Ping: People who've been to Rome recently-ish.

[Coffee Warlord]

It's looking like me and the wife will have the means to do the trip to Rome we've always wanted to do next year. It's rather early yet, but it's always fun to look at hotels. With that in mind, it's time to ping the FOFC brain trust.

We are looking for:

1) Clean & Quiet
2) In the thick of things (aka walking distance from a lot of the main sights).

Preferably, add helpful & friendly staff in there, who can recommend some things / food outside of the tourist traps that are just giving kickbacks to the hotel. And an awesome bar either in the hotel or very very near it is always a plus.

And holy jesus fuck hotels are pricey in Rome. I'm fully prepared to pay a chunk of change for lodging, but some of these hotels are just outrageous, particularly for how little they offer.

[Barkeep49]

Have you thought about Air BnB? You won't get staff but you probably will get other parts of what you're looking for?

[Logan]

Was there in October but did AirBNB. We chose this over hotels not only for the reasons you mentioned, but because my wife did a semester over there and she wanted to stay near where she had stayed previously right in Piazza Navona. This apartment was a very short walk from there (which you'll see is a very good location) and we walked everywhere else anyway.

Not going to try and push AirBNB but the place we stayed at easily met both of your conditions. It was a large 2BR with full kitchen, a nice comfortable living room, and a washer/dryer which was nice to have. All for much less than we would have paid for a hotel room. And the owner of the place left us maps, guidebooks, etc and we kept in touch with him through Whatsapp about recommendations although we largely made out way on our own or through other locals we encountered (plus my wife's prior experience there). With good wifi access in the apartment, we found that we didn't need a hotel staff helping us with things like that.

Happy to pass along the place we stayed at if you decide to take this avenue.

edit: Was easy to log in and find...we paid $182/night and with the AirBNB service fee it came out to just over $200/night. Compare against hotels (with tax, which can add up quickly). It looks like you can book further out for $113/night. Obviously a steal.

Palace of the masks navona little in Rome

edit #2: Also remember that you are going to be using your hotel/rental to crash at night and possibly crash during the day after a busy morning and before a big night.

[cartman]

The two things you are looking for are diametrically opposed. Things in the main part of Rome are almost always bustling. And you are correct, the hotels near the main tourist areas are outrageously priced. But the subway system in Rome isn't bad, so you can still stay a bit away from the main sights and still have a short journey to them.

[Neuqua]

I went to Paris last year and our group decided to go with AirBnB and it worked out great. About half the cost of what the hotels were and everything we wanted to see was within walking distance.

Just something to consider.

[Chief Rum]

I don't want to hijack CW's thread, but I have often thought of doing the AirBnB thing for travel, but have yet to do it. How easy was it to do this? Any particular risks in doing AirBnB that you don't get with hotels? It sounds like a great way to do things if you don't mind that you're more or less on your own wherever you are.

[Coffee Warlord]

Yeah, I'd never heard of the AirBnB thing.

[path12]

We always do VRBO instead of AirBnB when we've been in Europe, or any travel for that matter. Haven't had a bad experience yet.

We are also planning Italy next year. Can't wait!

[Logan]

Originally Posted by Chief Rum

I don't want to hijack CW's thread, but I have often thought of doing the AirBnB thing for travel, but have yet to do it. How easy was it to do this? Any particular risks in doing AirBnB that you don't get with hotels? It sounds like a great way to do things if you don't mind that you're more or less on your own wherever you are.

Ease of use = very easy to browse availability and book (some have "instant book" features while some you need to submit an availability request, which they then confirm). Communication with the owners during the booking/planning phase is usually very easy/quick too.

As for risks vs hotels, a few I can think of but YMMV...

1) If there's an issue with your place, you can't just go down to the front desk and get a new room. From what I can tell, owners tend to be very responsive and helpful in correcting things. You also have Airbnb to stand behind you in the event of a major issue. Now, that doesn't really help very much if there's a serious concern and you need a place to stay immediately, but I'm sure instances of that are few and far between. I've also heard of times where a problem resulted in the owner coordinating with another AirBNBer to get their guests into another place.

To this point, I'll add that the reviews left by others who have stayed there seem to be pretty accurate and negatives don't get scrubbed/hidden, so there's a lot of information you can go by.

2) Similar to above, units could be not as advertised so it could be a disappointment. My research again showed this to be pretty rare. With a hotel you usually know what you're getting especially with the big brands. But I could also see this being an issue with hotels in big cities especially internationally. That spacious room in the pictures turns into basically a closet in reality (oyster.com helps with that).

3) Safety...I could see people not being comfortable "living" in an apartment around other locals who they don't know, absent all the security measures of a hotel. While they're not the most secure since anyone can walk in, there is a security staff and cameras, everyone else staying there is in the same situation as you, etc.

I'd say those are the risks. Everything else would fall under pros/cons of the two choices. When we were booking our trip to Europe last year, I was very happy to use Airbnb for Rome and Barcelona, because I figured they were large cities and there was plenty of info available on moving around and wouldn't need a hotel staff. For Positano on the Amalfi Coast, we booked a top hotel...although I'm not sure if we would have found any good options with Airbnb there.

Anyway, if I know the city already or if it's a big city, those risks/cons are well worth accepting for what is usually a much larger place at a much lower cost.

I did have one not so great experience with the Barcelona booking I mentioned above that I'll tell you about for full disclosure. The place itself was beautiful and exactly as described. Problem was, and this was a mistake I made based on the map I was looking at, it was in a rougher section of the city off of Las Ramblas than I expected (basically, I thought I was booking north of it, and it was actually south). The entrance to the apt building was off a pretty dark alley and when we showed up, at like 5pm, there were a bunch of middle aged guys shirtless and drinking openly in the alley listening to music. Now I lived in NYC for a bunch of years so this wasn't overly concerning to me, but wasn't a great first impression. When we went out for dinner a few hours later there were more people there, now louder, and when we came back from dinner, there were two cop cars in the alley and about 6 guys lined up on the wall getting arrested. I don't know exactly what happened, but these guys weren't getting popped for open containers. Went back into the apt and got lucky finding a very nice but very affordable hotel in a nice part of town for the remaining 3 days we were there. It was too awesome of a trip up until that point to finish it in a crappy way where we weren't too comfortable.

Airbnb refunded us half of what we paid upfront for those nights, which was what would have happened if we had canceled it about a week out. Technically they're not liable for what is happening outside the units, and like I said, it was my own mistake that we ended up there. So I was happy with the experience, and that was the worst of my experiences...

[Chief Rum]

Great info, Logan. Thanks! I think I can definitely use something like this to help cut costs on travel.

[NobodyHere]

Hop on over to Greece just to show them what money looks like.