We booked the flight to Bari one week before going so there weren't many places to stay for us to choose. This is the main reason we chose this place to stay at. As every experience is unique and personal I am not going to say how our stay was. Rather I will list the things that we liked and the ones that could be improved:
Things we liked:
- The price was not necessarily cheap but lower than the average for the Bari area
- The position close to the train station and specially close to close stores where you get the chance to buy fresh local produce and taste the flavours of this area at a more accessible price than what you find in the more touristy zones
- The private room is actually an entire place only for the ones who book the place and has a very well equipped kitchen and a private bathroom
- Clean kitchen, clean cutlery
- Vittorio provided us with additional toiletries and towels and he was very nice and prompt during all our conversations. He even provided us with a few good restaurant choices.
Things that can be improved:
- The studio is probably an old storage room that was repurposed and has no windows but has two doors.
- During the summer is very hot in the evenings and late into the night. The electric fan is not enough to keep the room less hot and an AC unit would be really nice
- Because it is hot you have to keep the doors open, and if it does not get well enough you might have to sleep with at least one door open.
- One of the doors open literally to the terrace of a bar that the studio shares the building with. Here people come to have drinks from 7am until around 10 pm and will sit at tables right next to the door. Most of them are local people and if you are not used with Italians you will find very quick that they are loud. You might think that once they leave after 10 pm it gets quieter, but:
- The other door opens to the terrace of an restaurant. If you open it completely you might bump into the chair of someone eating there. Here people come during the nights to have dinner. If you are not used to Italy eating schedule you will be shocked to find that people still are having dinner well after 10 pm. As I mentioned the room is very hot so you still have to keep at least one door open to get a little bit of fresh air. Let me say that it might be hard to sleep with a full terrace of people eating, and being loud 5 meters from your bed.
- Because the location is very central even after the restaurant closes late into the night at 1am during weekend nights, there are still people passing by your door, cars passing on the street that can be loud and might wake you up
- There is a very annoying clock tower near the location that rings every 15 minutes
- There is no phone service and an WiFi connection could really help here
- There is an annoying little green light just above the bed that can't be shut down
- We couldn't find any dish soap
- The hairdryer has European outlet and we struggled but didn't succeed to fit it in any of the sockets.
- The bathroom had a very small ventilation and it's impossible not to flood the bathroom floor when you take a shower because the shower floor is the small kind and half of the water always gets out of the shower and into the bathroom floor.
- Although the studio is close to the train station, Terlizzi is relatively far from Bari, about 40 minutes by train if you want to stay here you have to take into account this because there is not much to do in Terlizzi. Even if you plan to go to a beach near Terlizzi you still have to go to Bari to get a train from there. We couldn't find a train that goes directly to Giovinazzo for example. Also to take into account that most of the tourist attractions in this area are in Bari or south of Bari so the 80 minutes for a round trip might be too much. Furthermore most of the times you don't have close connections in Bari Centrale so you have to wait about 20 minutes until you can get the next train to your destination