by Anne Davey

Created on: July 22, 2008   Last Updated: July 23, 2008

THE HOTEL AMBASCIATORI, MESTRE

I've just come back from a three night stay in this hotel, which is situated in Mestre - a sort of suburb near Venice. Having never been to Venice, I really wanted to visit, but travelling with four meant hotel rooms are not cheap and hotel rooms in Venice are especially not cheap. So this hotel provided an excellent solution - a few kilometres outside Venice itself makes all the difference to affordability, and clearly Mestre is working on this principle as there are a lot of hotels there.

ROOM

This one, the Ambasciatori, is four star, and we stayed in what they call a suite. First point - it's not! It is a nice large executive double with a queen sized bed and a walk in wardrobe but it does not have a separate sitting room, so in my book it is not a suite. It has a sitting area in the room separated from the bed by a lattice screen, but that doesn't count as a separate room does it? What it did have, rather extra-ordinarily, was a separate shower room with toilet and sink as well as a full sized bath room with two sinks, shower over the bath, loo and bidet. Nice big sort of twelve/fourteen feet square bathroom, all white suite, marble counter, tiled floor etc. Great. Hubby and I could both shower at the same time. So a suite of bathrooms then.....

This nice non-suite cost us 190 euros a night but they did three nights for the price of two, so it worked out well. They had a cot (which actually we ended up putting in the walk in wardrobe as it was large enough and had a window, so at least baby and we had a bit of privacy). They charge an extra 20 euros for an extra bed, though the cot was free. A standard double room at that time (July 2008) was 140E I think.

SERVICE

Housekeeping was excellent - the room was always beautifully tidy and there were tons of towels, enough spare pillows etc and blankets to spare and all carried out unobtrousively. Good minibar and not stupidly expensive (5.50E for half bottle of Prosecco, for example).

Excellent bellboy help on arrival and parking right outside the door helped ameliorate the impression left by the grumpy man on reception, but other staff were friendly - e.g breakfast and dinner waiters etc. We arrived in the restaurant at 9.28pm, having telephoned in advance to say we would be in before they clsed the kitchen at 9.30pm and were met with firstly a request to eat only cold food from the anti pasti buffet, but when pressed they produced a plate of spaghetti and two steaks and were polite,

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