Accomodation Overview

I promised to post something today to give people an idea of accommodation options. I had initially planned a single posting on this. Hopefully no one is upset that this ends up being much longer and multiple posts. Sorry in advance for being overly verbose :)

Our initial hope was that it would be reasonable to book larger group locations. However, due to the fact that it seems improbable that we'd be able to get everyone to arrive and depart on the exact times we'd prefer, we had to revisit our initial thinking. Complicating this is the fact that our own requirements are somewhat unique due to this being our wedding.

With all of that said, I'll start things off by covering a few basic items to be aware of and by describing our own requirements. So, here goes...

Things to be aware of:

• Croatia has a pretty steep VAT (22%) that gets added to pretty much everything. Some sites will advertise units with VAT added, some without, some will do both. Read the fine print
  
• Stairs are fairly common (eg: one apartment we looked into has 298 (!!) steps up) - if you don't like stairs, make sure you double check this
• Cars are not allowed to drive into the old city. As a result, transportation within is all on foot
• Prices range anywhere from about 25€ to 300€ a night
• Accommodations cover a whole range of options - this includes hostels, resorts, fancy hotels, villas, and apartments (and probably some other options I'm forgetting about)
  

Some potential places to start your search are:

• Butteryfly Services - recommended by our wedding planner, rentals are done through them, slightly more expensive
  
• Dubrovnik Apartment Source - another good looking option that has a slightly better electronic setup for booking than Butterfly does
• Dubrovnik Apartments - slightly cheaper option

The main difference between the first two and the third is that both Dubrovnik Apartment Source and Butterfly Services indicate that they have inspected the units that are available for rent through their website. Dubrovnik Apartments does not offer this guarantee, however, some of the same units show up on both, with the latter being somewhat cheaper.

Our accommodation requirements are as follows:

• relatively close to Sponza Palace to keep travel to the ceremony fairly simple as Alice will be in a wedding dress and heels
  
• not a huge number of steps to avoid having to go up and down in a dress and heels
• a relatively 'nice' unit - this is after all our wedding :)
• simple to arrange (take deposit via credit card, taxes already included, deal with a management company)
• an upper bound on cost of around 100 euro per night
  

The convenience requirement essentially limits us to either Old Town Dubrovnik or somewhere immediately outside of the city walls, preferably on the eastern side of town. We didn't have too much trouble finding something that meets the 3rd requirement, but the last one was a bit tougher with the other constraints. Of our top ten choices, only two were available for the entire time from September 19 to 24 for which we'll be in Dubrovnik.

As of now, our current plan is to stay here. It's just north of the city walls and offers quick access to the places we need to get to. It's a nice cozy bachelor apartment:



For other people, a whole variety of options are available depending on what their specific requirements are. Over the next few days, I'll post some details on the various areas in the city and I'll try to present some avenues for research for folks to get their accommodations sorted out. Please provide me some feedback with your requirements - I'll try and work that into the postings so that we can make sure that everyone gets taken care of!