VISTA Lago di Como

excellent location, just next to station and pier. the view is good

Incredible employees, excellent service, very good breakfast. Particular 5* service to Imbra and Ernest, ideal location to visit Como and shopping. Bedroom is splendid, all extremely good quality. Just one opportunity, the bed. Room 380. Double bed is 2 single bed and both are very “curving”.

My fiance and I stayed at Vista Lago/Palazzo for 3 nights in July 2024. I feel compelled to leave this review, not to put down Vista, but to help future travelers make an informed decision about where to stay when visiting Lake Como. We wish we had this information prior to booking our trip. Since this was the last leg of a 10-day trip to Europe and we were flying home from Milan, we thought it would make sense to make Como our base while visiting the lake so we would be in closer proximity to the airport for our morning flight home. We assumed we could easily catch ferries from Como to the other towns around the lake. We were originally going to stay at the Hilton Lake Como but were wooed by the beautiful pictures and overwhelmingly positive reviews for Vista Palazzo, and its proximity to the ferry and town solidified our choice to stay there instead. Within an hour of arrival, we realized we made an expensive mistake by opting to stay in Como and scrambled to salvage this part of the trip. Upon check-in, we were greeted by Alberto who sat with us to help plan our time in Como. He discussed what there was to do in Como, which would amount to about 2 hours of time, and then began discussing all of the things we should explore outside of Como, including a 45-minute train ride to Lugano in Switzerland. He immediately told us we would not want to deal with the ferry that's enclosed and not convenient to take (fabulous....). We walked the town of Como in about an hour and didn't find it to be all that unique or picturesque. It's flat and offers the worst vantage point of the lake than any other town. The water in this part of the lake is pretty gross too, with boats that ride around scooping up what looked like tree bark every day. It was about 95 degrees out, and since the lake water wasn't appealing, we wished we had a pool to jump in. There is also construction along the waterfront just outside of the hotel, so the view of the sunset is ruined by cranes and piles of concrete. It quickly became clear that most visitors to Como spend their time trying to get to the more charming towns around the lake, and we didn't realize how challenging that would be. The ferry: There is a fast ferry that gets you to Bellagio in 1 hour and a slow ferry that takes 2 hours. The fast ferry only runs a few times a day and they don't sell tickets online or in advance for this option (only for the slow ferry). You can only buy tickets the day of, which requires lining up at the ticket booth at 7 am so you can have a chance of getting one of the limited number of tickets when it opens at 7:30 am. Unfortunately, we did this twice, only to learn that the fast ferry would not be running either day bc of "choppy water" (the water looked completely calm). Apparently, this happens often. The slow ferry requires lining up over an hour before the scheduled departure time in the scorching heat in order to get a seat. So we'd be giving up 6 hours of our day for a roundtrip