Quinta da Balaia - Albufeira, Portugal 

Great Holiday !
Posted: Wed, May 03 2006
I read the other reviews and my experience is totally different. Last year my husband and I stayed at Quinta da Balaia and had a wonderful time! The bungalow was great, much bigger than we expected and the garden was very beautiful. The staff was very nice and the cleaning ladies were very nice as well. The only thing that could be better was breakfast; it was not like a breakfast you usually get in a hotel. I would also recommend car hire because the resort is a bit secluded and it is much too hot for walking and cycling !!!!

Terrible Time
Posted: Tue, Oct 25 2005
On arrival at this resort we were told that our villa did not have its own private pool, something that we specified in our booking and paid for. The staff were very unhelpful and unwilling to even try to accomodate us, telling us point blankly that most villas did not have their own pools - basically tough luck to us, which we had no choice but to accept. On our third day we awoke to discover money missing from our suitcases - a total of one thousand euros. This had obviously been taken whilst we were out during the night before and we had not noticed because everything had been put back in the same way that it was left. I immediately reported this to the member of staff on the reception desk, who didn't seem too phased by what she had just heard. She said that she would call the police but didn't, acting on the advice from the resort's security guard that there was no forced entry in to our villa. Indeed he was right - there were no signs of forced entry, leaving us to conclude that whoever entered our villa had legitimate means to do so! During this incident, the staff at the resort were uncooperative, unhelpful and cold. We had to get ourselves to the police station to report the burglary. The staff were defensive and made it clear that they did not believe us, they even commented that tourists make stories up in order to fraudalently claim on their insurance - implying that that's what we had done! Our villa did not have a security box and we later discovered that this was the case for most villas on the resort because keys had been lost or didn't work! At no point were we told that the reception had a safety deposit box that we could use. I would never stay at this resort again and would highly NOT recommend it to anybody else.