Hotels in Italy

From historic five-star deluxe inn to simple, homey one-star mom-and-pop pensions, you can find hotels to suit every taste and budget in Italy

You know the drill. This is the classic option for a place to lay your head whilst traveling. Doesn't mean it's the best—and rarely is it the cheapest (I've got two dozen lodging alternatives to hotels here)—but there's nothing wrong with a good ol' hotel room.

Heck, I've made much of my living over the past decade recommending hotels (along with restaurants and such) in travel guidebooks. Hotels are such a standard and widely chosen option, there's a whole section of this site devoted to how they work, how to find the best ones, the tricks to get a better/cheaper room, and the differences you'll find between most American and Italian hotels. You can read all about that here.

How to find a good hotel

Use your guidebooks, ask friends who have gone, peruse sites like TripAdvisor.com, and look at the better booking engines. I've partnered with three excellent booking engines that do things differently.

Unlike most other booking sites, these three include hundreds of choices in each city that are in the cheaper price ranges (the one- and two-star tourist hotels ignored by most major booking engines), plus they lists apartments, farm stays, B&Bs, and other non-hotel options.

My favorite booking engines are:

• Booking.com (www.booking.com) - Put it this way: when I had to book a trip to Sardegna this past fall for a magazine assignment, I canvassed various guidebooks and websites looking for just the right hotels...and ended up finding (and booking) every single one of my hotels with Booking.com. It's that good. It also has lots of nifty, user-friendly options, like arranging results for hotels according to neighborhoods, or their proximity to particular sights.
• HostelWorld (www.hostelworld.com) - Yes, its the premier independent booking site for hostels, but it also includes cheap hotels, campgrounds, and other budget options ignored by virtually every other search engine out there.

Reid's Recommended hotels

I've also begun posting my own hotel picks in every price category for Italy's major cities—a time-consuming task, but at least I've got Rome, Florence, and Venice largely finished.

Back when I was writing guidebooks, I spent a frightening amount of time touring European hotels. Depending on how large the city, I'd see anywhere from two dozen to more than 100 hotels, a never ending process of badgering desk clerks to let me peek into rooms, bouncing on beds, turning on taps (hot water? check.), repeatedly opening and closing windows to see how well they kept out traffic noise, and furiously scribbling notes. (I also spent an inordinate amount of time politely nodding at linen closets, hotel kitchens, conference rooms, and other bits of the hotel useless to my purposes but that overeager owners or managers felt it was vital that I see.)

Then I'd take my notes and my laptop back to my hotel (or a convenient pub) and spend hours crafting intricate, 300-word descriptions of the top 50 or 60 inns in each city, including laundry lists of obscure amenities and obsessive details on the decor, because this is what the guidebook editors required of me.

Not only was this excruciatingly dull, it was fairly useless to the travelers using the books. After having seen—and, over ten years of updating multiple editions of each book, stayed in—hundreds of hotels in dozens of towns, I finally figured it out. You don't need lengthy articles on 60 different places in Rome where you might spend the night.

No, far more useful would be to know, right off the bat, the top four or five hotels where you'd want to spend the night. The places that offer great value for your dollar no matter what the price range—whether a $20 hostel or a $500 frescoed suite. Hotels where it really is worth booking ahead for a room. In short, the hotels where—having sampled them all—I, myself, would stay if given a choice.

It doesn't matter what you prefer in a hotel—quirky & cheap, amazing location, rooms with a view, classic comfort, elegant, or designer. We've got choices for everyone.

People are always asking for my personal recommendations of where to stay in Rome, Florence, Venice, the Amalfi Coast, etc. Well, I've finally posted them, the hotel shortlists I've long e-mailed to friends and family. When I need a room—for myself, my parents, my buddies, or my Boy Scout troop—these are the places I call. These are, in short, the best hotels in Italy.

More hotels in Italy

Those are just the most popular places. To see a full list of hotels in cities, hill towns, ski resorts, beaches, islands, and countryside accommodations all across Italy, click on the map below:

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