I’m not sure where this fits, but I thought I’d stick it here.
Like a lot of you I don’t sleep well while flying. And while I know that the official RS policy is just power through and keep going sometimes that doesn’t work. For me what works is taking a shower and having an hour or two nap - no more than two - and then I can go until about 10 PM that night and I’m on European time
For this trip, I knew there was a high risk I could not check into my hotel early. It was sold out the night before which meant that was a good chance my room would not be ready when I got there. I had heard about that Day use rooms. There’s a website with that name (one word I’m not going put it in here so this doesn’t look like a sales pitch) but I was a little concerned this wouldn’t really work.
So I booked the Holiday Inn express at the Charles de Gaulle airport that you didn’t have to pay for in advance for about €60. I took the little train at the airport to the hotel showed up and they had my reservation. It was the €60 I had expected. The room was great. I closed the curtains, took a shower, took an hour and a half nap got up and headed into Paris. I’ll do it again. 60 euros is a lot cheaper than my hotel in Paris was for an extra night had it even been available
I would recommend when you’re doing this to look to make sure that the hotel is close to the airport via some kind of airport transportation. There were several options that were very affordable, but I realized I would have to get a shuttle to the hotel, and that seemed to be too much work for me for this, considering I knew at this hotel airport they were Hotels where you could take the train. For example, there was an Ibis that was about €40 but then I realized it was about a 20 minute hotel shuttle and I decided I’d rather pay the €20 to stay on the airport property and not have to deal with that shuttle. They also had hotels that were all the way in Paris, which might be an option for some of you, but it was not what I was looking for for this trip.
Now I’m not going to guarantee this always works this way, but I will say since you don’t have to pay in advance for a lot of these hotels it’s a low risk plan. Note there are some you do have to pay in advance I also ruled those out because I just wasn’t sure this was going to work.
You can also call hotels directly, but I was looking for an easy method that didn’t involve me trying to call a bunch of hotels in Paris and get price quotes.