Feel free to help us grow!

Since you asked:
I was not able to complete any of my reservations with my newly acquired visitfrance.travel membership! The best site was, sad to say, a UK operation called ‘Smooth Hound.’ It had more hotels per city, more information per hotel, and very quick service, even if they had to fax the hotel instead of using e-mail. Perhaps much of this is due to the fact that we do not reach France until 19 Sept – but, that should not truly matter.
We found no special ‘deals’ except very bland ‘tourist’ hotels – expect for a 3 for the price of 4 nights at le Haute Roches outside Tours. It was a Chateaux et Relais special – and very much appreciated.
A ‘special’ was mentioned about the Eurostar. In talking with a Hertz car rental agent, we found a much better special by keeping our car from England, taking it across the Channel, and trading it for a right-hand drive in Calais. It saved us OVER $800!!!!
I write this as a friend, and I hope visitfrance.travel works well. So far, it has cost us $20.13 US, and we have not been able to use it at all. If I were to forward our itinerary to you, could you tell if we will be able to use it at all? From all ‘specials’ indicated on your website, it does not look promising.
Thank you for listening to me. I appreciate your asking for advise. And – we watched every day of le Tour de France! OLN’s coverage was supurb! CC Rogers

Hi CCrogers!

We do appreciate your input. Immensely, in fact! Even though we’re disappointed we could not be of more help 🙁

Now let’s take all these things one by one and see where we failed:

Hotel reservations: We’ve just had a look at Smooth Hound. It looks like a very complete site indeed. Lots of hotels, mostly chain hotels. I think the reason why France.com may not be as useful to you is that we do have very few specials (some in Paris, but that’s it). We are looking to add a few hundred hotels in the next few weeks. And we will add specials, so you’ll be able to see that by the time you return. In fact we’ll add some of the same hotels you’ve found on this uk site.

Car Reservation: Brits listen to the brilliant piece of advise given by ccrogers! Now thanks to this Hertz agent (who shall remain nameless, unfortunately!) we all know what is the best way of getting a car hire across the channel. Thanks again!

Membership: you mention that the membership cost you $20.12 so far. I definitely more info on that since our memeberships are free. Please try and explain how you came to this price. Or if this is maybe related to another site???

Specials: We do have some specials on France.com. They may not be very promising (?), but these are special prices in really charming non-chain, independent hotels, where you will be received well and warmly. This may not seem much, but since you’re traveling you’ll feel better at any of these hotels than any "discounted" hotels offered elsewhere. We’ll stand behind that!

Again, thanks a lot for your input. It’s tremendously helpful! Look us up some time in the future. We’ll have more properties, more discounts. More choice.

Feel free to report back from your trip after visiting these hotels!

Sincerely,

Forums_Admin

Hello,

I was viewing the site and discovered some hotels had viewable comments while others did not. I began to read some of the comments earlier and wanted to finish reading them. When I came back today, I discovered the hotels did not have any comments.

Hello,

Just a quick note on hotel comments: as of today the comments are those made by customers sent to the hotels by France.com. All comments posted are therefore real comments made by people who have stayed there and have made their reservation through us. Hotels that have no comments are just those for which we either did not send customers or those for which travellers have not written their comments.

As for the disapearing comments, this is a temporary thing. It’s a problem we encountered last week, which we’ll fix later on today or tomorrow. Come back then and you’ll find all the comments posted in their glorious original form!

J

Dear france .com,
we recentley went with you to paris, the taxi pickup both ways was excellent, the hotel the saint paul, St Germain excellent, but your original offer said we had Breakfast in the deal, They denied this, a previous comment had said just the same thing in july 03 and i emailed you prior to going but received no reply. I have recommended you to others and I hope you can iron out these niggly problems so that you can become the best site on the net,
Best wishes roger bentley Cardiff Wales

Hello Thomas,

Thanks for taking the time to write. We appreciate your letting us know about problems encountered during your trip.

Just to make sure I understand correctly: the hotel denied the free breakfast and charged you for it, or did they deny they were aware of the special and ended up not charging it? I’m asking because we, obviously, contacted them about the previous comment, and we were told it had been an isolated incident and that the guest was not charged the breakfast in the end.

I’ll be happy to take it to then and make sure that you get the breakfast recredited. A deal’s a deal, and we’ll stand behind our commitments.

Glad, to hear the shuttle service worked out as planned.

Let me know and we’ll fix it!

Sincerely,

Estelle

Hello. First, I want to say we’ve been using your site for our French hotel reservations almost since you started. We’ve reserved our hotels in Paris with you since 1998 and have reserved a couple hotels in other parts of France. Your service has always been excellent. The hotels have been exactly as expected. The reviews are very helpful. Even the bad reviews are useful because we can see if it’s something that would bother us and find another place or if it’s something that might annoy the reviewer but wouldn’t be a problem for us, i.e. no parking in Paris or small bathrooms, etc.

