Paris hotels — some basic advice

You need a hotel room in Paris! Great, I write a website with advice about Paris! But here's the problem: This site is all about my personal favorite stuff in Paris, and I live here, so I don't exactly spend a lot of time in hotels, you know? I get a lot of questions about Parisian hotels, both from my readers and from friends who're planning a visit, and since I'm trying to cover as many parts of the tourist experience as possible here, hotels would definitely be conspicuous by their absence if I didn't mention them at all.

I've seen the inside of a few hotel rooms during my time in Paris, mostly while visiting acquaintances who're in town or whatever. The one piece of useful information I can think of regarding hotels is that, if you're American, you should expect your Parisian hotel room to be quite a bit smaller than you're used to when staying in a hotel in the States. So don't be shocked or disappointed; you haven't been ripped off and you haven't chosen poorly, that's simply the way it is in Paris, as well as most other big cities in Europe. Particularly, sometimes the bathroom and/or shower stall is unbelievably small, so be prepared to bump your elbows a few times. Even at 150 or 200 Euros a night, you might find that you're staying in a very modern, clean, comfortable sardine can.

Choosing a hotel for your trip to Paris when you're sitting back at home in your own country is a bit of a gamble, not so much because you don't get to see the room -- you can usually trust the photos on websites, although they tend to make the rooms look a little bigger -- but moreso because you don't get to see (and more importantly, hear) the street outside. I personally really hate trying to sleep in a noisy environment, and there are some touristy neighborhoods in Paris that are ungodly noisy all night long. If you end up with a hotel on one of these noisy streets (the Boulevard de Clichy in Pigalle comes to mind) you might have a miserable stay, no matter how nice the room is. Of course, if your hotel is in a noisy area you might be lucky and have a room that faces the back of the building, which might not be noisy at all. If you're booking a room through a website there's no way to inquire about this or guarantee that you'll get a good night's sleep, so if possible you're better off just finding a room in a quieter neighborhood. I wish I had any great advice about how to do this; if you're not already familiar with Paris there's no great way to find out if a particular street you've never seen before is noisy or not. When my friends are searching for hotels before a visit here, I always tell them to mail me a couple addresses and I'll look them up to report back whether they're in nice neighborhoods, on noisy streets, etc; just being familiar with Paris makes this pretty easy. Tell you what, I'd like to extend that same offer to readers of this website, but depending on how overwhelming the response is I might not have time to help everybody! I can handle a few extra e-mails a week, so don't be shy.