Accessible Hotels in Venice

Venice isn't the most convenient city for travelers in wheelchairs, or for slow walkers who find it difficult to manhandle suitcases up and down the steps of footbridges. (The city has more than 400 bridges in its historic center, and few of those bridges have ramps.)

To make matters worse, most Venice hotels are in renovated palazzi and other buildings that were built hundreds of years ago, before "accessibility" or "accessibilità" became part of the innkeeping vocabulary.

For disabled or mobility-impaired travelers, there are two things to look for when selecting a hotel in Venice:

• A location that makes it easy to reach the sights, over level ground or by vaporetto (public water bus).

• A hotel that is reasonably barrier-free, has an elevator big enough for wheelchairs, and makes a serious effort to accommodate disabled guests.

In this article, we've listed a number of hotels in Venice's centro storico that are convenient and accessible. We've focused on hotels that can accommodate wheelchair users.

Please note:

• We've limited our list to hotels that are easy to reach by public transportation, for a simple reason: Water taxis aren't wheelchair-accessible, and getting in or out of a water taxi can be difficult at low or high tide.

• In general, you're likely to find the highest degree of accessibility in large luxury hotels, where public rooms, guest rooms, and bathrooms tend to be more spacious than in small hotels.

• Large electric scooters and oversize wheelchairs are likely to be inconvenient in Venice, where streets may be narrow and crowded and interiors of buildings (including hotel lobbies, restaurants, and shops) are often cramped.

• We don't pretend to be accessibility experts. If you're a wheelchair user who'd like to share personal experiences at Venice hotels with other travelers, feel free to contact us.

• This article is a work in progress, and we expect to add more hotels as time goes by.

• Important: Hotel links will take you to pages at Booking.com, our secure reservations partner, which offers a "lowest price guarantee." When making a reservation, use the "Special Requests" box on the booking form to say that you need a wheelchair-accessible room. (Your booking confirmation will include an e-mail address for the hotel. We suggest using that address to remind the hotel of your request several days before you arrive in Venice.)

• If you choose to reserve a room at a hotel that isn't listed in this article, be sure that the hotel really is accessible--and that it's within easy reach of transportation and sightseeing. (And be leery of "crowdsourced" information: For example, TripAdvisor lists 108 wheelchair-accessible hotels in Venice, a wildly optimistic number that doesn't take hotel location into account.)

To get started on finding an accessible hotel in Venice, please go to page 2 of this article.