I hate writing bad hotel reviews, but this was a terrible lodging experience, so I felt like it was worth sharing this with other travelers.
I visited New Orleans, Louisiana for the first time in early November. My friend and I wanted to stay in a vacation rental, but all the ones we were interested were already booked. We wanted to stay in the French Quarter but didn’t have a ton of money to spend, so we ended up going with Chateau Dupre, an independent hotel off Decatur near Canal. While it had some pretty bad reviews, it also had many glowing reviews. I found that nearly every hotel in this price range in the French Quarter had some bad reviews since many of them are so old.
Our plane was delayed, and we showed up tired and ready to crash. We were immediately disappointed. When we walked in, the lobby looked nothing like it did online. On Hotels.com, it looked regal and fancy. In reality, it’s very basic and on the crummy side.
We reserved a non-smoking room with two double beds online several months in advance. We arrived and they gave us a smoking room. We complained and they didn’t care, so we decided to check out the room to see how bad it was. It wasn’t a faint smell–it absolutely reeked as though someone had just been in there smoking a pack of cigarettes, and my travel partner has bad allergies that get irritated by that much smoke residue. The windows don’t open, so we couldn’t air it out.
I went downstairs and told them we couldn’t stay in that room and that we booked a nonsmoking room, but the lady at the front desk was very rude and said that smoking or nonsmoking was just a preference and that they book rooms solely based on beds. I could tell she was flustered because two other parties were in the lobby complaining about other things to her, too–one about their room not being clean on arrival, and one was a booking issue. Another couple was waiting in line to talk to her. Everyone was rolling their eyes and seemed fed up with the hotel. She was being extremely unhelpful, and I had to get sassy and flat-out told her that we had to move rooms or would have to leave the hotel. (Sidenote: I asked her if we could get a refund if we went elsewhere, and she said no–I assume because we already paid online on Hotels.com. I wonder if it would be different if we booked directly with them and hadn’t paid yet.) She relented, but all they had available was a king bed room. We took it, but we are friends–not a couple–so while it was doable, it really would have been nice to have the double beds we originally booked.
The king bed room had two huge windows on the wall that faced outside. When we walked in, we saw that the entire curtain for one of them was sitting on a pile on the floor, leaving that window completely uncovered. I told the front desk and they didn’t do anything about it. Good thing I brought an eye mask, because it was extremely bright in the morning. And thank goodness the window only overlooked garages and not other hotels or residences where people could peer in. (The funny thing is that one of the curtains were also messed up in the double bed room we originally entered).
The one elevator in the hotel is really old and doesn’t always work properly. Sometimes the door won’t close and just shakes, so you have to push on the door hard to restart it (the hotel staff nonchalantly showed us how). The television remote control had tape on the back of it and didn’t work. A lot of the room numbers seemed to have fallen off, as some of the room numbers we passed by in the hallway were displayed in tape.
While sometimes it was very quiet from the hotel room, at other times there was a lot of outside noise, especially early morning–some industrial, some just people yelling and shouting. We weren’t really near bars, but we were next to some garages and alleys where things were loaded and unloaded, which I assume is where it was coming from. However, I slept with earplugs (in addition to the eye mask) to lessen it, and I’m sure it would be worse right on Bourbon Street with all the loud bars and partiers.
The room with the two double beds that we were originally assigned was quite large, though the room with the king bed that we ended up in was quite a bit smaller. The rooms themselves were clean, so I had no complaints about that. The location was very good–it was easy to walk all throughout the French Quarter from there, so it was a great home base. It was also very close to the St. Charles streetcar. There were also lots of nearby restaurants. In that sense, the hotel was a great pick.
Chateau Dupre was in a convenient spot, still in the French Quarter yet a bit removed from the madness. It just had awful service and a lot of things were in obvious disrepair, and the staff didn’t seem to care. When we checked out, the woman at the front desk flat-out said to me, “I know we didn’t meet your expectations.” Unfortunately, they didn’t do anything to fix it.
