Hôtel Mercure Annecy Centre — Hotel in Annecy

One of the worst hotel experiences I had in the last 10 years.

I unfortunately had a very disappointing experience with this hotel. I was travelling for business purposes, but the hotel does not meet the expectations I had for a 4-Star hotel.

The room was very overpriced and extremely dark so I had to turn on the lights even during the day (it was very sunny during my stay). Also, the equipment was poor and very old. Right in front of my room, the hotel decided to place a wagon with dirty laundry which stayed there for three days. The walls are also extremely thin and you can hear everything that is going on on the corridor and other rooms, as well as noises coming from the old building itself. On the upside, it was as clean as expected.

Breakfast was ok, however overpriced for what was offered, and the breakfast room was too small to seat all guests. This is why I was forced to have breakfast in the quite sad lobby. One might expect that in such a case, staff would care about at least setting the table, however, I had to ask for every single item of breakfast equipment (cup, cutlery,...) separately.

Also, I was not aware that on check-in, more than the actual room price would be pre-approved on my credit card. I was informed that this amount would be immediately released once I made the actual payment at check-out, but this turned out to be incorrect. In fact, I was informed by a highly unprofessional hotel manager that the bak could block the amount for up to 14 days. While this was in itself quite disappointing, I was shocked by the reaction of management to my complaint. First, even though I had already called them previously in English and was clearly not from France, they decided to keep communication in French. Also, when mentioning my other concerns with my stay, there was not even one single word of acknowledgement, rather I just received a very unpolite response that pretty much read as an arrogant "shut up".

I will definitely never be staying at this...

We arrived at the hotel around 7pm on August 2 after a (6+)-hour drive and found out that there was no parking available in the public parking lots or anywhere on the streets at a reasonable distance from the hotel due to the large number of people going to Annecy for the annual lake festival. Your website mentions the existence of an "arrangement" with the entity responsible for public parking in Annecy which made us feel confident (wrongly so) when booking the room that parking would not be a problem but says absolutely nothing about what happens when parking garages are full! After being made aware of the situation by the staff at the front desk, we inquired about the possibility to be re-directed to another hotel but were told that it was too late to get a refund for our reserved room at the Annecy-centre Mercure hotel. We finally decided to drive around the town until we could find a spot on the streets. We ended up parking illegally at about 2km from the hotel. It seems to me that the parking situation could be handled better. At the very least, customers should be warned when booking a room that parking could be very difficult at the time of the lake festival, so they are not taken by surprise (and can consider booking a room outside of downtown Annecy). Offering the option to reserve a parking spot in advance in the closest parking garage would be...

We arrived at the hotel around 7pm on August 2 after a (6+)-hour drive and found out that there was no parking available in the public parking lots or anywhere on the streets at a reasonable distance from the hotel due to the large number of people going to Annecy for the annual lake festival. Your website mentions the existence of an "arrangement" with the entity responsible for public parking in Annecy which made us feel confident (wrongly so) when booking the room that parking would not be a problem but says absolutely nothing about what happens when parking garages are full! After being made aware of the situation by the staff at the front desk, we inquired about the possibility to be re-directed to another hotel but were told that it was too late to get a refund for our reserved room at the Annecy-centre Mercure hotel. We finally decided to drive around the town until we could find a spot on the streets. We ended up parking illegally at about 2km from the hotel. It seems to me that the parking situation could be handled better. At the very least, customers should be warned when booking a room that parking could be very difficult at the time of the lake festival, so they are not taken by surprise (and can consider booking a room outside of downtown Annecy). Offering the option to reserve a parking spot in advance in the closest parking garage would be...