Venice Travel Blog

"Introducing Venice" at Venice for Visitors

ABOVE: Santa Lucia Railroad Station is on the edge of Venice's centro storico or historic center.

We've just published an article at Venice for Visitors that we should have written long ago: It gives an orientation and overview of Venice in three easy-to-read pages.

The article is titled "Introducing Venice," and it covers several important topics:

• Basic geography, with a satellite-photo map that shows the Venetian Lagoon, the city's historic center, the airport, the railroad station, the cruise terminals, and other major landmarks.

• Picking the right hotel location, with a zoomed-in photo map to help you understand which areas of town are likely to be the most convenient (or inconvenient) for your purposes.

• Arriving and getting around, with links to our articles on arriving in Venice, using public transportation, navigating Venice on foot, and related topics.

If you're visiting Venice for the first time, this quick tutorial will help you avoid confusion, and it could save you from making costly and frustrating planning mistakes. To read it, go to:

• Introducing Venice at Veniceforvisitors.com

A warning about travel agents

ABOVE: If your travel agent has a distorted view of Venice's geography, you could find yourself stuck a long way from airport transportation or the cruise port.

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by Durant Imboden

We'll almost certainly get a flood of angry e-mails for saying this, but it needs to be said:

Travel agents often give bad advice to their clients who are headed for Venice.

For example:

• A reader told us that her travel agent had arranged a water taxi from the airport to the city center at a cost of 150 euros per person. For a couple, that's almost triple the normal fare--and it's about 10 times the cost of an Alilaguna airport boat ride.

• Cruise passengers have told of being booked into hotels far from the Venice cruise terminals, with no easy way of getting from the hotel to the ship with their heavy luggage. (Venice is a city with more than 400 footbridges, and most of those bridges have steps.)

Why do such mistakes occur? I'd guess there are several reasons:

• Travel agents may be experts at getting the best fare from Virginia Beach to Venice, or at recommending the cabin with the largest balcony on the MS Croesus, but that doesn't mean they're familiar with the geography of a distant city where buses and taxis don't travel door to door.

• Even when a travel agent has visited Venice, his or her experience may be colored by the fact that someone else provided local transportation and baggage handling during a "fam trip" that was sponsored by a hotel or cruise line.

• Online travel agencies like Expedia and Travelocity typically recommend hotels based on price, availability, and other factors, using computer algorithms that don't take the traveler's individual needs into account. (Airlines and cruise lines are no better: When I checked in with Delta for a recent flight to Venice, the airline suggested two outrageously-priced hotels without regard for my budget or preferred location.)

Bottom line: Don't let a travel agent--or anyone else--make local transportation and hotel decisions for you unless you know exactly what you're getting and why. And for more guidance on planning a trip to Venice--or on reviewing your travel agent's recommendations--go to Venice for Visitors, which has more than 600 pages of illustrated travel advice.

Molino Stucky Hilton: How to reach the hotel

ABOVE: The Molino Stucky Hilton faces the Giudecca Canal and the cruise port. (Note the MSC ship in the background on the right side of the photo.)

The Molino Stucky Hilton isn't the most centrally-located hotel in Venice, but it's popular with convention groups, cruisers, and Hilton fans (including many who are redeeming points from the Hilton hotel group's loyalty program).

Because we've received e-mails from readers who haven't been able to figure out how to reach the hotel, we've just published an illustrated four-page article at Venice for Visitors titled "Molino Stucky Hilton Airport and Cruise Port Transportation."

The article includes step-by-step directions on how to reach the hotel from Marco Polo Airport and Venice's Marittima and San Basilio cruise terminals (or vice versa). It also has a Google aerial photo map that shows the hotel, the cruise piers, and other useful landmarks.

We hope you'll find our information useful if you're contemplating a stay at Venice's largest hotel, which is on the island of Giudecca across from the historic center of Venice and the cruise port. Click here to read the article.