The room decides more than the hotel does
At most resorts, picking a room is a rounding error. At Four Seasons Resort Mallorca at Formentor, it's closer to the whole decision. The building sits on a peninsula with one slow, winding road in, two real restaurants on site, and a week that lives or dies on what's outside your window and how far you have to walk to dinner. Get the room wrong here and you feel it every night, not just at check-in.
That's actually good news, in a way most resorts can't claim. The 1929 building was reconstructed inside its original footprint with every room turned to look at the water instead of the hill behind it, so even the cheapest category isn't stuck facing a car park or a service road. That doesn't mean every room is equal. It means the floor is high and the gap above it is about how much sea you get, how private your outdoor space is, and how far you are from the pools and restaurants.
The rooms worth booking
Guests who book ground-floor rooms with a private plunge pool consistently come back happy, and it's easy to see why on a property this spread out: you get your own outdoor space without needing to walk anywhere, which matters on the days you don't feel like getting dressed for the pool deck. One June stay described exactly this setup, ground floor with a private pool, and called the room beautiful even while flagging the food as underwhelming, which tells you the room itself was doing the work.
Suites get the strongest and most specific praise in the reports: a Lavazza machine and a proper hairdryer in one write-up, a sea-facing terrace and a bathroom singled out as a highlight in another, decor and lighting called out by name in a third. One family traveling with three kids booked a suite with an adjoining room and found having three bathrooms between them made a real difference on a longer stay. If you can stretch to a suite over a base room, the reports say it's the terrace and the layout you're paying for, not just square footage.
Even the base Pine View rooms get a partial sea view, which is the one structural fact worth knowing before you book anything: there's no category here that puts you nowhere.
The ones to skip
The reports don't split cleanly into named categories the way they do at some resorts, and that itself is worth saying: nobody's writing in to complain about a specific room number or a bad-view category. What they complain about instead is the building's one real design constraint. Rooms and the property overall get called isolated more than once, and that isolation is structural, not a room-category flaw: the mountain road in can run over an hour from Palma, and it's shared with cyclist packs and tour buses. More than one couple has skipped their off-property dinner plans rather than drive it after dark.
So the room to skip isn't a room at all. It's booking here expecting to treat Mallorca like a base for touring the island. One guest called the location "a bit isolated" despite loving the room itself, and a family write-up recommended renting a car specifically to make use of the coastline the hotel doesn't put you in the middle of. If your plan is Deià one night and Sóller the next, you'll fight the road every time.
Book the room for the terrace or the private pool, not the square footage — and book the week for the estate, not the island.
Worth it, if you know what you're buying
The staff make a real difference here regardless of room category. Managers and the GM introduce themselves early in a stay, and more than one report describes small, specific gestures, a handwritten note at dinner, a birthday cheesecake sent up from Mel, that suggest the service is doing more lifting than the room finishes are. Shima keeps showing up as the best meal on property; Mel draws complaints about portions not matching the price. None of that changes with room category. What changes is whether you're sitting on your own terrace at sunset or walking a corridor to get to one.
If a private pool or a genuinely private terrace matters to you, pay for it. If it doesn't, the base Pine View rooms still put you in front of the sea, and the money is better spent on a night or two at a hotel more central to the island instead of a bigger suite here.
