Finding a hotel in a European city can be frustrating. Rooms are generally pretty small and many hotels don’t have standard rooms that allow more than two people. Even chain hotels, and in some cities, especially chain hotels will only have their biggest and most expensive suites allow more than 2 or 3 people.
This means for chain hotels you may need to either get two rooms or pony up for an expensive suite. Sometimes places further outside the city will allow 4 people in a room, but we vastly prefer to be in the heart of a city rather than having to spend time commuting.
The Search
I started looking at the Marriott and IHG chain hotel options. The few that would allow all four of us in one room were 30+ minutes from the heart of Rome. We had no interest in dealing with an hour+ of commuting every day. I was not all that interested in getting two rooms and having to be separate the whole vacation. It wasn’t ruled out, but we wanted to avoid it.
I decided to look for non-chain hotel options. I started by reading reviews on TripAdvisor. I’ve had good experiences researching hotels on the site before and looking for the best family hotels in Rome, the first option that came up looked quite promising.
The Hotel Quirinale is not part of a chain, but appeared to be centrally located. It offered rooms that were family friendly and could hold 4 people, and was reasonably priced. I spent weeks reading through reviews and exploring other options but always came back to this hotel as being one of the best deals I could find.
Booking
By the summer of 2017 I had decided to book the hotel. I had recently gotten a new credit card that had a very valuable and relevant benefit. The Citi Prestige card has a benefit where you can get the 4th night free on a hotel stay. It’s a pretty fantastic perk that at the time could be used for nearly any stay 4 nights or longer. After your stay you would get a statement credit for the average of the rate during your stay. It was the average of the base rate and didn’t include taxes and fees, but it was pretty fantastic deal. Even better, you could use AAA rates or any other publicly available rate the concierge could find online.
In order to book the 7 night stay I called the concierge number for the credit card. They found the hotel and the rate for the room I had seen on the hotel’s site. We booked a refundable rate for a junior suite which appeared pretty large from the pictures and description. It had a bed and a couch with a pullout bed for the kids. The room rate included a buffet breakfast which is always a big selling point for us.
Re-Booking
About a month before our stay, I checked the prices again and they had gone down slightly. I called up the concierge again and asked to rebook the room. Instead of rebooking the junior suite at a lower price, I instead booked a bigger full suite room at essentially the same price, though this rate was non refundable. We were sure our plans weren’t going to change so it wasn’t a big risk. Also, because we booked it using the Citi Prestige card, a benefit of that card is the trip delay/interruption insurance it provides. If one of us had gotten sick and we had been unable to go on the trip, we would have been protected by that benefit.
We were set with our suite in the heart of Rome for 7 days for approximately $1600. Due to the 4th night free we would be getting approximately $240 back as a statement credit after the trip.
Tomatico Travels 