PWMTrav

I love Eataly. In Florence it's on Via dei Martelli, just off of Piazza del Duomo. A trip there ensured we would use our kitchenette.

JMN57

I knew it wasn't a good area but we had a car and there is secure parking. With a car, downtown & the ZTL is a problem. So, for a couple of free nights, Eataly next door and driving around Torino, it was cheap slumming it. Hadn't been to Torino before so it was a peek before Venezia e Firenze.

BMWMOT

Great forum and info. I'll be Florence April 1-6. I'm looking for a clean comfortable room for the wife and I and of course centrally located. I checked out the Grand Duomo mentioned above but unless you're willing to book the non refundable rate, it is ~$300/night. I prefer to spend $200 or less. We already have several tours planned so we won't be spending much time at the hotel and in the room.
I typically book several hotels early in my planning process (refundable only) then make a decision as we get closer to the trip date.
I have 6 hotels booked ranging from 670 euros for 5 nights to 1050 euros.
Hotel Duomo
Hotel Laurus Al Duomo
Hotel Pendini
Hotel Axial
Residenza Giotto
Hotel dei Macchiaioli

If anyone has knowledge on any of these, it would be appreciated.

PWMTrav

Keep in mind that Easter is April 6. I can't comment on any of those hotels, but I will suggest that if you have a property with a good prepaid rate, check what a "cancel for any reason" trip insurance rider would cost you. I insure my trips because I have a 2 year old and plans change, so if you're already insuring the trip sometimes a prepaid rate works.

If I'm going off of websites, Hotel Duomo looks pretty decent. Keep in mind that they only have an elevator to the 4th floor, where reception is. The website says stairs to their other floors (3 and 5). Personally, I'm fine with that. The location is excellent. I believe it's right next door to Granduomo, I remember walking past the entrance. The location is unbeatable, except that I don't know how crowded the Piazza del Duomo will be on Easter Sunday.

I generally advise people going to Florence to not spend extra on full service hotels. Especially in that city, you need to manufacture excuses to stay at the hotel - the historic center is very compact and anything you might want to do is going to be a short walk away. A clean room, housekeeping and maybe breakfast are all I suggest. Breakfast because it's easy to save time by eating on the way out, but also because your breakfast tastes might be more "American" and hotels usually do an American breakfast. Italians generally do more of what we'd consider a continental breakfast - bread, butter, maybe some fruit and a caffe. But location is otherwise the important factor. Even if its raining, you'll go out. And by my Maine standards, Florence is never cold, so there's that.

If I were in your shoes (no kids, no need for anything but a bed), I'd probably try Hotel Duomo sight unseen, as long as you don't see any red flags on Tripadvisor about cleanliness. While TA is awful for restaurants, I find it good for hotels, because us American tourists love to say everything we ate is the best, and every hotel we slept in was the worst

PWMTrav

Also, let me add - I usually see the demand for a kitchenette on one's second visit to Florence (or most other Italian cities). It happened to me too. First time around, I thought what a shame it was I couldn't really get anything from the Mercato Centrale. All subsequent visits, I've got a kitchen! If it's your first visit there, you won't realistically have the time to slow down and cook.

Perche

I agree with you 90%. Some people go to experience Italy, while others want to bring their motherland with them and to feel as if they never left home.

TripAdvisor is awful for restaurants, but I think it is also of only limited use for hotels. A year ago they listed a hostel that only offered weekly rentals and that is located in a rundown neighborhood just outside the train station as the best hotel in Torino. They currently list a hotel that is not much better than a Travelodge as the best hotel in Rome, even though it’s located 30 minutes outside of Rome. Photos posted by the hotels are worthless. Where TA can help in my opinion is when people post their own photos showing mold in the bathroom, paint peeling from the walls, dirty carpets, and so on. Otherwise TA Hotel advice can steer you very wrong. Some of the top rated hotels in Venice aren’t even located in Venice. They are located on the mainland in an industrial part of Mestre.

Many hotels in Rome are ranked highly by people because they are, "close to everything." In Rome, being close to everything is not possible. It’s a spread out city. In Venice, being close to everything is actually a negative, unless you want to be mobbed by crowds.

I also agree with you about breakfast not being substantial. TripAdvisor has many hotel reviews where people write something like, "I would have given them another star but the breakfast was terrible,” or, "The breakfast was just average." In the USA we are taught that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. In Italy eating a big breakfast is considered unhealthy because so soon after waking your digestive organs are not yet warmed up, and they shouldn’t be stressed by eating a big meal.

