Can I Still Find a Hotel Room During the Olympic Games?

Though the plush four- and five-star hotels were snapped up fast, there are still plenty of rooms to go around, especially if you dig a bit deeper than the standard booking services (which skew widlly toward such upscale and chain joints) and concentrate on the far more numerous mid-scale two- and three-star hotels.

So holing up in a hotel elsewhere in the Piemonte region is not a hardship. It just means you'll need to check whether you'll be on a train line and, if not—or if you want more freedom of movement—you'll have to rent a car.

Finding a hotel with rooms available—that's a bit trickier. Aside from cold calling places you find in guidebooks, there are three main ways to find a hotel:

• Try the paltry pickings at the "official" Olympics hotel booking service—which only lists about 39 properties, mostly upper mid-scale—Jumbo Grandi Eventi.
• Go to the regional (Piemonte) and local (11 provincial) tourist office Web sites—as well as that of the neighboring Valle d'Asota region, which is as close as much of Piemonte is to the Games, lying a mere 90 mintues north of Turin—and troll all their on-line accommodations databases for leads.
• Use a booking engine that includes smaller, mom-and-pop hotels, not just the big chains, such as Venere.

My real advice, though, is to skip the hotel hunt and go straight to sifting through the various lodging options beyond hotels because those (a) generally cost less, and (b) are still available even in Turin and the Olympic sites themselves. happy hunting!