I always use Venere as part of my research, because I love the way they give a map of each city with districts identified by neighborhood name or principal tourist site. I've booked through them several times and everything went smoothly.

I second that Kayd - I try to book everything with Venere.com if possible.
Their "user-friendly" website is by far the best!

I've used venere.com only once and they were fine. However, as a previous poster pointed out, they said nothing would be charged at that time. In fact, I did have the hotel charge on my credit card the first night.

Thank You All.

I will move forward w/ this plan. It is very user friendly!

~Jay

i just used venere to book a trip to rome and i love it. quick and easy. i used discount code B4UBLSK and got 4% instant savings! AWESOME!!!

I've just jused venere to book our hotels in Venice, Florence and Paris - I love how it gives location maps, photos and reviews. Just didn't realise you could get an additional 4% saving, wish I had known before booking.

i like venere for the maps and location and to see the variety of the hotels but i have yet to have found them to be the cheapest.

U can also use that code if u want, same 4% discount: ATJNES9

Even with the discount, you can often find a lower rate by going directly to the hotel website. But it's a good search tool to find hotels that aren't listed on expedia or orbitz.

One caveat -- with the weak dollar, there's much more incentive to use the U.S. booking sites so we can pay in dollars.

Why, though? If the US site charges more in total, it doesn't matter whether it's dollars or Euros. Some Euro sites give a cheaper result than some US sites, and of course you can sometimes often find that a US site is cheaper than a Euro site, but the currency doesn't seem to the deciding factor.

pinging to self re Venere code.