Advice on hotels in Paris?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I will go to Paris in late September with my wife for a scientific conference. Hotels are so expensive, and my wife told me she had plenty of bad experiences there. Can you advise me on a good hotel? I am thinking something comfy and clean rather than luxurious.

I can stretch my budget a bit, because the University will refund me part of the costs, but my supervisor asked me to use my common sense and I don’t want to take advantage of the situation. The thing is, I don’t even know what a good budget is for a hotel stay in Paris. And how much should I figure out for food, transport and things like that? Any advice would be appreciated.

2

Instead of a hotel, have you considered renting an apartment? It could work out cheaper, you will have more room, and you will have a kitchen so you can cook a few meals and save yet more money.

This is what we do when we stay in major cities. In June we were in Budapest, and next month we are in Copenhagen. In both cases we found a wide range of apartments on the net. I image it’s the same for Paris.

3

For two days? In retrospect I realize that was the most important piece of information. Is it still a cheaper prospect?

4

We stayed for four days last year in a small apartment on the Ile St. Louis (about as central as you can get in Paris) for 87 euros a night. I should imagine you’ll still be able to find an apartment available for two nights in late September. The site we used was http://www.holidaylettings.co.uk/.

Alternatively, the Ibis chain of hotels is basic, clean and reliable. Step up to the Novotel chain (which is owned by the same company) for more luxury. I’ve stayed in a few hotels in the Mercure chain on business which have all been nice.

Another way to find reliable small independent hotels is to look on the Eurostar website for packages that include train tickets and hotels. Obviously, you’re not interested in the train tickets, but you can be pretty sure that any hotel Eurostar is using will be OK.

5

Transport is pretty straightforward. You can pick up a Paris Visite card at the train station in Charles de Gaulle airport. It is valid for all public transport within Paris. A two day card costs 28.30 euros.

6

That’s a pretty broad request. Can you narrow it down to one or two arrondissements? What did your wife consider to be a bad experience?

7

We stayed at the Hotel Daval in the Bastille. Our room was a courtyard double.

It was quiet, clean, comfortable, had good light, free wi-fi, and maybe a block from what I read was one of the best open air markets (great fruits & cheeses for picnic, great variety of inexpensive cashmere/linen interesting scarves that make excellent souvenir/holiday presents) that happen in Paris (Sundays) and two blocks tops from the Metro station and bus 69 which takes one past a lot of the major monuments and you can hop on and off at will. I think it was 85 euros a night.
For two days, I wouldn’t bother with a Visite card. A carnet of tickets is cheaper and you can share it and use it on the bus and the Metro. Plus, Paris is an amazing city to walk around in, and with all the great museums, you won’t end up doing as much running from end to end of the city as you might have thought. Paris just eats up the time.

Go to Ile St-Louis and have some ice cream from Berthilion and walk down the main drag admiring the shops. Then get in line at Amorino Gelato and get more ice cream. The ice cream in Paris is the best we’ve ever had. It was wonderful. (There’s also an Amorino Gelato on Place de Bastille, by the Hotel.)

I know you just asked for Hotel recommendations, but I got carried away. Anyway, we’d stay there again in a heartbeat. Plus they have a big black lab named Max who is teh awsum and hangs out in the lobby. And the staff are honest, in our experience. My husband accidentally left his passport card behind when we checked out and they told us about it when we came to pick up our luggage–another nice thing, even though they have a small lobby area, they store luggage for guests who have checked out but don’t leave until the evening.

8

I forgot to mention, re: your food budget question–food and drink is really expensive in Paris. We sat down at the bar by the Metro in Place de Bastille and ordered two beers and they were eleven euros each. Madness. There’s a Starbucks as well up the street which we went to quite happily. Actual brewed coffee, so rare, so heavenly a treat…also very expensive. We spent the month of May traveling through France & Spain, and some (many) days our food bill easily outstripped our housing bill. Which was a bummer, since in Spain at least, it was also often a wad of salty gristle shaped like a chop. The food was hit or miss, but mostly a hit in France. I admit we went to McDonald’s to have a Royale and a cup of beer. :wink: You can save money by buying your breakfast/lunch picnic stuff from a shop/market: croissants, baguettes (excellent breakfast with nutella spread) and yoghurt and fresh fruit and cheese. They say if you go to a restaurant for lunch you’ll pay half price for the same prix fixe meal you would get if you went there for dinner, but we did not experience that–although to be fair, we didn’t really do lunch while we were there, I think it was usually ice cream and more ice cream and off to another museum. So I can’t really put a number on it for you; I found the guidebooks assessments of our expected budgets to be wildly offbase, so we probably don’t reflect the norm, and who knows how much your conference peeps will be feeding you two, isn’t there usually a schmoozy dinner at such things? :wink:

And more info about carnets.

