St Christopher's Inn Paris - Gare du Nord — Hotel in Paris

POC, stay away from this hostel unless you are comfortable with someone coming into your room unannounced.

This review is a long time in coming. I got busy and never got around to posting my review. As far as the facility itself, I would say that it's decent just to have some place to lay your head. We had the shared bathroom with six bunks. My recommendation would be to try to find a private bath, it was a little bit uncomfortable sharing the bath with strangers from other units, but we knew this was the case when we booked the hostel. The location was good, close to the train station that took you to all of the tourist site. We found a walking tour about a mile away from there and it was convenient, it included walking and taking the train to the touristy spots. The room was clean, we like that. There was a restaurant bar type of place right beneath where we could grab a bite to eat before heading out or when we return. But beware the music is loud at night, if you are a light sleeper the bass and the music will keep you up until it closes.

There is a taxi stand a block away in front of the train station and it gets pretty loud overnight from the cabbies laughing and talking. There is no air condition and in order to stay cool overnight you must raise the window. We like the fact that each of the bunk had an USB outlet where we could charge our phones overnight.

Okay so here is where the problem occurred. Two of us were doing the walking tour the following morning, the other four which included one kid went to the Eiffel Tower tour at night. They arrived back at the hostel about 12:30 a.m. while me and the other person was getting our suitcase packed for our trip back home, since we could not sleep because of the loud music. When our family came into the room we asked them how was the Eiffel Tower and they started telling us their experience. About 4 minutes later our door opened and a man came into the room. Of course this caught us off guard because we did not hear a knock, nor someone say anything outside the door, but suddenly the door opened. We all jumped and looked at the man standing in the door as he announced that we were disturbing the floor. We were puzzled because it was only two of us in the room and the other four people had just arrived so we couldn't figure out how in 4 minutes we could be disturbing the floor to the point he was on our floor and in our room in only 4 minutes. Plus the music was so loud which is probably the reason why we never heard him knock at the door, we could not understand how could we be louder than the music and how the music would not be disturbing the floor.

My family told me they saw the guy at the counter when they walked to the elevator. They mentioned they greeted him but he did not return their greetings. We figured in order for him to know what room they went to he either had to watch it on a camera or he followed them to the room because he was basically on their tails. He was agitated and upset. We were shocked so we actually didn't have a opportunity to respond to him when he said we were loud because we were trying to figure out how he got into the room. After he left, we discussed how happy we were that we had the young boy with us because otherwise we could have been getting undressed in the room when our unknown visitor appeared.

We were a group of of five women in our 40s and 50s and one 12-year-old child, a boy. The only thing that we can come up with why he felt the need to come into the room was he was surprised to see us being African-Americans and was basically profiling us. We understand the stereotype of French people but we tried not to buy into that but it was obvious why he followed them and came into our room unannounced. Again stay away unless you enjoy...

POC, stay away from this hostel unless you are comfortable with someone coming into your room unannounced.

This review is a long time in coming. I got busy and never got around to posting my review. As far as the facility itself, I would say that it's decent just to have some place to lay your head. We had the shared bathroom with six bunks. My recommendation would be to try to find a private bath, it was a little bit uncomfortable sharing the bath with strangers from other units, but we knew this was the case when we booked the hostel. The location was good, close to the train station that took you to all of the tourist site. We found a walking tour about a mile away from there and it was convenient, it included walking and taking the train to the touristy spots. The room was clean, we like that. There was a restaurant bar type of place right beneath where we could grab a bite to eat before heading out or when we return. But beware the music is loud at night, if you are a light sleeper the bass and the music will keep you up until it closes.

There is a taxi stand a block away in front of the train station and it gets pretty loud overnight from the cabbies laughing and talking. There is no air condition and in order to stay cool overnight you must raise the window. We like the fact that each of the bunk had an USB outlet where we could charge our phones overnight.

