I've read previous posts referring to pensiones. How do they differ from hotels? How do you book a reservation on the web for the pensiones? Thanks.

Hi Annie,

A pensione is traditionally a B&B. However, they can be small hotels. A hotel has to have certain amenities that B&B's and pensiones needn't offer.

Just try "pensione" and the place where you wish to go on google.com.

I've stayed in one in Vienna and it wasn't a B&B as I call that term (it was not someone's house). They can be just one-two floors in an older building and run more by a family, as ira says, although they can certainly hire people to help. The one I was in was on the 2-3 floors of a building that also housed apartments and maybe some professional offices--a hotel wouldn't be like that. It had most of the things a 2-3* hotel would, though, including breakfast room, front desk, etc. Given it's odd location not off the street, there was some special procedure to get in at night, or maybe I was given a doorkey. They are rated a little lower than hotels (ie, a 4* pension in Vienna is not the same level of amenties etc as a 4* hotel, more like a 3* hotel) and can be cheaper. Most of the places I've been that had them (Krakow, Prague, Vienna), they would be listed on hotel booking sites along with the hotels, but there wouldn't be a reason to have a web site only for pensions really. In Vienna, there is one company that actually owns a couple pensions, so that's sort of like some hotels. They have them in Italy, also, and I think Spain but not sure what they are called there. Other countries too, I'm sure.

They don't really have them in France, though--anything that would fall into the same type as what I stayed at in Vienna would just probably be called a 2* hotel. In rural areas, it would be more like a B&B (chambres d'hote). There are a few places called pensions in Paris, but they are more like rooming houses, not for very short-term tourists.

They also have them in Greece, where they are a kind of intermediate stage between basic rooms (domatia) in someone's house and a hotel. In the UK, I suppose the equivalent would be a Guest House.

A language note to help if you're doing an online search: If you mean the small hotels and B&Bs in Italy, the plural is "pensioni." (Tnere's no such thing as "pensiones" in Italian.) So if you were to do a Google search for "pensiones" you'd probably get a lot of information about pensions in Spanish-speaking countries.