On Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:57:04 +0000, Mimi wrote
(in article ):
> Most towns except the smallest have Tourism Offices that can help you find a
> place to stay.
This is what I have always been told, and the first time recently I travelled
by car in Italy I confidently thought that this would be enough. Sadly the
reality is that it's not always as easy as that.
Firstly we have to drive into the town, find a place to park, and find the
Tourist Office. This can take an hour at least. Then by the time we get to it
we have quite often found it closed. This may be due to a week-end (but we
still want to travel - even on Sundays!), or because it's after hours, or for
some other unknown reason. Even when they're open they often haven't been of
very much help.
The first day we were in Italy in a car we found ourselves at around 4 pm
near Asti (not a tourist destination as you will know). With the help of our
GPS we located the tourist office and miraculously also found a parking
space. In the office though, they were not particularly helpful. All they
could do was give us one of those pictorial tourist maps with a few hotels
listed on the back. When we asked if they could find out which places had
rooms available they just pointed to the phone numbers listed that we could
ring ourselves (but not from the office, purtroppo). Fortunately there was a
hotel actually within walking distance, where we did get a room. The
experience though didn't encourage us very much to use the Tourist Offices
elsewhere.
Tourist offices could work I think, if one arrived by rail in the centre of a
town in the middle of the day, intending to spend a few days. You have time
to invest in hotel-hunting and you know you are not going anywhere else that
day. It doesn't make so much sense for us to make our way into the centre of
a town (even a small one) just to find somewhere to stay outside the town for
a night.
--
Mike Lane (UK North Yorkshire)
To contact me replace invalid with mike underscore lane
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