Finding the hotel proved a little difficult. I got to Les Halles without problems, I even found one of the exits they had listed on the Accor website. But then I had to walk through about five levels of shopping mall. Insane. In the following evening I took a wrong exit and a wrong turn, and walked in a big circle for about 45 minutes, which wasn’t too fun as I was seriously dehydrated. At least I got a nice [night view of the Hotel de Ville](/v/paris2006/2007-07-15_+Paris+with+Gabrielle+096.jpg.html).

The hotel itself turned out to be quite nice. Very modern, with LCD screens used in the reception hall and in the elevators (the later displaying some information on the breakfast). The room was neat (like really most Novotels’ rooms). I did note that the TV was an LCD TV as well. Maybe this is mainstream for normal people like me (well, except that I do not own a TV due to the [TV licenses](http://gez.pandemonium.de) involved and the low quality of the German TV programs, but I disgress). But in most hotels I visit the TVs are aging CRT’s.

The view from my window was also pretty nice. See photo! There was an Internet connection in the room (CAT5 / ethernet wire ready to plug in), but since I was just in town to meet a friend and would not be online that night, I didn’t bring a notebook and didn’t try the quality of the service.

The prices are quite high, as can be expected by the area. The room was 288 Euros (list price). The coke in the mini bar was 4 Euros a can. But who pays list price, and whoever drinks Mini bar drinks?

I’d definitely sleep there again. And if you’re looking for a business hotel in downtown Paris, the Novotel Les Halles seems like a good place to stay.

The Golden Boutique Hotel surely makes an impression when you arrive. Huge lobby. Classical European statues (made to look greek and roman) everywhere. And gold everywhere, too. The staff has neat unifroms, the front desk is dark marble. The whole building is huge. The rooms also make a good first impression. Except for the cockroach that waited for us in the bathroom.

It was disposed off by one of my Indonesian hosts, and we decided to ignore this little incident. Until two days later a giant specimen jumped us after we returned and ran around the room. We’re talking five centimeters and black as the night here. The hotel put us into a new, smaller room, which was not quite as nice – and had smoking, loud tourists across the corridor.

After you’ve gotten over the initial impression of grandeur, and even if you don’t encounter roaches, there are some bad things to be said about this hotel. They have no internet connections in the rooms; connectivity is only available in the “business center”. Inconvenient. The line is also very, very slow.

The hotel also does not have any safes. The safes in the wall closets in the rooms are too small to put notebooks into them, and the one in our room was as broken as the closet itself; it didn’t lock. Also broken were the ceiling lamps. In the week we stayed there, the staff did not manage to exchange the light bulbs – and yes, this was a problem in both of our rooms.

And finally, they have a night-club in the building (the 7th floor, if I recall correctly). Fine if you like such things, but it’s really not nice to have your room’s floor shake until 1:00am when you want to sleep.

There are some good notes, though. The staff is very nice and polite, and, with the exception of the reception, helpful and competent. I was even brought my notepad that I had forgotten at the breakfast table. Speaking of breakfast; this was included in our room’s price and was actually good – for an included buffet breakfast.

And they had well-working showers; something that I now know is not a given in Indonesian hotels.

Overall I can not recommend the Golden Boutique. There are too many things that are substandard there. I have the feeling that the hotel could be quite nice if the management took more care to fix problems. Except the night club there is nothing fundamentally wrong, just things that are all based on the incompetence of the staff.

First of all – no Internet. Okay, maybe not so important for normal people. For a geek, this isn’t quite so trivial. Well, at least their website is okay.

The breakfast was – well – not too great. Okay, I know, Hotel breakfasts are hardly worth their money, and that does include breakfasts you get for free. We tried their kitchen at other times. It can best described as Okay. The lunch buffet was not very appealing. They offered it to us, obviously after the normal lunch time, and there were literally flies all over it. No, thank you, and don’t ask again.

The water in the shower didn’t drain quite right, which I think was a defect in the floor and couldn’t be fixed quite so easily. But it was pretty icky to step in the shower in the morning and have the floor still wet from the night before.

The worst about the hotel, however – the stench of their bed cloth and towels was horrible. I have no idea what exactly they do with it; is it just a horrible chemical cleaning process, is it being dried in the exhaust of some sort of generator, or do they put it out for drying while they fumigate the compound? I couldn’t even identify the smell, but it did not quite smell like Diesel. But that was pretty bad, especially the towels.

Overall, I think I wouldn’t want to go there again. Maybe if they change their management things could improve; the facilities are really okay and the hotel has potential, but like this I have to say … uh, no.

The hotel is part of the Accor chain (it is operated under the Mercure label, which seems to be their “brand” for medium-class hotels that do not fit into any chain). It’s part of the Ancol complex, which seems to be a resort/amusement part on the coast in the northwestern section of Jakarta.

224The hotel itself is pleasant enough – clean and orderly, for the most part; I’ve seen much worse. There are some defects in some of the rooms I’ve seen and the elevator system is somehow messed up (bad programming). The staff is helpful, so far, and I am sure we’re their “favorite” customers. First they didn’t have the room we had ordered and we got a “tower suite” (pretty nice). After that we got moved to a normal “Deluxe king” room. It’s much smaller, but comes with a balcony. Unlike our first room’s bathroom this one didn’t have an individual shower; you have to use the bathtub for that. It was also broken (warm water tap didn’t work properly) and the bathroom was a bit dirty. The balcony’s floor was oily and covered with a film of soot. We discovered in an evening that diesel exhausts were making the balcony unusable – hence the soot.

221We finally got moved to yet another room (same category, no balcony) because the second room didn’t have any Internet access, and that is, somehow quite a necessity. (The WLAN of the theme park is open and unsecured, but you can’t connect; probably has a MAC address filter – I did not experiment much as the reception was very bad.) “Broadband Internet” here is handled by Ethernet over the power line. So far, it sounds pretty cool and geeky, right? Well – yes and no. The “broadband” part is a joke. Either someone is using up all the bandwidth (not an unreasonable thought) or the hotel is connected via ISDN (also not an unreasonable thought; that was considered broadband once upon a time). Second, you can’t login manually to use it – you have to call the hotel staff to unlock the line.