Paris - Hotel Shangri-La

Although we had some service issues last year, we decided to return to the Shangri-La one more time. It's a wonderful hotel in a quiet part of the 16th and with glorious views of the Eiffel Tower. In addition, management acknowledged the failures and extended some some attracrtive courtesies and perks for this stay.

Our lovely room 52, with terrace and Eiffel Tower view.

Out on the lovely terrace, those ugly apartment buildings are still there, but at least this room gives us a much better view than last year.

Time for some champagne and pupus before heading out to dinner.

Tonight we're off to try Alain Ducasse's new brasserie Champeaux, at the still under construciton Canopée in Forum des Halles in the 1st. The hotel's new BWM 7 series was available so we were dropped off in style, although this resto is hard to find with the on going construction.

We rejected the first table that the hostess with an attitude attempted to give us. When I gave her attitude back in French, we got a much better table.

And look what was on the menu tonight, the same Coquilletes with ham, comté and black truffles as on the La Première Lounge menu. We shared it as our starter and it was divine as always.

For our main, we shared the extraodinary Crapaudine-style free-range chicken with lemon and frites.

Our desserts were amazing.

What a fabulous meal. We Uber'd back to our hotel for the wonderful light show from our terrace.

Hotel Shangri-La Paris

Hotel Shangri-La

Paris

Lured by the beautiful website pic of a gorgeously decorated room with terrace, we splurged for an Eiffel Tower view room with terrace. Bad move. This hotel has issues. The first hint of trouble came at check-in, when the front desk reception staffer didn't know how to work a credit card machine. She thought there was a problem with my credit cards. I had to show her how to insert the card into the reader. Wow, seriously? Does anyone even train these people?

The room itself (#64) was pleasant but as we came to learn was probably the worst possible Terrace Eiffel Tower view room. It was in the lower wing of the hotel with not a single window treatment.

The vaunted terrace was not a convenient extension of the the room like in the web photo, but rather two flights of stairs up on the roof.

It was so inconvenient to access that we only used it once. Furthermore, while we could see most of the tower, the base of the tower was obscured by the rear of an ugly apartment building.

Back downstairs, the Eiffel Tower view from our room complete with ugly apartment building.

The hotel hadn't even bothered to remove some of the construction plastic from one of our windows.

A far cry from this pic on the web site.

During our stay, the hotel was having problems with the one and only elevator to our wing. It only worked half the time, so we had to use service stairs and/or service elevators and walk thru a maze of halls and reception rooms to get up and down.

After we settled in, we went downstairs for a drink... or so we thought. Le Bar was not open and The Lounge had no one to serve drinks. It was pretty though although you'd think that at least one bar or restaurant would take advantage of the location and have... an Eiffel Tower view.