Martinhal Lisbon Oriente

"I stayed at Martinhal Lisbon for four nights, solo parenting my 6 and 7-year-olds, and overall we had a really lovely stay. From the moment we arrived, the welcome at reception was incredibly warm. We were made to feel genuinely welcome and were taken up to our room, which was a lovely start after travelling with two children! The room itself was probably where my expectations weren’t quite met. It had absolutely everything we needed and was perfectly comfortable, but it just didn’t feel like a five-star hotel room to me. These are small things, but there was no hair conditioner and the toiletry bottles were an absolute battle to actually get anything out of! Nothing that ruins a holiday, of course, but at this level you do notice the details. We used both pools and the children enjoyed them, although again I felt the facilities were quite plain. They were perfectly nice pools, but there wasn’t much about them that really captivated the children or made them feel particularly special compared with other five-star family hotels we’ve stayed in. Breakfast, however, was AMAZING. The food was excellent, but what really made it was the staff. They were warm, funny, attentive and brilliant with the children. We ate in the hotel restaurant on our first evening and had a fantastic meal. My children actually chose from the main menu because the children’s menu was mostly the usual nuggets, pizza, burgers etc, and we wanted to try some local food while we were in Portugal. The chef came out to speak to the children, which they absolutely loved, and one morning even made them warm pancakes for breakfast. Those little interactions ended up being some of their favourite memories from the hotel. The hotel also helped organise two trips for us. The tuk-tuk tour wasn’t particularly great, although that wasn’t really the hotel’s fault, but our day trip to Pena Palace was absolutely amazing and one of the highlights of our whole Lisbon trip. Most evenings I would have a pre-dinner cocktail at the hotel before getting an Uber into Lisbon for dinner. One evening my daughter wandered behind the bar to ask for something and I immediately apologised. The response from the bartender summed up the staff perfectly: “Please, this is a hotel for children, it’s expected!” As a mum travelling alone with two young children, that attitude means more than people probably realise. I never once felt that the children were an inconvenience or that I needed to keep apologising for them simply being children. A very special mention also has to go to Amy at the Kids Club. My two absolutely loved her and loved spending time there. Would I return? Probably not, but importantly, that isn’t because we had a bad stay. Quite the opposite, we had a lovely four days and came away with some brilliant memories. For me, though, the facilities and rooms simply didn’t feel five-star. What was five-star was the team. The staff are absolutely the heart of this hotel and they turned what could have been a fairly ordinary hotel stay into a genuinely lovely family holiday."

"Absolutely incredible experience"

"We travel a great deal and stay in a lot of five star hotels, so I am comparing Martinhal Lisbon Oriente inside its own league, not to anything below it. In that league it stands apart. What makes it work is the children's floor at the top of the hotel. This is not a token playroom with two puzzles and a screen. It is a properly designed world for children, and ours did not want to leave it. What matters even more is the supervised childcare, booked and paid separately, where you can leave your child in professional hands for a few hours. If you have a call, a meeting, a conference, or simply want one dinner without negotiating, that single service changes the shape of the whole trip. I have not seen it done this well anywhere else. The location does half the work. The Oceanário is a short walk away and it is enormous, one of the best we have visited anywhere. The entire waterfront is made for walking, there is good food all around it, and an afternoon with a small child needs no planning at all. The staff are the other half, warm and unhurried, and genuinely good with children, which is not something you can train into people. One of them deserves her own paragraph. In the restaurant, ask for Charlene. She is the reason we looked forward to every single meal, and by the second day she knew exactly how we like things without us having to say a word again. She reads a table before anyone at it speaks. She is quick without ever seeming rushed, precise without ever seeming cold, and she is wonderful with children, patient in a way that is completely natural to her. Not once during the entire week did she forget or miss a thing, which anyone who has eaten in hotel restaurants with a small child will understand is close to impossible. Everyone here is polite and professional. Charlene is on a different level, and she lifts the atmosphere of the whole room. If management is reading this: she is an ambassador for your brand, and people like her are the reason guests come back. One small detail that says more than any list of amenities: our son was given a plush fox by the team, Lisek. Months later he is still one of his favourite toys and he travels everywhere with us. That is what a child actually remembers. We have stayed in many beautiful hotels. Very few are designed around what it is really like to travel with a young child. I wish more five star hotels would look closely at what Martinhal Lisbon Oriente does here, and copy it."