Travel 4 minutes 14 November 2023

You Should Stay at a Hotel in Venice

In a fantastic city filled with river streets and boat cars, Venice hotels have a lot to live up to. That they exceed expectations is just one more reason to spend the night.

The hotels below are part of the MICHELIN Guide hotel selection. Each of the 5,000+ hotels in the selection has been chosen by our experts for its extraordinary style, service, and personality — and each can be booked on the MICHELIN Guide website and app.

You don’t need to have seen Venice to fall in love with what it represents. When I was young, its premise grabbed hold of me immediately. The canals and waterways were unbelievable — an impossible fantasyland of river streets and boat cars. I couldn’t shake the idea. Most of us won’t be able to visit everywhere we’d like to, so the idea of a place might be all we ever have of it. But that’s what turns us into travelers. The potential of places like Venice is what inspires us to go everywhere else.

It’s been an unsettling few years for Venezia. Floods follow droughts follow floods. In 2019, the city was hit with an historic flood. In 2023, another, with water levels exceeding two meters for the first time ever. But there’s hope; the floodgates designed to protect Venice from the rising sea are nearly fully operational (unintended consequences from the barriers, in the form of stagnant water, continue to be debated).

Speaking of unintended consequences, another lasting concern for Venice is over-tourism. Cruise ships carrying thousands of day trippers regularly descend upon the islands. While tourism is always good for business, these particular tourists are notable for spending relatively little money on land while putting an outsized strain on the city’s infrastructure and abilities. Yes, we’re biased, but dropping in for a half-day and departing back to the boat should be no one’s ideal way to experience any destination, let alone this one.

If you ask us, it’s better to get to know a place than to barely know a bunch of them. And to do that, you’ll need to stay a night or three. It’s hard to compete with the wonders of Venice, but the city’s best hotels are up to the challenge, as you’ll see below. Each one offering its own take on what makes Venice magic.


Hotel Metropole
Venice, Italy

Even by Venetian standards, the Hotel Metropole is steeped in history — this was once an orphanage where Vivaldi gave music lessons. More recently, though still decades ago, it was acquired by the Beggiato family, and remains a family-owned and -operated hotel, decorated with the owners’ collections of art and antiques. And while it’s been renovated to keep pace with the times, its style is deliciously decadent, and eclectic.

Book Hotel Metropole on MICHELIN Guide →


Il Palazzo Experimental
Venice, Italy

The Experimental Group has blossomed quickly from a word-of-mouth Parisian cocktail phenomenon to a full-fledged hospitality concern. If there ever were a city whose hotel scene needed an infusion of youthful cool, it’s Venice, whose bridges and canals are so thick with tourists you could be forgiven for wondering if there’s any nightlife culture here at all. That’s where Il Palazzo Experimental comes in.

Book Il Palazzo Experimental on MICHELIN Guide →


SINA Centurion Palace
Venice, Italy

Behind the postcard-perfect Venetian-Gothic exterior of this former convent is something else entirely: a thoroughly modern luxury boutique hotel. Not that you’ll think for so much as a moment that you’re anywhere other than Venice. Set at the mouth of the Grand Canal, with the lagoon on one side and narrow alleyways on the other, the scene surrounding the Centurion Palace is about as typically Venetian as it could possibly be.

Book SINA Centurion Palace on MICHELIN Guide →


Ca’ Bonfadini
Venice, Italy

Venice is a place that wears opulence well. And while Ca’ Bonfadini may hide itself away behind a relatively unassuming, if handsome, 18th-century façade, what’s inside is the kind of high elegance for which the city has become practically synonymous. Its location, right on the Cannaregio canal, offers both convenience and quiet in roughly equal measure; its interiors an ode to the city’s neoclassical period.

