Venice Port and Hotel help
 

Plan to stay at Venice for a few days post cruise. What are the hotel options? Old town? Downtown? Airport? Cruise port? How far apart are they? Sight seeing suggestion please. Litterally anything goes.

Venice is all old town. I think your best bet is to find a good local private travel agent - one with experience, not a teenager with a job for the summer - and have them find you a hotel. Sight seeing is easy - get a good guidebook for just Venice and go on your own. Very easy. Don't forget urano and the other islands.

Thanks Reme, you mean find a local travel agent here, not over there. Any suggestion for a hpotel? I can probably book on line.

Put Venice Hotels in the search space above for a list of threads on this subject or go under Trip Advisor Venice Hotels. You can most likely find one and book on your own.
Good luck!

It's all Old Town but there are different neighborhoods. Use Trip Advisor. There are many wonderful places to stay. Don't stay near cruise port or at airport. Once in Venice, you can walk everywhere.
Look at Hotel Calcina, Pensione Accademia and Villa Flora for starters. There is a large fairly new Hilton Stucky property too.

The reason I suggest a travel agent is that Venice has a lot of hotels and your agent should be able to suggest one that fits your needs. A guide book will identify all the neighborhoods. Part of the fun of Venice is walking around and see what you find.

Hotel options are everything from hostels to ultra grand hotels. Without knowing your budget or tastes, hard to suggest anything. Look in the Europe Forum. Since many people travel to Venice, you will find lots of recs.

Stay in Venice proper, not Mestre or near the airport or on the Lido. You might want to look at a map to help visualize things, but everything is actually walkable or you take a vaporetto.

I don't think you need a travel agent. Look on Tripadvisor, find a few hotels you like, check availability, than ask for opinions on the Europe Forum. Be sure to say your budget if you want people to give you specific recs.

You might like to pick up Fodor's Guide: Venice's 25 Best (or something similar). Comes with maps.

Agree, go to TripAdvisor and get a centrally located hotel within your budget. My favorite way to tour Venice is a day pass on the Vaporetto and a guide book to choose what I want to see. It is a wonderful city.

We've just returned from Venice and a cruise. Our choice was a hotel near the railway station to save carrying luggage over lots of bridges. We chose the Carlton Capri and were happy with that choice. It was then only ten minutes walk to the people mover to the cruise terminal and five minutes walk to the vaporetto station to go elsewhere in Venice.
Two suggestions - make sure you have 1 euro coins for the people mover tickets, and make use of the porters to take your luggage to your hotel.

Thanks for all the tips. Marg, I will check out Carlton Capri. For us, location is important. We plan to "walk" everywhere and take an occassional "ride", be it water taxi or metro, There are much homework to do.

Actually, the only way to get around Venice is to walk or take water transportation (a water taxi costs more than 100 euros, so most people take the water "bus" called a vaporetto, which costs more like 7 euros, though you can also buy a pass).

Venice has no cars, no "metro" or any other public transport that is not on the water. Definitely do your homework. It's a fabulous place ... I'm going there in 3 weeks ... but it's mobbed by tourists in the summer, so you really do need to decide what you want to do and to plan your time more than in most places.

Doug, would staying by the airport an option? Take the train (?) to Venizia Santa Lucia then walk from there. I heard the airport is only 15 minutes from Venice.

Not sure when the OP is going but we will be there at end of August but leaving on an early flight so people had suggested that we stay close to the airport. The Marriott courtyard is just outside the airport with shuttle service. Would it limit our exploration if we stay there? Are there any attractions on the main land by the airport?

There's nothing that I know of on the landside in Venice. I know people stay in Maestre (or even further out) and take the train in daily. My parents did that when they visited Venice as part of a bigger Italy package tour (very few of the big tour groups actually spend the night in the city). And people on this board have recommended hotels on the mainland.

But for me the point of actually traveling to Venice for more than a day is to stay there and experience the city after the bigger hordes have gone home. After dark, the city is much more magical and infinitely less crowded. If I were visiting NYC, for example, I'd never stay at a LaGuardia airport hotel ... not in a million years.

Having said that, the bus from Marco Polo to the bus station in Venice is fairly quick (about 20 minutes I'm told) and not expensive. So staying near the airport may be an option for you. I certainly understand why you might want to do so if you have a very early flight, but I probably wouldn't spend but one night there (the last).

There is one hotel right at the bus station, and people like it. There are also several not terribly expensive hotels in Santa Croce, which is convenient to the bus station and the people mover to the cruise port (not to mention the buses to the airport). Or there are hotels around the train station.

I'm not sure I have a definitive answer here. This is only my second trip to Venice, but I do not regret that on the first trip we spent 2 nights in the city rather than staying in a soulless chain hotel on the mainland. And I don't regret that I've splurged on a hotel that I would otherwise not stay in this time. But those are personal choices.

Have a look at www.venere.com for hotels in Venice. Don't bother with the hotel at Piazzale Roma where the bus station is, it's not that good, but it all depends on your budget.

You should be able to find a reasonably priced hotel in the town itself but again, depends on your budget.

Thanks Doug and Rubicund. We found a small boutique hotel by the airport called Titian Inn, with only 39 rooms, maybe a block or 2 (?) from the Marriott, defiently not the faceless chains, and the cost is reasonable.

Our 6:45 am international flight really limits the options of where we wanted to stay. We have 4 nights total in Venice so a half hour bus ride there and back is not bad. We hate moving from hotel to hotel as you have to pack and unpack (that's why we like cruises!).

Doug, I understand the comparison but LaGuardia is more than 20 minutes away from anywahere! :)

I have heard that the mass at the Basilica is well worth the time spent and afterward, you can really take in the sight of the inside of the building with very few people around by that time.

What kind of night life is there in the old town?