Creative Cogitation

I have been called by other artists trav­el­ing to the Bien­nial & asked about hotels in Flo­rence, ship­ping etc.  Since I have done my research I am post­ing the infor­ma­tion here.  Given the sheer num­ber of hotels in down­town Flo­rence I get the feel­ing it has gone the way of Venice.  Peo­ple don’t live there, they only work there.  Most of the occu­pants of the city on any given day are prob­a­bly tourists these days.  I am also post­ing my research on fly­ing as well. 

Although I could have booked my hotel through the hotel site itself, I opted for my travel agent instead.  Since I am an Amer­i­can Auto­mo­bile Asso­ci­a­tion (AAA) mem­ber so it makes sense for me to use them; I like the one-stop shop­ping thing: hotel, air­fare, trip insur­ance etc.   Your expe­ri­ence with regard to using an travel agent may vary.  But even with a travel agent I did my home­work first.  For exam­ple I really do not like trav­el­ing through most the major US hubs (Atlanta, JFK, DFW, Chicago etc.) if I can avoid it.  Also I could request that my con­nect­ing flights be in the same ter­mi­nal, get decent lay-over times, and book aisle seats. It is a chal­lenge per­form­ing all that via an air­line web­site; often times if you get the out-bound trip the way you want it, you often will find the in-bound side is a com­plete night­mare & book­ing each half sep­a­rately tends to really inflate the cost.   Given the sheer num­ber of hotels in Flo­rence, I did need to nar­row down the field some before book­ing a hotel as well.  For me price, loca­tion and ameni­ties, in that order, were important. 

Air­port Research:  Try Googling “<air­port name or city> air­port reviews”.  The fol­low­ing web­sites may be use­ful too.  

•  SleepingInAirports.net  is a hoot to read. 
• Also check out http://www.airlinequality.com/Airports/apt_forum.htm.

Air­line Research: con­sider http://www.airlinequality.com/Forum/seats.htm

Hotel Research: When I went to research hotels in Flo­rence I found the fol­low­ing sites useful:

• booking.com where you can put in the city, check-in/check-out dates, refine your search by star rat­ing, facil­i­ties, hotel type, hotel theme, and district.  
• nyceflorence.com which has a handy lit­tle map so you can get close to the what­ever land­mark you desire – in my case the Fortezza da Basso  in addi­tion to price, star rat­ing & check-in/check-out dates. 
• I used hotel reviews at Expedia.com, to val­i­date my impres­sions once I got some hotel ideas. 
• I hear that Utell prop­er­ties are often rec­om­mended by over­seas trav­el­ers accord­ing to my travel agent. 

I have quite acci­den­tally and  iron­i­cally set­tled on the Hotel Ari­zona (ironic because I am a res­i­dent of Ari­zona).  It is about 1 mile from the Fortezza.  I am not averse to walk­ing so this dis­tance does not seem extreme to me and besides Flo­rence has the rep­u­ta­tion of being a great walk­ing city.  Whether that holds true or not remains to be seen.  There were at least two other hotels which were a bit closer that I did con­sider: Hotel Basilea and Hotel Sem­pi­one but in the end Hotel Ari­zona won out in my research by a hair.  All of these hotels are 3-star hotels. For some that may be just a bit too high-end for oth­ers way too bud­get ori­ented, which is why your own research is required for validation. 

Ini­tially I had a lovely flight set up with Lufthansa, but some­thing hap­pened in the book­ing, it could not be fixed and the price had just about dou­bled oth­er­wise.  Now I am fly­ing Delta Air­lines & part­ners, which turned out to a lit­tle bit less expen­sive so I used the dif­fer­ence in price to buy trip insurance. 

Trip insur­ance: I decided this trip was too impor­tant not to have it.  It cov­ers many things includ­ing ben­e­fits relat­ing to lost or delayed lug­gage, replace­ment flights, hotels at con­nect­ing air­ports when flights are delayed can­cel, since I included my hotel, it has a replace­ment hotel ben­e­fit as well.  I am trav­el­ing in win­ter which may present some weather related chal­lenges.  Still, I con­sider trip insur­ance more of an incan­ta­tion to be per­formed to ensure a good travel expe­ri­ence.  You may or may not think it is nec­es­sary.  My insur­ance is through Access Amer­ica – I think I received a dis­count because of my AAA membership. 

For the record I do not have any busi­ness rela­tion­ship with any of the air­ports, hotels, air­lines, or web­sites men­tioned herein, nor do I have a busi­ness rela­tion­ship with AAA or Access Amer­ica. I am not specif­i­cally rec­om­mend­ing any air­line, hotel, or web­site as I have lit­tle to no expe­ri­ence with them.  I do enjoy my AAA mem­ber­ship, but as with all such things, you have to use it to get your money’s worth.  I can­not say whether Access Amer­ica trip insur­ance is good or bad as I have never filed a claim with them. 

Good luck in your trav­els and I hope to see you in Italy.

Yours in Art,

-Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

PS. I am still look­ing for Spon­sors & Con­tribut­ing Patrons to help me pay the esti­mated $8000 it is going to cost me to attend this event.  Every lit­tle bit helps.