Hotels with elevators: Amsterdam, Paris, Burgundy, Normandy

For Amsterdam the Ibis Hotel at Centraal Station should be step-free. There is also a brand new Doubletree across from Centraal which might offer discount rates off-season. Also check-out the Movenpick Hotel, it's further away at the cruise ship terminal but is in a modern building.

In Paris I can suggest the Hotel Ideal on rue Emile-Zola in the 15th and Hotel Caravelle on rue des Martyrs in the 9th. Both fall within your budget and both have elevators, small but they go up and down just fine.

For Paris, try Hotel des Grandes Ecoles in the 5th arrondissement. They have an elevator, good location, nice hotel with a courtyard/garden. Prices start at 120 euros for two. Another hotel I like a lot, but not as centrally located, is Hotel de l'Avre in the 15th arrondissement. About 3 long blocks from Ecole Militaire and the east end of the Champs de Mars. It's a half block from a great Metro stop (La Motte Picquet-Grenelle) which is the hub for 3 Metro lines making it a direct connection by Metro to many places you'll want to go. The hotel is also a half block from a really good Monoprix and a twice a week outdoor market. The owner, Bernard, and his staff are wonderful. They have a very nice garden where you can eat breakfast, elevator, decent sized rooms, nice bathrooms and is very clean. We stayed there for 6 wks on one trip and enjoyed it. Their prices start at 92 euros for two.

In Paris the Hotel du Loiret has an elevator to all floors. It's just steps from Rue du Rivoli in the 4th. The shower in a single room was very small-don't know what a double is like. The breakfast room is down a spiral staircase, but there are bakeries and cafes very near.

I'm splitting this message up because even though it was within the character limit, it would not post. Here's the first part. I feel her pain, literally! I have bone spurs below both knee caps. Last year I got shots before our trip to France. It was a miracle. Up until then, I had to take stairs one step at a time both up and down. I will get shots again before our trip this spring. One thing the U of AZ orthopedist said was to see someone in their field to get the shots, not just a family doctor. Most of the bad experiences people have with them are because the person giving the shot(s) was not an expert at doing it. Now I'll try to post the rest.

Here's the rest, so far. Now, having said all that, my husband(64) and I(67) still opt for lodgings on the ground floor or with only one flight of stairs to climb or with an elevator. Most of the resources for locating lodging will include whether or not there is a lift, but sometimes that information is hidden in the description and not searchable. For the smaller towns along your journey, you might try searching Logis. If you click on "more criteria" at the bottom of the search box, it will take you to an advanced search page where you can mark all kinds of boxes to limit your search to something that will be good for you. Logis hotels rarely have more than a ground and 1st floor. You can mark a box for there to be a lift, but it will severely limit your results. For example, when I put Bayeux for the location, I got 20 results in the area, but if I marked the "lift" box, there were only 2. Most listings have a link to the hotel's website. When you find an attractive place, you can always go through that link to email them to ask about rooms on the ground floor. Logis hotels are usually in small towns and have free parking. We stayed in 3 of them in France last June. Our primary criteria was that the restaurant have a rating of 3 or higher. We were not disappointed. I will continue this later with some other suitable searching possibilities I encountered in planning for my knees on our upcoming trip.

We stayed at The Toren Hotel in Amsterdam. Upscale, nice hotel on the canal with a normal size elevator. Price depending on date is 130 euros.

Amsterdam in general may be a problem if you're uncertain on stairs. Most old buildings and surprisingly many modern buildings in the Netherlands and the Flemish parts of Belgium have exceptionally steep staircases due to historical pressures on space - both tall risers and very short treads that you can get less than half your foot on.

Here I am again. First, 130 Euros today is $175, so your budget is reasonable. Unfortunately, you will really have to research and browse to find something that will work. The usual suspects (Homeaway.com, VRBO.com, TripAdvisor.com, etc.) do not make it easy to search for places on the ground floor or with an elevator. What I did was to use as many criteria as were appropriate for us to narrow down the number of results, then browsed them. Tedious, I know. However, I found many ground (0) floor places as possibilities. One trick you can use with Booking.com is to sort your results based on the "Review Score" from "Mature couples." In looking for places in Amsterdam, I stumbled on Amsterdamapartments.com. When you get results from the other criteria, at the bottom of the apartment description is a quick list of what the place has to offer. The floor is always listed. One heads up is that if you identify a place with an elevator using any of these sources, be sure to find out where it starts and where it ends. In our experience, some lifts start on floor 1, not floor 0. Some go only as far as the floor below the top floor. Another thing to watch out for is the location of the bed in the room or apartment. Sometimes it is in a loft area with steep stairs to climb up to it, and the bathroom is on the main level. That's always a lose-lose situation for this mature couple.

In Amsterdam I would recommend Hotel Brouwer...look it up on TripAdvisor. The elevator (like in many old buildings in Europe) is tiny, but will fit 2 people. The rooms were simple and basic, but very clean. I had a view of the canal and it was located a 10 minute walk from the Central train station.

Dick, a huge number of tiny hotels in Paris have ... tiny ... elevators. So you could do a normal search (say, TripAdvisor), and then go to the websites of those you like to be certain of an elevator. I do worry that at a few places with elevator, it might not go to a (sometimes) basement breakfast room. It does go, at my choice, Hotel Louvre Sainte-Anne.

Dear Dick, Go to airbnb.com or homelidays.co.uk. Both have holiday homes/flats for rent by owner and they are usually cheaper than hotels plus you get the added bonus of an actual small "homey" place. We stayed in Paris in 2010 (we were ash cloud victims) just three-four blocks west of the Seine where the Ile de la Cite and Ile St.Louis meet on the 4th floor of an apartment building. It had a small elevator and balcony, washer, kitchen. I don't remember the price but I can tell you it was no more than 100E a night (that was my max). We loved it! From Paris we trained to Nice and used the same company for another flat on an upper floor in a building with an elevator. We had views of red-tiled roofs and the Alps from our windows. Planning an April trip to Spain and will use one of the two companies I named. They usually tell you which story and if they have an elevator. Trudy

In Amsterdam, try Hotel Hestia near Vondel Park. They have good rates and an elevator--and they're not a huge, business class hotel (www.hotel-hestia.nl).

Sign up for Ibis email, etc. on their website. If you sign up for their rewards program on line and then book a room, you'll get a discount.
I would also suggest looking/booking things on line with Hotels.com --sign up for their rewards program first. After you stay a certain # of nights you get a free room. Enjoy your trip!

I'm in the process of finding places in Germany that are wheelchair friendy - not nessisarily total wheelchair access, but limited stairs, step-ups, etc. I've found on the Michelin site http://www.viamichelin.com/
you can filter hotels by wheelchair acess. I would think to get this rating limited stairs would be required? I've also e-mailed possible places and asked - some have been very truthful, but others don't even reply.

Thanks for all the helpful ideas. Susan, we stayed at the Hotel des Grandes Ecoles ten years ago, thanks for reminding me about the elevator. We loved it, so maybe we'll return. Lo, thanks for all your good thoughts. My wife may go with a cortisone shot but wants to minimize this for other reasons. We've been looking on the Logis website for countryside possibilities, and Homeaway, which we've used before, for city apartments. Laurie, thanks for the tipoff to Brouwer in Amsterdam, it looks like a good candidate. I appreciate all the good people on this board who are so ready to share their good ideas and goodwill.

In addition to the hotel having a lift, try to determine if there are a lot of steps leading to the hotel entrance (this was a problem for me when I traveled with a knee injury).

Bear in mind also, that the restroom facilities in many restaurants/cafes in Europe are either up or downstairs.