I love Paris as a city. I like the French, with their gloomy intellectual world view, the good food, and the notion of social infrastructure that still exists, provided of course that you are not a second generation North African immigrant living in the Banlieues .
But what I am finding frustrating is the notion of hotel management that exists in Paris. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that I had a salmon day coming up, little did I know in terms of accommodation that it would be a salmon week.
Here is the sequence:
I make a booking via our electronic booking service for SAP hotels, and get a couple of nights at the Villa d'Ambassadeurs in Longchamps. That, according to my previous experience, should have been that.
Then I get a mail back from the hotel saying, no actually we are full.
I assume that I will then cancel that booking, and find another hotel altogether in the same area. This is when it starts to go a bit surreal.
The hotel then says that they have booked me into another hotel in the same chain, and that I should go there. I say that I would rather cancel the booking, and stay near where I wanted to go thanks very much.
They reply that if I do not take the night in the other hotel they will charge me a cancellation fee for the room that they are incapable of providing in the first hotel. (Eh? At this point I am kind of a commercial hostage of their greater organisation).
I call this second hotel, VIlla van Gogh in the Pigalle, and ask if in fact they have a booking in my name, which they do not.
I then get the hotel booking organisation involved, who start sending a load of exasperated e-mails asking them how they can be such a bunch of unprofessional goobers, and what they hell is going on?
Finally, they admit that they can do nothing, and that I do indeed have be a commercial hostage, and go to this other hotel, which at least at this point has acknowledged my existence.
So, I go there that night, and it's an OK hotel, and in fact I find a very nice little Italian restaurant next door, and have a very authentic pizza, a glass of red wine, and then go and have a good nights sleep in this very Parisian hotel. This means that there are five floors, each with about three rooms on them, each of which is itself quite small. The lift is also generally tiny, being retrofitted into the tiny staircase. I think they are cute, but they are not for the claustrophobic...
So, the next morning I take the metro to the SAP office in La Defense, and log in to my e-mail. After I had left the office last night, it transpired that the hotel booking service had sent me a notice saying that the Villa van Gogh only had a room for one night. But I only get this having travelled half way over Paris, and so after another electronic shouting match I have to get back onto the Metro, and go and collect my stuff from the first hotel, as they are about to throw my gear into the street.
Now, this is actually, apart from the inconvenience starting to be funny. I mean, how much more incompetent could you be?
So, I get my stuff, and I go back to the office, work the day, and then in the evening I go to the other hotel, who have in fact got a booking for me, which at this stage I see as being nothing short of miraculous. So, once booked in, I want to go to the room in this hotel, which is much like the other, i.e. more vertical than horizontal, five floors of four rooms or so. Only now the elevator is broken, and I have to the ascent, luckily to the first floor only, up a staircase that looks like something out of Dr Seuss, so narrow and steep is it.
But there are a fair few "third age" tourists, e.g. coffin dodgers, being forced to make the dizzying ascent to the fifth floor on foot.
Well, that would have been one of the most frustrating hotel experiences in my more than a decade of travelling with SAP, but there was one upside. Because of their utter disorganisation, they forgot about who I was and where I had been, and only charged me for one night of the two. Normally I would have pointed out the error, because small hotels have proprietors, and they rely on the revenue, but in this case I just quietly grinned and signed.
There is a saying in marketing that the delighted client will tell almost no-one, where the disgruntled one will complain endlessly. I cannot give a stronger recommendation to anyone looking for a hotel in Paris. Avoid these incompetent clowns like the plague.
The next night I was in Frankfurt, and I walked up to the reception desk of the new Movenpick Hotel near the conference centre, and just said one word: "Newlands". The young German clerk smiled, tapped in a couple of letters, and welcomed me, produced a room key in seconds, and wished me a good stay, and if I smiled with contentment at the difference, well, likely he had no idea why.
Interestingly I went to Paris again on Thursday and got the same treatment, but not so extreme. Went to the booked hotel, and lo and behold they were fully booked! Still, this time rather than being taken commercial hostage, and being whisked off as a prisoner to the other side of Paris, he phoned other hotels in the neighbourhood, and found me a hotel within half a block at the same price. This is obviously a bit like the old commercial overbooking trick on airlines that used to take place with business class flights.
I am trying to think about how to prevent this happening again, but I have not thought of any foolproof strategies...
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