Paris Hotel Thoughts

Paris has a lot of hotels! We’ve seen only a few and stayed in only one - many times -, so I can’t make any recommendations for specific hotels. I can, though, offer up a few thoughts on hotels for your travels.

Book directly with the hotel, not a third-party site.

It used to be that third-party sites, such as Expedia, Hotel.com and Booking.com, could offer lower prices on many hotels. Now, almost all hotels will offer the same or better prices on their own website, so there’s no financial advantage to booking elsewhere.

There is, though, a huge (possible) disadvantage to booking through a third-party: if something goes wrong with your third-party reservation you will play hell getting it straightened out. You’re standing at the desk, probably jet-lagged and tired, needing a shower and a good night’s sleep and the nice desk clerk at the hotel you booked six months ago says they have no record of your reservation, despite that confirmation you have from the third-party site. Good luck trying to get ahold of customer service at that reservation site, and if you do, good luck getting it straightened out. The hotel says it never received the reservation, the third-party site says it was sent to the hotel. And the nice desk clerk looks at you and says, “Je regrette, on est complet.” “Sorry, we’re full.” You stand there and wonder how to say, “We’re screwed” in French.

If you have the booking confirmation directly from the hotel, you’re probably going to be okay. First, you’re much less likely to encounter the problem of a gone-missing reservation. Second, if something has gone awry, having a printed confirmation directly from the hotel means they’ve messed up so they need to fix the problem. And they will.

So two important lessons here: always book directly through the hotel’s website; and have printed copies of your reservation with you and ready to show if a problem occurs.

Stay at 3-Star and Above Hotels, and How Hotels Are Rated

I know folks who say they are perfectly fine with 2-star hotels. Good for them, but some years ago after several less-than-satisfactory experiences in 2-star hotels, we said, “Never again.”

Now a 3-star rating does not guarantee a great hotel, because much of the French hotel rating citeria has nothing to do with the room! The important room criteria are things such as the size of the room, whether it has a telephone and a flat-screen television, etc.

Even the important criterion - the size of the room - has little to do with the quality of the hotel: a 4-star hotel has rooms that, on average, are about 10 square feet larger than a 3-star. Most of the rating differences are how many of the staff speak English, how big the reception area is, how big the dining room is, and so forth. There is nothing on the quality of the shower, or the comfort of the beds and so forth.

This means that you can stay in two 3-star hotels and one of them will have nice new beds, beautiful bed linens, a view of a quiet park, deep, lush towels, and a large bathroom with a modern shower, while the other will have twenty-year old towels, beds that Napoleon slept in, overlooking the noisiest street in town, above a bar, with a bathroom like we once had: 8 ft long, 20” wide; we had to have the door open to use the sink.

With Internet booking, you can at least get a look at the rooms and some idea of the quality of the place. But I guarantee you that you will have a far better chance of having a nice room in a 3-star hotel than a 2-star, and if you can splurge for a 4-star, you’ll be fine (although we stayed in a 4-star hotel once that was the tightest room possible, with towels that a Hotel 6 would have discarded years before and one tiny window). And a hint about looking at hotel photos online: if the photos leave you with any doubt about the place, you can be assured that the rooms will be far worse than the photo shows. Guaranteed.