Paris has overestimated its appeal – and bargain-hunters could benefit
Has Paris overestimated the appeal of the Olympics this summer? It certainly seems that many of the city’s hotels may have done so. They were expecting to profit from a bonanza of bookings. As recently as last December, Le Monde reported that prices during the 17 days of the Games, which start on July 26, had reached dizzying heights.
According to the French newspaper, Ibis hotels whose normal rates were €80-€200 were charging between between €400 and €600 per night during the Games, and one, Ibis Styles, on rue de Crimée in the 18th arrondissement, was pricing its rooms at €700 a night. The four-star Hôtel du Beaumont in Montmartre, an independent hotel, was charging €1,210 for the night of August 3-4, compared with a rate of €220 at the beginning of July.
Meanwhile, from July 20–September 8, the cost of a single Metro ticket will rise from €2.15 to €4, bus tickets will double from €2.50 to €5 and the Louvre admission price has already risen by nearly 30 per cent this year.
But it seems as though the expected demand – put off surely by these price hikes – has not materialised as expected. When I checked rates at the Ibis Styles this week via Booking.com, they had fallen back to just over €200 a night during the Olympic weeks, and there was still plenty of availability at that price. Meanwhile, rooms at the Hôtel du Beaumont were on sale for €529 for August 3-4, less than half the rate found by Le Monde, though still priced up.
These examples seem to reflect the situation overall. Prices are still higher than normal for July/August, but rates which had been ratcheted up to take advantage of a surge in demand during the Games have dropped significantly. According to the data insights company, Lighthouse, overall average rates for the Olympic period have fallen in the last nine months from €523 to €282 for three-star hotels and from €738 to €430 for four-star properties. Even in the last month or so, they have dropped €50 a night. Five-star hotel rates have held up better, and are now creeping up again, but they have still dropped overall in the last three months.
My own research this week found dozens of hotels in the city with availability throughout the 16-day period in July and August. Many, probably most, were offering both discounts and – on Booking.com – free cancellation. Examples, based on a three-night stay in a three-star hotel over the climactic days of the Games (August 9-12), were: the Hôtel des Marronniers in the 6th arrondissement, which was offering a rate cut from £1,324 to £760; the Hôtel Bonne Nouvelle in the 2nd, rate reduced from £836 to £546 and the Hôtel Saint-Louis en L’Isle, in the 4th, from £1,511 to £917.
Overall, Lighthouse says that while hotel bookings are higher during the Olympics than most of the rest of the summer, occupancy rates are mostly still below 70 per cent, only hitting levels above that on four days over the period. Meanwhile, occupancy rates for short-let apartments, such as Airbnb, are at less than 28 per cent – actually below those of early July. Rates are higher – roughly double the overall average for 2024, though a glance at the Airbnb website shows that many owners are now cutting their prices to try to attract customers.
So if you were put off a visit to the Olympics by reports of high prices and are still keen to go, you may be encouraged first that there are still tickets available for many sports (click here to learn more), as well as free events such as the triathlon and the marathon, and that there are also plenty of reasonable fares from London to Paris on Eurostar, too. For those dates of August 9-12, I found returns at £158 and generally over the period of the Olympics, you can buy tickets for less than that – usually under £130 return. In my experience of booking Eurostar tickets at only a few weeks’ notice, that looks cheap. And if you are travelling from further north in the UK there are plenty of flights available at under or around £100 return. From Manchester from August 9-12, starting at £104 with EasyJet, for example.
