Portofino Bay

[Livia]

Hello! We are headed to universal at the end if June and had originally booked royal pacific but did some googling and think portofino may suit us better.

Does anyone know if all the rooms have been renovated? I tried to get an idea with google and they show the new rooms but the hotel doesn't indicate if everything is done. Disney leaves the old room photos up on their sure until a year after completion. Ha!

 

[DryCreek]

We stayed at the Portofino Bay from May 12th through May 17th.
Great place!

No, the renovations are not complete. They are presently working on the exterior of the Villas Section (main building, back side). But, don't let this ruin your plans! We had originally booked a standard two-queen garden view room. At check-in the nice young lady at the desk made us an offer we couldn't refuse (say this in your best Al Corleone voice). They offered us a two-queen room in the Villas Section (slightly larger than standard rooms), and, the best part was that these rooms were discounted an addition $75 per night! That means we got the room for $159.75 per night - plus $9.41 Local Occupancy Tax (6%) and $10.19 State Sales Tax (6%). The reason they offered this rate is because you essentially have NO view. The windows are covered by translucent plastic sheeting that lets light in, but also protects your privacy while there are workers on the scaffolding outside your window. All of the base coat paint has been applied, now the workers are into the labor-intensive part of hand painting all of the faux architectural enhancements. They were laying out the designs by hand during our stay, and on the last morning we actually had a painter meticulously plying his trade while we were packing.

It worked for us. You might like a view, but we were only in the room long enough to shower and then hit the bed. Our view of the Villas Pool/Bocce Ball Court would have been partially obscured by trees anyway (room 2448, fourth floor).

Ahh! One thing that they may not mention to you at the time of booking, check-in or check-out: they will put an advance charge of $200 per night (on top of your room charges) on your bill. This will NOT show up on your receipt at check-out. It does show up on your credit card account though! We were checking our CC balance this morning and we saw that they had charged us a full one thousand dollars more than we owed! A quick call to the hotel straightened things out. The excess charge will "fall off" after a few days. This advance charge is to cover anything that could be charged to your room - such as in-park purchases charged to your room card, room service, stealing towels or robes, or gobbling up all of the mini-bar items.

Ciao.

 

[macraven]

i put a MC down for charging and only $1 hold was put on each day then dropped the following day.
i would check my cc account each evening.

didn't have any issues with the large amount placed on my cc like you did.



you can pull up your hotel account on your tv in the room to see what charges they have placed on your account.

 

[DryCreek]

you can pull up your hotel account on your tv in the room to see what charges they have placed on your account.

That's true, but you only see anything (other than room rate and taxes) if there were charges made. We didn't have any, and when I looked on the TV after drilling through the menu, I never saw the $200 per day charge there. In fact, it's not detailed or mentioned at all on our final statement issued at checkout. Nor was it shown at all on the PDF copy of the final statement they emailed to me later that day.

Now, it has just gotten stranger. I have been religiously checking our CC balance to see if the extra $1,000 would disappear as promised. It did, in a strange way. The ENTIRE bill has disappeared. It was in the pending transactions, and now - nothing. That is just plain weird. Pretty soon the CC company will be bugging me about carrying too much of a credit balance. We paid the entire projected amount to the card before we left (along with room for incidentals). I wonder what happened?

 

[hermionesnape]

We stayed at the Portofino Bay from May 12th through May 17th.

Ahh! One thing that they may not mention to you at the time of booking, check-in or check-out: they will put an advance charge of $200 per night (on top of your room charges) on your bill. This will NOT show up on your receipt at check-out. It does show up on your credit card account though! We were checking our CC balance this morning and we saw that they had charged us a full one thousand dollars more than we owed! A quick call to the hotel straightened things out. The excess charge will "fall off" after a few days. This advance charge is to cover anything that could be charged to your room - such as in-park purchases charged to your room card, room service, stealing towels or robes, or gobbling up all of the mini-bar items.

Ciao.

Did you have charging to your room turned on and is that maybe the cause of the $200 per night hold. There weren't fees like that when I stayed with them in 08 and paid everything through the HP package. We requested that room charges be turned off since we had two teen/preteen girls running around and wanted to control the amount of money spent.

 

[macraven]

That's true, but you only see anything (other than room rate and taxes) if there were charges made. We didn't have any, and when I looked on the TV after drilling through the menu, I never saw the $200 per day charge there. In fact, it's not detailed or mentioned at all on our final statement issued at checkout. Nor was it shown at all on the PDF copy of the final statement they emailed to me later that day.

Now, it has just gotten stranger. I have been religiously checking our CC balance to see if the extra $1,000 would disappear as promised. It did, in a strange way. The ENTIRE bill has disappeared. It was in the pending transactions, and now - nothing. That is just plain weird. Pretty soon the CC company will be bugging me about carrying too much of a credit balance. We paid the entire projected amount to the card before we left (along with room for incidentals). I wonder what happened?

i like it when the entire room charges disappear.......
maybe they will forget to charge youse..............

 

[damo]

Did you have charging to your room turned on and is that maybe the cause of the $200 per night hold. There weren't fees like that when I stayed with them in 08 and paid everything through the HP package. We requested that room charges be turned off since we had two teen/preteen girls running around and wanted to control the amount of money spent.

I think that is probably the cause. My kids were down and they didn't have the hold put on. They don't have enough room on their credit cards for that sort of hold to be put on and still have enough room to eat, lol.

 

[aubriee]

We stayed at RPR May 12th-14th and did not have any extra charges added to our credit card. We did not have room charging added to our account though.

 

[DryCreek]

If they would have explained the choice of opting in or out of enabling room charges against our card - I would have opted out.

The lodging bill re-posted today. Room charges only. All is in balance.

 

[bumbershoot]

That sort of thing is generally dependent on your specific CC. Our credit union cc never shows stuff like that nor is a large hold taken. We have stayed I site four times, room-only bookings with room charging, an that has never happened.

I remember from working at amazon that some banks/cc companies would show every tiny pending charge, others would show a dollar hold, others would show more, etc. same with refunds; different cards would show them in different ways.

When I used my chase debit at restaurants it behaved the same way your cc did. Would show a big hold, days later it all disappeared, then it would pop back up. I hated that!

 

[DryCreek]

That sort of thing is generally dependent on your specific CC. Our credit union cc never shows stuff like that nor is a large hold taken. We have stayed I site four times, room-only bookings with room charging, an that has never happened.

I remember from working at amazon that some banks/cc companies would show every tiny pending charge, others would show a dollar hold, others would show more, etc. same with refunds; different cards would show them in different ways.

When I used my chase debit at restaurants it behaved the same way your cc did. Would show a big hold, days later it all disappeared, then it would pop back up. I hated that!

Our only CC is issued through a credit union. It is a MasterCard. It does tend to show a bunch of stuff in the "Pending Transactions" file, including those dinky charges that range anywhere from one penny to one dollar just to verify the account status.

I guess that it was a good thing two years ago when they were performing the account reviews and talked us into upping our limit from $1,500 to $5,000. We've never been over, and so it had never been an issue. If we needed to have a larger limit, we would always send a payment between 2 and 3 thousand dollars before our trip in order to build up a large enough credit to cover those costs. That may have been why they started harping on us to raise our limit. In all the years we've used this card (since 1988) we've never carried a balance on it, and have never been charged interest. You would think that they would understand that we never intend to either. On the positive side, we use it for everything, and that is how we get our airfare for trips where we don't drive or use the RV. They only require 22,500 points for each R/T ticket inside the lower 48.