Venice Hotels With a Pool, and Why Almost All of Them Need a Boat
Best all-round: Nolinski VeneziaVenice is built on water and almost none of its hotels can offer you any to swim in. The handful that can are mostly on other islands, and that decides your whole trip, not just your afternoons.
Which Venice hotel has the best pool?
Nolinski Venezia, because its sixth-floor pool is the only one inside the six historic sestieri and it sits under the building's original timber roof, so it works in February as well as July. Hilton Molino Stucky on Giudecca is the better value. Ignore both if you will not take a boat every time you leave.
Which one fits how you travel
Find the row that sounds like your trip. Every pick below names the traveller it is wrong for, so you can book on fit rather than on rank.
| If you are | Book | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Wanting a pool and Venice on foot | Nolinski Venezia | The only hotel pool inside the six historic sestieri. |
| Travelling outside high summer | Nolinski Venezia | Enclosed under the roof, so it does not shut for the season. |
| Wanting a real outdoor swim, cost no object | Belmond Hotel Cipriani | Heated seawater, in a garden, with a launch running 24 hours. |
| Here in summer and watching the budget | Hilton Molino Stucky Venice | A Giudecca rooftop at well below island-resort rates. |
| Bringing children who want to swim properly | JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa | A resort with space, on its own island. Accept the boat. |
| Wanting the sea rather than a pool | Hotel Excelsior Venice Lido Resort | The Lido is the only part of Venice with real beach swimming. |
| Needing a pool at the lowest possible rate | Novotel Venezia Mestre Castellana | The mainland. Cheapest here, and not really Venice. |
- Free cancellation on most rooms
- No booking fee
- Prices on Trip.com
What the bands mean
Rates are shown as bands, not numbers. No Venice hotel publishes a fixed nightly price, and the properties on this page are among the most seasonal in Europe, several closing entirely over winter, so a figure printed here would be wrong within days. The bands describe where each hotel sits against the others, and the live rate for your dates opens through the button on each card.
- €
- the cheapest tier, which for a pool means the mainland
- €€
- mid-range, and thin on the ground in this category
- €€€
- upper tier, the island resorts
- €€€€
- the city's most expensive addresses
The 7 hotels, and who each one is wrong for
Walking times are to Piazza San Marco. Walking times are real pedestrian routes to Piazza San Marco, measured through OpenStreetMap foot routing at 4.5 km/h with water crossings rejected. That correction is the whole story on this page. Left to itself the router will send you across the Giudecca canal on a vaporetto and count the crossing as walking, which turns a boat ride and a wait on a pontoon into an eight-minute stroll. Once ferry legs are excluded, only one hotel here has a walking route to San Marco at all. For the rest the honest figure is not a number of minutes, it is a boat, and the cards say so.
Calle Larga XXII Marzo, San Marco
Nolinski Venezia
€€€€Best all-roundA five-star hotel off Calle Larga XXII Marzo whose sixth-floor pool is the only one inside the historic sestieri.
- Walk to Piazza San Marco
- 5 minutes, 358 m to Piazza San Marco to Piazza San Marco
- Right for
- Anyone who wants a pool and Venice itself, rather than a pool and a boat timetable. The hotel's own site puts the pool on the sixth floor beneath the building's original timber framework, with large windows over the rooftops, open daily from 07:00 to 23:00.
- Wrong for
- Wrong for: Families who want children splashing about. The pool is described as primarily reserved for hotel residents and the hotel publishes no children's hours, so it reads as a quiet adult space rather than a holiday pool.
- The catch
- The catch: Being enclosed under a roof is exactly why it works year-round, and it also means this is a swim with a view through glass rather than an open-air rooftop. If you pictured sunbathing, picture again.
Giudecca, at the eastern tip
Belmond Hotel Cipriani
€€€€A heated seawater pool in a garden at the end of Giudecca, with a shuttle boat that runs around the clock.
- Walk to Piazza San Marco
- No walking route to San Marco. The hotel's own launch, about 5 minutes. to Piazza San Marco
- Right for
- Anyone who wants a genuine outdoor swim in Venice and will pay for it. The hotel states the pool is filtered and heated with seawater, open 09:00 to 19:00, and that its private launch runs a continuous service 24 hours a day with St Mark's about five minutes away.
- Wrong for
- Wrong for: Anyone counting the cost, and anyone who wants to wander back to their room at any hour on foot. Everything here depends on a boat, even if it is a very good boat.
- The catch
- The catch: The hotel calls this the only pool in central Venice, which is a marketing line rather than a fact: Giudecca is a separate island across the canal, and Nolinski's pool is the one actually inside the historic centre.
Giudecca, in the old flour mill
Hilton Molino Stucky Venice
€€€Best valueA converted 19th-century flour mill on Giudecca with a rooftop pool and a shuttle boat to San Marco and the Zattere.
- Walk to Piazza San Marco
- No walking route to San Marco. Hotel shuttle boat, roughly every 20 minutes. to Piazza San Marco
- Right for
- Summer visitors who want a rooftop swim and a view back across the water at Venice, at a rate well below the two properties above it here.
- Wrong for
- Wrong for: Anyone travelling outside high summer for the pool. It is open to the sky, and an open-air pool in the northern Adriatic is a June to September proposition.
- The catch
- The catch: The pool season is the catch and the hotel does not publish its dates on the page we could reach, since Hilton's site refuses automated requests. Secondary sources put it at roughly mid-May to September, weather permitting. Confirm the dates with the hotel before you book the pool rather than the hotel.
