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Hotel Hell

Grand Name But No Grandeur at Hotel Napoleon

December 7, 2006 at 12:43 PM | 0 Comments

Why do sites like HotelChatter or TripAdvisor exist? Perhaps so that potential travelers can read our advice and ignore it, like British blogger missketeers who spent a month in France on a training course recently. From Paris he and his work pals were wizzed 45 minutes out to Fontainebleau to the Hotel Napoleon:

I was ushered into the reception of Hotel Napoleon which looked respectable enough but I knew had troubles lurking ahead (we had read some etripadvisor.com website advising us DO NOT EVER GO TO THE HOTEL NAPOLEON, worst hotel ever, etc.).

Okay, let's give him the benefit of the doubt: it sounds like his company might've booked this accommodation for him. Things progress well at first--he's lucky enough to score a room bigger than the broom closet flat he's using in London, which makes it all seem not so bad. At least for a minute or too.

However I was unpleasantly surprised to find that 1) the walls are padded, and 2) the walls are scratched, like the top layer of the wall was peeling off EVERYWHERE. And this was a flippin' three star hotel!! As one of my colleague put it cleverly " It's the sort of room you rent per hour, not per night".

We hate to say "I told you so", so we won't. And sure, sometimes there are travelers who just get a bad deal at an otherwise good place. But when every bit of feedback includes words like "worst" and "never", you've really gotta start searching for somewhere else to rest your head.

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Hotel Napoleon reviews [TripAdvisor]