Honeymoon Hotels in Paris

Hotel Regina, located on the Rue du Rivoli is right across the street from the Tuileries Gardens and the Louvre. This is the place you want to be if you plan on spending a great deal of time on the Right Bank, especially at the museum or visiting boutiques on Rue St. Honore.

You may be making a splurge like this once in your life - so you want to get it right.
It’s been about twenty years since my ‘then fiance/now husband’ treated me to a hotel splurge in Paris - and he must have picked the right hotel- because we’re still here! By the way, he hedged his bets and picked two Paris hotels (two nights at each hotel) just to make sure.

However, the hotel industry has gone through major changes in the past twenty years. No longer can the icons of Paris’s luxury hotels rest on the laurels. The rapidity of word-of-mouth, thanks to sites like Trip Advisor customer reviews lets you know soon enough, if the $900-per-night establishment is going to nickle and dime you for internet service.

Because we live in Paris, I can’t give you a first hand (recent) account of staying in any of the hotels I’ve earmarked for you, but here are the hotels I would choose if a special someone might suggest it’s time to celebrate twenty years of traveling together through the world - and through life.

By the way, honeymoons can be celebrated anytime you’re feeling romantic (the hotel doesn’t have to know you’ve actually been married for ten or twenty years - or you’re not ‘quite’ married).

So if the question comes up - where would you like to stay for a night? Here are my choices:

Hotel Raphael
17 Avenue Kleber
Arc de Triomphe/Champs Elysees
Paris, 75116
France
Hotel Raphael is a privately owned ’boutique hotel’ on the Right Bank.

Relais Christine
3 Rue Christine
Paris 75006
St. Germain-des-Pres
Relais Christine is a former abbey complex not far from Pont Neuf, Ile de la Cite and Notre Dame Cathedral.

Hotel Regina
2 Place des Pyramides
Paris 75001
Across from the Tuileries and the Louvre Museum
Although this is not a ’boutique hotel’, its expert concierge service will make you feel like a ‘regular’. (The last I read in guest reviews they still charge for internet service, though). This is the most ideal location if you plan on spending time at either the Louvre or Musee d’Orsay. We’ve stayed here several times with family members and we were never disappointed. If you’re dissatisfied with your room for any reason, the staff makes great efforts to move you to a room that will suit your needs.
France

Hôtel Pavillon de la Reine - Paris
28, place des Vosges - 75003 Paris
Marais District
Although I ‘ve never stayed here, I love the location tucked into the ‘royal’ alley of the Place des Vosges in the Marais district. The lobby looks especially welcoming in Fall and winter with its warm colors and plenty of wood. Even though it’s not an ‘old hotel’ it has an ‘old and established’ aura. It is very discreet.

You may be wondering why the
Hotel Ritz is missing from this list. The cost of staying at the Hotel Ritz has skyrocketed just like the price of oil. It now costs over $1000 per night to stay at the Ritz Hotel.
Unless you really have cash to burn, it’s hard to justify such exhorbitant rates. Even for a honeymoon.

Another hotel you’ll note that’s lacking from my list is the Hotel Crillon.
For our first ‘honeymoon’ trip we had stayed two nights at the Crillon and two nights at the Ritz.
I have noted by recent guest reviewers on Trip Advisor that my impressions of impersonal reception at the Crillon has not improved over the years. The only lasting memory I have of the Crillon was the rumble of the Metro that could be heard from our first room which needed to be changed after the first night.

The ‘impersonal’ nature of some luxury hotels these days is no surprise. All you need to do is to take a quick look at what’s happened in the hotel business. Most of the top hotels in Paris and other major European cities have been bought up by consortiums such as Starwood Capital Group. Starwood is owned by a group of investors described as including “many leading public and private retirement programs, university endowments, foundations, banks, insurance companies and high net worth investors”

Concorde Hotels and Resorts has been around for a long time (since the 1800s)but it now appears to be in association with Starwood (according to the Company History). What does this mean for you, the hotel guest?
It means that you can book a luxury hotel room in Paris at a competitive price, but in exchange for the attractive price, you are bound to lose out on some of the intimacy of a boutique hotel.

Concorde Hotels and Resorts has several excellent hotels which I’ve mentioned in past posts:
Hotel Lutetia
Blvd. Raspail

Hotel Concorde-Montparnasse (right next to the Montparnasse train station)
Rue Commandant Mouchotte

Concorde-St. Lazare (Grand Hotel Terminus)
Blvd. St. Lazare

Concorde-Lafayette

Hotel Louvre

Hotel Ambassadeur

You can check out some of Concorde Hotels special promotions such as the Marie Antoinette spring promotion which includes free tickets to the Marie Antoinette Grand Palais exhibit or their promotions which include breakfast and dinner at the hotels. When you compare these hotel rates to some of the Right Bank ‘designer hotels’, you may be surprised to see the difference in rates (especially between Left Bank and Right Bank hotels.)

By the way, if going to Paris is the treat in itself, and a luxury hotel is not in the budget, there are hundreds of affordable hotels that will place you in the center of Paris. When you’re truly in love, you create the magic, the elegance, the luxury of being together.