I and two friends stayed at the Hotel Mercure Porto Batalha over Christmas for three days. My main problem with the Hotel Mercure Batalha was their poor customer service, shady business practices, and unaccomodating style. The "guest is always...

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I and two friends stayed at the Hotel Mercure Porto Batalha over Christmas for three days. The rooms were okay, although pretty small; one of us had to step out of the way to let the other past at the foot of the bed next to the wall. The bathrooms were nice with good toiletries. The location was good - just down the street from the Santa Catarina shopping area, 15-minute walk downhill across the river to the portwine lodges. I felt like the higher price of this hotel was primarily to pay for the huge lobby and the restaurant. We had Christmas dinner at the hotel, and the buffet was quite good with about 50 different kinds of dessert. We had breakfast in the hotel one morning, which was adequate, although one would expect more for the price. Same goes for the Christmas dinner, which was about 25 euros.

My main problem with the Hotel Mercure Batalha was their poor customer service, shady business practices, and unaccomodating style. The "guest is always correct" philosophy is definitely not practiced here. My friend went down to the check out while I was still in the room, and when I came down, she was standing there arguing with the hotel staff with two policemen at her side. First of all, note that breakfast is not included in the cost of the room, which was not mentioned when we checked in, and is pretty surprising anyway, considering that this is supposed to be a four-star hotel. They had actually tried to charge us for breakfast for three days, although we only ate breakfast there one day. My friend argued with them, and they did remove the two extra days of breakfast.

We had also left a small bag of laundry to be cleaned on our second day there. The bag contained about 12 pairs of underwear, 6-8 pairs of socks, about 4-5 cotton shirts, and 3 or so pairs of jeans. It filled a small, plastic bag. When they presented my friend with the bill for the laundry, it was 70 euros, ie over 100 dollars! We had expected it would be maybe 20-25 euros at a maximum, but definitely not 70! The hotel staff claimed that there was a list of laundry prices in the room, but neither of us had seen it. Our other friend who had her own room said she had seen the list which was on a piece of paper inside the closet, so maybe there actually was one in our room, but not very openly displayed in any case. My friend told the staff that she felt the prices were unfair and should have been posted in the room and that she refused to pay it as is, and the man on duty immediately picked up the phone and dialed the police and started speaking threateningly in Portuguese, thinking that my friend would back down and just pay the bill. The police arrived; they were actually pretty nice, but they said that she should have asked for the prices ahead of time, and that she would have to pay the bill, or else go to the police station and file a complaint, which wouldn't really do any good and would just take time away from our vacation. So my friend ended up paying the bill (in cash, unfortunately, or else she could have disputed the charge with the credit card company), and we left. We would have been disgruntled but much happier if they had at least reduced the laundry bill, as the prices really were tantamount to extortion, but they were not willing to accommodate us at all.

In short, I would not recommend this hotel to anyone. The facilities were average, overpriced, and they have the worst customer service I've ever seen in my life. Resorting to calling the police (as the first option!) rather than dealing diplomatically and arriving at some sort of mutually agreeable compromise renders this supposedly four-star hotel as the bottom of the barrel as far as I'm concerned.

My main problem with the Hotel Mercure Batalha was their poor customer service, shady business practices, and unaccomodating style. The "guest is always correct" philosophy is definitely not practiced here. First of all, breakfast is not included in ...

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