Luxury Portugal Trip Review: Batalha, Queluz Palace, Cabo da Roca, Nazare, Obidos, Fatima, Cascais, Lisbon

The trip was an overall success but fell short in a few areas. Our flight was delayed six hours so unfortunately we lost a large chunk of the day we arrived and had to sacrifice a few planned tours that I had been looking forward to doing. But our agent Filomena and our guide helped turnaround an initial bad start to our trip with a warm greeting at the airport. Our guide did everything she could to help us make the most of what remained in our first day. She also did an awesome job on day two with going through our planned itinerary.
While I thought our trip to Fatima went as expected and our visit to Batalha was quite nice, I felt most of everything else we saw was kind of a waste. On day one, we skipped Jeronimos Monastery, Belem, and the Pena Palace in order to visit Queluz Palace and Cabo da Roca. The palace we saw was nice, but underwhelming. Cabo was cool to see, but I think we erred in not visiting the much more historically / culturally important Jeronimos Monastery and Belem. For this first day though, it was a tough call and the situation was largely out of all of our hands thanks to the scheduling snafu caused by the airline. However, day two was a normal day and therefore more the fault of the travel company. I didn't see any value in half of our planned itinerary, i.e., Nazare and Obidos. The Fatima and Batalha stops made sense and were appreciated, but the other two just felt like "filler" and part of a standardized set route that got forced on us. I would have rather cut those entirely and have completed the Jeronimos and Belem portions of the prior day's planned tours that we missed. 
Our hotel was nice, but felt kind of small and it's air conditioning was almost nonexistent so we resorted to opening all the room's windows. On the one hand, this worked like a charm because we felt awesome breezes throughout the night that ended up chilling the room better than the air conditioning. On the other hand, our room was right above a popular night life area and we were surrounded on three sides by never ending noise of drunken partiers till 4am every morning. I'm not sure what could have been done about this; I would have liked for the travel company to have known about these small details and advised me about them but then again, I'm not sure if someone could have known about them without having actually stayed in that hotel themselves.
With respect to planning, this company used Travefy to share summaries of the evolving itinerary. While I liked the embrace of tech to centralize the info sharing process, I wasn't a fan of that website/app. It got a little confusing tracking the different versions of the itinerary (old ones seemed to linger when they should have disappeared) and sometimes left me just wanting a simple PDF to be able to print and read. It was also a little annoying how the itinerary was shared on this platform yet when I commented on some changes I wanted made, I was asked to write those down in an email instead of using the platform. If we're going to use something then let's fully use it, otherwise why bother complicating things?
While overall I'd give our guide high marks and rate her a first class guide, one thing I felt let down on was her choice of lunch during our second day. We ended up eating pizza which I thought was a wasted opportunity that should have been spent eating authentic Portuguese cuisine given our rather compressed schedule in the country. One other critique I have would be Vera's "story telling" skills. She is clearly a brilliant archaeologist / historian but not good in terms of communicating her vast knowledge to a lay audience. I found that she often began speaking having assumed quite a bit about what we already knew and that often made it hard to follow some of her monologues as there were some references we just didn't get and as a result there were times when it was hard to focus / be excited to her descriptions. (This is the teacher in me talking since I know this is something to always be aware of in front of my students).