Review of La Villa Royale 4*

We only managed to stay two of the four nights that we were booked because my daughter awoke the second morning to find many bed bugs crawling on her pillows! I've stayed at many hotels, and this is my first encounter with bed bugs. It was horrifying enough that, despite the hotel offering to put her in another room, we immediately changed our travel plans and moved to another hotel. Who wants to move to another room in a place that clearly has bed bugs? My husband had commented from the moment that we arrived in our rooms (we had three rooms rented for five people) that the mattresses were old. They noticeably sag in the middle. I kind of dismissed that as charm for an old European hotel. It never occurred to me that there would be critters crawling in those old mattresses. After the bed bug discovery, someone from the hotel called my daughter to tell her that the bed bugs probably came from the Metro nearby (WHAT? ), and that she needed to boil all of her clothes to make sure that they weren't infested. Well, that wasn't exactly helpful since they weren't offering any assistance with her clothing. Nor did they offer to refund the room fee. They also did not offer to help pay for the cab we had to take to get to a new hotel. There was no compensation that they could have offered that would have covered the half day of sightseeing that we lost on our only full not-Christmas day in Paris. But since they didn't offer anything other than switching her to another room, it's not an issue (for them). It's funny that when I informed the woman at the front desk about the bed bugs (and showed her pictures), she said almost all hotels in Paris have bed bugs because of the humidity. The hotel that we moved to, however, showed no signs of old mattresses and bed bugs. Hmm. Also, the woman at the desk insisted that we send an e-mail to management about the bugs. I figured they already knew about it, but I sent an e-mail anyone. No one ever responded. It's a shame, too, because we liked the charm of this hotel when we arrived. The staff was helpful and nice. I was even willing to ignore the fact that the water in my shower backed up around my ankles every time that I used it. We all chose to ignore the very odd bullet hole in the elevator door. Not sure how that happened, but they should probably get that fixed. I can't recommend this hotel to anyone due to the bugs. And I don't think that the housekeeper who was vacuuming the room as we left is going to be enough "extermination. "