Venice Travel Blog

A new hotel on Murano: LaGare Hotel Venezia

ABOVE: The LaGare Hotel Venezia (right) is directly across from the Murano Museo boat platform, which offers direct waterbus connections to Marco Polo Airport, Venice's historic center, and the Marittima cruise terminals.

Murano  is famous for its glass factories and shops, but the car-free island (which lies just off Venice in the Venetian Lagoon) has other attractions, too--including historic churches, a superb Glass Museum, and plenty of restaurants with canalside tables. Until recently, Murano had only a handful of tiny hotels, but now there's a brand-new hostelry in town: the four-star LaGare Hotel Venezia, which belongs to the Accor hotel group's design-oriented M Gallery collection.

The LaGare Hotel Venezia isn't just convenient as a hotel for Murano enthusiasts: It may also be the perfect hotel for cruisers who want to spend a day or two in Venice before departing from the Marritima cruise basin. The118-room boutique hotel is directly adjacent to the Murano Museo waterbus stop, which is served by Alilaguna Blue Line and Red Line boats from Venice Marco Polo Aiport. Blue Line boats also serve the Marittima cruise terminal, which means that you can:

1) Go directly from the airport to the hotel by Alilaguna boat. (The hotel is literally only a few steps from the Alilaguna stop, with no stairs to climb or bridges to cross.)

2) Use the Museo waterbus stop for day trips into Venice's histroric center (about a 20-minute ride on public vaporetti or motoscafi).

3) Catch another Alilaguna Blue Line boat to Marittima on the day of your cruise ship's departure.

Alternatively, you could stay at the LaGare Hotel Venezia after your cruise, taking the Alilaguna boat to Venice Marco Polo Airport when you're ready to fly home.

We definitely recommend considering theLaGare Hotel Venezia if you're cruising with heavy luggage, because you'll eliminate the need for hauling your bulky bags over bridges or hiring an expensive (and sometimes difficult to board) water taxi.

For more information about the hotel, see Booking.com's LaGare Hotel Venezia pages, Venere's LaGare Hotel listing, or the hotel's own site. (You'll probably get the best rate from our discount hotel partners, Booking.com and Venere, but--as always--we recommend comparing rates to be on the safe side.)

To learn more about the island of Murano, read our illustrated 11-page Murano travel guide.

Roundtrip Cruises from Venice: Updated for 2013

ABOVE: Royal Caribbean's Splendour of the Seas departs Venice with two Alilaguna airport and tour boats in the foreground. Note the "bricole" or wooden navigation markers next to the ship channel.

The American novelist Henry James wrote that the best way to approach Venice is by sea, and we concur. We'd add that the best way to leave Venice is also by sea--and if you can travel by sea in both directions, so much the better.

To make it easier for you to find ship itineraries in 2013 that start and end in Venice, we've just updated our "Roundtrip Cruises from Venice" article at Veniceforvisitors.com. Our freshly-revised article describes 10 oceangoing cruise lines, three river-cruise companies, a hotel barge, and a Greek car-passenger ferry with voyages that begin and end in Venice, Italy.

A new player in the Venice roundtrip cruise market for 2013 is Uniworld Boutique River Cruises, which will offer seven-night cruises from Venice to the Po River with shore excursions to Bologna, Padua, Ravenna, and Verona.

For more information, including in-depth cruise reviews, see "Roundtrip Cruises from Venice" and the Venice for Cruisers section of Veniceforvisitors.com.

BELOW: Compagnie du Ponant's L'Austral at the San Basilio cruise pier in central Venice.

New rules for cruise ships in Venice

ABOVE: Thanks to a new decree by the Port of Venice, megaships like Celebrity Summit will no longer be allowed to moor along the waterfront above the Piazza San Marco when they're visiting Venice for the day.

Seatrade Insider, an online newsletter for the cruise industry, reports that Venice is tightening up its restrictions on cruise ships in the wake of the recent Costa Concordia incident.

For example, ships larger than 40,000 GRT (which includes most ships of lines such as Celebrity, Costa, Holland America, MSC, Princess and Royal Caribbean) will be subject to the following rules:

• They won't be able to moor at the Riva dei Sette Martiri, a pier next to the public gardens and Biennale exposition grounds above the Piazza San Marco and the Doge's Palace. Instead, the ships will need to use the main Marittima cruise basin. (This will be a slight inconvenience for cruise ships and passengers who are spending the day in Venice, but it won't affect cruises that begin or end in the city.)

• When arriving or departing, such ships will need to stay 2 miles apart, and smaller ships will need to remain 0.7 miles apart. (This will require ships to stagger their arrival and departure times more than they've done in the past.)

• Vessels larger than 40,000 GRT will be banned from using St. Mark's Basin and the Giudecca Canal "as soon as alternative routings have been identified." (In practice, there are no alternative routings, and there won't be unless or until the Venice port authorities come up with massive amounts of money to dredge an alternative deepwater shipping channel in the Venetian Lagoon.)

The Seatrade Insider article didn't cite an implementation date for the new rules, so it's too early to tell how many of this year's cruise departure and arrival times will be affected. If you're cruising from Venice this year, watch for e-mails from your cruise line and check the Venezia Terminal Passeggeri's ship schedules for pier assignments, arrival times, and departure times.