LateRooms.com, booking a last minute hotel room

I recently went to Rome for three days and unbelievably didn’t book a hotel room until about five hours before the flight. Normally I am fairly good at sorting things like this out well in advance, but on this occasion it just wasn’t possible.

So I was recommended a visit to http://www.laterooms.com which turns out to be a gold mine of information (thanks Matt)! As a visitor to the site you simply put in the country and area you wish to visit – I entered ‘Trevi, Rome’ and got a long, long list of al the available rooms I could book. Narrowing all this down took a while, not because the site’s filters are no good, but because I didn’t really know where I wanted to stay or at what kind of hotel. I managed to get it to about five choices, and then went simply for location.

Not ever having stayed in Rome before I wasn’t sure what to expect from the area I had selected – it was within walking distance of the Trevi Fountain, Pantheon, Colosseum and many more sights, and had a metro stop very close by as well for those trips further afield.

It turned out to be a very good choice! The Hotel St, Moritz is certainly not going to win awards for splendour or sophistication, but you couldn’t want for a more friendly staff (all spoke good English) and the accommodation was perfectly good enough. The hotel itself is located on Vai Nazionale – a fairly main road in Central Rome, and to find the hotel means going through a set of solid wooden doors, ascending two flights of stairs and going through a door… all a bit different to any other hotel I have ever stayed at.

Nonetheless, despite not having a luxurious bar or dining room, this hotel was ideally located and gave us exactly what we needed – a base to explore from. On the last day in Rome we were not due to fly out until 9pm, which would normally mean checking out of the hotel and wandering around with luggage for hours on end. However, the hotel were able to look after our bags for us until we returned at about 6pm, whereupon they kindly booked us a taxi to the airport. This kind of personal service is probably available from lots of places, but it was unexpected and we were very pleased to be offered it.

So, would I use the hotel again? On balance, it was well located, had friendly staff, the rooms were clean and tidy, it was peaceful and had good service. The breakfasts were basic and there were no real facilities to mention, but yes – it is worth going back to if you want to explore Rome. If you want a luxury hotel with bars and restaurants, etc, then don’t look here – but *do* spend some time on the laterooms.com web site!

As a sample of what Rome contains, here is a web gallery of a few images I took whilst there. Note the weather on the first two days was really, really good – hot enough for T-shirts, certainly! In fact, I almost got sunburn whilst sitting at a cafe outside the Pantheon. Day three was a different matter, a lot wetter, but no less fun all the same!