt like hugging clouds.

The pool was too noisy - and not because of clients, but because of the music. In the morning it was ok, just ambient music. In the afternoon it was way too loud and sometimes trashy. That, allied to the fact that the music was placed in the middle of the pool cluster made it impossible to pick a quieter place, and being near the entrance to the hotel also made it difficult to enter the hotel with a sleeping baby.

The pools are amazing. The staff are extremely professional and helpful. The reception and mainly Marcelo is extremely nice and supportive. The kids club and kids activities are very nice. Kids enjoy this place like heaven. Food variety and quantity is also excellent.

It’s very much a family with kids below 12 years hotel. If you have teens or for adults it’s extremely boring and nothing to do neither for teens nor adults. I suggest the hotel to at least add some recreation room with pool tables and ping pong for teens to enjoy a little bit. The gym is also very disappointing with two different very tiny rooms one for cardio with only couple of machines and another room for weight which is also very humble. Not expected for a 5 stars hotel

The food is great given the amount of people they need to serve. The staff is friendly and helpful. The adults pool area is generally clean . Being able to charge my ev was a great great plus and the fact that on the last day we got to checkout but still have lunch was a tremendously good touch.

The bar is just not enough, too many lines and most of the time just 1 or 2 from the staff working on it. As such the quality of the drinks is very mediocre, things are done in seconds and with low quality drinks and ingredients. The kids pool area with the boat is just plain disgusting, it’s so so so so dirty because there used to be grass next to the pool which now is just mud. The kids club is also very simple and blend, my kids are 4 and 5 and only went once because they didn’t had much to do in there

The hotel is great for families, my son loved it. Food is great, so many options in the buffet, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They even have a snack bar in the afternoons which was also pretty good. After dinner, in the bar/lobby the have a singer kids love it, the can dance and play. They have 4 pools, two of them for babies and toddlers. We found the train that takes you to the beach very useful as well. Room service was great, we found the staff very helpful and nice.

We had an experience while our son and our friends daughters, were playing in the kids pool (the one with the pirate boat) one kid pooped inside the pool. And honestly the way the hotel reacted about the situation was completely out of what we thought it should be, they left the feces floating there for about 2-3 hours, they only put yellow cones around the pool, but no one was actually making sure that someone else get inside the pool, so kids will keep jumpling in. The next day I was able to talk to the manager of the hotel, she told me that the pool was already cleaned. It's completely understandable that things like this can happen in a kids pool, the only thing we felt is they could've reacted better at the moment.

The resort is really nice, big and fun. The rooms have a nice design and the bed was comfortable. The location is ok, close to the beach and the hotel offers frequent shuttles during the day. As is it all inclusive, you can enjoy drinks and cocktails from the various bars in the hotel (w/ and w/o alcohol). OUr 2 kids (12 and 9) enjoyed both, the various pools and the football area, where they met many other kids.

The hotel is really big and it was loaded with people, so the dinning room was always busy. same for the lines in the bars. Personally I do not like it when the All Inclusive is not included some kinds of alcohol, which requires extra payment :-( There is one dining room, and a dinner restaurant, which unfortunatelly we could not use because it is only for those who stay 5 nights or more. We enjoyeda voucher for a "special" lunch, which was OK.

Food and service in the pool bar/restaurant was excellent. Breakfast was good. Some foods- i.e. beans were often warm/cold. Coffee was excellent. Lots of choice.

I felt the Moonlight restaurant was very uninviting. It was very beige and lacked ambienece. I wanted to have dinner in there for my 60th birthday but just stayed in the regular restaurant which had a little more character. I was hoping for a little more fuss as it was my 60th birthday, maybe a free upgrade would have been nice, some choclates or flowers placed in the room on the day would have added a nice little touch. That said i was presented with a veny nice cheesecake on a decorated board. I would visit this hotel again and would recommend to a friend.

Super friendly and helpful staff. Amazing food and drinks. Great facilities and lots of children-friendly infrastructure.

The beds were super uncomfortable - the double beds were actually made of two single beds, but the bed linen was not large enough to cover the two mattresses, so somehow we always woke up in the middle of the night with the beds completely messed up. The buffet room is very noisy and although we accept that this is a family oriented resort, we felt that more could have been done to avoid the “school cantine” feeling that we got every time we walked into that room.

The kids club is great, the staff is super firendly and helpfull. The SPA is great, and you can get the children to the Kids club in order to take advantage of it and relax. The pool area is also great, with a huge garden where kids can play sports

There is not much we didn't liked, maybe the fact that was not walkable to the beach and it was somewhat windy, but we knew that and where expecting it. The gym is not super complete, and is inside the SPA with limited equipment, but given you go to relax and on vacation also not something very important.

We really enjoyed the breakfast here! There was such a wide variety of food to choose from, and everything tasted delicious. Rooms are good size and clean with nice size bed.

We had a bit of trouble finding our way to the beach. The pathway wasn't marked properly, and we had a hard time figuring out which direction to go. It ended up being a longer walk than we anticipated, but we eventually made it there. The scenery was worth the effort, though - the beach was like private and very clean.