Albergo San Giorgio

A small hotel in a large house, near the center of Vieste. The staff were friendly, and the rooms were clean, pleasant, and reasonably priced. Breakfast was the one disappointment: the coffee didn’t taste real, and the juice wasn’t proper juice.

Clean place, convenient location, and fair prices.

The good points were the location, cleanliness, and breakfast, though breakfast only ran from 8 to 10. The main question is whether this place is worth €200 a night. We paid that rate directly on the hotel website for five nights during the week of August 15th, and the service felt poor for the price. It’s a weak 3-star hotel, more like a Day Use place. We stayed in room 10 on the second floor. The room was very basic, with a tiny postcard-sized TV, and the bidet was so small and badly placed that it was pointless to sit on. They’d be better off removing it and spending the money on a larger smart TV. There was no balcony or clothes pegs at the window for wet swimwear, and no bathroom outlets, so using a hairdryer meant doing it on the bed. The breakfast window was far too early by usual standards. On holiday, sleeping in after a late night should be possible, but we missed breakfast two or three times. The beach club, Lido VESTA, was a 700-meter walk away. We passed larger, better-organized beaches with music and entertainment on the way. Despite having paid the hotel for beach service, our reserved umbrella wasn’t there when we arrived, and we got the last available spot. We nearly missed out on beach service altogether. The hotel should have reserved the place in advance, so I don’t see what the arrangement was for. I knew there was no parking, but a loading and unloading area would have helped. The hotel is on a narrow one-way street, and stopping briefly felt stressful, like doing something wrong. You can park in the blue lines for €7 a day, if you can find a spot. The hotel is in a building with other condos. At night, you enter through a secondary entrance using a set of five or six identical keys. Every evening we spent 20 minutes working out which key opened each door before reaching our room. After all those hassles, does this seem like a €200-a-night hotel to you?

I stayed five days in August and had to leave two nights early for personal reasons, so I didn’t pay for one night. From the start, the welcome felt cold, and the atmosphere stayed chilly throughout. I did appreciate Filomena’s kindness at breakfast, and Giusy’s too. The breakfast itself wasn’t to my taste, mostly industrial-style cakes rather than homemade ones. The air conditioner seemed old, noisy, and not very effective. Early in the morning there was loud clattering from glass bottles, probably from the garbage trucks passing by. After 10 p.m., you had to enter through another doorway, which I didn’t like. The stairwell lighting was dim: there was no light as you came in, you had to switch it on, and then it went off again right away. It made me feel a bit apprehensive. Personally, I don’t think I’d return.