Lake Como without the Lake Como price

The famous names on this lake start around CHF 1,600 a night. Five minutes from the station, the same water and the same light go for under CHF 200.

2026-09-21 · Como, Italy

Lake Como at dusk from the Como waterfront — Como, the town rather than the shoreline villas — where the arithmetic works.

There is a version of Lake Como that costs about as much per night as a return flight to Tokyo. Villa d'Este and Grand Hotel Tremezzo are genuinely magnificent and genuinely out of reach — we tracked both for a while at two and a half to three times our ceiling before taking them off the list.

Here is the thing nobody says out loud: they are on the shoreline. The lake is not.

The Pinacoteca Civica in Como's old town, a Turner show on the banner

What we actually found

Como the town sits at the southern tip, twelve minutes by train from Milan, and it is full of small, well-run apartment-style properties in the old centre. We have five of them on the tracker. The cheapest price we have recorded in that group is CHF 132≈ €140 · $160 a night; the dearest typical price among them is CHF 263≈ €278 · $320.

That is the whole spread of a lake that markets itself at CHF 1,600≈ €1,693 · $1,945.

The Broletto and cathedral square in the centre of Como

Historical Suites by "The House Of Travelers" from CHF 133, tucked in the old town behind the basilica, is the steadiest thing we track anywhere on the lake — CHF 132≈ €140 · $160 at its floor, CHF 146≈ €155 · $178 typical, and a swing of only 24% across everything we have seen. You are not gambling on dates. Fitzgerald Building by "The House Of Travelers" from CHF 140, seven hundred metres from Como San Giovanni, behaves almost identically. Alessia's Place from CHF 158 and Vitrum - Como Luxury Suites from CHF 173 fill in between them.

Bello!Lake Como Suites from CHF 133 is the opposite temperament: CHF 133≈ €141 · $162 at its best, CHF 334≈ €354 · $406 at its worst. Same town, same walk to the water, more than double the price depending on when you turn up. That gap is the opportunity, and it is why we publish the range rather than a single "from" number.

Café umbrellas filling the piazza in the late afternoon

No rewards club here — and that is the trade

Every one of these five is independently run, so there is no loyalty programme to join and no member rate to unlock. On our Baden-Baden and Lausanne pages that is worth real money; here it simply does not exist.

What you get instead is a floor of CHF 132≈ €140 · $160 with no membership required. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to forget.

What these actually are

None of the five is a hotel. They are rental homes and apartments in the old town — the kind of places we went and looked at ourselves, liked, and decided we wanted on the list. Hand-picked, in other words, rather than turned up by a search.

You get your own key, a good room and usually a kitchen. You do not get a concierge, a spa or breakfast downstairs. If that sounds like a loss, this is the wrong page. If it sounds like a week with the run of the place, Como is the best value we have found in northern Italy.

A cappuccino on the terrace, which is the correct way to begin

A lakeside village with its campanile, a short ferry hop from Como

The town itself, which people skip

Most visitors treat Como as a transit point for the ferry and miss a town that has been important since the Romans founded Novum Comum here in 59 BC under Julius Caesar.

The cathedral front — Gothic below, Renaissance above, and nobody minds

The Duomo took nearly four centuries to build, from 1396 to 1770, which is why it runs

Gothic at the front and Baroque at the dome. The two seated figures flanking the main door are Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger — both born here, and both pagans, which makes them an unusual choice for a cathedral façade.

Basilica of Sant'Abbondio, eleventh-century Romanesque with five naves and a cycle of

fourteenth-century frescoes in the apse. Ten minutes from the centre and usually empty.

Villa Olmo, neoclassical, 1797, with gardens open to the public along the western shore.
Como is where silk comes from — the town has woven it since the fifteenth century and

still supplies a large share of Europe's luxury houses. The Museo della Seta explains the whole process, and the shops around Via Vittorio Emanuele are the reason to bring an empty bag.

The Broletto, Como's thirteenth-century town hall, striped in three colours of marble

Como's rationalist war memorial of 1933 — the town is a quiet pilgrimage for architects

The practical bit

Go in the shoulder — late April, or the second half of September when the Milanese have gone home. The ferries still run, the water is still warm enough to look at, and the town stops charging August prices.

The marina, with the mountains folding down behind the masts

The routes worth the day:

The funicular to Brunate, seven minutes, running since 1894. At the top there is a

path to the Volta lighthouse and a view down the whole southwestern arm of the lake.

The slow ferry to Bellagio, about two hours, calling at Torno, Nesso and Argegno. The

fast hydrofoil takes forty-five minutes and shows you nothing.

Villa Carlotta at Tremezzo and Villa del Balbianello at Lenno — the two great garden

villas, both reachable by ferry, both at their best in May when the azaleas go.

Greenway del Lago, a waymarked ten-kilometre walk between Colonno and Griante through

the lakeside villages, mostly flat and mostly car-free.

The Aero Club Como hangar — seaplanes have flown off this water since 1930

The view back down over the lake from Brunate, above Como

Dinner on the lake — the kind of meal a kitchen in the apartment lets you skip or splurge on

Book direct where the property has its own engine. Several of these only publish through Booking.com, and for those we say so on the hotel page rather than pretending otherwise.

Sunset over the lake from the hills above Como

One warning from our own notes: these are one- and two-unit properties. They sell out completely rather than getting expensive, and "no availability" on your dates does not mean the price went up. It means somebody else was faster.