Paris in Autumn, Three Days...

After booking the flight four months in advance with we wait for time to pass... Thursday 6 November we have the flight from Bergamo Orio al Serio to Paris Beauvais Expected arrival at 21:50, the return is for Sunday 9 with expected arrival at the airport at 23:10 Flight paid 50€ each return!

As the date approaches we start planning the most important details of our short trip...

Where to sleep?

We don't want to spend a lot; I try some search engines and find some offers that seem interesting (from 50/70€ per room...) but then reading the reviews of those who've been there I find opinions that contradict each other...in others I can't understand whether there's certainly a bathroom in the room or not...Since we're a group of nine people and varied in age, tastes and preferences, I don't want to run the risk of making a choice that, even if in good faith, is then contested once we're there... As a safe alternative there's that of going to hotel chains where, seen one, you've seen them all.... There's the basic category made up of Formule1 where you don't have a bathroom in the room, the slightly higher one where the standard is similar but there are two small separate compartments in the room: one for the shower and the other for the toilet....

The higher category where you can rest assured that no one will find anything to complain about is Ibis

It all depends on the price you want and can spend... I, by booking in September, found Ibis with some really interesting offers Rooms at 39€ per couple...,then since we needed 5 rooms some I paid 59€ But for the quality of service and the rooms it's really a good price... We played a bit of a jigsaw game...on Thursday night 5 rooms weren't available at a decent price (like all good offers you always need to book well in advance...)imagine that one room cost 39€ and the other, the offer having ended, they were asking me for 129€.... Unacceptable... So in the area where we booked, right next door in the same building, there's the ETAP HOTEL So I booked 3 rooms for the first night at the Etap and 2 at the Ibis...then the next morning we all moved to the Ibis where I had all the rooms at a decent price...

To sum up, we spent for 3 nights in Paris 72€ each....not bad, right? Here's what we chose among the many...

39 Quai Paul Doumer - 92400 - COURBEVOIE - FRANCE Tel: (+33)1/ 49970550 Fax: (+33)1/49970717 Telephone bookings: (+33)1/49970550 Hotel code: 3296 From the metro stop you have about fifteen minutes on foot...but the area is really quiet, even after midnight you can return safely, and you find people walking their dog for the last little business of the day...near the hotel there's a pastry shop/bakery that is out of this world...and nearby there's a bar, coffee shop...pharmacy and supermarket where you can buy water or other things...Everyone was satisfied!!! How to get from the airport to the hotel?

We evaluated various alternatives, including that of taking a minivan..or a taxi to arrive directly at the hotel But the most practical and economical choice seemed to us to be this:

The airport itself provides a bus service that for 13€ per leg takes you to Paris Porte Maillot where with a ten-minute walk you reach the metro stop and can go in any direction... A paid bus service (€ 13 per journey and per person), connecting Paris Porte Maillot to Beauvais airport, is available to passengers holding an air transport ticket. Since you're never the only ones taking the bus I advise you to follow the suggestion given on the site and which I copied below: you'll avoid queues and useless waste of time!!! To allow you to save time and avoid queues at the counter we recommend buying the bus tickets for the OUTWARD and RETURN journeys online tickets.aeroportbeauvais.com

The distance from the airport is about 80km, so it'll take you about an hour and a quarter to reach the terminus at Porte Maillot

We're at the hotel around midnight and after a night's rest we're ready to visit Paris... Wanting to see everything in three days is truly a crazy thing...but we're crazy...