The notification came through while we were packing. Etna had put enough ash into the sky to close the airspace, and our flight home from Sicily was cancelled. Not delayed. Cancelled, with nothing offered until the following day.
Our daughter is two. If you have travelled with a toddler you already know what that sentence costs. She had been promised a plane. She had a nap due in about ninety minutes, a dinner due after that, and roughly zero interest in the airspace over Catania.
So I had a window. Not the leisurely evening a solo traveller gets to spend comparing nine booking tabs, but the twenty minutes before a two-year-old decides the airport floor is a good place to lie down.
Why the usual approach falls apart
Shopping around works when you have time and two free hands. You open Booking.com, then Expedia, then the hotel's own site, and you compare. That is twenty minutes per hotel on a good connection.
With a toddler, you have neither. One hand is holding a child. The other is holding a phone at 4% with airport wifi that several hundred stranded people are now sitting on. Every minute you spend comparing is a minute closer to a meltdown you will not talk your way out of.
Prices climb too. The hotels near a closed airport can read the same departure board you can. The room that looked fine at five is not the room on offer at seven.
So the question narrows. It stops being "what is the cheapest hotel in Sicily" and becomes: is this hotel, tonight, a fair price or a panic price? Answer that and you can stop looking and go feed your child.
What I did instead
My wife found La Blanca Resort & Spa on the map, above the gulf at Castellammare del Golfo on the western side of the island. Far from the ash, reachable before dark, and a resort rather than a city hotel, which with a toddler is the difference between an evening and an ordeal.
I put the name into HotelMonitor from the passenger seat while she drove and our daughter fell asleep in the back.
The alert came back before we reached the motorway. I had a price, and I had context for it: what that room normally goes for, and whether the number on my screen sat inside that range or well above it.
It sat inside. That was the whole decision. I booked, forwarded the confirmation, and put the phone away before she woke up. Ten minutes, most of it typing.
The hotel
La Blanca sits above the gulf at Castellammare del Golfo, about an hour west of Palermo and a long way from the eastern slopes where Etna does its business. Four star, a proper spa, and breakfast included, which when you are checking in at dusk with a hungry toddler is worth more than any amount of marble in the lobby.
Guests rate it 9.6 on Agoda and 9.0 on Booking.com. Our daughter rated the pool highly and the lift very highly.
La Blanca Resort & Spa
If Etna disrupts your trip
Eruptions on Etna are common and rarely dangerous to tourists. What they do is close Catania airport for a day or two, because ash and jet engines do not mix. Flights get cancelled at short notice, and the island keeps functioning while air travel stops.
- Go west. Etna sits on the east coast. Palermo, Trapani and Castellammare del Golfo carry on as normal, and Palermo airport often keeps flying when Catania cannot.
- Book a room before you join the rebooking queue. Airline queues take hours. Hotel stock does not wait for you.
- Check the price against its normal range. A hotel that usually goes for one number and is asking double tonight is worth ten minutes of looking elsewhere. One that is asking its usual rate is worth booking now.
- Keep the receipts. Under UK and EU rules, a cancelled flight often means the airline owes you accommodation costs. You will need the paperwork.
- With small children, book the resort over the city hotel. A pool, a restaurant on site and breakfast included removes three decisions from an evening when you have none left in you.
Would I have managed without it?
Probably. I would have booked something, paid whatever was showing, and spent the drive wondering if I had been fleeced. The difference was not the money. It was knowing, before I tapped confirm, that the number in front of me was normal for that hotel.
That is the whole job. Most weeks it looks like a few pounds off a booking you already made. On a bad evening in western Sicily, with a toddler asleep in the back and a volcano behind us, it looked like getting the night back.
Track a hotel before you need to
Add any hotel and we will tell you what it normally costs, then email you when the price drops. Free, and there is no account to set up.
Start tracking a hotel →La Blanca Resort & Spa is in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily. We are an affiliate, so if you book through the link above we may earn a commission at no cost to you. Prices move, which is rather the point of this website. Flight disruption compensation rules vary by airline and route, so check with your carrier.