Farol Design Hotel - Cascais, Portugal 

My Fianc? and I stayed at the Farol Hotel for 2 nights at the end of June and found the Farol the be the perfect luxury getaway from a stressful London life. As soon as you walk up to the hotel you can see straight through the hotels floor to ceiling glass doors to the Atlantic Ocean. The pool area is amazing and you get to listen to Ibiza style mellow sounds whilst relaxing on a padded double white lounger while ordering cocktails and bar snacks from the attentive staff. Exactly what we were after on this occasion. We unfortunately didn’t manage to stay in a design room but the room we got was nice enough and we had a terrace with sun loungers that looked over the Atlantic ocean and rocks surrounding. Not a huge room but the Jacuzzi bath and firm King-size bed made up for it ;-) Breakfast was ok and dinner at sunset out on the patio was perfect. The surrounding area of the hotel was very nice and the 10/15 min stroll into the centre of Cascais is a lovely walk, especially at sunset walking back after dinner / drinks in town. Cocktails in the hotel bar were great, but if you are just after beers / spirits etc there is an off-licence about 5 min walk from the hotel. Staff were helpful and willing on every occasion we needed something. We will definitely be staying here again!

Although the Farol reviews we read on tripadvisor were not very encouraging, we still decided to give it a try for our honeymoon based on the extremely appealing website of the hotel...But what a terrible mistake. The website in question is misleading... "We do not have anyone to help you with the luggage and the pool is out of service but you can use the one of the hotel next door" This was the first things we've been told at our arrival. Ok, these things happen but concerning the pool they should have warned us before. The public spaces are well maintained, neat and quite pleasant but the room we got was unfortunately way below what we were expecting. They call it "ocean view" and you can see the ocean from the smal terrace but barely from the inside, as the glass doors are very small. A thick electric wire running through many cigarette butts in the terrace, funny smell in the room, room service food overpriced and far from good, when we got served the waitress left with the caddy there was no table to put the dishes on, so we had to use the armchair as a table. A women in the room next to ours was sick and each one of her coughs sounded like if she was with us in the room, which is unacceptable for a real five star hotel. A service door was permanently open in our way to the room (104) , giving an unpleasant sight to the back office and we had to walk over a towel in the middle of the corridor, covering a leak or a stain, we didn't get to know. We will certainly go back to cascais but absolutely not to the Farol which we do not recommend at all. It seems like this hotel is made to be published on magazines, not to make customers feel good.