Okay so here is where the problem occurred. Two of us were doing the walking tour the following morning, the other four which included one kid went to the Eiffel Tower tour at night. They arrived back at the hostel about 12:30 a.m. while me and the other person was getting our suitcase packed for our trip back home, since we could not sleep because of the loud music. When our family came into the room we asked them how was the Eiffel Tower and they started telling us their experience. About 4 minutes later our door opened and a man came into the room. Of course this caught us off guard because we did not hear a knock, nor someone say anything outside the door, but suddenly the door opened. We all jumped and looked at the man standing in the door as he announced that we were disturbing the floor. We were puzzled because it was only two of us in the room and the other four people had just arrived so we couldn't figure out how in 4 minutes we could be disturbing the floor to the point he was on our floor and in our room in only 4 minutes. Plus the music was so loud which is probably the reason why we never heard him knock at the door, we could not understand how could we be louder than the music and how the music would not be disturbing the floor.

My family told me they saw the guy at the counter when they walked to the elevator. They mentioned they greeted him but he did not return their greetings. We figured in order for him to know what room they went to he either had to watch it on a camera or he followed them to the room because he was basically on their tails. He was agitated and upset. We were shocked so we actually didn't have a opportunity to respond to him when he said we were loud because we were trying to figure out how he got into the room. After he left, we discussed how happy we were that we had the young boy with us because otherwise we could have been getting undressed in the room when our unknown visitor appeared.

We were a group of of five women in our 40s and 50s and one 12-year-old child, a boy. The only thing that we can come up with why he felt the need to come into the room was he was surprised to see us being African-Americans and was basically profiling us. We understand the stereotype of French people but we tried not to buy into that but it was obvious why he followed them and came into our room unannounced. Again stay away unless you enjoy...

Stayed here for two nights. To be honest, it is not a bad hostel for the price, especially considering that it’s in Paris in a relatively good location. However, my experience in this hostel wasn’t so nice. I booked a private double room for two nights and this is what happened during our stay.

The first issue I had was that the party at the bar located on the ground floor goes until late (around 1:30 AM). For those who enjoy partying, sure why not. I think it’s a great place to make friends from different parts of the world considering how diverse the guests were at the hostel. However, there are definitely people who need to get some sleep because of their travel plans. Most hostels around the world do set quiet hours, normally after 23:00, and this hostel also says on the walls and room key to care about people who are sleeping, but the hostel itself doesn’t care much about people who want to sleep. If you are not a party person and want to go to bed early, explicitly mention it at the reception at check-in. There are rooms that are less affected by the noise and if they are available, the staff would probably be happy to offer it to you. In our case, we did go down to the reception to ask whether it was possible to get a new room and the guy was happy to do so. However, the new room that we got had a broken heater. Paris was 2°C that night and was very windy. So we decided to just use the room that we initially had, and that’s where the second issue begins.

The second issue. We changed our room but we moved back to the room that we initially got because of the broken heater. It all looked fine but the staff at the reception forgot to put that we moved back to the initial room on the system. The day after, when we got back to our room in the evening, somebody else was using our room and our stuff was gone. Thankfully, our stuff was safely stored in the storage behind the reception and nothing was gone (actually, our ziplock bag and bottled water disappeared but I guess they just thought it was trash). The reception did try to find a solution and eventually offered us a new private room, with a partial refund. If you ever end up changing your bed or room, I would recommend you double-check it so that something that happened to us wouldn’t happen to you. Everything was fine in the end but it was quite embarrassing and unpleasant when it happened.

But as you can see from my experience, one thing that I do appreciate is that the staff did try to help as much as they could to solve our problem. For the first issue, the staff did try to find a new room, where he made a mistake which can happen I guess, and the second issue was handled quite professionally by the staff at the reception.

Perhaps the owners of the hostel or whoever actually manages the hostel should really think about how to make this hostel a better place for everyone. Despite its great location and affordable price, it really isn’t a place for everyone. Before asking their guests to respect others who are sleeping, the hostel itself needs to respect people who want to sleep early. Fix broken facilities as soon as possible so that the staff at the reception who didn’t really do anything wrong don’t need to receive complaints from their guests. Hire more people to reduce mistakes made by staff (we requested to change our room around 00:30 and there was just one guy at the reception while there were people waiting for more than half an hour in the queue to check in, and the guy seemed to be exhausted...