Arriving mid- September. Has anyone "winged" their way through most of Northern Italy with regards to lodging? We know we need reservations for Venice but what about the rest of Northern Italy. Any experience of finding last minute lodging? We did pretty well in Portugal and it gave us a lot of flexibility.
Posted by
New Orleans
1214 posts
Depends. Seems doable if having flexibility is more important to you than finding lodging within certain criteria, ie, within walking distance, or easy public transportation distance, from your arriving bus or train station (or car park); in a certain neighborhood, like city center; or within a certain budget. If none of those will be deal-breakers for you, then you could likely carry on happily with your "winging it" plan. Personally, my time in Italy is so precious that I don't want to spend 1-2 or more hours in a day looking for my next hotel/B&B. I also often travel solo, or with one family member or friends who's depending on me to make arrangements, so I really like to have hotels/B&Bs nailed down in advance. I'd love to hear if you do this and how it goes if you do!
Posted by
Washington DC
27617 posts
I have done it, but would caution you that a car-less visitor may be dealing with a trade-off between price, location and quality. I tried looking for a room after arriving in the city a couple of times in Sicily in 2015 and ended up in places that most visitors would not have been happy with; apparently I look a bit impoverished to the tourist office staffers! At least in some parts of Italy there are still some low-end places out there. I now look for rooms a few days in advance for most of my stops on booking.com and diligently read lots of reviews. I have not had quality issues, but the best bargains are usually gone. For me it's a worthwhile trade-off, because I am not good at estimating how much time I'll need in a city on my first visit and would not like to be forced to move on before I've seen all I want to see.
It's hard to know whether things will be tougher or easier this year. Visitor levels will probably be down a lot in the non-coastal, non-mountain locations. But will a lot of the hotels not reopened?
As was pointed out in a different thread recently, you might consider making reservations based on your best guess and canceling them within the free-cancelation window if necessary. That's just not something I like to do, but I've found it easy on booking.com on the few occasions when I've needed to do it. I've found it a bit of a struggle with reservations made directly with hotels (including once at an independent in the US), who didn't acknowledge my initial emailed request to cancel, leaving me wondering whether I was going to end up being billed. (I wasn't.)
Posted by
San Francisco Bay Area (USA)
15838 posts
Just make sure you have internet access and you can search and book a place online on the go on the same day.
It's Wed 7/14/2021 10pm in Italy at the time of this writing and I just checked the availability of a room for 2 nights starting tonight in the city of Venice.
Over 300 properties came up on Booking.com with prices from $95 and up.