We stayed at the Hotel Continental for 4 nights during our trip to Venice in June 2003. Hotel Continental is a 3 star hotel located near the train station in Venice. We stayed in Room 114.

Location

We arrived by train in Venice and when we got out of the train station I found Venice just the way that I Had imagined it to be: sunny, Canal Grande, lots of boats and lots of tourist. Fortunately the hotel is not very far from the train station so after a 5 minute walk we were there. The hotel didn’t look very impressive on the outside. It looked grayish and some of the building was covered due to construction work. But the hotel is located by the shore of Canal Grande and it is close to the vaporetto stop (vaporetto is the boat “bus” that goes up and down Canal Grande) and close to Scalzi bridge (bridge crossing Canal Grande from Cannaregio to Santa Croce/San Polo)

In the hotel area you will find lots of shops, restaurants, internet cafes, a laundry place, ice cream shops, markets, mask shop and so on.

Reservation

According to the guide book you have to book a hotel pretty early when going to Italy. We didn’t plan it very well so we didn’t book a hotel until 1 week before we left for Italy. When booking this late you either get something that is really bad or something that is a bit expensive. I guess you can say that we got a hotel room that was pretty expensive because we paid 150 € per night including breakfast. We booked the hotel room using http://www.holidaycity.com

The lobby at the hotel was small but with air condition so it was really nice to get inside. We had 35 degrees Celsius on some days and I guess that explains why I appreciated the air-con J. The people working at the front desk where polite and spoke several languages (Italian, English, Spanish). In the lobby we also found different newspapers (USA Today). The hotel has 107 rooms.

The room

When we got to the hotel the porter carried our luggage to our room and we were excited when he headed for the room located on the canal side. And we did get a room with a view to Canal Grande at it was very nice. We had two large windows facing the canal and 1 window in the bathroom which didn’t have much of a view.

The room was not tiny as I had expected it to be. Instead we got a room that was above average in size. The room had a carpet, a king size bed (which was a bit too hard for me), a sofa, two chairs and a small table, a wardrobe with a few hangers, a small color TV (with quite a few German, Italian and English channels, but with a remote that wasn’t really working that well) and a small safe. With the air condition in the room we could control the temperature. The only thing that would have been nice to have was a small mini bar.

The bathroom we got had tiles and included toilet, bide and a bathtub. The only problem with the bathtub was that there was no shower curtain and we ended up splashing water all over the floor when taking a shower. Apart from this there was a hair dryer mounted on the wall and little bars of soaps and shampoo in small bags.

The breakfast

Breakfast was included and we enjoyed this every day. When it comes to warm stuff the hotel offered scrambled eggs, boiled eggs and bacon. And they had a toast machine and a selection of both white and dark bread. And with toast you get a selection of jam, honey, cheese and ham of course. They also had quite a selection of sweet stuff. Apart from this there were a couple of choices when it comes to cereal and they also had canned fruit mix which I enjoyed. They had a few choices of juice but it wasn’t great. And we got tea or coffee served at the table.

When we were there they were doing some sort of construction work on the outside of the hotel and it got pretty noisy in the breakfast room area.

Conclusion

We were pretty thrilled to get a room with a view to the Canal Grande that’s for sure. The room was larger than expected, the location was pretty good (after all it is a small town and you can more or less walk everywhere) but it was a bit expensive. But Venice is so popular that the hotels are expensive here.