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Daily Deal—Paris for $399

Welcome to the reidsguides.com daily travel deal for March 4, 2005.

Paris in the springtime means light crowds—and short lines at the Louvre. It also means balmy days to nibble on hot crepes while strolling the city parks in bloom. The catch is this $399 deal from Gate1 Travel is good only on a handful departure dates. But for an extra 50 bucks, you can go anytime in April or May—and stay for a full six nights.

If you fly out on April 20 or 21 or on May 18 or 19, the hotel you’d get would the Kyriad Paris la Villette near the Parc de la Villette, which is out in the boondocks of the 19th arrondissement—that’s fine if you prefer a Parisian neighborhood to the tourist zone, but it’s quite a hike from the sights of central Paris. Fair warning.

Try to avoid the April 13 or 14, as the hotel for those dates is a soulless conventioneer hotel out beyond the Gare de Bercy.

If those departure dates don’t work, up the ante to $449 and you can travel anytime between April 1 and May 27. What’s more, you’d be staying at the modest little Relais de Paris. No great shakes as a hotel, but the location— tucked between the Bastille Opera house and Gare de Lyon train station—is better than any of those others. It’s a short walk from the nightlife and restaurants of the Bastille and Marais neighborhoods, and it’s right across the Seine from the lovely Jardin des Plantes gardens, one of my favorite un-touristy corners of Paris.

So long as you’re considering ponying up $449 anyway, why not stay longer in Paris? From April 1 to May 31, a company called Go-Today.com is offering six nights at a hotel near Père Lachaise cemetery, plus roundtrip airfare from Newark.

They can price it so low because, rather than using a US carrier, they fly you over there on Air India, which stops at Paris on its way from Newark to Delhi. Don’t live in Jersey? ‘Fraid the bad news is that prices start at $639 outside the New York area and can go as high as $1,200 on the West Coast.

As usual, all those prices are per person for two people traveling together, and taxes and fees are gong to tack on another $100 to $200. But rather than listen to me blabber about all the fine print, you can peruse it yourself.

Just go to reidsguides.com, click on the transcript for this Daily Deal, and you’ll find links to both of these bargains—as well as hundreds of trip planning tools and a guide to free things to see and do in Paris in the Europe for Free section. That’s www.reidsguides.com.

Until tomorrow’s deal, thanks for listening.