Mmm, Paris! (March 2018)

[Gill H]

Bonjour mes amis! You may have read some of our previous trippies on the Dibb, from our visits to WDW and DLP, as well as various other destinations. Just in case you are new to us, we are Gill and Peter H on the Dibb, and we look like this:

We both love theatre, music, food and visiting nice places. Oh, and all things Disney of course! In fact we celebrated our joint 50th birthday last year with a ‘double dose of Disney’ – three days at DLP, then a train from Paris to Barcelona for an overnight stay, and then a 7 night Med cruise on the Disney Magic. It was utterly amazing – but it had taken us a good while to save for, and when we got home our budget for future holidays was pretty much non-existent.

The other member of our household is our lovely cat Spikey. She’s a rescue cat and we’ve had her two years. We’re not entirely sure of her age but we think she’s around 15, and though she’s generally in good shape for an older cat, she had some health problems over the past few months which meant that any hope of building up that holiday budget was put on hold for a while. You’ll be glad to know she’s in better health now though. Here she is on a walk in the park! (Yes ... yes we do. We don't have a garden and live on the high street, and since she's deaf it isn't safe to let her out alone.)

So, at the beginning of this year we decided to start saving in earnest for another WDW trip in a few years’ time. We were going to have to be strict with ourselves. No DLP trip this year. No long weekends to various tempting European cities. We’d restrict ourselves to a ‘staycation’ this year and take advantage of all the fun free stuff London has to offer. We made a savings chart and prepared to buckle down.

And then …

Eurostar announced their latest offer - £29 tickets. Ooh, tempting. Of course, we knew those tickets would be at awkward times and dates – certainly not a weekend away. But, worth a look perhaps? So we looked. And then we realised that Peter’s birthday was coming up in March, and he had a few days annual leave to spare. So we played around with dates on the Eurostar website, and worked out that we could travel to Paris on a Monday lunchtime, and back on a Thursday afternoon, for £29 each way per person. Well, it would have been rude not to at that price. So we got our annual leave approved, and grabbed the tickets as soon as we could.

The next step was to decide whether to make it a Paris trip, or a sneaky couple of days at DLP. We weighed up the pros and cons, which wasn’t easy. For all those who say DLP is too expensive, well, I can tell you that the cost of a DLP offsite trip, compared with a few days in Paris, came out at about the same price. There are loads of inexpensive hotels around DLP, and the cost of 3 nights in the Ibis with park tickets and eating offsite was pretty reasonable. But we’d only recently had a DLP trip, and there wasn’t really much to pull us back so soon. Neither of us are massive Star Wars fans, so the ‘Season of the Force’ wasn’t a draw in itself. Added to that, Phantom Manor is down for its long refurb, and that’s one of our favourite rides. We both felt that we didn’t really want another DLP trip so soon.

However, trying to find accommodation in Paris that was reasonably central and didn’t bust the budget was a huge challenge. We’ve often stayed in Ibis and Campanile hotels in various countries, and they tend to be basic but clean, safe and comfortable. But most of the Paris ones were either a long way out, or had dreadful reviews, or were out of our budget. Many were all three!

Eventually, after several days trawling the internet, we found a good deal on Expedia and tried to book – only for the website to go wrong when we tried to pay. After endless buffering and error messages, we phoned Expedia customer service, who were less than helpful. First they put us through to an American line where we got hold messages in Spanish, then when we rang off and called back, they said they could book the hotel for us – but at a much higher price than we’d seen. Even though it was clearly still available on the website when we did a dummy booking, they insisted it was no longer available at that price. So we rang off and gave up for the night, sending them an annoyed email of complaint.

The next day we got a bland ‘sorry, looking into it’ apology, and that night we tried again. This time we found a good deal for the Hotel Novanox, a three star hotel in Montparnasse, which came out at just over £200 for three nights. Yet again, the website didn’t allow us to book, sending us into buffering hell. We phoned Expedia again and were told yet again that they could book, but not at that price. However, this time it was only a couple of pounds more, so we agreed to book. Expedia did eventually (after a couple of chases) send us a £25 voucher in apology, but we can only use it on a flight/hotel combination, which we’re unlikely to do any time soon. Ah well.

Anyway, we now have a booking for the Hotel Novanox. Reviews seem pretty good, and although we know it won’t be the lap of luxury, it looks a decent place in a good location.