The Vincent Hotel, Malta
When I look to book hotels for trips, the main sites I use are AmexTravel and Booking.com. Between them, I always find the best deals and I never end up with the “oh you booked with Expedia” room in the corner. I typically will google “best hotels in X city” and scroll through a couple of sites to see if any places stick out to me and then I just head to my hotel sites and use the map feature to see where all of the hotels are. I like to balance location to the top sights, unique hotel details, and reasonable price. When it came to finding a place in Malta, The Vincent Hotel hit all three.
We arrived after check-in so there was no concierge, something I have found typical of boutique or guesthouse hotels in Europe. They email you a code to get in and then leave your keys somewhere along the desk for you. All of the rooms in The Vincent have their own name and style. We stayed in The Araba room which certainly had an Arabian cave feel. It still had modern touches like a waterfall shower and air conditioning (which is a HUGE find in Europe, especially in the summer) but had the perfect vacation feeling.
Our door opened right into the open-air courtyard where breakfast is served which made me a bit nervous about noise waking us up but luckily the walls seem to be thick and the hotel is so small that there weren’t many guests and the ones that were there were polite and not partiers, which I appreciated.
Breakfast was included – a must at whatever hotel we book. This helps keep cost down as well as keeping a better schedule so we don’t have to worry about finding a place to eat and then waiting for service on top of whatever else we wanted to do for the day. It was a typical European breakfast – cold meats, cheese, yogurt, fruit, pastries, coffee & tea. Not bad but nothing to write home about either. It got us through to lunch which was fine. I think my favorite beverage was the lemon cucumber water they had at the front desk. That was always nice and refreshing to come back to each day!
The hotel was within walking distance of a great night life scene in Valletta, where we went each night for dinner. There were museums and ruins along the water and several tours you could take from the city. In fact, you can even book the tours through the hotel! Since we had a rental car, we drove ourselves instead. The street parking is insane but we were able to find spots pretty close each night (even though one night we got a $25 ticket for apparently parking in a resident spot – oops). From there we were able to drive to Mdina in about 30 minutes. Most locations were about a 30 min drive (unless you went farther north to Gozo) so it was a good location for starting from.
The Vincent was the perfect blend of old-world Europe and modern comforts. An adorable boutique hotel perfect for a weekend, or week-long getaway!
Xx
Kali
