Hotel Le Relais De Poste

We stayed at this hotel for 2 nights. The room was not very large but really well equipped, a mini fridge with water bottles, a small safe , A coffee machine with unlimited coffee. I stress the very pleasant welcome of the staff. The hotel is very well located to visit the city.

In over 40 years of traveling in France, this is the first time I have ever changed hotels mid-stay. For a hotel to get 1 star, you need to know what went wrong. And in this case plenty. On the hotel’s website, air-conditioning is listed as one of the basic amenities, except when it isn’t, as my wife and I unfortunately learned. The day we arrived at the hotel it was 72 degrees / 72% humidity. Upon entering our south facing room with two large windows we immediately felt the heat and attempted unsuccessfully, to run the mini-split air conditioning unit. We thought perhaps we didn’t understand how the remote worked and decided to try again after dinner. Upon entering our still uncomfortably hot room later in the evening, we again tried to make the AC unit work, and again without success. To make matters worse, there were mosquitoes in the room, so we decided to keep the windows shut and deal with the heat rather than allow more mosquitoes in during the night. Then, to make matters worse, a group of men, some obviously drunk, started talking loudly, shouting, and singing somewhere on the street below, making it even more difficult to fall asleep. Finally, at 2am I went downstairs and asked the nightshift man at the front desk if he would please go out and ask the men to quite down or move along so guests of the hotel could get some sleep. I was fairly certain others in the hotel were also being disturbed. The front desk man assured he would deal with it. He didn’t. The group continued shouting and singing until 3:30am when, thankfully, it began to rain. The men then departed, leaving my wife and I to fall asleep sometime around 4am. In the morning, after 4 hours sleep and breakfast in the hotel, I spoke with the morning front desk man about our ongoing problem with the AC. He came up to our room, and after determining the AC was indeed not working, told us he would have a technician come and try to fix the unit, and if unsuccessful we could change rooms. When my wife and I returned from lunch, we asked the afternoon front desk man, Mehdie, if the AC was fixed. He claimed to know nothing about the problem and told us there was nothing wrong with the AC unit. Then he informed us, “The hotel turns off the AC in October,” and made clear he thought this would suffice. Since it was now obvious the AC had not been repaired we requested a different room, as promised by the morning front desk man. Mehdie replied, “We are fully booked. If I had been informed earlier perhaps it would have been possible.” I asked him to come up to our room to experience for himself how uncomfortably hot it was. Again, with an attitude of total indifference, he refused and made it clear that would be the end of the issue as far as he was concerned. That was the final straw. We left this sorry excuse for a hotel and moved to the Mercure Hotel, 2 minutes walk away. There, the AC worked perfectly, the staff were extremely friendly, and the breakfast buffet put the Hotel le Relais de Poste’s to shame. The Hotel Mercure will be receiving a 4 star review. Ps. As of this writing, the Hotel le Relais de Poste has refused to refund us for the night we didn’t stay in their unbearably hot room that lacked the AC, still currently listed on their website. And I almost forgot. The hot water in the shower was only lukewarm and the shower soap container was empty.

We booked a junior suite. The Picture of the junior suite was NOTHING like the room we had. There was a bedroom and a small alcove with two twin beds. The lighting in the hotel room was dark. Maybe a 20 watt bulb was used. The telephone did not work. The shower sometimes worked. The closet barely held any clothes. We kept our clothes in our suitcases. Glad we were there for only 2 nights. There was no manager on site to submit our complaints…only day staff. We were told we would have to wait for Manager on Monday. We were checking out on Sunday. There was no lobby, only a “rustic room with tables” for breakfast. Location was good but I do not recommend this hotel as the room was falsely advertised and when we complained, they did not care. There are other hotels in Arles that seemed nicer.