And hey, if you’re a runner, this looks like a great early morning route to wake up with.

9

The Ibis hotel chain has several hotels in Paris. A bit bland, but reliable quality with a good continental (read American) breakfast.

10

:confused:

If that’s the kind of money you paid on a regular basis and you were unable to find anything that was a whole lot less expensive, than I’m afraid you didn’t look very well, or at least not in the right places. Or you were scammed in an obscene way. Beer is more expensive in France than it is in some other European countries, but IME you should be able to get a 0.25l glass of beer for 3 or 4 euros in the vast majority of the places in Paris - which I, coming from the Netherlands, would find expensive. But France just isn’t beer country, and neither are Spain or Italy, so if you want an inexpensive drink, you should try a glass of wine. Another thing that surprises me is that you could not find inexpensive coffee. Paris is filled to the brim with cafés-tabac where you can get an espresso for one euro if you drink it standing up at the bar instead of sitting down.

To sum up, things might be a bit more expensive than you’re used to but enjoying Paris absolutely does not have to be insanely expensive.

11

To add to Švejk: all bars in Paris have two different price lists for beverages. One is for sitting down, (expensive, but you can stay at your table for quite a long time) and the cheaper one is for standing at the bar and finishing your drink fast. And no free refills. And tiny cups/glasses.

Most Parisians just buy a bottle of water/beer/soda/wine at one of the little supermarkets, and a fresh bread at a bakery, and eat their lunch in one of the many parks. There’s no law against drinking alcohol in public.

12

I’ve stayed in two small but nice, relatively inexpensive hotels in Paris that I can recommend.

One in the Marais:

One in the Latin Quarter:

13

Before deciding on a hotel, decide which things you’ll be doing and seeing, and find something in convenient walking distance of them. And if you’ll be taking the Metro a lot, get a hotel near a major hub; this’ll save you a lot of time.

14

I stayed at the Hotel Champ de Mars.

It is a bit of an exaggeration to say it is at the foot of the Eiffel Tower but is was nice and in a great neighborhood.

15

Švejk, don’t worry, it wasn’t our usual experience.
I merely mention it on the offchance that the OP takes me up on my hotel recommendation–that bar is right by the steps to a Metro station, has wi-fi, is always crowded and a great place to people watch, so odds are that he and the missus might take a seat and order some drinks. It’s the grand ol’ “this is what we did, so in case you’re like us, this is what happened” kind of information. I wish I’d been able to drink more of the amazing and inexpensive wines, but my allergies acted up that month in Spain and then even worse in France and the lovely tasty red wines exacerbated them. Oddly, beer didn’t seem to. I blame that ol’ scapegoat sulfites.

Beer, in Spain and France was generally more expensive than people from the United States are used to though, although the exchange rate had a bit to do with that. You say 4 euro tops for a .25l of beer and I say that about 6USD for about 8 ounces of beer is generally not considered cheap. But isn’t that what Europeans are stereotypically supposed to hate about Americans, that we like our cheap, large portions? :wink: It doesn’t seem that long ago though that in Europe, beer was cheaper than water. But I’m probably just old.

It’s great that things are cheaper when you stand at a bar, but if you’ve been standing in museums all day and want to watch more of the live action, the cost of the tables is worth it. Sure, if you take the time to be a smart cafe shopper and go to the right places at the right times, you will save some money. But these people have two days. And in my experience, sometimes you just get to the point you want to sit down and eat and drink and relax…and generally, Paris is expensive.

And I think you missed my comment about brewed coffee. Sorry, a 6oz. double long shot pulled from an espresso machine delivered with the little teabag style packaging that “proves” it’s Columbian coffee from a prepackaged pod is not the same as the plain ol’ ground beans dumped into a filter with near boiling water run through it. It’s one of those little differences we learn to appreciate through travel. Who knew that ordering an asparagus salad in Spain gets you salty wet scrambled pasteurised egg mixture with chunks of tinned asparagus? I certainly do now. And so do you if you go to El Patio in Salamanca. Good enough food and service, just unexpected as in the States, a salad is usually greenery. But, that’s just because that’s what we’ve made salad mean here. Really the word is just to mean mixture, yes?

Travel is great because there are things you take for granted that you never knew you did, and you appreciate them all the more when you return home and you miss all the wonderful surprises you loved in the country you were visiting.