HouseTrip Blog – Holiday apartment news, travel and rental tips

We’ve been saying it forever: holiday apartments are cheaper than hotels. Now we’ve decided to put it to the test.

Lucy decides to take her husband Mark and her children Tom and Katie on a surprise weekend trip to Paris. She wants to stay in a relatively central location, within walking distance of Paris’s main attractions (if you’ve tried taking children on the Paris metro, you’ll know exactly why!). Tom’s birthday is on the 25th of September, so she picks the weekend of the 24-26 September. She hopes that planning well in advance will mean she gets a great deal!

We at HouseTrip get calls or emails describing situations like this all the time. One of the great things about working for a start up is that we get such personal contact with our clients…it’s interesting for us and we love to help! We also know all about the benefits of holiday apartments over hotels, and many of our Paris holiday apartments are particularly stunning. Nevertheless, this is a price comparison test, so we set the following conditions. We looked on meta search engines (TripAdvisor, Kayak, Trivago etc) for the cheapest hotels in central Paris for our family’s stay. We looked for both quadruple rooms, and two double rooms. Here are the three best results (the double rooms were actually cheaper!).

The cheapest hotel we could find in Paris city centre was a 2* hotel near the Bastille. It costs 270€ for the stay. We decided to check it out on TripAdvisor, and there are many negative customer reviews such as “this hotel is a scam” or “this hotel was depressing”. There was also a 2* hotel near Montmartre, costing 320€, and a 3-star hotel in Paris Est for 348€, both of which had negative reviews on TripAdvisor.  The titles of this hotel’s reviews in TripAdvisor are quite funny: “You’ll regret this stay”, “Dont do it!!” and “Pathetic third world standards”. The first hotel with consistently positive reviews (rated #268 of 1,794 on TripAdvisor) that we could find in Paris city centre would cost our family 400€ for their weekend in two 10sqm “standard” rooms.

We then looked for Paris holiday apartments on HouseTrip. There are a lot to choose from: maybe not quite as many as hotels but last time I checked there were over 500, which gives you a pretty great selection! And the cheapest are not necessarily the best value. But that’s what we were looking for. Here are the results.

So, here are some of the cheapest options. Lucy could go for a charming 2-bedroom apartment in the heart of Montmartre for just 224€. Alternatively, there’s the trendy Trocadero area, minutes from the Eiffel Tower, in a 75sqm apartment with 2 bedrooms for a grand total of just 260€. If Lucy was concerned that these holiday apartments don’t have reviews, she could plump for a beautiful 2-bedroom apartment in the heart of Paris for 352€. A little more expensive, but great value, with two 5* reviews from happy guests.

Beat that, hotels.

The kitchen and view of our great value holiday apartment in Montmartre

Check out this great new deal here, still cheaper than hotels !