Quinta Perestrello

Stayed here the last week in February 2020. Overall it is a nice place to use as a base. Very clean. Friendly staff. Great for the price. If you want five stars this is not it. You need to speak to your bank manager if you want five stars. Fairly quiet location. We were given a ground floor room, twin single beds, sliding patio door onto a tiled verandah overlooking small but well kept garden, lawn and pergola. Swimming pool nearby. Brand new sun loungers. Pool water very cold. Not heated. Old style TV in the room with thirty-odd channels. Dressing table with a hairdryer in the drawer (fastened into the drawer bottom but there is enough flex to dry ones hair). Overall very clean room with good quality bed linen. I had emailed the hotel before we arrived asking if there was a kettle in the room. There wasn't but they very kindly put one in the room with cups, sachets of coffee, tea etc. This saved me the hassle of taking my trusty old travel kettle. Nice touch. The bathroom has a full size enamel bath with a shower overhead. Toilet, bidet and sink. All quite modern. Shaver socket over the sink. Very clean and all worked great. I did find that the sink plug was slightly too small for the plughole though, hence the water slowly drained away when having a shave. Toilet paper replenished by the excellent cleaning ladies. Clean towels provided whenever you want them. You can flush toilet paper down the toilet in Madeira by the way and the tap water is perfectly fine to drink (after many holidays in Greece I thought it was worth mentioning this). The big downside is that the dining room/ dining conservatory is far too small for a hotel with this number of rooms. The hotel has been substantially enlarged in recent years to provide more rooms. Our first time for breakfast and there were no tables available. It was a stormy day and everybody was inside. There are tables outside for better weather days. We ate our breakfast in the hotel foyer to the amusement of the Germans. Breakfast........you get what you pay for and this is a reasonably priced hotel. Fresh pineapple, melon usually on offer which was fine. Cereals, milk, a big bowl of natural yoghurt, rolls, croissants (very sweet like cakes). Big toaster (conveyor belt type machine), butter, jams and marmalades. The big downer was the warm food available. Baked beans like chewing on bullets, scrambled eggs you could bounce off the walls. One day we had bacon which wasn't really like our bacon but this floppy, fatty stuff. Usually there were these awful little frankfurter sausage things, hundreds of them stored in the warmer. Breakfast was so bad we didn't bother and walked into town on our last two days to a cafe we had found that did a half decent English breakfast. Breakfast is served from 07.30 to 10.00. One time we went down for breakfast there were no clean plates. I asked the member of staff twice for a plate for me and the wife. In the end I went into the kitchen and got them myself. Could be better managed to be honest. I would avoid going for breakfast after 08.30 as stuff has run out. They don't replenish all of it. Location: 20 minute walk down to the seafront. There are plenty of shops and restaurants near the hotel too. Shop around re: the restaurants as prices vary a lot. Half a litre of the local lager, Coral, is anything from 2.5 to 4 Euros a glass in bars. I was buying 1 litre bottles of Coral from the shop round the corner at 2.19 Euros per bottle. We bought a 1 litre bottle of Bacardi when we arrived at Madeira airport for 15 Euros (it's just a little shop near the baggage carousel not duty free). The same bottle was 29 Euros in the shop near the hotel. Clientele in the hotel a real mixture...French, German, Scandinavian. There is a bookshelf in the conservatory where you can swap books. Car hire: We booked a car online before we flew and picked it up at the airport. Budget Car Hire (part of Avis). Based at Madeira airport, no shuttle bus service. Very good. 65 Euros for a Renault Clio diesel and I bought a car hire excess insurance policy for 12 Euros for the week (saves you a lot instead of buying the hire firms full fat insurance at 8 Euros per day). We could have got one of those horrible little Fiat 500 noddy cars for a tenner cheaper but we've used one before. Wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding. Madeira is mountainous. Some of the gradients make your hair stand on end. Believe me you need something with a lot of pull in it. Overall a great holiday. Madeira doesn't have any beaches and no nightclubs that I could see. Not really for the younger crowd. More suited to middle aged or older.

