Hotels

It probably varies from trip to trip. You'll have to ask the travel people at ETBD. In general, I think you can expect the hotels to be of the sort at the upper end of Rick's recommendations in his books. I've been on a number of ETBD Italy trips and have stayed at many nice hotels in Italy. You can guess that hotels that can accommodate 25 people are not tiny. Hotels are centrally located in cities and are not of the "chain" variety.

I have not taken a Rick Steves tour myself. However, I have crossed paths with their tours on several trips. My guess is that if you contact Rick's tour staff, they may not be able to tell you exactly which hotels you would be staying in, because in many cases they put their folks in multiple (small) hotels. To get a good idea of which hotels are probably in the mix, look in Rick's books, at the nicest sounding small hotels in the old city center (not necessarily the splurge hotels, but the ones that appear to offer plenty of character). I have been frustrated more than a few times when trying to book one of these hotels when I've been told by the manager "no, no, I'm sorry we are full - we have a Rick Steves tour!" I'm sure the hotels they use on the tours are very nice.

Thanks! The info is helpful.