Good for an overnight family stay.
Written: Apr 12 '07 (Updated Apr 13 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Clean suite with a separate bath and toilet; microwave and fridge; close to airport.
Cons: Not cheap; maddeningly confusing shuttles; too far from city centre.
The Bottom Line: Clean and convenient from the airport, great for an overnight stay. Don't even think about commuting to Paris daily.
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| asafono's Full Review: Suitehotel Paris Roissy Cdg |
Suitehotel Roissy is one of many hotels near the Charles de Gaulle airport (CDG). So many, in fact, that choosing can be non-trivial. TripAdvisor.com to the rescue, I picked Suitehotel for a single overnight stay for our family, travelling back West across the Atlantic.
My impressions...
The Good
The room (carpets, furniture, bath fixtures) looked clean and newish. While not large (certainly not suite by North American standards), it was larger than a typical shoebox European hotel room. There are two beds - a king-size and a twin, in a corner. The king-size has a slide out, making another twin bed.
Perhaps to justify its suite name, the room was equipped with a partition of the kind used to reconfigure convention rooms. It worked well - only, however, if the abovementioned slide out was not in use.
There are two private bathrooms: one with a bath/shower/sink and an extra-deep bathtub, and a separate lavatory accessed from the minuscule room foyer. The bath fixtures, while not super high end, had a high perceived quality, probably better than the typical U.S. Sheraton/Hilton/Doubletree. The extra-deep bath was a hit with the children. No complaints about water pressure, either.
The room has a small fridge and microwave, handy for in-room snacks. The hotel lobby sells decent pre-packed sandwiches, fruit and yogurt bowls - not cheap but not outrageously expensive.
We had the room on the first floor, with windows facing the street. Noise was not a problem at all, since the street in front of the hotel is mainly used by (infrequent) airport shuttles (more on that later).
Service was friendly; the girl at the reception tried to explain us the shuttle issue, but her somewhat limited English and my very limited French made reaching complete understanding difficult.
The Bad
As I wrote, Suitehotel is in a cluster of tens of hotels near CDG. There is another Suitehotel that is in a different suburb near CDG, not Roissy. Combine this with a Byzantine shuttle schedule, and the split personality of CDG, and you have a recipe for... not quite disaster, but certainly an opportunity wait a long time, get on the wrong bus, be late for your plane, etc. My French is rudimentary, but apparently this was not a problem, as a confused French-speaking lady tried to get shuttle directions from me.
CDG is connected by rail to Paris proper; most of the trains we saw on the schedule were express trains, going non-stop for about 3/4 of the way into town. The trip is about 25 miles, takes 35 minutes, and cost us 55 USD roundtrip for 2 adults and 2 small children. The train, mostly empty going near the airport, fills up quite nicely at or near Gare du Nord - this is a commuter train for many Parisians/Parisiennes.
The cost - booked about 2 months in advance directly on the hotel site - was about 90 euro, 125 USD or so - not quite cheap but certainly not outrageously expensive.
Overall, I would recommend this as a layover hotel, but not as a base to explore Paris.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
asafono
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Location: St. Paul, Minnesota
Reviews written: 39
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I have no principles; all I've got is nerves - Akutagawa Ryunosuke.
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