AAF

My husband and I haven't been to Europe in twenty years, only have ten days in Italy and are not very experienced travellers. Therefore, we decided to do the hosted tour to Italy (Venice, Florence and Rome). We are going in June. We get our flight, transportation between cities and one city tour. We are also provided breakfast. We are on our own otherwise. It seems like a nice compromise. Anyway, has anyone used the Central Company before? More importantly...is the Four Star Superior rating a good hotel rating? Has anyone heard of these hotels:
Rome: Dei Mellini
Florence: De La Ville
Venice: Saturnia

RufusTFirefly

Are you referring to Central Holidays, or some other company with the word "Central" in the name?

AAF

Yes, Central Holidays. We signed up for a hosted tour. It is not a fully escorted tour. I guess I would describe it as a partial package. Our transportation is pre-arranged and we get one tour per city, but we are basically on our own. (Central Holidays)
Thank you.

RufusTFirefly

We did do a similar tour with them, but it was in 1996. That's a bit far back, and a company could have changed quite a bit in that amount of time. For what it is worth now, we were completely satisfied with our experience.

We couldn't have come near to the same price for the flights, level of hotels, and transport between cities as they did with their package.

Our hostess was knowledgeable and helpful.

We really enjoyed being on our own in each city and not having to follow a group everywhere or dine where some company wanted us to dine every night.

They did, however, offer optional local tours; e.g., to the Vatican--we took advantage of that one as tour groups got in quicker than the general public.

Again, it was about 10 years ago.

I do know that the Saturnia is centrally located in Venice. 4 stars is a good rating.

Note that in Italy, stars rate features of the hotel; e.g., the presence of an elevator, conference rooms, a central lobby, etc. It doesn't rate location, atmosphere, cleanliness, service, etc. Though one would expect that a 4-star would have better service and be cleaner than a 1-star, it isn't always so.

Rookie

I don't have first-hand knowledge of any of your hotels, but two things you can do to find comments/reviews:

1) enter the names (one at a time) into the "search this forum" box above and click the "search" button on the right. Note: for De La Ville, type: De La Villa AND Florence (otherwise you'll get lots of Paris references you care nothing about.)

2) Go to www.tripadvisor.com and enter each of your hotels there. Dei Mellini and De La Ville get consistently good remarks. Saturnia gets mixed reviews.

Have a lovely trip.

ira

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