Book Ca’ Bonfadini on MICHELIN Guide →


Hotel Indigo Sant’Elena
Venice, Italy

The Hotel Indigo Venice – Sant’Elena is named for the island that lies just across the bridge from the hotel, at the far end of the city proper. And it makes its home not in some purpose-built hotel building but in a 1930s convent, a short walk from the 11th-century Church of Sant’Elena — a perfect venue for a hotel that aims to offer an air of tranquil contemplation.

Book Hotel Indigo Sant’Elena on MICHELIN Guide →


The Venice Venice Hotel
Venice, Italy

The Venice Venice Hotel, dedicated as it is to “postvenezianità” — post-Venetian-ness — finds itself in the 13th-century Byzantine-style Palazzo Ca’ da Mosto, overlooking the Grand Canal and the Rialto Bridge. Its owners, however, have their sights set squarely on the future, and take their inspiration from the avant-garde spirit that they feel has always been an integral part of Venetian life.

Book the Venice Venice Hotel on MICHELIN Guide →


Splendid Venice
Venice, Italy

The relationship between Splendid Venice, the hotel, and splendid Venice, the city, goes back a long time. An inn was first built on this site in the sixteenth century, and the property has been almost continuously in use as hotel since, although a 21st-century renovation eradicated any traces of mustiness. Can’t argue with the decision to keep the rosy façade with casement windows — splendid, indeed.

Book Splendid Venice on MICHELIN Guide →


Nolinski Venezia
Venice, Italy

Nolinski Venezia is further proof that there’s no necessary tradeoff between high luxury and high fashion — in the right hands, a hotel is perfectly capable of delivering both. Nor does it shy away from the action. Nolinski Venezia is set on the Calle Larga XXII Marzo, in a stately building that once housed the city’s Chamber of Commerce, with high-end retailers like Ferragamo and Armani for neighbors.

Book Nolinski Venezia on MICHELIN Guide →


Aman Venice
Venice, Italy

It’s fitting that Aman would choose this as the setting for their first city hotel. Like many of their far-flung, impossibly photogenic locales, there’s a sense that Venice isn’t quite of this earth. Rather than build something modern, they’ve made use of a meticulously preserved Renaissance palace as a setting. Of course in Venice it couldn’t be any other way, but it’s a pleasure to see that they know when to leave well enough alone.

Book Aman Venice on MICHELIN Guide →


Charming House iQs
Venice, Italy

Not IQs, as in Intelligence Quotient — though you will indeed feel smart staying here — but i Qs, Italian for, well, “the Qs.” This is an annex, or perhaps more precisely a satellite property, belonging to Charming House DD.724, and its four exceedingly stylish suites stand about twenty minutes from the main hotel, close by to the Piazza San Marco, with views over the Rio del Mondo Nuovo.

Book Charming House iQs on MICHELIN Guide →


Palazzo Maria Formosa
Venice, Italy

A good boutique hotel strikes a balance between upending certain expectations while thoroughly fulfilling others. A Venetian hotelier must be tempted to reject the whole ornate package of Gothic/Renaissance glamour that’s characteristic of the city. Palazzo Maria Formosa, however, chooses a route that’s more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding.

Book Palazzo Maria Formosa on MICHELIN Guide →


Hotel Gritti Palace
Venice, Italy

Venice is a magic city—the site of many a novel, love affair and Bellini cocktail, with pigeons, Canaletto style watery vistas, and alleyways and bridges that lead nowhere. In many ways, the only proper place to stay in Venice is a palace. And of all the palaces-turned-hotels in Venice, they say that the Hotel Gritti Palace is the most perfect.

Book Hotel Gritti Palace on MICHELIN Guide →


Palazzina Grassi
Venice, Italy

If ever there were a city that needed a bit of the old Philippe Starck treatment it was Venice. With Palazzina Grassi, Starck is at full strength: masks on the bedside lamps, comically exaggerated chandeliers, mirrors on every surface. It’s a classic Venetian palazzo filtered through the mind of a dedicated anti-classicist, and the result was always going to be memorable.

Book Palazzina Grassi on MICHELIN Guide →


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Top image: Il Palazzo Experimental

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