Originally Posted by
esfox
Thanks, Palal. Very helpful.
We're not paranoid people, but understand that, to first-time travelers to this region, all the information about street and public-transport pick-pocketing and petty theft is overwhelming - from all kinds of reliable sources. To be fair, the focus is more on our final destination of Barcelona than Portugal!
I've bookmarked the excellent sticky note about the trains.
For Portuguese local and long-distance train/metro transport, do automated machines accept chip-and-signature credit cards, not just chip-and-pin?
Thanks again.
You are going to Portugal, which is a perfectly normal EU destination in Western Europe. You're not going to Nigeria or something, stop panicking so much about thefts and pickpockets. The risk will be at least as large, if not larger, in many US cities as in Portugal.
From LIS, you can take the metro to the important Lisbon train stations. The metro costs only one euro or so. It might be annoying with your luggage, but you'll survive I think. If you really don't want to drag your luggage everywhere, just take a taxi; more expensive but still manageable.
Indeed you can take a train to Porto, it will be no problem. You can buy the tickets right there. Research beforehand from which lisbon station it departs (I think appolonia). I don't know about credit cards, but keep in mind that creditcards without chip/PIN are less commonly used in Europe (we prefer to use debit cards). So you might want to bring a normal visa or mastercard that does have a pin.
Oh I see now that you fly directly to port and so will only have one train ride in the direction of Lisbon. Well within Lisbon it's easiest to use the metro which costs only 1 euro or something per ride (no matter how far you go, except to some of the remotest suburbs but you probably won't go there anyway). The metro runs all the way to the airport. If your hotel is too far for a metro station, just take a taxi, they are cheap there.