Hotel Martelli - Florence, Italy     

About the best thing I can say is that it is central and close to all the main sites including the Rail Station and the Duomo which is just down the street, after that it all goes down hill. Getting there is a nightmare and you have to park round the corner in a private car park. It's expensive but then inner city parking always is. My advice would be to leave the car and get in on the train. You can't use it once you are there anyway. We found the staff unfriendly and unhelpful. The room was quite the worst I have ever stayed in with no window to speak of, certainly not one that you could look out or one that gave any natural light to the room. The furniture was old and tired though the bed was comfortable enough and the cleaning staff worked miracles. The bathroom was awful with a tiny bath the surface of which was peeling and stained. The plug was missing to both the bath and the sink.The shower hose attached to the bath worked but there was nowhere to fix it and no shower curtain though that didn't matter because once in the bath you could not stand up in it anyway as there was a low beam in the way! Tiles were cracked, different colours and had grout missing. When we complained they said "Ah room 58 is like that" and they had no others available. Breakfast was poor with nothing warm and not even the ability to make toast. At ?205 for the room per night, it was without doubt the worst value for money hotel that I have ever stayed in. I would imagine that the most satisfied "guests" would have been the mosquitoes which abounded.

We arrived to the Hotel Martelli after taking a night train from Paris to Florence. We emailed the hotel a few weeks earlier to let them know that we were planning on coming a day earlier than planned. Although we had a confirmation email stating that this would be no problem, the lady at the front desk was not aware of the change. Thankfully I had a copy of the email and we were ensured that our room would be available at the normal check in time. We were extremely surprised that we had been upgraded to the best room in the hotel. (It is the blue room with paintings on the walls that is featured prominently on their website just in case you want to check it out.) Sure beats the night train accommodations! The breakfast was nothing special and the help at the front desk was hit or miss but we loved our room! Very convenient location to the sights and to the train station as well.