V B.
Yelp
My husband and I stayed at Bahiacafe Hotel for 4 nights 2 weeks ago. We really enjoyed the hotel, which is quite beautiful, charming and very well located right in Pelhourinho. The breakfast was very good, as well. The staff are friendly and helpful.
I'm giving the hotel 3.5 rather than 5 stars because of one very disappointing part that I would like to point out as a warning for people considering buying the day boat trip to the islands of Frades and Itaparica through the hotel. This trip was offered by a company called Apollonio and, as I mentioned above, booked through the hotel. When we asked the hotel staff about the trip, they told us that it involves spending 2 hours on a beach on Frades and then 3.5 hours discovering Itaparica (it's the largest island in the bay, so there's a center and some historical buildings). This last part really appealed to us, so we booked the tour.
While the 2-hour stay on Frades was exactly as the hotel staff described, the Itaparica part was not at all what we were told it would be. First, the tour guide told us that we'd be having lunch on Itaparica, which I found to be a bit strange since lunch is not included in the price of the trip, so it didn't make sense for him to tell us where lunch would be. However, when we got to Itaparica, it began to make perfect sense. Instead of depositing you at a spot from where you can go to explore the town, the boat (as well as all the boats doing similar tours, it seems) came to one very small beach completely removed from everything else on the island. The only thing on the beach was, as you might guess by now, was a restaurant for $R36 per person for a buffet-style lunch. There was no possibility of going to any other restaurant, the town, or anywhere at all from that beach (including the town because it was too far and there was no transportation available to take us there). ALL of 3.5 hours on Itaparica were confined to that small beach with this big restaurant and bar, full of trapped tourists like us. No wonder the guide wanted us to wait till we get to this beach to have lunch. Bringing a boat full of people who have nowhere to go for 3.5 hours but this place probably gets them a nice cut from this enterprise. The restaurant is decent, but not where we would've chosen to eat. Moreover, the feeling of being totally used like that leaves one with a very unpleasant aftertaste.
But the part about not having seen any of Itaparica was what upset us the most. Our main motivation for going was the promise to explore Itaparica and have our own time to explore. The actual tour may be exactly what a lot of people might want on a boat tour like this, but that's not how the tour was described to us, and that's the part that I was quite disappointed in. When I mentioned this back at the hotel to a lady on the staff, she seemed genuinely surprised by what took place on the tour, so I think the hotel honestly didn't know what the Itaparica part of the tour actually entailed. I hope they know better now and stop advertising it as a chance to get to know Itaparica. In any case, I'm posting this here because I myself wish I'd seen a warning like this before we booked this because if we'd known these details, we would've certainly not gone on this tour and done something else that day instead.
Another important thing to note is that the trip is not for those who have a limited range of motion. There is no pier at either beach, so we first had to disembark from the cruise boat onto a smaller boat at some distance from the shore and then from the smaller boat into the shallow water at the beach. Two people, both older, actually fell into the water and hurt themselves a bit during one of these manoeuvers, so if you had something like a hip replacement recently, you might want think twice about doing this. There was no warning about this to us and although, luckily, this is not an issue for us, this can very well be a problem for many others.
