The Best Lodgings in Venice

How to find, and reserve, the best hotels in Venice in every price range and neighborhood

Booking engines:
www.venere.com
www.booking.com
www.getaroom.com
www.hostelworld.com
www.hotelscombined.com

Reid's top 10 Hotels in Venice
1) Albergo Pensione Guerrato [€€]
2) Hotel Danieli [€€€€€]
3) Hotel Bernardi-Semenzato [€€]
4) Albergo Ai Do Mori [€€€]
5) Locanda Fiorita [€€€]
6) Hotel Violino d'Oro [€€€]
7) Hotel Cipriani [€€€€€]
8) Hotel Pensione Accademia [€€€€]
9) Hotel Galleria [€€€]
10) Foresteria Valdese–Palazzo Cavagnis [€]

ReidsItaly.com Venice Map

» View ENLARGED MAP with all listings

Venice tours

» THE VENICE BOOKSHELF

Hotels in Venice Venice is a monstrously expensive city—captive audience, see—and you pay a premium just to spend the night in town, listening to the canal water slap against the marble facades of Gothic palazzi outside your hotel room.

Beyond hotels
• B&Bs
• Apartments
• Hostels
• Campgrounds
• ResidencesKeep in mind one thing: Prices for lodgings in Venice are high to begin with, can double in summer, and triple during Carnevale. Annoying? Yes. Frustrating? Yes. Worth it to sleep in La Serenissima? Boy, howdy, yes.

Venice is a city to which you should devote at least two to three days, and the option of staying in a hotel in the landlubbing industrial suburb of Mestre (something many sneaky group tours resort to) is one of the worst travel decisions I see many Euro-pinching travelers make.

Don't worry, though. It's just a matter of knowing where to look to find wonderful hotels and other places to stay in every price range—even a room overlooking the Grand Canal for less than $200 (at the Hotel Galleria), or one overlooking Piazza San Marco where the rates start at €99 (that'd be the Relais Piazza San Marco).

The new Venice hotel tax
As of late August, 2011, Venice should begin charging a hotel bed tax. (It was supposed to happen in July, but protests put it off.)

This is the city's doing, and it is not a scam. All charges are per person, per night, for all guests over the age of 10 and can be charged for stays of up to 10 days.

In genral, you pay €1 per category rating—hotels are rated by "stars," Residences by "keys," etc.

So a couple (2) staying three nights (2 x 3 = 6) in a four-star room (6 x €4 = €24) would pay an extra €24.

When similar taxes took effect in Rome and Florence earlier in the year, some hotels folded the fee into their quoted rates; others tacked it on when you went to check out. Just be prepared.

There are three ways to find hotels in Venice:

Reid Recommends: My list of 19 personal favorite Venice hotels, in all price ranges. When friends or family ask for my advice on where to stay, this is the list I give them.
Book online: This is the route I usually go these days. There are several booking engines that have not only excellent collections of hotels in all price ranges (plus non-hotel alternatives, like B&Bs and apartments), but also user reviews, loads of photos, and—amazingly—often lower prices than the hotel itself is charging. ReidsItaly.com has partnered with five of the best of these: Venere.com, Booking.com, GetARoom.com, Hotelscombined.com, and Hostelworld.com (which actually lists more inexpensive hotels than it does hostels)
The Venice tourist office: The official tourism website has a great database of all lodgings in Venice. But it is just that: a database. Thousands of entries you have to plow through, and each only contains the bare facts (number of rooms, price range, address, basic amenities offered, contact info). Useful if you have tons of time to research, but not so easy to get a quick overview of the best place available for your needs.

Hotels in Venice from Booking.com

note
I've inserted the Booking.com results for Florence in a frame below, but you may want to open it in a separate window instead, to make things like using your browser's "Back" button easier. If you stay on this page, right click to get a browser functions menu for "back" and such.

Booking.com is one of the best hotel booking engines out there, especially for European trips, offering many smaller, mom-and-pop hotels and alternatives such as B&Bs and apartments.

(I just returned from a trip to Sardegna and, though I scoured guidebooks and other online resources, I found five of the six places I ended up staying by using Booking.com.)

You may also want to peruse the offerings at the competitor booking engine Venere.com, as well as at the nifty hotel aggregator HotelsCombined.

Venice Lodgings from Venere.com

» More hotels in Venice (from €25)

» B&Bs in Venice (from €30)

» Guesthouses in Venice (from €30)

» Apartments in Venice (from €45)

Tips

Pay extra for A/C in summer: No matter what kind of lodging you pick, if it's summer (a) try to get a room with air-conditioning and (b) even if you can't (or you can but have a hankering for some fresh air) resist the urge to open the windows to your room. Venice is, I believe, the primary breeding ground for the mosquito population of Southern Europe, and precious few Italian hoteliers have discovered that newfangled invention called window screens. Keep the windows shut, or prepare to be bitten. (Also, carry some bug spray for those romantic canalside dinners outside. Trust me.)
If you're looking for a hotel near a particular sight, just go to that sight's page and, in the sidebar on the right, you'll see a list of all the nearby hotels (with "Reid Recommends" choices preceded by a little RR icon: ).
Book ahead in summer and during Carnevale: Venice is way more popular than the number of beds it has, so while in the dead of winter you can often show up and find a good place to crash easily, the best rooms (and the best-value hotels) are booked well in advance for the summer months and the two weeks prior to Ash Wednesday (when Venice breaks out the fancy dress and masks for its famed Carnevale celebrations). Same goes (though less so, and more at the chic and high end hotels) during the Venice Biennale art festival and the Venice Film Festival.
Avoid Mestre: Any hotels with an address in "Venezia-Mestre" is actually in the dull, modern, industrial suburb at the mainland end of the bridge over to the real, ancient Venice you came all this way to see. Do not stay in Mestre! You'll spend more time and money commuting each day in an out of Venice proper than you will save.

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This material was last updated January 2011. All information was accurate at the time.

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