KimKim is the service I needed and didn't eve...

Portugal | Apr 29 - May 6, 2022

Location couldn't be better - hotel was clean and had a great breakfast. Room was pretty small, but you expect that in Europe.

There are two "secret" elevators nearby that locals use to avoid the hills. We found them towards the end of our stay - both are a left turn as you leave the hotel.

Stunning hotel! We would be very happy to stay there again. Our room was very recently refinished (it smelled like they had finished that morning) and had a couple of odd quirks. Namely the front door was abnormally short such that my husband had to duck to come in. And despite the room being HUGE, the bathroom didn't have a door on it which we found uncomfortable. Views were incredible, breakfasts were great.

Great location, friendly staff, very clean, good breakfast. Almost too trendy...looks like it was designed to be instagrammed. A small thing, but they could use sheer curtains on the windows, it was either blackout or be fully exposed to the courtyard and guests on the other side of it.

Amazing! Loved it! Highlight of my trip (I say "my" because my husband missed it due to jetlag). I learned so much, the guide Daniela was superb, and it was the perfect way to spend four hours in Lisbon.

So, the destinations were lovely. But our "guide" Rui on this was really pretty terrible. This was originally meant to be a small group tour and we really wish it had been. Rui was our private "guide" but he was really more like a driver. He didn't have anything to tell us about about the sights even we asked him really easy questions. As soon he picked us up he started to try to sell us on booking a walking tour with him in Lisbon and using him to book stuff for Douro where we were going next. Since he didn't have anything useful to say about the sights he was more like an awkward third wheel that we wanted to ditch. We overheard some of the stuff other guides were telling their guests and really felt like we missed out.

Our guide was nice and the bikes were in good condition, but we would not recommend this excursion. Porto is not at all a cycling city. We were riding bikes on crowded sidewalks and through narrow streets where it felt alternately super rude and super unsafe to be biking. Our guide mentioned that we were a small group (seven of us) and I literally cannot imagine having any more of us do that at once. Avid cyclists will be mortified and anxious cyclists will panic. Stick to walking tours.

This was a good tour of the city and our guide was very knowledgeable and personable. Through no fault of her own though she followed the SPECTACULAR guide I had had for the food tour, who is a hard act to follow and had already shared a lot of the same information. At this point we had already walked some of these spots as well, albeit with less context. I would recommend doing this tour before the food tour to help set overall context for Lisbon.

This vastly exceeded our expectations. I really expected this to be a tourist trap dinner and a show type deal - and I mean yes, mostly there were tourists there, but the quality of the performances and the food were very high. And a few locals even came in later on! Definitely recommend.

We loved everything about Quinta de la Rosa - I would just recommend leaving out the lunch portion of this or adding some expectation setting. It was a huge (delicious) lunch that ended up being the same thing as I had ordered for my dinner at their restaurant the night before. It was huge and lengthy and ended up taking a huge chunk of the day when I think we would have preferred a light salad and to move on to another tasting instead.