How many beds you actually need, and why stated capacity misleads

The number platforms display largest is maximum guests. It is also the least useful number, because it adds up different things.

What stated capacity hides

Sofa beds. An apartment for six often means two bedrooms and a sofa bed in the living room. Whoever sleeps there has no door, no wardrobe, and goes to bed when everyone else stops standing up.

That is not a flaw in itself, but it needs knowing before you divide rooms among five people.

Bathrooms. This is the real bottleneck. Six people with one bathroom means an hour of queueing every morning. The right question is not how many beds, it is how many bathrooms.

Bed sizes. A double counts as two people, but the width varies considerably between apartments.

The questions to ask

How many bedrooms have a door. How many beds are sofa beds. How many bathrooms there are and whether they have a shower or a bath. Whether single beds can be joined.

For mixed groups of couples and singles, distribution matters more than total capacity.

How the five Chiaia units are laid out

On Vico Santa Maria a Cappella Vecchia the units differ in layout, which is exactly why a group can combine them to suit itself.

The 90 square metre unit has two bedrooms and two bathrooms, sleeping up to six. The 70 and both 60 square metre units have a bedroom plus sofa bed, each sleeping up to four, and one of the two 60 square metre units has an en suite bathroom with a bathtub. The smallest, at 45 square metres, is a studio for two.

Booking more than one, a group of ten or twelve gets more enclosed bedrooms and more bathrooms than any single apartment of the same capacity, while staying on one floor.