Montebelo Vista Alegre Ílhavo Hotel

great hotel with great service. very nice location and excellent breakfast

Such a beautiful, and peaceful hotel, the staff is good and welcoming. Unfortunately, it’s far from Aveiro city center, but you may find the right connection to the nature.

The hotel is in a beautiful location overlooking a river and part of a porcelain factory. The décor is very beautiful and contains a lot of porcelain. There is a museum and two shops on the premises that shows and sells porcelain, well worth a visit. The hotel is classed as a 5-star hotel but doesn’t live up to its classification. We were upgraded to a suite, which was very nice, but had to wait 30 minutes for someone to show us the directions to our room. The direction was made by a young boy who didn’t know how long it would take to get to the hotel, didn’t know where we should park and couldn’t drive us in the buggy since he didn’t have a driving license. After standing for 10 minutes and trying to get an answer from him we started walking and found the room only 3 minutes’ walk away… The room was nice and quite large but not really cosy. It had a small outdoor seating area from where you could see the river standing up, but also the carpark. After settling into our room, we went to the pool bar for some sandwiches. After waiting for 30 minutes, we asked for our sandwiches and they had forgotten about them, at that time we were the only guests at the bar. The pool bar was the only open bar during daytime (the second bar opened 7PM) and had very limited offerings. No draught beer at all and only very small glasses of sparkling wine, to mention two things. We hade breakfast the first day about an hour before closing time and almost everything on the buffet was empty or nearly empty and it took long time (or never) for the staff to refill. There were a lot of tables around us that didn’t get cleaned for our stay at the breakfast. Later that day we explored the surroundings and the hotel called around 3 PM and asked if we wanted our room cleaned. We had left a sign on the door and all, but one, towels on the bathroom floor and was really surprised by the question. On the second day our room was cleaned but not until after 4 PM (and we had left a sign on the door since 10 AM). Breakfast the following days did not improve and neither did the pool bar (there weren’t any other restaurants or bar nearby). All in all, a nice looking hotel in a somewhat remote location but more a 2 to 3-star experience.