Suggestion: The forums are not particularly helpful or particularly active. You need to attract more experienced travelers to the forums. It might serve your purpose to have some of your staff members who travel a lot post and/or reply to posts to set the tone you want. If you get a good mix of experienced people and newbies, you have a better chance of people helping people.

Enticing questions attract interested posters, e.g., "What is your favorite hotel in France and why?" or "What is your favorite theme park in France and why?" or "Where did you have your best meal in France?" You get the idea, open-ended questions.

Obviously, people in the forums can post questions, but the occasional post by you to entice people to become engaged might increase activity. If there are only a few answers to a question, you might have a staff member reply to the post so the poster doesn’t feel abandoned.

You’re off to a good start and your reservation service is excellent. Thanks for all your efforts.

SalB,

You’re absolutely correct about the forums. Sometimes they feel (even to us !) like incessant teen babbling. But there’s more to them, thanks to people, like you, who have posted enlightning, thoughtful posts which are very useful for travelers. We are going to be more focused on these posts and have our staff contribute in a more meaningful way.

We’ve been hard at work in bringing more info to the site, the results of which should be apparent pretty soon. This may have been to the expense of more forums participation on our part. For this, we apologize.

In any event, thanks for being such a loyal customer, and thank you very much for all the kind words. Please stick around… France.com is going to be much more interesting and information-rich in the coming months.

Hopefully you’ll agee! And if you don’t, again please let us know.

Best wishes from all of us for this new year!

Estelle

Wow, I love your new look. You’ve really improved the site. It has so many really neat "French" things on it now . . . especially the real estate links.

I can’t wait to spend some more time exploring. Any more surprises in the future?

Thanks so much for all your hard work.

No one seems to check this thread very often, but I would like to respectfully suggest that the thread "France-USA Rift; for how long?" is somewhat counterproductive to the idea of a travel web site. I’ve seen some incredibly cruel things said there and the language tends to be more crude than on other threads. Is it really necessary? Does anyone edit it?

If the purpose of this forum is to discuss travel in France and the French culture, is it possible the "France-USA Rift" thread might be more appropriate on a politically oriented forum. There are plenty of those available.

I’m sure someone reading this will tell me that if it bothers me, I should leave the forum and perhaps that is correct, but I thought I’d at least tell you that I find some of the attitudes and the language used in the "France-USA Rift" thread narrow minded, offensive and somewhat unnerving.

Admin. SalB’s observations are right on, as usual. Why is it she (or he) reminds me of my mother? Anyway, I have probably been guilty of some of the behaviors that she mentioned. I look at the Forums as a diversion and try not to get too hung up by them. She or he is right, though, the site should concentrate on culture, travel, and education. Then again, the internet is the world and we have to come to grips with it. As you can see, I love the site and it has afforded my wife and I much pleasure. I look look forward to visiting your fine country in the Spring. Regards, Donerail

I enjoyed my stay at the Hotel Saint Paul Paris which I booked through France.com and everything went very smoothly. I was however, a little disapointed (being a first time France.com user) when I sent a message to France.com 4 days before my trip to confirm everything was in order with my reservation (I included my reservation number as requested) and didn’t receive a response until today!! a month later!! I left Feb 21 and returned from Paris on Feb 26th. The reply I received today said "thank you for contacting France.com" that’s it. A month to respond to e-mails is a little rediculous. I had to e-mail the Hotel directly to make sure everything was OK. I even tried to call the number you have listed and it goes straight to an answering machine. I was a little nervous thinking there was no one on the other side of this website. I’m just gald everything went smoothly. I would hope if you list a phone number and e-mail address you would be a little more efficient in responding to your clients concerns.

Thanks for your email,

As a customer, it may be difficult to understand that France.com gets bombarded, litterally, everyday with questions, comments, ideas, opinions, remarks that rank from the easy to the extremely complex, most of which have really nothing to do with travel to France. Just listing a telephone number and an email does not make us more efficient, unfortunately, because it increases our workload exponentially.

We want to concentrate on our customers and continue providing the best service possible, but to do this we cannot answer the questions of everyone under the sun and their parents, grand-parents…

So we have recently updated our phone system and have made vast improvements to the way we handle emails. One month is ridiculous to get an email answer, we’ll agree with that!

Don’t fear. There is always someone monitoring the hotel reservations to ensure our customers do get a fast answer to their question and get what they want. I’m surprised that it took us so long to respond to your email, because we do try to answer customers concerns really fast.

For those who are reading this and who have made reservations, just keep in mind that you will almost always get a faster answer to your question if you email it than if you phone in. One reason is that it makes it easier to track the history of questions/answer given, etc. Also, since we work with offices in different time zones, email is pretty much read 20 hours/day, while phone service is not as extensive, yet. That being said, a phone number available for customers only would seem to make much sense. We’ll work on it.

FA