Ischia recommendations

We will be there on Friday :) so I cannot 100% guarantee these recommendations yet, but we will be staying at Hotel Nettuno in Forio. It looks lovely and was in our budget which was hard to find with our somewhat last minute planning. We are planning to spend an afternoon at one of the thermal gardens, likely the Poseidon. We also have a ferry booked to Capri for one day, and a 3-hour boat tour of the island with Capri Precious.

Thanks. Look forward to reading a review,

A couple of Ischia guides offer a variety of private island tours...

https://www.ischiareview.com/ischia-island-tours.html

http://ischiaguidedtours.com/

Make sure to block out time to see the huge Castello Aragonese.
It took us about 4 hours to see it all, it's really well worth it, and the views from there are stunning.
We had lunch up there in their little outdoor café.
Ischia is so pretty.

Not sure when your tour is so it may have already happened. We stayed in Ischia in October 2019 at Castle Aroganese. The rooms are former monk rooms so quite simple (no TV or AC) but we loved it. They have a lovely breakfast included with the room rate. We spent an afternoon just sipping a bottle of wine while sitting on the terrace. We had dinner at the Castle one night. It is highly rated on Trip Advisor but, sadly, we did not enjoy it. Conversely, we had the best meal of our trip at a restaurant within walking distance of the Castle in Ischia Porto. We took a taxi from the ferry location to get there. We took bus #7 to return to the ferry. If you want to take the bus to get there you find the busess by exiting left from the ferry. Walking about a .25 mile until you see a road that turns right and goes up a hill. Take this road up the hill and you will find the bus lot.

Thank you for the info. We will definitely visit the Castle and consider staying there.

When u get off ferry, is it possible just to walk into old town?

Twenty years ago, we stayed in the lovely Il Monasterio in the Castle Aragonese. I second that recommendation: fabulous!

We had a family trip to Ischia in Sep 2019 and loved it. We rented a home in Forio so I can't speak to hotels. However, our favorite activities were climbing mount Epomeo, renting a boat to cruise around the island, and enjoying the beaches (Citara won our best pick). We made use of the bus system and thought it very convenient for exploring the island. We did visit Castello Aragonese which was great, but we did not stay there.

I just returned from Ischia this week. I highly recommend Hotel Noris. It is within a 2-5 minute walk from the Castle (which is an absolute must!), is at the very start of old town, has a wonderful breakfast and a lovely rooftop terrace where you look out over the ocean one direction and can see the castle the other direction. Most of all, they are wonderful and nice and will help you any way they can. It’s an easy bus ride from the ferry station.

Thank you all.

Rachel - how was your stay on Ischia?

It was incredible, we LOVED Ischia. The only negative was that it was our first stop so we were a bit jetlagged, but all the more reason to return! I did post a trip report in that forum if you're interested. We really enjoyed staying in Forio, but if you planned on taking multiple trips to other islands I could see the benefit of staying closer to Porto. We only took one day trip to Capri so it was easy enough to take the bus over to Porto. We stayed at Hotel Nettuno and it was great, although I did wish they had an outdoor pool so that was one downside--the indoor one was a bit grungy. But the room was gorgeous with a large balcony with an amazing sunset view. So much so that we chose to stay in and have dinner on the balcony numerous times.

For activities, we loved our day at Poseidon Thermal Gardens. The island is known for the thermal hot springs and we had never experienced it before so we definitely wanted to check it out. It is a bit pricey but if you can spend an entire day there, I think it's worth it for both the thermal pools and their private beach. We did enjoy our day trip to Capri as well although it was incredibly hot and crowded.

Thanks Rachel. I'll read the trip report.