The travel gargoyles are against us!

We have not set foot in Paris yet, and already we are on to our fourth hotel there.

It began with a little online excursion into a popular European travel website where the online travel-shopper enters in the dates they are travelling, whereupon the site spits out a bunch of hotel deals with different dates.

Why would anyone program a website in this way, unless they have malevolent intent on my bank account?

I, unwittingly, picked the Hotel de Vendome, not realizing I was booking into a room that very night.  And so we backed out of that one. You can check my posting here if you’re in the mood to read a travel-rant.

Not staying here at the Hotel de Vendome, although that would have been nice.

Then we learned that the hotel chain where we are currently guests in Switzerland also owns a pile of hotels in Paris, so we visited with our concierge who booked a room for us at a sister-hotel. We relaxed. Too soon.

The hotel contacted us later saying that our booking was made in error, there were no rooms available at any of their Paris hotels, but they recommended another hotel chain. They blamed a glitch in their internal computer system, but we suspect the hotel chain’s cleaning staff’s grapevine has it in for us. Maybe we don’t tip enough?

Next we went to http://www.expedia.com, which found a great deal for us at the Waldorf  Madeleine, near the heart of Paris.

When I wrote to confirm our reservations at the Madeleine, the concierge wrote back to say our rooms were under renovation and not ready, therefore they have booked rooms for us in another Waldorf hotel, the Arc d’Triomphe.

The Hotel Waldorf Madeleine - we are not staying here either.

At this point, I’m afraid to send a confirmation note to the Arc d’Triomphe for fear it will draw their attention to us, whereupon they will hit the eject button, a serious danger because we’ve noticed that our hotels started out very close to the centre of Paris, but every move takes us further outward. We haven’t passed the city limits yet, but that is the way we appear to be going.

The Waldorf Arc de Triomphe - Will we stay here? Will we triumph over Paris elusive hotels?

But how bad can it get? We’re leaving tomorrow – it’s not as if there are two more weeks to go, providing hotels 14 days to progressively bump us further and further away from Paris until we find ourselves staying in a Super 8 in Moscow.