requesting feedback on Hotel Accademia in Florence

Ruth, you can easily find reviews for all the hotels you are interested in by going to venere.com and booking.com. These are reviews written by people who have actually stayed at the hotel and can be trusted. They are very easy to find. http://www.venere.com/hotels/florence/hotel-accademia/#reviews http://www.booking.com/hotel/it/hotelaccademia.html?sid=cd0de73afe7deb18b943d174c0b47c30&aid=306742 You can use these two sites for any hotel you are interested in. It's the best way to get a lot of opinions from people who have actually used the hotel. Donna

tripadvisor is the only well used review site. The key to all user-review sites is to look for overall averages and trends. Not everyone will be happy so generally ignore negative reviews unless there are a high percentage of them. And the more reviews a place has, the more stock you can put into the overall percentages. The good thing about such sites is that you can look at reviews for things that matter to you most. And sometimes acute conditions can be noted. Such as a major construction project next door that has turned an otherwise quiet hotel into an early morning wake-up call.

We stayed there two years ago and were very pleased. The price was affordable, the rooms were clean, easy walking distance from the train station, good location within Florence and the coffee was good at breakfast. What more could you want? The closest to a downside was carrying your bags up to the second floor. Not an issue for our group, but it might be for some.

With TA you need to be really careful of fake reviews, both good and bad. I post a lot on TA but never use the reviews to find hotels or restaurants. I've seen too many fake reviews get posted to really put any faith in their system. Anyone can post a review even if they've never been to the property. I would just use sites where you have to actually have stayed there before being allowed to post a review. Donna

At the risk of hijacking the thread, there has been much press about tripadvisor being full of fake reviews and some anecdotal evidence, but nothing to show that it is rife with fakes. My advice to advoid the most negative reviews (and logically the most glowing) is sound. And I also noted that the more reviews a hotel has, the more you can trust the averages. When a hotel has hundreds of reviews, fakes will not skew the averages. If a hotel only has a dozen or so reviews, I'm far more careful. Also, not sure what I was trying to say in the first line of my post above, but I was not trying to imply that TA is "the only" review site. Must of had a brain cramp...

Don't know the Accademia specifically, but I would check Booking.com or Venere.com for reviews - and I read the bad reviews, too, for balance.

We stayed in their sister hotel, Hotel dei Macchiaioli, and it was fabulous. The people were fabulous, as was the location.