Intercontinental Palacio Das

I want to begin by saying that the hotel was beautiful and overall, the experience was great given the location and amenities of the hotel. My son and I arrived from the train station approximately 3 hours before check-in and were being accommodated by allowing us to check in early. We only needed to wait about 20 minutes for the room to be ready, which was a tremendous surprise. There were only two concerns that I had with our stay and that I would not have expected with this hotel. The first was the check-in staff member that seemed abrupt during our check in. She was concerned that I would not be charged for the room until the end of our stay. She stated that this is the arrangement with Expedia (three times) in which we booked the room. I stated that we did not use Expedia but utilized our AAA membership to book the room. Her response, "Well I don't know about that, because I cannot see that information. “Interestingly, while we waited for our room to be ready, we waited in the bar and I was charged the full amount for our room approximately 5 minutes after leaving the front desk. Unfortunately, the front desk staff member was more concerned about the charge (or lack thereof), that no information was shared about the hotel including breakfast times (already included in our cost), amenities, Wi-Fi or checkout information. The only other thing that she made sure of was that I was signed up for the IHG membership. As it turned out the concierge was the most helpful in filling in this information for us, in addition to assisting with a booking of a dinner reservation the next evening. Secondly, I was surprised with the arrival of window cleaning staff outside our hotel windows at 5:45 AM on our second and final morning (Thursday, 7/11). The conversation was loud and continued for 20 minutes and in turn began my day several hours before my anticipated wake up time. I am typically not one to complain about these types of things, but given the rating of this hotel I would have hoped for a higher level of consideration. In total, I stayed in five hotels during my visits in Spain and Portugal and this was the highest rated hotel of any. Given the reception we received and the window washing incident, I would have expected higher quality service.