Enjoyed a short stay at this property in February 2020. The hotel is easy to find at the end of a main road junction and has a limited amount of on-site parking available at the front and side of the hotel. The check-in was quick and easy and staff made sure all of the facilities and services were pointed out. The rooms are lovely and rustic with wood flooring and big wooden beds. The standard of cleaning was excellent with fresh toiletries and towels provided every day. The hotel has an old section (which I was in) that has opening windows and an annex that includes rooms with full balconies facing the outdoor pool. Only thing to be aware of is the number of power sockets in the rooms is limited with each allocated to lighting or hair-drier etc. A good idea to pack a multi-socket adaptor! Breakfast was a generous selection of hot and cold foods served in a buffet style. I had no problem finding plenty to enjoy each day and some effort was made to vary the hot foods daily. The hotel is close to some beautiful parks and about a 10/15 minute walk into the centre of Funchal. There is a steep hill to climb on the way back which may not be suitable for all but the local bus service is frequent and just €1.70 per journey. Beware of the small supermarkets close to the hotel as they are very expensive and seem to price things for the 5 star residents which dominate the area. (e.g. A bottle of local wine €9.99 in local supermarket compared to €3.69 in Pingo Doce in town or the Funchal Forum). Overall highly recommended for location, standard of service and staff helpfulness.

Hotel Quinta Perestrello, Funchal, Madeira The hotel is rated 4 stars. Who actually awards the stars? The Perestrella’s certainly does not qualify for 4 stars now ~ if it ever did. The room we were given was on the ground floor, and had sliding patio doors with no windows which could be opened. The air-con system was blowing warm air. There was a control panel but the room temperature could not be changed. The outside temperature was 24 degrees Celsius. When we asked the quite unhelpful receptionist about this, we were told that the temperature was set centrally for the whole hotel and could not be altered for individual rooms. She suggested the patio door should be left open. This was unacceptable - sleeping at night with open patio doors on the ground floor. We asked to be moved to an upstairs room where we would be prepared to sleep with an open window. We were shown upstairs to another room, over threadbare stair and landing carpets. The view was…. A brick wall to the right, a laundry room straight ahead, and a back entrance to the hotel from the laundry room. Work started at 7am with the laundry staff talking loudly, sitting on the steps to the laundry room, smoking and making so much noise we were forced to get up. Our room had a ‘filthy’ upholstered chair, next to an exceptionally old TV. The net curtains and the drapes had clearly not been cleaned for a very long time, very dirty. The bathroom had non of the niceties of the usual 4 star standard: No magnifying mirror in bathroom No cotton wool balls, no cotton buds No face cloths No shower hats The shower head was a filthy plastic thing and merely dribbled out some water as most of the holes were blocked. The toilet seat was cracked and glued together ~ badly. As luck would have it ~ a hair dryer was provided. Sadly, this was screwed into the back of a drawer in the dressing table, making it virtually impossible to dry your hair as the cord only just managed to come out of the drawer. The only way to dry your hair was to sit with your head bent over the dresser. The hair dryer shared a power socket with the ancient TV. The TV would go off when you switched on the dryer – and vice-versa. And… unbelievably, there was no lift in the hotel. The small swimming pool had clearly not been cleaned in a very long time. Pool loungers ‘very’ dirty ~ unsurprisingly, we never once saw anyone either in the pool or on the sunbeds. The hotel did not have anything resembling a grand foyer ~ only a narrow passage with one very old and dirty sofa. Next to that was the ‘bar’, a cupboard sized, unmanned place where, unsurprisingly, not once, did we see anyone being served or asking for a drink! And lastly. We contacted the tour rep in order to book a tour…….. Luisa arrived at the hotel the next day on time and booked the tour for us. In addition to that, we explained all the above to her. We asked if she’d seen round the hotel ~ she hadn’t We asked her if she’d come with us so that she could see the extremely worn carpets on the stair, plus our ‘1 star’ room. We asked her if she could honestly rate this hotel as a 4 star……… she said no. We found the Irish receptionist and the girl who laid out and cleared the breakfasts to be very pleasant and helpful.