Don't Book a Room at Hotel Ca'Alvise in Venice Italy

Ca’ Alvise:
Address: San Marco 3673, Venice, 30124 Italy

We booked Ca’ Alvise through hotels.com for 10/6/10-10/8/10 at a rate of $189 per night. I did quite a bit of research on hotels and decided on Ca’ Alvise because it was a four star hotel on a canal furnished with Italian antiques…just my style. Bad choice…whatever you do (especially if you are American), DO NOT BOOK THIS HOTEL...you won't be staying there!

We knew we would be arriving at the hotel in the morning and emailed the hotel a week or two before our departure requesting an early check-in. We received no answer which should have been our first clue. We arrived between 9-10AM on 10/6/10 as we alerted them we would. The lady at the front desk confirmed they had our reservation and photocopied our passports. Then she quite matter of factly told us to come back at 2PM because that is their check-in time. The hotel still uses keys with room number tags hanging from them and I could clearly see five or six keys just hanging there. From her curtness with us (we might be being paranoid but it felt like the fact that we were American brought on the rudeness), we could tell we weren’t going to get anywhere arguing so we had her store our luggage in closet and took off to explore Venice.
We returned at 2:15PM and requested our room. The same five or six keys we had seen earlier were still hanging there. The same front desk clerk called the porter who loaded up our luggage on a hand truck and went out the front door. The desk clerk couldn’t shut the door behind us fast enough (literally…the door bumped into me as she was pushing it closed) as she told us we were going to their “other” building.

Five or 10 minutes into our 15-20 minute trek across Venice I knew something was wrong and started to get nervous. The porter finally pulled our luggage between the rows of tables in one of the street-side restaurants and rang the buzzer of an unmarked door. Someone rang us in and we proceeded up a flight of dark steps. The only thing you could see clearly was the art piece at the top of the steps which was a back lighted piece of pink glass with a raised figure of an overweight woman in a slightly risqué position…now I’m really nervous.

At the top of the steps, the porter took his tip and off he went never saying one word to us. The lady who greeted us saw the looks of confusion and despair on our faces and asked if we knew what was going on. We said we didn’t and she explained that Ca’ Alvise didn’t have a room for us so they made arrangements for us to stay at her boutique hotel. She also shared that Ca’ Alvise had been doing this to guests all week…carting them off to her hotel leaving her to do the explaining.