Also, restaurants don’t open until 7:00-7:30 PM. Italians don’t eat dinner until 8 or 9 PM, and they finish around 9:30-10:30 PM. They are still somewhat full in the morning and don't wake up and say, "Where are the waffles, bagels, cheese omelets, bacon, ham, smoked salmon, granola, and the oatmeal?" People seem to expect all that when rating a hotel on TA, and that's just not the Italian way. Save that appetite for pasta during lunch.

There are also complaints that “The hotel breakfast was 20 euros each, and it was just a few croissants and some canned fruit.” Hotels realize that Americans really want their breakfast. They expect it to be like a dinner, and they will pay for it, and so they get overcharged. In Italy it is more common to just stop at a bar on the way to work and have a coffee. If hungry, have a croissant with it, and that’s it for breakfast. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but not too long ago hotels in Rome could only sell breakfast items if they were pre-packaged in individual cellophane wrappers, meaning made from a factory, or if made from scratch on the premises. That means tourists would pay 15-20 euros to have breakfast when all they were getting was a croissant that is equivalent to what comes out of a vending machine at the train station.

The other problem with TA for hotels is that so many hotels are rated as terrible because people don’t like the bathroom. Specifically, they complain that the shower didn’t have a curtain and the floor got flooded. There was one that I read about a great hotel where someone complained, “By the time the three of us were done showering there was so much water on the floor that it flooded into the living room!”

Italians tend to be, “green.” Most shut the water off while brushing their teeth or washing their hands. Showers generally have a hose that you can attach to a fixture above so that the water rains down on you, or you can detach it and use it to hose your body down. In Italy many people wet themselves down then turn off the water. Then they lather up and turn the water back on to rinse themselves off. Sometimes they do it while sitting down in the tub. Five Italians can probably take a shower using less water than one American. They use such a small amount of water that there is no pressing reason to have a shower curtain. I’m not making a judgment here, but the customs are very different, and TA reflects that in disappointing ratings for some very nice hotels. I sometimes think that no breakfast and a lack of shower curtains and flooded bathrooms are positive features because those hotels are not set up for American tourism and the rate will be much better.

With restaurant reviews the most obvious things to ignore are complaints about the service. In the USA what passes for great service would often be considered rude to an Italian, and vice-versa. In Italy you get a table for dinner, and that is your table for the night. It is considered that you are there with friends and family and want to talk and not rush, so you might not see a waiter or get a menu for fifteen minutes, or even longer. Then you might wait half an hour for your first course. When it comes to getting the check, at a good restaurant, don’t hold your breath. Bringing the check is equivalent to telling you to leave, and that would be considered rude. In many restaurants in the USA a waiter brings the check at the same time they bring the main course and says, “No rush, just whenever you’re ready.” In Italy that would be one of the rudest things a waiter could do. I’ve seen great restaurants scathed on TA by people who didn’t like the service, expecting it to be all about table turnover, like TGIF or Chiles. They are mad because it might take a half an hour for the meal to come out after ordering it, or it takes a half an hour to pay the check, even though that's just the way things work in Italy.

I agree with you 90%; restaurant reviews are worthless, and hotel reviews are only good if you take into account the bad things that people say, excluding any comments about the breakfast and the bathroom.

PWMTrav

It might make me a jerk, but I advise them to stay home if they've asked my opinion

I'll say up front that I should have been more specific. TA is good for researching hotels - meaning, you or I identify some potential properties, then I go read TA to see what others said. Individual preferences are way too hard to distill into a Top XX list, but the commentary is helpful in the reviews themselves.

When I'm going to a new city outside of the US, my research process pretty much goes like this -

1. What do I want to see and where is it? (It's almost always the historic center of town if it's Europe)
2. Are there neighborhoods to avoid within the historic center? (Generally not on the basis of crime, at least not in Italy, but I also learned I want to be a little further from people in some cities like Venice)
3. Do I want a full service hotel (almost never), an apartment or a basic room?
4. Find hotels that meet the above requirements, then google for reviews, read TA, FT, etc. What I'm looking for at this stage is anything not obvious from the website and location, positive or negative. Is the place dirty? Moldy? Are the rooms right on the street? More recently, can I get a room with a tub (since I have a toddler). If I want a kitchen, can I get one?
5. Maybe ask FT as a last pass, if there isn't any recent data already here.

