2023 Lisbon Trip (Day One – Holiday Inn Express Lisbon Airport)

There’s a shuttle bus that can be requested to get from Lisbon Airport to the Holiday Inn Express Lisbon Airport, but I thought that I might as well just walk. What could possibly go wrong with walking through industrial estates at night and all that?

The airport roundabout has a car on display and then I was off on my little meander.

I was delighted to see that there was a pavement as these things are never entirely guaranteed. Even so, I wouldn’t have wanted to do this walk with luggage as there were a lot of bumpy surfaces along the way.

This happened a lot in the United States and there was little option other than to walk in the road, but fortunately, there were sidewalks along both sides of the road. I do sometimes slightly dread a road closure on an expedition such as this as there wouldn’t have been an easy alternative road for me to walk along. For anyone reading this post wondering whether to walk to the hotel, I’d say it’s easy enough.

The hotel is just visible in the background, a little shining beacon.

And here we are. I then promptly couldn’t find the way in as it’s accessed from the other side and there are no signs. For a moment I wondered whether it was closed. However, after walking around looking at the hotel from numerous angles I was able to find the reception area. The receptionist was welcoming guests in English which I admit is helpful, although I was slightly surprised they didn’t at least start in Portuguese.

With the choice of a welcome drink or points, I decided I’d try the beer and I received 0.5 litres of Super Bock. It tasted of pretty much every other generic European lager, but I was pleased to be safely in the hotel and there’s a little bar area.

I was worried when I entered the room as the toilet was flushing in the bathroom and I wondered whether they’d given me an occupied room. However, it transpired that the flush was just jammed and using my extensive civil engineering skills that I’ve learned from my friend Liam, I fixed it. I nearly phoned reception to tell them I’d fixed part of their hotel, but I decided against it in case they thought that I was odd.

The breakfast is included in the room rate and the cold meats looked fairly mass produced, so I avoided those. The cheese was better, albeit unexceptional.

The pastries were better, including the pasteis de nata (custard tarts) which are a personal favourite of mine.

I think that’s suitably healthy.

It’s a large breakfast area and it wasn’t particularly busy during my visit. There was a friendly staff member cleaning and restocking, it was an inviting environment and I liked that it wasn’t too busy and bustling.

Just before I left I thought I should check the other pastries, I was very pleased with the doughnut.

This is a perfectly agreeable hotel, the room rate was around £50 for the night and it was convenient for the airport. On reflection, it would have been just as quick to get the metro into the city centre and stay in a more central hotel, but I liked being near to the airport hotel in case there was a long flight delay.

I had a look at the reviews on-line, which are broadly favourable, and wondered about this one:

“Staff is extremely unfriendly, they make you do downstairs for every little thing. Not to mention it is very expensive, I paid USD 3200 for 5 nights.
There’s no service here; it’s better to go Airbnb because you still have to do everything yourself. No microwave in the room; no cutlery, no water. The reception told me drink water from the bathroom tap”.

I’m not quite sure how anyone could spend $3,200 for five nights unless that somehow includes business class flights. And I drink water from the tap, although to be fair I have quite low standards in this regard.

“I thought I would book with an American hotel near the airport so I would not need Euros just for my overnight stay”

I’m not sure that it works like that and they were disappointed that this US hotel did charge them in euros. Most of the complaints about the hotel are around their shuttle, or lack of shuttle in many cases. But, I’d stay at the hotel again if arriving late into Lisbon Airport, there were no noises disturbances internally or externally and everything was sufficiently clean and comfortable.