Hotéis Mercure em Beauvais

The hotel has quite a number of pluses: attractive, well-located building, smart modern interior, generally well-designed rooms… But there are some (mostly minor) negatives too. Finding your way into it by car through the one way system is difficult, as the obvious route is “no entry”. They had told me when I booked that there was a free hotel carpark. What they didn’t say was that there were only half a dozen places, though happily we got the last one. Otherwise, it wasn’t clear what the nearby long stay solution would have been. The welcome was average: they didn’t have the key ready despite my checking in online 2 days before and they needed prompting to produce the voucher for the Accor loyalty welcome drink. Also it was firmly only for the cardholder, not for his companion too, as in some more generous Mercures. There was a touch of meanness about the equipping of the room. One tea bag. No free water in the fridge – but a note inviting us to spend 7 Euros on a reusable bottle which they would then fill for us! (There are other ways of achieving “zero plastic”, eg glass bottles as in the Amiens Mercure or cartons and tins as in Clermont-Ferrand.) The tiniest of paper cups for making tea. (No wonder they thought one tea bag would do for both guests!) Only two plugs for charging things, though admittedly there were four USB points. Breakfast had the same sense of putting out as little as they could get away with and spreading it sparsely over too wide an area. There was an almost total absence of staff as well, so that when the inadequate supply of croissants ran out at about 8.20 it took a long time to find someone to ask for more and then, by the time they were baked, we had effectively finished. The layout of the provisions also defied any logic, with milk as far away from the cereals as the size of the room allowed! Overall though, the quality of what was on offer was fine. It was about 10-20 Euros a night more than some of the other Mercures that we use quite regularly, without much obvious justification, except that the Beauvais restaurants also seemed above averagely expensive for what they were too. Nonetheless, if Beauvais offered a decent restaurant or two (see separate 3 star review of Le Senso, widely regarded as the best in town) I would use it again as an acceptably convenient and comfortable stopover.