I generally find most hotels on my own, rather than through people I know, because much of the time what I want is different than what they like. I also have a strong preference against staying in American chains abroad - as well as Hyatt treats me as a Diamond, SPG as a Gold, etc, I could save a lot of money and just stay in the US if that's what I wanted.

That's exactly why I lean on the commentary specific to the place - location is another story. Quite frankly, it's a really basic skill, independent of travel experience, to figure out if a hotel is in a good location. Google Maps is a fine place to start - find the major places you want to see, then plot the candidate hotels to figure out if it's in a good spot for your needs.

I should also add that I wouldn't put TA ahead of the information on FT in general. If someone's going to Italy, I hope they stop in this sub and check things out.

Yeah, that comes back to individual preferences, and why I also don't trust the rankings and prefer to scan the reviews themselves. If someone wants an American breakfast, a lot of hotels offer it, but I don't particularly want or need that. Preferisco un caffè, un po' di pane col burro e un altro caffè. That's no different than at home, though - I'm just not hungry until lunch.

Lunch is the meal for me in Italy. I like a nice dinner, but if I had to make a list of all of my favorite meals in the Italian cities I've visited, they're all lunch. For the folks that don't want to eat dinner at 8, it's very possible to eat a great lunch, have an aperitivo and some snacks, and call it a day. Then again, I'm not trying to skip any meals if I've gone all the way to Italy.

Wow, that's miserable. I've truthfully only eaten at my hotel in Rome once - at the St. Regis, where our room wasn't ready so we had lunch. It was expensive and very average.

European bathrooms in general take some getting used to. I'll check websites and TA to find out if I can get a tub, because my daughter is 2 and it's a lot easier.

Definitely. Those are the bargains. At the end of the day, every minute I spent at the hotel was a minute I couldn't be out enjoying my destination. That's why I generally don't suggest big full service hotels unless I know the person really wants that.

With TA restaurant reviews, the most important thing to ignore is all of it I'm pretty sure that if we sent someone out with these basic guidelines -

1. Avoid the places with menus outside on big posterboard with pictures
2. Avoid places where someone is outside trying to get you to go in
3. Avoid the places packed at 6pm, be wary if they're open before 7 in the major cities
4. (because I love gelato) If it's piled high, run the F away

They'd eat better than if they hit the top 10 on TA for any Italian city.

People could throw darts and do better than the TA restaurant ranks.

Mr. Roboto

Pasquetta (aka lunedì dell'Angelo) is April 6th, Easter is April 5th.

PWMTrav

Correct, sorry.

t325

Any FTers have recommendations for hotels near the Florence city center? Nothing too cheap, but nothing too extravagant, probably somewhere in the 150-200 EUR/night range.

Usually I try to stay at one of the major chains, for the rewards and because you usually know what you're getting. But it seems like they're all either way outside the city center, or way outside my price range. A ton of local hotels come up on searches, but would appreciate recommendations to help narrow it down. Thanks!

Philatravelgirl

I stayed in a single room at the Hotel Degli Orafi and it was great - next to Uffizi and the river steps from the bridge. breakfast was included as was really fast wifi in my rate. Can't get any more central than this place IMO - I walked everywhere - to my food tour, my Fiat500 tour of the countryside and lots of great foods and gelato. I haven't posted my review yet on my philatravelgirl blog yet but would recommend it

lionmb

We stayed in Il Guelfo Bianco when we traveled to Florence. We had a family of 4 and the best room! Great location for walking everywhere. Reasonably priced and the bathroom tiling was amazing. Check out the reviews as we loved our stay there.

http://www.ilguelfobianco.it/

Mary Beth

lionmb

Philatravelgirl, would you give some details about your food tour? I'm going in May and thinking of doing something along those lines. Thanks!

MB

Perche

Le Tre Stanze is a nice B&B 100 feet from the Duomo. Le Tre Stanze means three rooms, and that's all they have. So, if you are interested you should reserve well in advance. It comes to me highly recommended by someone who knows Florence very well and has stayed there many times.http://www.letrestanze.it/index.html

Perche

Context Travel is a highly recommended and endorsed tour company. They are a little different. For example, the guides have to have a masters degree or a PhD in a topic related to their tour e.g., art, architecture, history, cooking, etc. They only take up to six people per group, so no tour buses, no one walking backwards speaking through a megaphone to a group of 25 people while carrying a flag, etc.

https://www.contexttravel.com/city/florence
https://www.contexttravel.com/city/tuscany