I want to start off by saying that, for the price, I would probably choose this hotel again. I do…read morehave several gripes.
Gripes:
#1) The hipster minimalism is overdone in weird ways. And I am a millennial who sold everything I own to travel. I've been living out of a backpack for 3 weeks. So I don't have complicated expectations. But like... A trash can larger than a vase would be great. Why put a giant projector screen in the corner of my room, but only tiny 3 oz coffee cups?
#2) This hotel seems to do a lot to cater to foreigners. Most of the signs are in English. The staff mostly speaks English. But they SO do not understand how Americans and British people feel about morning beverages. Coffee and tea are meaningful to us. Like VERY meaningful. I've stayed in 10 other hotels in Europe this summer, and even the castles and tiny little single rooms provide a tea kettle, and enough stuff to make a cup of tea and a couple of cups of coffee. Not here. From what I read in reviews, the regular standard room doesn't have anything like that. So we got the master mob, which has a huge fridge, since it said that the master mob had a coffee machine.
Except it doesn't have a kettle. It has a finicky espresso machine that sometimes works. 2 paper cups that hold a single shot of espresso. A few sugars. A single stir stick. That's it. But they didn't refill it daily.
On the second day, the housekeeping threw away our travel mugs. These were not paper cups. They were plastic Starbucks travel mugs. They were dirty, so I guess the housekeeper thought that meant she should trash them? Ugh. We would have washed them.
#3) They leave large bottled waters in the fridge, great, but no cups. This is a room that sleeps 5. We aren't all going to drink out of the bottle. We asked for cups, and the housekeepers took them each day so we had to go down and ask for more. Every. Day.
ON THE PLUS SIDE....
The hotel is clean. The price was reasonable. There is all sorts of random stuff that my kids loved. A teepee tent to play in. Shadow puppets. There is a washer and dryer on the third floor, and they don't charge to use them, which was very nice, since we are backpacking, and this was a 4 day stay. They do, however, charge a ludicrous 3€ for a laundry detergent pod, so it evens out there. Most places charge a € or 2 for each machine use.
The area is safe, quiet, and nice. The room gets very very dark. Slept until nearly 11am one day and didn't know if it was morning when I awoke. We had a beautiful balcony overlooking the river.
There is a tram stop just about 300 meters away. Tip: when you go into town, buy a 10 pack of the little metro tickets. They are good for 1 hour of use with all the transfers, but there is nowhere to buy them at the stop by the hotel. Nearest stop where you can buy tickets is a little over a mile away. So buy plenty when you can.
Musee de Confluence is very close by. The walk to the confluence is beautiful and peaceful. On the weekends during our stay, there was a DJ, and the dance parties on the mezzanine were fantastic.
The staff were always friendly and helpful. There are two elevators and they are both fast.
Breakfast is priced far outside our budget. At 16€ a person, it would cost our family as much as a fancy sit down dinner. We bought breakfast stuff at the Carrefour nearby.
