Tips for Making Hotel Reservations in Italy

Going to Italy? Speaking from personal experience it takes advance planning, especially if you are making the hotel reservations yourself and not through a tour company or travel agent. It doesn't have to be that difficult, and here are some tips travel I learned from doing it myself.

Online Travel Websites

Various online travel websites make it easier to make hotel arrangements than ever before. I found a huge disparity in availability and also pricing, so once I found a good deal and good price, I would always compare this to a few other sites.

Some of the more popular hotel booking sites for Italy are www.venere.com , which is owned by Expedia, and www.booking.com, whose parent company is Priceline. I also used hotels.com, which is also owned by Expedia. Surprisingly sometimes the price would be different between Venere and Hotels.com even though they are both owned by Expedia.

The main advantage to using these travel websites is that there is no advance booking fee at either Booking.com or Venere. At Hotels.com, although they charge when the reservation is made, there are no fees for cancelling. Venere allows cancellation up to one day prior to the reservation without fees, and Booking.com charges no fees to cancel, provided the cancellation is seven days in advance.

Of course all these travel sites have some of their hotel rates offered at special low prices which state nonrefundable, so it is important to read the fine print. Venere has its headquarters in Rome and seemed to have the best deals very often, although not all my hotel choices had availability all the time. They also have a call center and will assist you by phone if you like.

Research Reviews

All these travel websites have reviews from customers and reviews can also be found on sites such as TripAdvisor and www.virtualtourist.com. Trip Advisor is Virtual Tourist's parent company, and guess who owns Trip Advisor? If you guessed Expedia, you are correct, since Expedia is the largest online travel company in the world. They own quite a few of the travel websites and you can read more here if you are interested in the truth about travel websites.

They key thing to remember about reviews is to check to see how recent they are as well as what type of traveler is writing it. A retired couple may have a totally different perspective than a young family or solo traveler.

A Few Other Tips

Here a few other tips I learned after traveling to Italy several times.

*Breakfast is included at most hotels, especially if they are 3 star or higher.

* A 4 star hotel in Italy is more like a 3 star hotel in the U.S.

*Most hotel rooms are much smaller than in the U.S. and very few provide washcloths. The towels may be very thin, like a kitchen towel, not thick terrycloth.

*Some hotels only have a bathtub and no shower.

Planning a trip to Italy was fun and a great learning experience. Researching everything I could in advance was extremely helpful. Hopefully these hotel reservation tips will help you when planning your upcoming trip to Italy.