Isola delle Rose, a private island in the lagoon
JW Marriott Venice Resort & Spa
€€€€A resort occupying its own island in the southern lagoon, with several pools including a rooftop.
- Walk to Piazza San Marco
- No walking route. Private island, reached only by the resort's boat. to Piazza San Marco
- Right for
- Families who want a resort holiday with Venice attached, and who would rather have gardens and space than a palazzo staircase and a room that sleeps three at a push.
- Wrong for
- Wrong for: A short first visit. If you have three days and have never seen Venice, staying on a private island spends a meaningful part of them on the water.
- The catch
- The catch: The island is the appeal and the constraint at once. Marriott's site refuses automated requests, so we could not confirm pool months or shuttle times from the operator, and both are worth asking about directly given everything depends on the boat.
Isola di San Clemente, in the southern lagoon
San Clemente Palace Kempinski
€€€€A former monastery on its own island south of Giudecca, with an outdoor pool in parkland.
- Walk to Piazza San Marco
- No walking route. Private island, reached only by the hotel's boat. to Piazza San Marco
- Right for
- Travellers who want the quietest possible Venice, with a pool, gardens and no passing crowds at all. San Clemente sits well out in the lagoon, roughly 2.5 km south of Piazza San Marco across open water.
- Wrong for
- Wrong for: Anyone with a packed sightseeing list. Every trip into the city is a scheduled boat in both directions, which is a different kind of holiday from a hotel you walk out of.
- The catch
- The catch: The isolation cuts both ways, and it is sharpest in the evening: dinner in Venice means committing to a return crossing time rather than deciding when you have finished.
Lungomare Marconi, Lido di Venezia
Hotel Excelsior Venice Lido Resort
€€€A Moorish-styled beach hotel on the Lido's seafront, with a pool and a private stretch of Adriatic sand.
- Walk to Piazza San Marco
- No walking route to San Marco. Vaporetto across the lagoon, about 6 km. to Piazza San Marco
- Right for
- Anyone who wants a beach holiday and Venice in the same week. The Lido is the lagoon's barrier island and the only part of the commune with real sea swimming, which no amount of hotel pool elsewhere replaces.
- Wrong for
- Wrong for: Winter and shoulder-season visitors. The Lido is a seaside resort and it runs on a seaside calendar, with much of the seafront closed outside the summer months.
- The catch
- The catch: It is a 20-minute boat ride from the sights before you count the wait, so the Lido works for a week and frustrates a long weekend.
Mestre, on the mainland
Novotel Venezia Mestre Castellana
€A mainland hotel with an outdoor pool, on the Venice commune's terraferma rather than in the lagoon.
- Walk to Piazza San Marco
- No walking route. Mestre is on the mainland and the crossing is by road or rail. to Piazza San Marco
- Right for
- Families who want a pool and cannot reach the island rates, and who accept that they are commuting into Venice rather than staying in it.
- Wrong for
- Wrong for: A first visit. Venice is worth sleeping in for the two hours before the day-trippers land and the hours after they leave, and a mainland base buys you neither.
- The catch
- The catch: This is the only genuinely affordable pool on the list and it is affordable because it is not in Venice. The city itself concedes the point by cutting the tourist tax on mainland accommodation by 30 per cent.
Where not to book in Venice
The trap on this page is not a bad neighbourhood, it is a bad assumption. Booking a Venice hotel for its pool quietly rewrites your holiday, because six of the seven here are on islands or the mainland and every single trip you make is then a boat with a timetable and a last sailing. That is fine for a week and wearing over a long weekend. Two smaller traps follow from it. First, seasonality: an open-air pool in the northern Adriatic is a summer amenity, and several of these properties close or curtail service outside the season, so a March booking made for the pool may find it drained. Second, check what a pool listing actually means before you pay for it, because in this city the word covers a rooftop plunge, a heated seawater garden pool and a mainland courtyard, and the photographs rarely distinguish them. One search hazard worth naming: Venice, Florida ranks on the same searches and has considerably more hotel pools than Venice, Italy. Check the country before you book.
When to book
This category behaves differently from ordinary Venice hotels because the stock is tiny. There are only a handful of hotel pools in the entire commune, so summer weekends at the island properties go months ahead and there is no substitutable inventory when they do. Book high summer four to six months out if the pool is the reason for the trip. The counter-intuitive advice is to consider the shoulder months seriously: in May and late September the city is at its best, rates fall sharply, and if you have chosen the one enclosed pool rather than an open-air one you lose nothing at all.
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Photo credits (7)
Photos via Wikimedia Commons, used under their respective licences.
- Calle Larga XXII Marzo in San Marco, the street holding the only hotel pool inside historic Venice: Bjoertvedt - CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- Fondamenta San Giovanni on Giudecca, reached from Venice only by boat: Bjoertvedt - CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- The former Molino Stucky flour mill on Giudecca, seen across the water: Ricardalovesmonuments - CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- Sacca Sessola, the private island in the Venetian lagoon also known as Isola delle Rose: Abxbay - CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
- The island of San Clemente alone in the Venetian lagoon, reached only by boat: Wolfgang Moroder - CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
- The beach on the Lido di Venezia, the only part of Venice with real sea swimming: Ebru Alan - CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
- Piazza Ferretto in Mestre, the mainland town that is not Venice: Robot8A - CC BY-SA 4.0 · source