The Hotel Chamonix is a pretty horrible place to stay in a city famed for its beauty. The location is seedy, although with quite good transport links, at 8 Rue d'Hauteville in the Opera/Grand Boulevards section of the city. It's certainly not Paris's most picturesque district (we passed two "massage parlours" as we walked from the top of the road looking for the Chamonix at the bottom), but the real problems are inside the hotel. The staff on the desk were largely helpful, although when we arrived we were asked to go away for an hour (even though the check-in time had passed) because the room hadn't yet been cleaned. We duly did so, and when we returned we found lodgings that would have shamed a cheap youth hostel. I booked a double room. Rather than a double bed, there were three single camp-beds awkwardly crammed a metre apart in to a fairly small room. The furniture was of an appalling standard - cracked, broken and poorly maintained, and the decor generally was unpleasant. The bathroom was large but nasty and dust was thick everywhere. The hotel proudly displayed three stars, and certainly charged three-star prices, but our room was awful. The place as a whole looked as though it hadn't been renovated in thirty years. I'd recommend this hotel as a budget option, if it charged budget prices, but it doesn't. We were going to pay 110 Euros per night for our tumble-down en-suite. So instead of having our break in Paris ruined by a terrible hotel, we simply visited the Tourist Information bureau under the Palais-Royal at the Louvre, found an incredibly helpful, multi-lingual member of staff to assist us, and found a better value, better situated, much more pleasant hotel to move in to that very afternoon. We were only too happy to remove our bags from the over-priced Chamonix, but disgusted to be charged for one night despite our unpacked cases occupying the room less than 3 hours. Don't repeat our mistake! Avoid the Chamonix. By the way, we moved in to the Timhotel Palais Royal, part ofjust one minutes' walk from the Louvre. It was everything that the awful Hotel Chamonix wasn't.