Hotel Excelsior Venice Lido Resort

"Venice Lido, the original Film Festival hotel, the cinema-loving anniversary."

Why Hotel Excelsior Venice Lido Resort for an anniversary

Hotel Excelsior Venice Lido Resort opened in 1908 on the Lido beach (the Adriatic-facing barrier island that protects the Venice lagoon, accessed by 15-minute vaporetto from San Marco) and remains the Lido flagship. Two hundred and forty-eight rooms and suites across the multi-building Moorish-Venetian complex, the upper-tier Royal Suite (with private beach terrace and direct Adriatic Sea access) is the multi-bedroom flagship. The asset is the Venice Film Festival heritage, the Excelsior is the official festival hotel since 1932, and the property has hosted every major film figure of the past 90 years (Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hitchcock, Fellini, Visconti). The festival programme runs late August through early September; the anniversary couple who plans the trip around the festival has the cinema-loving anniversary asset. The Excelsior's private beach (the only hotel-private-beach in Venice), the in-house dining at Tropicana, and the morning vaporetto to San Marco (15 minutes) handle the day. Hotel Excelsior is the right pick for the anniversary couple where the Lido beach-position and the Film Festival heritage are the assets, the trip's centerpiece is the morning Adriatic-swim and the evening vaporetto to San Marco for dinner.

Best room to request

Royal Suite (the multi-bedroom flagship with beach terrace) or Junior Suite Sea View when the flagship is already taken.

The wider context

Hotel Excelsior Venice Lido Resort sits within our broader Top 20 Hotels in Venice for an Anniversary list. It scored an aggregate 9.6/10 across the three editorial criteria, competitive against the field but, on an anniversary-specific factors, the angle above is what earned its rank. For the alternatives in the same Venice neighbourhood, see Venice Lido and adjacent. For a different city entirely, see the related lists below.

If you have already chosen the dates, our editor recommends booking the room twelve weeks ahead. Rooms with the coveted orientation are claimed first, while popular-month availability runs out months in advance. It is the terrace and plunge-pool suites, the rooms this rank rests on, that book up soonest.

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Further reading