Hotel confirmations for Schengen tourist visa to Italy. Some questions

Question

I made my hotel reservations in Rome, Venice, Florence and Pisa for my upcoming travel. I have a few questions:

1. Can I make the reservations via hotels.com or expedia.com? I am worried because I remember reading somewhere that the confirmation has to come from Italy. Not sure what that means. I already paid in full and I have all the confirmations.
2. Do have to list all the traveler's in my group on the hotel reservation? We are a family of 3 and we are traveling with a family 2. We are 5 in total. We booked 2 rooms wherever we went and only 1 person from each family is on the reservations. There is no way I could add everyones names. Can someone explain this policy?
3. In Florence, I booked two rooms in 1 reservation and each room has the name of the occupant from each family (1 per family). Is this ok?

I would really appreciate any help in this matter as I am nervous about the visa.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I can tell from my experience. I always book hotels from booking.com. I use that to do my Schengen Visa all the time and I never have any problem with it. To answer your question.

1. The Visa requires you to have all the hotels book with confirmation form the hotel so if you're travelling to Italy then yes it has to come from Italy. You have to show all the hotels booked for the duration of your stay in Italy.

2. If all of your family has to apply for the Visa then yes your confirmation from hotel has to have all of the names as application is separate for each family member and not as a group. When I use to do was that I called up the hotel and asked them to give me a confirmation to put my name and my girlfriend in the confirmation and I used that as the confirmation and it worked. I got no problem with the embassy but the hotel required full charge before they can do that so it was fine by me.

3. As each family member has to apply for the visa separately I think it's best to check with the embassy. Otherwise, I would say you need the confirmation for each of the family member.

Hope this helps. What I would suggest is to call up the hotel and ask for the confirmation for each family member. If you have paid the full amount already the hotel should be fine to give you the letter. Otherwise, I would suggest change the hotel.