Loews Portofino Bay Hotel Review: Worth It with Kids?

Our family recently visited Universal Studios Florida, and we recovered from the constant exposure to motion simulators each night at Loews Portofino Bay Hotel. Here is the honest version: the hotel is genuinely beautiful, the free front-of-line perk is the real reason to book it, and I would probably not stay here again with my kids. If you want the short answer before scrolling through every fountain photo, that is it.

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

DISCLOSURE: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning when you click the links and make a purchase, we receive a commission.

Quick Verdict: Is Loews Portofino Bay Worth It?

• Book it if: you were going to buy Universal Express Unlimited anyway. The free version that comes with every room essentially pays for the night.
• Skip it if: you want a hotel that entertains your kids all day. It is calm and grown-up, not a kid playground.
• The one caveat nobody warned us about back then: the free Express perk covers Universal Studios Florida and Islands of Adventure only. It does not work at Epic Universe (the new park) or Volcano Bay.
• Rooms: start around $390+ a night and climb fast in peak season. This is still Universal’s top-tier pricing.
• Big update since our trip: the pool was a dirt pit when we visited. The Beach Pool is now open, which changes the “nothing for kids” complaint quite a bit.

How Do You Book Loews Portofino Bay Hotel?

Loews Portofino Bay Hotel is one of Universal Orlando’s on-site resorts, and it sits in the premier tier — the most expensive end of the lineup. (It is no longer automatically the priciest room on property; the new Helios Grand Hotel at Epic Universe now competes for that crown.) In the months leading up to our trip, I compulsively checked the price to see if I could find a better deal. I never saw rates dip below the high $400s, and that was in February — not President’s Day weekend, not peak season. Today the lowest published starting rate sits around $393 a night, but rates are dynamic and run well above that in busy stretches, so check the live price for your dates.

At Disney properties you can shave off a big chunk by renting Disney Vacation Club points. There is no equivalent shortcut at Universal that I am aware of. If you do not want to pay the rack rate, your best move is points and miles. If that phrase makes your eyes glaze, my beginner’s guide to earning travel points walks through it without the lingo.

I booked our stay using Citi ThankYou Points earned from the Citi Premier card — now rebranded the Citi Strata Premier. The annual fee is still $95, and ThankYou points get redeemed through Citi’s travel portal, so they cover most travel. The signup bonus moves around (I have seen 60,000 and higher floated as limited-time offers), so check the live offer before you apply rather than counting on a fixed number.

My husband and I combined our respective ThankYou points to cover the stay. One landmine to remember: shared ThankYou Points generally expire about 90 days after they are transferred. Wait until you are actually ready to book before you combine, and confirm the current Citi terms first, because the program’s expiration mechanics have shifted in recent years. If you are weighing which card to start with, my roundup of the best points cards for beginners compares the usual suspects.

What Is Universal Express Unlimited (and Where Does It Work)?

This is the whole reason to book Portofino Bay. Every guest in the room gets Universal Express Unlimited included — a front-of-line pass on most rides at the theme parks. I use “front of the line” loosely, because we were often nowhere near the front. Even so, it is a massive perk. Three premier-tier hotels include it: Portofino Bay, Hard Rock, and Royal Pacific.

Here is the crucial 2025 update. The free Express Unlimited covers Universal Studios Florida and Islands of Adventure only. It does not work at the new Epic Universe park or at Volcano Bay. If Epic Universe is on your list, you have to buy Express for that park separately, and the new on-site Helios Grand Hotel does not hand it out for free either. So the “the hotel pays for itself” math only holds for the two original parks.

Why it still matters: a standalone Express Unlimited pass currently runs somewhere in the ballpark of $150 to $380 per person, per day, depending on the season — roughly double what it cost when I first wrote this. Multiply that by a family of four across a couple of days and the included version starts looking like the best free thing at the resort. For more on how the parks stack up, see our Universal Studios Florida overview.

What Was Check-In Like at Loews Portofino Bay?

We visited Universal Studios Florida over a long weekend. We do not pull our kids out of school. I can’t risk our kindergartener missing that episode of Peppa Pig, after all. So we took an evening flight that landed at midnight. Universal does not offer any free airport transfer, so we booked a private car. (Worth packing smart for a late arrival — our Orlando packing list covers the must-haves.)

By the time we got to the hotel, it was pushing 1:00 a.m. Did I mention my kids are 5 and 7 and their bedtime is 8:00 p.m. (hence the name of the blog)? We were on the edge.

I waited a few minutes at the desk before someone came out from the back to check us in. The woman was nice and gave me some water bottles, but I was still confused by the directions she scribbled on the map when I walked away. To be fair, my sense of direction is sub-par. My senior dog with poor vision and an inability to read could have found the room faster.

