If you are looking for a small hotel at reasonable prices (very hard to find in Venice) with AMAZING LOCATION, Hotel LIsbona is your place. This hotel is located just around the corner from the San Marco Water Taxi Stop. So easy to get too. From Santa Lucia Train Station, hop on the Water Taxi (#1 or #41) and go to San Marco, get off, walk a few short blocks and you are there. The hotel website has great and easy walking directions on their website.

They provided a free breakfast but it was barely adequate and served in a very small room that doubled as their sitting room during the day. Having said that their server who cleaned tables in between guests did a great job of keeping the tables moving and clean and serving a coffee and tea very quickly. The rest was buffet. Basic continental though the items were often on the stale side and the fruits very limited.

On our check out day we had to leave before breakfast began (by about 1/2 hr) and asked if we could get coffee to go (something other hotels in Italy did for us) but this hotel did not accommodate that request.

If it's location you want you'll get it but don't expect friendly cheery front desk folks because you won't find it here. The front desk people (except Chris who was very friendly) are sullen and non-accommodating. They will help you if you ask but you're left feeling like you bothered them unnecessarily. Smiles are also not given freely if at all. It could be a cultural thing in Venice??

The hotel has 3 floors and we were on the very top floor. We had to walk 59 steps to our room and 59 steps down each time we left. It's good if you want a cardio workout and don't mind carrying your stuff up and down these steps.

The room was frankly horrible. It was small barely larger than a double bed. It had a double bed, a window (with a view of the building next door even though their website says every room has canal view) and the TV was a 12 inch TV propped on top of a 6-8 foot wardrobe crammed in front of the bed. If you have claustrophobia, don't pick this hotel as despite it's great location, you are likely not to enjoy it.

The hotel entrance and lobby are very quaint. Right outside the doors of the hotel is gondola rides and lobby has lots of charming antiques.. but the carpeting is very old, the hotel beyond the lobby is shabby and our room was stanky.. dusty (we had to dust our own headboard) and very very small.

Having said all this, we still enjoyed our stay in Venice and loved the location of this hotel and since we spent very little time in our hotel room we were able to take deep cleansing breathes at nite to avoid a panic attack before falling off into an exhausted tourist induced sleep.

PS no internet access.

We stayed at this hotel in the beginning of august, when it was hot.
The aircondition was very bad, we could not sleep there. The room was very small and it had a smell of old smoke. Therefor we decided to leave the hotel after a few ours. We offer to pay for one night, but had to pay for the hole stay (3 nights) !!! We left and will never come back. The hotel has a good location, but this didn`t help us.
Olav from Norway

The location is fine - in easy reach of San Marco etc. The hotel itself seems to be limited by its structure / history. No lift, so a long walk up stairs. Small rooms - I thought ours was small until I saw the pics of some others! At least we could get up both sides of the double bed! Our ' bathroom' would have made a good size wardrobe - perhaps it had been! - but it did have modern fittings and plenty of hot water etc. Air con was fine. Breakfast limited but adequate. Breakfast room small and had to wait most mornings for a table to become free. Staff were pleasant and helpful and everything as very clean. Not the best three star I have stayed in in Europe but all the basics were there and at the price it represented good value.

I stayed here once in September 2007 and again in August 2010 with very different experiences. First time, at very short notice, we got a small but atmospheric room with a balcony overlooking the canal where the gondolas embark from. Thinking we could repeat the experience, we booked a month ahead to finish off a hiking holiday in the Dolomites. I think the receptionist looked us up and down and decided from our dusty boots that we merited the worst room in the hotel. It was tiny - smaller than some of the bathrooms in hotels we had stayed in earlier in the week. No view of the canal. Nice view of a wall 6 feet away and some scaffolding. In fact it was impossible to tell if the sun was shining outside or see the sky at all and we had to keep the dim bedside lights on all the time to illuminate the room. Very poor ventilation if you closed the window to keep the noise out.
On the other hand, it did have all the 3 star facilities crammed in (which made it difficult to move around).
I noticed in the hotel literature in the room that it advertises its rooms as all overlooking the canal - which is not the case.