Hotel Spa - Au Charme Rabelaisien

The hotel boasts clean, spacious rooms with comfortable beds and a central location near attractions. Guests appreciate the friendly staff and amenities but find it overpriced.

Thank you to the staff at Hotel Au Charme Rabelaisien for a perfect few days in Amboise before going to Paris. After entering the beautiful lobby area, our first moment in the hotel was drinking a glass of wine in the beautiful courtyard. This became the daily ritual before getting ready for dinner! The two staff we met were so friendly, helpful with restaurant suggestions, transportation and excursion advice and arranging, and just really nice to talk to during our stay. Our room on the top floor, with it's own staircase, was perfect - the bed was so comfortable, the room was peaceful and extremely spacious to relax with a drink. It was nice walking down the stairs and throughout the hotel as it's a beautiful space to be in decorated with art, colour and historical ambience. We loved breakfast each morning. We prefer this hotel's style of fewer but nicely laid out items of higher quality. Fruit, coffee, cheeses, jams, bread, the sweet courtyard and friendly staff - perfect start to each morning. Amboise was the highlight of our trip to France and our experience at Hotel Au Charme Rabelaisien made it exceptional.

Let's start with the positive things: Au Charme Rabelaisien is a beautiful old boutique hotel with nice and big rooms, it's conveniently located in the city center but it's still quiet and you have a parking place on the spot. The breakfast is also good compared to the usual French breakfast in other hotels. What spoiled our stay was the fact that the heating in the bathroom did not work and it's not nice to take a shower in a cold room with November temperatures outside. When I informed the reception I was told on the first day that we just don't know how to switch the heating on. On the second day they realized that it was really broken and all I got was ' luckily it's not so cold these days, so just leave the bathroom door open and the room will heat up with the bedroom's temperature'. Only that in the bedroom the heating also worked very poorly although we had it full on ... The second thing to warn about is the sauna: You pay 35 Euros for an hour for which you get individual access to the sauna and a jacuzzi in a very tiny room. There is a shower but no opportunity to relax somewhere on a bed, all you have is actually one table with two chairs separated by a door from the breakfast room. And it was cold in that room as well. I would not have bothered writing this review if at our check-out we would have had an excuse, just a simple 'We are sorry for the inconvenience with the heating' would have been enough. But nothing came although I mentioned the issue once more, this was disappointing.