Just received our Best of Italy in 17 Days hotel list

Jon, the 17-day Best of Italy was our favorite RS tour! Each city/area is a special place to be! I see your hotels for Venice, Florence & Siena are the same ones used on our tour. Be sure to read the guidebook about each location ahead of time, so you can maximize your enjoyment during your free time.

In subsequent independent trips back to Italy, we have usually returned to 1-2 of these locations - now being back at all of them. Have a great time!

We haven't done this tour, but on other tours we have stayed at the Serenissima, Accademia, and Aberdeen. They are all fine, in great locations with helpful staff.

We especially love the Aberdeen, and stay there whenever we're in Rome.

We are on this tour in September so look forward to responses.

Hi Jon, the hotels are the same as the BOI tour I was on in May 2019 with the exception of Bolzano. All great hotels, with bountiful breakfasts (especially the first hotel) and great locations. I really enjoyed this tour and hope you do too!

Orvieto: Altarocco Wine Resort: Stayed here on our Best of Tour in 2017. Fantastic location, incredible view, and accommodation. A true “WOW” experience. Several people on our tour chose to “rest and relax,” on the free day, rather than take the offered trip to Orvieto, We chose to go to Orvieto and felt it was a wise decision. My thinking is “I can always relax at home.”

Jon,
If at all possible, try and request room 6 at the Hotel Villa Steno. Talk to your guide and see if he can arrange that. It is the best room with the best view and patio at the hotel. My wife and I stayed their and when we registered, the owner said we got the best room in the hotel and he wasn’t wrong. I put together two slide show videos on YouTube of our tour that I think you will find interesting. Be sure to turn up the sound. If you have any questions, please free to send me a personal message and I will try to
answer any questions you may have. It was a great tour!

https://youtu.be/c5mdy0OzRC4

https://youtu.be/MZia6oOs8iA

Gary

jon,

I'm familiar with some of those hotels, and you're in for a treat.....

• Hotel Royal Victoria is right in the centre of Varenna and great views over the lake.
• Hotel Villa Steno is perhaps my favourite hotel in all of Europe. The owners are wonderful people, the rooms are impeccable and they serve a nice breakfast. It's up the hill a bit from the main part of the "old town" so the crowds are never a problem. Sitting on the balcony with an Aperol Spritz or other beverage and admiring the view is one of my favourite activities.
• Hotel Aberdeen is in a quieter part of Rome but also very close to Termini station. Assuming everything is the same, it's a fantastic hotel and they serve (or used to serve) a great breakfast.

I'm in Monterosso on a sabbatical and even though I haven't stayed in Hotel Villa Steno, it has one of the best views in town. Easy to get to the main street and the train station. And the owners are really nice, too. A perfect place to stay!

If at all possible, try and request room 6 at the Hotel Villa Steno.
Talk to your guide and see if he can arrange that. It is the best room
with the best view and patio at the hotel.

Um, other people who will be on this tour may be reading this same thread? The guide may be placed in a very uncomfortable position if he/she ends up with a fair number of people ALL requesting this room?

One of our RS tour leaders told us that she, knowing the hotels well, would keep track and rotate the best rooms among the group. So if you got a great view one place, you would likely not get the best the next stop. Still worth asking. And be nice.

On other tours, it often seemed that the hotel assigned the rooms.

Stan is correct and it was the same on all 6 trips we have done with RS.

Stan’s experience is what we had for our RS tours, also. Some hotels have similar rooms, but if there’s some with a view or special feature, they try to rotate who gets the nice rooms over the tour. Personally, I wouldn’t want to begin the tour asking for special requests for myself. (If you do stay at the first hotel before the tour begins and have that room, they probably wouldn’t move you when the tour begins.)

Our hotel room at Lake Como faced away from the lake, and I could hear cars buzzing by on the road for a long time. But, we had a fantastic room at Cinque Terre on the top floor overlooking the water and a very nice room at Siena. The only thing we noticed was that we were one of the more limber/active couples and had packed light, and we were given the rooms on higher floors (which was fine with us) when there were multiple floors.

In response to the comment that if you are staying in one of the best rooms in one town, the tour guide will likely rotate your room selection to a lesser quality of room to give everyone a chance to have the better room was very true on our tour. The other I learned on our tour was how few people knew or used this forum for information. Out of 26 people on the tour, I think there was only one other person who knew about this forum. That surprised me.

Wow, that really surprises me too, yosemite1. I figured that the people who'd found this site and were using it for their tour info were also using the forum too. Wow.

I have stayed at Hotel Villa Steno in Monterosso and it was one of our favorites, took the recommendation from my RS guide book. Wish we had spent more time on the great wrap around balcony. We walked from the train station to the hotel and it was so beautiful, right along the ocean, through the tunnel. The breakfast is wonderful and there is a pharmacy and lots of restaurants close by. You can also easily walk to the ocean from the hotel, very accessible.

We received our hotel list but I haven't seen who our Tour Guide is

Jon thank you for sharing these hotel names! I'm set to join this tour June 12, so I'll be excited to hear your trip report. I'm working on planning a bit for the free time, so its helpful to know where we may be staying.

Enjoy the adventure!!!!

Thank you for posting. I will be going with the September 14th tour group.

I took this tour in 2006 and stayed in several of the same hotels (Florence, Monterosso, Siena) nice to see they're still going strong! I echo the comments about Hotel Villa Steno being amazing - one of the best hotels I've ever stayed in. I still dream about their lemon marmalade (not joking). Only two of the rooms there do not have balconies so your chances are pretty good you'll have a view even if you don't request one, plus they have a nice terrace.

I'm surprised to see the lodging in Bolzano. Everything I have seen states that the stay is in the Alpe di Siusi. Can you confirm that you indeed styayed in Bolzano?

Yes. We actually did stay at the Stadt Hotel Citta in Bolzano for the Best of Italy in 17 Days tour. I thought it was a bit unusual too because most of those particular tours have you staying right in the Alpe di Siusi area. However, RS did it this way on this tour because of the slightly early time of the season, in which the Alpe di Siusi tends to be a little iffy in terms of weather and some of the upper lifts are not yet running. Turned out great though. We had a little more time to spend in Bolzano with a fantastic Tyrollean dinner and then took our tour bus up early the next morning to Compatsch for a wonderful hike. The weather turned out to be just perfect! The hotel in Bolzano was also wonderful with an available spa for tour members.

Thank Jon.

The tour guide should be listed at the top of the roster which is usually provided at the same time as the hotel list.

I agree with the above that an amazingly small number of people on the tours post or even read posts on the forum.