First Timer’s Trip to Universal Orlando and Loews Portofino Bay Hotel

Hello! I’m Stacey, your Disney Hotel Lady. Tag along with me as we take you through our very first trip to Universal Orlando and a tour of the Lowes Portofino Bay Hotel.

This was an absolutely whirlwind trip for us. We only had two days, one night: half of one day spent in Universal Studios, and half of the second day spent in Islands of Adventure. The Loews Portofino Bay Hotel is modeled after an Italian coastal city area.

The front desk and bell services are to the right as you enter. There’s a seating area to the left. This is where we spent at least a half hour on our checkout day, killing some time. If you go straight through the lobby, you’ll come into this area.

An Avis Rental car counter right there in the lobby, along with the concierge desk under a blue awning. They’ll help you if you haven’t bought your Universal tickets yet. But I would recommend buying them ahead of time, especially with Epic Universe coming so very soon.

There’s a business center down the hall next to the concierge desk. So we have a story about the business center. I did order a couple of things from Amazon to be delivered to us at the hotel. And it came the day that we checked in, but we were in Universal Studios park. So we came back to the hotel. We were busy in the park and busy looking around the property of the hotel. And I go to the front desk around 9:00 PM to try to pick up my package and they said, “well, the business center is closed. You’ll have to pick it up in the morning.” I have never heard of that before. But, okay, “so when’s the business center open?” “Oh, 7:30 AM to 4:00 PM.” I was like, “what??”

So that was why we had to stay in that seating area for half an hour. After we checked out, I went to pick up the package ’cause we were going on further in our travels in Orlando, somewhere else. And I needed those items that I had ordered. I walk in to the business center and there’s a sign up, “out to lunch.” So we spent half an hour waiting to pick it up.

And then I finally get in there and he says there’s a handling charge. I was like, oh my goodness, for heaven’s sake. Now I know that’s becoming a thing. If you don’t know, that is becoming more and more popular at these hotels that they’re gonna charge you if you want to have some groceries delivered or send some stuff through Amazon or anything. Any packages coming through, they’re gonna charge you to receive and store those items.

But I was not aware of that here. So it was $5 for me to get these two or three tiny, little things in a package. So that was a little frustrating. Especially since I had come down to collect it the night before at the front desk and she did not mention the charge. But you can learn from my mistakes. So understand that if you choose to do this, you will be charged.

It was a nice big room. It looked like our room was an ADA accessible room and there was a peep pole at wheelchair height. And I thought maybe that was just a coincidence; that they just, by chance, gave us this room. But as we were walking down the hall later on, I realized every door in the hall had that peep hole at wheelchair height. So I don’t know if all of the rooms in the hotel are set up for ADA, or if we were on an ADA floor, or a wing. But I thought it was just very interesting and unusual.

There were three pools at this property, the Portofino Bay.

This is the main pool area, like the large pool. There’s a cabana area at the entrance where you can get water. They even have a pump bottle next to the water full of sunscreen if you forgot some. They also had toys and other accessories available for purchase. It was closed though when I went by in the evening. It’s probably open during the day.

There is a separate fenced area with a playground and kiddie pool/splash place to the left of the main pool as you enter. They were having their movie by the pool. I think one of the Madagascar movies was playing. There’s a tower there that has a slide in it. There’s also a restaurant/bar to the right as you enter. The hot tub is at the back, near cabanas for rent and the tower slide. The hot tub has a waterfall falling into it to drown out noise from the pool (and aesthetics, I imagine, haha.)

The other two pools were “quiet” pools. One of those was on our side of the hotel. The main pool and second quiet pool were on the opposite side of the hotel to our room.

There was not hot tub at the quiet pool near our room, but there was one near the other quiet pool. There was also a bocce ball court near that far quiet pool.

There is an arcade along with other restaurants and stores in the little plaza-type area.

We went in to the gelato shop and we each got our little scoop of gelato. One in a cup, one in a cone. It was very tasty. I was half tempted to go back for another scoop, but we had more things to do, like check out the pools for you.

Right off the mail pool is the gym. It was a fairly big gym.

There’s a laundry on site. The laundry was close to the second quiet pool, not the quiet pool that was by our room. If you had an accident, there is soap and everything for you to buy in a vending machine.

Okay. So there’s a cute story here. This picture is An American Tail. I don’t know if you know this movie, but it’s about a little mouse that moves to America. We went to see it in the theater when I was a little kid, like five years old or something, and I got so enthralled in the movie and so caught up that I stood up on my chair in the theater and yelled, “Run, mouse! Run!” when the cat was chasing Fievel. So that’s a popular story in my family.

But we had a wonderful time. The hotel was super cute. You can watch the YouTube video for further info on what we did in the parks at Universal Orlando.

Epic Universe opens May 22nd, 2025. If you’re headed over there, don’t forget to come on over to the original parks, Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure. Lots of fun things to do there.