After a relatively long and confusing walk, we located our room. We booked a basic studio room with two queen beds. I opened the door….

Wow! We must have been upgraded!

I was really tired by that point, so I thought it was just me, but don’t hotel rooms usually come with beds? I walked the room like three times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating, then called the front desk.

Oops, we must have put you in the parlor room.

Yeahhh…..we kind of need beds too.

After another twenty minutes (and approaching 2:00 a.m.), someone came to let us into the room Right. Next. Door. The person who brought the new keys said the woman who checked us in must have been confused, because most people book the parlor room and the studio together.

It would have been a super nice gesture to leave that middle door unlocked, since I am pretty sure no one was in the parlor room during our stay, but that was a hard no. We never heard about the mix-up again. I didn’t complain and it wasn’t a catastrophe, but at a roughly $500-a-night hotel — knowing it happened in the middle of the night with little kids — I would have expected someone to circle back and at least say sorry.

What Are the Rooms at Loews Portofino Bay Like?

Yep, this looks right.

At least it had beds.

The room was pretty standard for a basic hotel room — standard rooms here start around 450 square feet, so there is room to spread out a suitcase explosion. The bathroom was spacious. Not Waldorf Astoria Chicago spacious, but large enough for multiple people to move around freely.

It had a separate bathtub complete with weird shutters that let you take a bath on full display to the rest of the room. Johnny Knoxville would have had a field day.

Our room had a balcony with a great view.

From what I could see, most rooms do not have balconies, so if a view matters to you, request one when you book and assume it is not guaranteed.

What Is the Resort Itself Like?

Loews Portofino Bay Hotel is very well done. It does not feel crowded at all. The lobby was a ghost town — my favorite kind of town when I am traveling.

The whole place leans hard into an Italian theme — it is modeled on the seaside village of Portofino, right down to a recreated harbor piazza.

There are fountains everywhere.

Men sing fancy songs off balconies in front of a bunch of branches.

And the view cannot be beat.

Here is the big thing that has changed since our visit. When we stayed, Portofino Bay’s pool was closed for construction — a giant mound of dirt I couldn’t picture turning into anything. That same spot is now the Beach Pool, the resort’s main pool, with a white-sand beach, a Roman aqueduct-themed waterslide, a poolside bar and eatery, cabanas, and dive-in movies. If you read my original “nothing for kids to do” gripe and panicked, relax — the headline complaint that fueled it no longer applies. There is finally a legitimate kid amenity here.

There is also a very small arcade. It seemed like they threw it in because they felt obligated. Definitely not worth a stop.

How Do You Get to the Parks from Portofino Bay?

Loews Portofino Bay Hotel is technically walking distance to CityWalk and the theme parks via a landscaped garden walkway, but it is a real walk. The easier option is the free water taxi from the hotel’s Harbor Piazza dock. The boats run roughly every 15 minutes, starting about a half hour before Early Park Admission and going until around 2:00 a.m., 365 days a year. If you want to check out what thongs the kids are wearing these days, the boat will bring you back from CityWalk well past midnight.

We never waited very long for the boat. On our last ride of the trip, we got a boat captain who blasted YMCA and got the whole boat rocking out like everyone was two White Claws in. I had no idea I had been on the sad boat before. Even on the library boat, I highly recommend taking it. It is super convenient.

Where Should You Eat at Loews Portofino Bay?

Portofino Bay has several restaurants, and they lean Italian and grown-up: Trattoria del Porto, Mama Della’s Ristorante, and the fine-dining Bice, plus more casual spots like Sal’s Market Deli, a gelateria, and Splendido Bar & Grill. They looked fancy and not especially kid-friendly from the outside, so I only made it to the Starbucks at the hotel. We ate at the theme parks during the day and had dinner each night at CityWalk.

What Are the Best Gluten-Free Dining Options at CityWalk?

The Cowfish

The Cowfish is a burger-and-sushi place with fun decor. Kids can design a fish, then watch it swim in a virtual fish bowl elsewhere in the restaurant — a genuinely good distraction while you wait on food.

The Cowfish offers gluten-free buns, but most of the sushi rolls cannot be made gluten free, so set expectations there. I ordered a burger. The table also shared some sushi. The food was good, but I like our local sushi restaurant better.

Toothsome Chocolate Emporium & Savory Feast Kitchen

I had such high hopes for Toothsome. I mean, seriously, how cool is that exterior?

Toothsome has a ton of intricate desserts. I thought this place would be a huge hit with the kids.

It was a disaster.

We had 7:45 p.m. reservations. We arrived around 7:30 p.m. and were told they had us down for 8:00 p.m. The hostess said, and I quote, “We have tables now, but we aren’t going to seat you until closer to your reservation time.”

