Villa Victor Louis - Bordeaux Centre

As a world traveller, I was disappointed with this hotel because of the huge disparity between the photos on their website and the room and facilities actually provided. To be fair, the reception staff were fantastic and frinedly and the lobby was elegantly furnished. My wife and I had a superior room for 4 nights and it fell short of expectations for the following reasons: 1. Steep and narrow staricase with shabby carpet to reach the second floor, 2. The bath room and toliet at two ends of the room, 3. No kettle in the room, 4. No sofa or easy chair to relax, 5. Bare minimum toiletries (only shower gel and shampoo) with disfunctional dispensers, 6. Lack of cleanliness-dust accumulated in the corners and lumps of hair in two places, 7. Floor carpet not cleaned for a while! The hotel is located in an isolated street where I felt slightly insecurre in the night. Overall, an Air BnB would have been a better choice for the money. The hotel does not understand customers requirements. NOT Recommended!

tl;dr: Hotel locked us out in the middle of the night (the reception closes at 7 PM and access is through an electronic keypad); ghosted us for a week; and refused to compensate for the night at another hotel we had to pay for so we wouldn't sleep on the street. Would not recommend staying here! Here are the full details, from the email I sent to the manager, Hélène, the day after: "Yesterday night, my partner and I were locked out of Villa Victor Louis after we returned from attending a wedding due to the keypad being dead. It was 2 AM. The streets were desolate, and our phones' batteries were low. We tried calling the hotel number again and again, hearing silence on the other end and seeing "Call Failed" notice after notice. We texted friends to ask them (and the French wedding planner) to try calling from their phones. We were wearing contacts at the wedding which were quickly drying on our eyes (they are daily disposables that must be removed at night). But our glasses, passports, and clean changes of clothes were all inaccessible, inside the room. I was beginning to bleed through my tampon as we sat on the curb outside wondering if help would come. We stood outside the hotel for almost an hour. Our friends thankfully let us know that there were rooms available at another hotel and we went there to stay the night. We woke up in the morning to walk, squinting at the blurry world, guided by our friend back to Villa Victor Louis. What if we had needed to catch a flight? Your hotel would have been withholding our travel documents. Please imagine being visually impaired, stuck in uncomfortable formalwear, bleeding, needing to use the restroom, unable to use your phone, without your identification, in a foreign city. Now imagine that no one from Villa Victor Louis even deigns to respond to your desperate email, Instagram direct message, and several attempted calls on Instagram's platform. This is what happened to us. No one called us or responded to the email from last night. We came back to Villa Victor Louis and went to our room. On the way out, we ran into an employee at the reception desk. She apologized to us, told us she had seen my email from last night, and told us to forward her the invoice from the other hotel for reimbursement as well as a refund for last night. We were shocked when another employee told us that the Villa Victor Louis will only be offering a refund for last night, not reimbursing our emergency stay last night at the other hotel. [..] We also hope this never happens again to any of your guests and would strongly encourage you to develop an action plan that includes 1) an emergency phone number that does not route through a hotel landline and is more resistant to failures due to power outages and/or 2) offering a physical key to the front door. We still don't know what to do if the keypad does not work tonight on our last night of our stay. What number would we call?" Hélène didn't respond for a week. They ended

Beautiful, quirky five-star experience We stayed at Villa Victor Louis as a family of three (12 yo child and two parents) and it was a fantastic experience. The building is phenomenal, and the staff are so great. The room itself was comfortable and spacious, as well as delightfully quirky. The location is also great, with all kinds of things just a few short blocks away. Breakfast is fairly so-so, don't get too excited about that, but it does the job and it's great to have the option not to have to go out and get it, and it's served in such a lovely space in the sunroom that mediocrity is forgotten. I'd recommend Villa Victor Louis without hesitation and would absolutely stay there again.