We are looking to book a room for May. Have already run into no vacancies. Any suggestions?

www.venere.com allows you to search for available rooms by date and many of the properties can be booked with instant confirmation on-line. (or you may browse there and then book direct with the hotel.)

There are also reviews for most hotels by former guests.

" We are looking to book a room for May. Have already run into no vacancies."

What a surprise. I started booking in November and about half the popular places were already booked.

Check out Casa Martini at www.casamartini.it

I loved this small, pretty, friendly b&b type hotel in the Cannaregio area.

Try the small hotel Ai Do Mori not far from Piazza San Marco. It's fairly reasonable (for Venice) One tiny room has a roof terrace. No elevator.

You might save yourself some time if you warn people about which places you've already tried and found booked. Also you need to give an idea of your price range.

Laterooms.com and lastminute.com are two sites that specialize in short-notice bookings and often have great bargains.

Hotelinvenice.com is another you might try. There are sometimes "special offers on this site.

All three of the sites listed above allow you to search for availability by date, and will show you rates on the spot.

We stayed at the Hotel Antica Venezia (3 star) - it was a 5 min walk from San Marco on a quiet out of the way ally. It was a B&B type of atmosphere. Cute rooms - the baths were very small, but all new and VERY clean. They have a great roof top terrace for breakfast and drinks. You do have to climb stairs with your luggage, but worth it in my opinion. Very charming B&B type of hotel - we went last May and spent approximately 180Euro per night including breakfast. They have a website....seach and you will probably find it.

For what it's worth, Lesli, venere and many other sites which supposedly let you put in your dates and then show you which hotels have availability for those dates, don't always work that way. I've done venere and despite showing me a list of 10 or 12 "available" in one town, when I tried them individually in the next step, they'd all come back "sorry, this hotel does not have rooms available for your dates". I think the original list is simply all the hotels which have rooms within a general time period -- like that summer or that winter and have listings, but it doesn't mean they actually have rooms available for your specific dates.