"f you value your belongings or expect basic honesty, do not stay here. This was the worst experience of any trip we have taken, and what the hotel did after the theft was worse than the theft itself.
We checked in on 5 July 2026 (Room 308) around 1:30 pm. The receptionist took our passports, filed our details and spent 15-20 minutes showing us around, more than enough time to be able to identify us as the guests of that room. We went up to the room, unpacked, locked our cash, watches and jewellery in the in-room safe, and went out around 2:30.
According to the GNR police report, at about 3:30 that same receptionist received a call from our room asking to change the safe code. He went up, found an unknown man inside, a stranger who was plainly not either of the guests he had checked in barely two hours earlier, and he did nothing. He did not check the man’s identity, did not raise any alarm, did not call us. The safe code was changed. When we came back, our own code no longer worked and everything in the safe was gone. And it was not only the safe: our branded handbags and a large 77 cm suitcase with nearly all our clothes, left in the room, had been taken too. In all, we lost around €7,700 in cash, jewellery, watches, designer bags and clothing.
Then came the moment that tells you everything. We got back to our room around 5:30 and let ourselves in with the key card. About five minutes later the receptionist, the same man, knocked on our door and asked whether our room had been open. At the time we had not even noticed anything was missing, and we didn’t understand why he was asking; we said no, we had just come in and were sitting there, and that the door might not have latched, in fact the latch was faulty and would not close on the first attempt, something the GNR officer later inspected and recorded himself. He stood there and said nothing, not a single word, about the stranger he had found in that very room two hours earlier, or about the safe code that had been changed while he was up there. Only afterwards did it make sense: he already knew what had happened and was feeling out what we knew, covering himself instead of telling us the truth.
When we realised we had been robbed and the police were called, the receptionist dealt with the GNR entirely in Portuguese, a language we do not speak. Nothing was translated or explained to us. While he gave his account to the officers, we stood there unable to follow a word, with no idea he was telling them he had been inside our room and found a stranger there.
For the next five days we asked him and the manager, over and over, what had happened and whether they had checked the CCTV and the safe logs. We were told nothing, every single time. They never gave us the CCTV. They never gave us the safe records. We only discovered that a staff member had been in our room and found an intruder when we read the police report back home in India.
That same night, shaken after the robbery, we asked to be moved to a different room. The one they put us in had a balcony door that would not lock either. We asked again, either to change rooms or to have it fixed, and despite knowing the state we were in, having just been robbed in their own hotel, they refused to do either that night, leaving us to wedge chairs against the door so we could sleep. We were in a foreign country, shaken and with a language barrier, and not once did anyone here ask if we were okay. The manager did not even come to see us; we had to ask several times before he would meet us at all. The written “incident report” they handed us left out every important fact.
To this day the hotel insists it is not to blame, and its insurer has denied any negligence, despite all of these facts, including their own employee’s account to the police. Mistakes and accidents are one thing. What we went through was not a mistake: from the receptionist to the manager, it was a deliberate, collective campaign of concealment, lies and non-cooperation. Callous, evasive, and without a shred of care for the people who stay here. A sham in the name of hospitality. Keep your valuables, and your trust, far from this place."
