La Marisa

Excellent hotel, very clean and very well located. Room with a lot of character. Bedding is top-notch. Very nice bathroom, fully tiled. The breakfast is plentiful and excellent. The staff is very pleasant and full of good advice. Possibility to reserve a paid parking next to the hotel. I highly recommend it and would return with great pleasure.

We enjoyed 5 nights in St Jean de Luz staying at La Marisa, a booking we made at the last minute due to our other accommodation becoming unavailable. Once there, we found out it was school holidays for parts of France, so were glad the hotel had room for us. The hotel can be walked to from the train station, and is easily accessible from the main beach area. We hired bicycles for one day, with the town and surrounds being a good place to explore on bikes. We found reception / check in / the room / facilities good. We moved the large table, chairs and bedside tables around a bit to facilitate better movement in the room, which was filled with quality furniture. The bathroom is very modern, although the door opens into the bathroom, so you have to manoeuvre around it to access the toilet behind it, meaning there’s only room for one person at a time in the bathroom. We wanted to do a load of laundry in house, and they offered to do it for us at 14 euros, which we declined and went to the local laundromat ourselves. We were self-catering and on a budget, so we didn’t appear to fit the general demographic of guests at La Marisa, who seemed to have breakfast at the hotel, to go out for the day and to eat out for lunch and dinner. Although there is evidence of cups of tea / coffee for self service in the reception area, we could only grab tea bags, some sugar and cups to take up to our room, as there didn’t appear to be any hot water available any of the times we went downstairs. Breakfast was advertised for 14 euros per person, which we declined, although we did access some plates and bowls from the kitchen area to take upstairs. The reception staff were initially friendly, however when we asked further into our stay about various things, we found them a little cold. As an example, when enquiring as to how to access the local airport across the border in Spain (in San Sebastián which is what our airline booking stated), the lady was very brusque with us, insisting it didn’t exist and that the only nearby airport was called something completely different. Fortunately, we speak quite reasonable French and were able to figure things out for ourselves. We were correct. The room had a frustrating window setup, in that you couldn’t fully open the shutters without moving the curtains from one side of the shutter to the other. They were very tall, and we needed to stretch high to reach them. Obviously we didn’t want to damage the curtains! The window is a good place to dry some towels / bathers as needed, with a detachable wooden pole installed. It was lovely to listen to the waves at night and watch an incredibly dramatic thunder & lightning storm from one night! Sadly, a neighbouring balcony had cigarette smoke wafting into our room most days so we had to be attentive to that, regularly having to close the windows. Everything at the hotel is well made and solid, with nice furnishings, bedding, carpet, curtains and art. Unfortunately, those things aren’t that important to us; we just would have preferred warmer and more helpful staff and less of the sense that when asking questions, we weren’t getting in their way.

Perfect hotel, cozy, quiet, nice, very clean.ideal location.ideal parking.very professional arrival zu departure.