The Deal Mommy

Living Room, Suite 3301, Hyatt Etoile Paris, July 13, 2013

“Madame, You have been upgraded to the Ambassador Suite as a Diamond Gold Passport Member with Hyatt.”

The words every hotel guest dreams to hear…until my follow up question.

“What is the view?”

“It’s a lovely South facing Paris view, Madame.”

Uh-Oh.

Let me stop here and explain that I had specifically booked the Executive King with the Eiffel Tower View because I had brought the kids to Paris for the Bastille Day fireworks, and the Eiffel Tower faced North.

At this point I politely declined the upgrade and asked to be put into the room I reserved, the Executive Club King which states it has views of the Eiffel Tower. The front desk then told me it was no longer available since they had assigned me the upgrade!

As we were checking a day before the fireworks (and were exhausted from an 8 hour train ride) I decided to go ahead and take the suite and deal with the view in the morning.

And now the review:

Hyatt Etoile

Location: More convenient than I expected! There’s a mall attached to the hotel with the Porte Maillot metro in the basement. It’s a 15 minute straight shot down the Champs Elysses to the Rue Rivoli/Louvre.

Hotel: HUGE. At 34 floors and 950 rooms, the hotel is the tallest in Paris, and is terrific for views, even of the side that doesn’t face the tower. It’s literally a “bucket list” location for the Bastille Day fireworks (spoiler alert: we found a way to get a view, but it’s not what you might have expected).

Service: Not to Hyatt standards at all. Perhaps my view was skewed by the fact that they were jammed full for Bastille Day, or that I have SUCH high standards for Hyatt, but on every level things were just a bit “off”. Some examples:

• The reservation mess (which gets deeper in the next post).
• I called to get extra sheets and blankets so Deal Kid could sleep on the sofa because even though the suite was comically large it only had a king sized bed.  After three phone calls over six hours they never arrived and he ended up using a bathrobe for a blanket.
• The Club Room was PACKED, to the point that one morning we waited almost 30 minutes for a table at breakfast.

In the next post I’ll review the actual rooms I saw and address how the view issue was handled.

*I know this is a first world problem and have funded a kiva loan to compensate. Click on the kiva link to fund your first loan for free.