Holiday Inn Porto Gaia an IHG Hotel

"Must be a popular venue as the Manchester City football team were staying here tonight, or if not in the Holiday Inn rooms perhaps the ones below the 12 floor that they don’t control. Sadly, our room experience was awful and caused us to cancel our return trip on Thursday after our planned Durão Valley experience. On arrival we ran the shower and all that came out was brown water. When we complained wewere told it must’ve been caused by rainwater !! There had however been no rain all day. Despite being giving an upgrade, the rooms are seriously tired and the room safe was locked open but with no opportunity to use it. The bed was poorly made and the terrace outside the room was both locked to make it unusable and looked so derelict as to make it unwelcoming if it vould have been accessed. To the hotels credit, they resolve the safe issue and the bathwater now runs clear although with it being impossible to turn the bathwater on without the shower also running. Having seen what came out of the tap previously we have no intention of using those facilities whilst here and indeed are relying on bottled water for cleaning teeth. This doesn’t purport be a five star hotel and it’s competitively priced but frankly from our experience it would struggles to get a three star hotel. You do get what you pay and the consequences of cheap were obvious here."

"Having just returned from a truly wonderful 7-night stay at the Holiday Inn Gaia we'd like to thank the hotel for upgrading us to a sensational room. Having emailed beforehand to make sure the extra bed in our room would be big enough for our teenage daughter, we were overwhelmed to be upgraded to the 2 floor suite, with 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a huge living area. Having such a lovely room to come back to at the end of every day made our trip even more special. The view of the Douro from our bedroom window was wonderful. While the hotel is at the top of the hill in Gaia, it's only a 5 minute taxi down to the riverside, and Bolt/Uber are so cheap and make getting around very easy. It also means the location is really quiet and we all slept well. Everywhere was also spotlessly clean and housekeeping did an excellent job every day. We used the bar and room service a couple of times and the food/drink was good quality and reasonably priced, which is unusual for many hotels. All in all we've had a wonderful stay and our amazing room made the trip so memorable. So from our perspective, this hotel comes very highly recommended."

"Amazing hotel! This was booked by my tour company and I was blown away. My room was two floors with 1.5 bathrooms & incredible views. It’s a five minute drive/Uber ($5USD) down to the Gaia side of the Douro River with fabulous restaurants, bars, shopping, and views and only a 15 min Uber ($8USD) to the main square in Porto. Breakfast buffet was awesome. Cons: There were no directions for the safe. I followed typical hotel safe steps and was able to lock it but not unlock it. It took three calls and two hours for someone to come unlock it finally after 11pm after they kept saying someone was coming. Considering I needed my passport out of the safe so I could get to bed for an early morning flight this was not good. Walls are quite thin and I could hear a tremendous amount of water flowing from other rooms through my walls which made me check several times to see if there was some kind of flood/leak somewhere and it also took awhile before I realized the sounds like someone opening doors and turning on/off their light switches or having conversations were not coming from my own room. Scary at first and woke me up in the middle of the night the first night."