"YOTEL Porto Hotel
The Yotel Hotel Porto is not what I would call a real hotel. It is more a collection of inadequate, cheaply finished rooms masquerading as a hotel. Maybe it should be called ‘Notel’. I will explain.
The hotel’s shtick is that it is modern, colorful with ‘mood lighting’, neon signs and walls, making it out to be a sort of pop art place. However, once you look below the neon ‘hood’ the truth can be seen easily. Maybe the idea of Yotel is to attract the younger guests, but if that is the case, then Yotel is pulling the wool over their eyes too, as they probably do not know real hotels. Many are too young to have known the hotels of old, where there was hospitality. Let’s take a look.
The restaurant:
Firstly, the restaurant does not operate with the hotel but alongside it. The ambience is non-existent, and the furnishings cheap.
You cannot sign your meals on your room number as in a normal hotel, but have to pay cash or by credit card. It would have been good to know this before entering the premises.
The waiters seemed to be dressed in their own jeans.
Secondly, the a la carte food is nowhere near good enough. The cream of vegetable soup was very bland and tasteless. The Caesar salad is smothered, literally drowning in sauce. The ‘wagyu’ burger was as dry as the desert. The dipping sauce that came with the burger and fries was very spicy and unidentifiable. I asked for ketchup but got a sort of translucent red sauce in packets that purported to be ketchup. Again, cheap.
My verdict: Worse than any fast food joint, and definitely not worth the expense.
The difference between lousy food and good food is the care that goes into making it. Here there was no care.
The Room:
I have not seen such an inadequate ‘room’ in all my fifty years in the hotel industry, managing ‘real’ hotels.
Again, the ‘mood lighting’ does not cover the fact that the rooms look decidedly cheap. There are no bedside tables, so nowhere to place your reading glasses, book or water glass for the night.
The open clothes hanger rod has five hangers. There is a place under the suitcase shelf for shoes, but only two cupboard shelves for clothes. Both of those two shelves are occupied, one by a spare pillow and the other by a hot water kettle. If you like living out of your suitcase then the room will suit you perfectly.
You cannot swing a dead cat in the room without hitting the walls, and in our room there was a completely useless nook where an armchair was thrown in to make it look better. I found it useful to stow my suitcases so that our clothes could be accessible.
The shower head is not powerful enough. There is no hook or shelf on which to hang your towel for use after a shower, so you have to exit the shower, and get a cold blast, to get to the towel. There is enough space to place a towel bar high up on the wall opposite the shower and I wondered why this was not supplied. At least the towels were a decent size. There is also seepage under the shower door to the wash basin area. There is no privacy whatsoever in which to dress after drying yourself.
While the desk is adequate, there is only a short stool on which to sit while working. Not great for a healthy back. I requested a chair which was brought to our room.
There is no bin under the desk, only one in the room under the sink between the WC and the shower room, and another in the WC.
The toilet paper and tissues are probably the cheapest out there, and feel more like sandpaper.
On our last day, while packing to depart, a large cockroach scrambled onto the bed and then disappeared behind the ironing board nook…..not a great goodbye.
The cleaning service: Only once was our room serviced before 3 or 4 p.m.
Sadly, cheap brands such as Yotel have infected the hospitality industry and transformed it into a real estate industry rather than a hotel industry in the true sense of the word. They are solely in business to make money while forgetting the ‘hospitality’ part of the business. Hotels, even the cheap brands, are supposed to afford the guest a good experience, and value for money. Obviously, this is not high on the Yotel Porto’s list of targets. Again, you might say that the social media marks are high, but that is misleading, as I explained.
It is a ‘heads in beds’ operation designed to take as much from the customer while giving the customer as little as possible."