We tried to walk around the candy store, but it was basically Grand Central Station at rush hour. They had a lot of cute stuff to look at on the rare occasion we could see it through the crowd.

There is nowhere to sit while you wait, so a mob of people just presses up against a wall. When the hostess said she would seat us closer to our reservation time, she actually meant a half hour after the incorrect time in her computer — so we were seated about 45 minutes after our original reservation.

The service was bananas slow. Blanche and Sophia would have served us faster. We started to wonder whether they had food at all.

The employees at Toothsome really need some training on what not to say out loud, because after the hostess told us we were going to wait for no reason, the server announced our food was sitting under the heat lamp. Why aren’t you just bringing it out, then?

Spoiler alert, it didn’t come out for a long time after that. When did it finally arrive, you ask? 9:20 p.m. As you may remember, we got there at 7:30 p.m. We were in Toothsome for 110 minutes before we received our food, all after a long day at the theme parks with little kids who are normally asleep by then.

When the food came out, it very obviously had been sitting under that heat lamp as promised. My husband’s pasta had a thick film over it.

I ordered a reuben on a gluten-free bun. Mine was actually pretty decent, but no one else liked theirs.

We skipped dessert completely because we didn’t have it in us to wait another hour. In fairness, this was one bad night, not a verdict on the kitchen forever — but I’d make a reservation, build in a buffer, and keep your expectations on a short leash. Hours run roughly late morning to about 10:00 p.m. and shift around, so confirm before you go.

Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville

We chose Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville on a whim on our last night because it was conveniently located without much of a wait. The restaurant screams vacation. It gets bonus points for having a separate gluten-free menu with several real options, including sandwiches on a gluten-free bun and a gluten-free dessert. I ordered nachos as a meal rather than an appetizer.

They were disgustingly large. I didn’t make a dent, and I love my nachos. If you order these, share them. Of the three CityWalk spots we tried, this was the easy win for families.

Final Thoughts: Should You Stay at Loews Portofino Bay?

Loews Portofino Bay Hotel is really nice. The resort is calm, the boat is great, and I like the Italian theme and the views of the water.

Is it worth it? That depends on one thing: Express Unlimited. If you were going to buy it anyway, the free version that comes with every room makes the nightly rate easy to swallow. If you weren’t — and especially if your trip centers on Epic Universe, where the free perk doesn’t work — the math gets a lot harder.

As a family hotel, my take has softened slightly, but not flipped. When we stayed, the pool was a dirt pit and there was genuinely nothing for kids to do, which made it a tough sell with little ones. The reopened Beach Pool — sand, waterslide, dive-in movies — fixes the single biggest gap, so I’d no longer say “nothing for kids.” Still, the dining skews grown-up, the arcade is an afterthought, and it lacks the constant kid-focused programming you get at Disney resorts down the road. If your kids are the whole point of the trip, you can do better. If you want a quiet, beautiful base with the best free perk in Orlando, this is it.

Overall, we had a good stay, and I’m glad we tried it once. I didn’t tour the other hotels myself, but some, like Hard Rock, also include Universal Express Unlimited and may land better with kids. If we return, we’ll probably try another resort. For more on building the trip itself, our guide to Universal Orlando with toddlers and the must-dos at Universal Orlando are good next reads.

Loews Portofino Bay Hotel FAQ

Does Loews Portofino Bay include Universal Express Unlimited?

Yes. Every guest staying in the room gets Universal Express Unlimited included, and it is the main reason to book this hotel. Just know it covers Universal Studios Florida and Islands of Adventure only — not Epic Universe or Volcano Bay.

How much does Loews Portofino Bay cost per night?

Rooms start around $393 a night as a published low rate, but pricing is dynamic and climbs well above that in peak season. It is still Universal’s premier-tier pricing, so always check the live rate for your dates before booking.

Is the pool open at Loews Portofino Bay?

Yes. The Beach Pool that was under construction during our visit is now the resort’s main pool, with a white-sand beach, a themed waterslide, a pool bar, cabanas, and dive-in movies.

Is Loews Portofino Bay good for families with young kids?

It’s fine, not magical. The Beach Pool gives kids something to do, but the dining and overall vibe skew grown-up, and there is far less kid programming than at comparable Disney resorts. If the free Express perk is your priority, it works great. If you want a hotel that entertains your kids all day, look elsewhere.

How do you get from Loews Portofino Bay to the parks?

A free water taxi from the hotel’s Harbor Piazza dock runs roughly every 15 minutes from about a half hour before Early Park Admission until around 2:00 a.m. There is also a walking path to CityWalk and the parks if you prefer to stretch your legs.