Planning a longer trip than we usually do, a full two weeks, and we keep going round in circles on this.
Hotel logic: someone else does the cleaning, there's a lift, there's a restaurant, and if something's wrong there's a person at a desk at 2am. Apartment logic: more space, own kitchen, cheaper over two weeks, and nobody is asking why my dog is in the breakfast room.
I'm partially sighted with a guide dog rather than a chair user, so my access needs are different, but the trade off feels like the same one and the chair users here have done far more of these than I have. Which way do people go for a longer stay, and what's the thing that decides it?
Apartment every time for a fortnight, for one reason: the kitchen. Two weeks of restaurant food when you've got a diet to manage is exhausting and expensive, and being able to make your own breakfast at your own pace in your dressing gown is worth a great deal.
But I'd never book an apartment without a photo of every doorway. Hotels at least tend to have a lift and a corridor you can get down. Apartments are somebody's flat with a listing on it.
Disagree, gently. Hotel for me, and the reason is the shower.
Adapted hotel rooms are built to a standard, badly sometimes, but built. Apartment bathrooms are whatever the owner has got, and "wet room" in a private listing means anything at all. Also the 2am thing is real. Lift broke at 7am in a hotel once and there was a night porter, a plan, and eventually breakfast brought to me. In an apartment the lift breaking is just your problem.
From the carer side the apartment wins and it isn't close, but for a reason that doesn't show up on any listing: space to be off duty.
A hotel room means we are both in the same room all fortnight and there is no point in the day where I'm not on. An apartment with a second bedroom and a sitting room means I can make a coffee at seven and read for an hour while she's still asleep, and that hour is what stops the second week being grim. If you're travelling with anyone who helps you, I'd weigh that above the kitchen.
#5August 9, 2026, 9:30 am Fran, my honest answer after fifteen years of both: the length of the stay decides it, and two weeks is past the tipping point. Up to about four or five nights I take the hotel, because the standard is more predictable and I can absorb a bad bathroom for a few days. Beyond a week I want the apartment, because space, a kitchen and a bit of routine stop the trip becoming an endurance test.
What it actually depends on is not the type of property, it is which risks you can verify and which you cannot. In a hotel the things you can pin down are the room and the lift, and the things you cannot are whether the adapted room will still be yours on arrival and how the staff behave when something goes wrong. In an apartment you can usually verify far more, because you are talking to the person who owns the place and they can go and hold a tape measure against a door, but you carry every failure yourself: no night porter, no maintenance, no second room to move you to. So the apartment rewards thorough advance work and punishes optimism, and the hotel is the reverse.
Practically, for a two week apartment I now insist on five things before paying: photographs of the entrance, the bathroom doorway and the shower floor taken today rather than from the listing; the clear opening of the bathroom door in centimetres; confirmation that the shower is level with the floor with no lip; the bed height; and a name and phone number for someone local who can come out if something breaks. That last one is the one people forget and it is the one that replaces the night porter. Neil's point about a second bedroom is the best argument in this thread and I would put it near the top of the list if anyone travels with you, for the reasons set out in travelling with a carer or personal assistant.
Two things that swing it either way and are worth checking before you choose. Bin the assumption that ground floor solves everything: a ground floor apartment can still have three steps to the street door, and that is the single most common apartment failure I see. And think about the day rather than just the property, because an apartment in a quiet residential street with no accessible facilities nearby is a harder fortnight than a plain hotel in the middle of things, which is part of the wider route planning in accessible toilets abroad.
For a guide dog owner I would add one apartment specific question I cannot answer for you but the owner can: where does the dog relieve herself, and is there a patch of grass that does not involve crossing a road you do not know. In a hotel the concierge solves that in a sentence. In an apartment nobody has thought about it at all.
This has been genuinely useful, thank you. Leaning apartment, mostly on Brenda's kitchen point and Neil's second bedroom one, which I had not thought about at all and which applies to my husband just as much.
Have asked an owner the five questions and got four answers back within a day, which is promising. The missing one is the local contact number, and I notice they skipped it rather than said no, so I've asked again.
Still slightly nervous about the dog and the road. Might just book somewhere with a garden and pay a bit more for the peace of mind.
