Just back from an excellent Valentine's weekend stay. The hotel itself was beautiful and Starwood really showed why the SPG program delivers at levels far beyond most other programs.

Firstly, on the Starwood side the prepaid rates on spg.com were a bit more than I ideally wanted to spend for the weekend (560EUR/ night for 3 nights), so I found a much cheaper BRG rate on a popular website and ended up with a discounted rate of 317EUR/ night. The hotel is much more generous than most with Suite Night Awards and so I used three to upgrade to a Makkasar Suite. We were actually given what I believe was one of the largest, with a huge balcony. Lastly, I requested a Your24 late arrival and checkout, so was able to stay in the hotel until 10pm at night. In short, I paid around 1,000/EUR for an experience which should really have cost 2,000-6,000, depending on whether you value the Makkasar Suite upgrade at its actual retail value. Either way, pretty great.

To the hotel itself, it's compact and well designed, actually reminding me rather a lot of the (otherwise not comparable) Great Northern Hotel. Our suite wasn't huge (with the exception of the terrace), but it was well designed and was a comfortable place to spend time in. I could imagine staying for long periods at a time, except the 50,000EUR/ month run rate would make that rather impractical.

It feels very fresh, modern and high quality. Service was also flawless, and much better than I would expect from Paris in particular. I make an effort to speak my passable French when in Paris to avoid the unfriendliness that you inevitably get when you're pegged as an Anglo-Saxon, but the staff were friendly and effective in either language. Brunch at the 1* La Scene was an authentically Parisian experience, and the hotel bar (les Heures) is one of the most capable bars that I've seen at any Starwood hotel. We felt both the bar and restaurant were higher quality and executed at higher service levels than the George V next door where we lunched at the 3* Le Cinq and had drinks at Le Bar.

My one criticism would be that I don't expect a true luxury hotel in the 21st century to try to nickel and dime me with the incidentals. There may perhaps be not so many Millennials staying at the hotel just now, but that will change in the next 5 years. Dry cleaning my 2 piece suit was $60 ($90 on Sundays), and a vodka with sparkling water from the minibar would have cost $55. Not cool. It's maybe an easy way to make extra margin from its Arab and Russian clientele right now, but might end up being an expensive choice in the longer term.