Hotel HM

Our Members Say

 My girlfriend and I stayed at Hotel HM for 1 night during a weekend visit to Marseille in June 2009.

We paid 40 Euros for a double room with en-suite facilities, with no breakfast included. We booked the hotel online (through www.hotelclub.net), paid a 10% deposit at the time of booking and settled the bill upon checking in at the hotel.

Location

Hotel HM enjoys a central location, convenient for exploring the sights of Marseille on foot.

It is located on the small side street of Rue des Recollettes, just 50m off the main street of La Canabiere and less than 5 minutes walk from the port. If you’re not familiar with the layout of Marseille, the city is pretty much centred around the port. From there, La Canabiere (a wide boulevard known as the “Champs Elysees of Marseille”) is the main street running inland. To reach Hotel HM from the port, you need only walk about 200m along La Canabiere and then turn right and walk a further 50m along Rue des Recollettes. In short, this hotel is very centrally located.

We arrived in Marseille on a bus from the airport, which dropped us off at the bus station next to Gare Saint Charles railway station. From there, it was around 15 minutes walk to the hotel.

Prior to our visit, we had a quick look at Google Street View just to familiarise ourselves with the surrounding area and identify exactly where the hotel was. Consequently, we found it very easily upon arrival. A quick tip: the entrance to Rue des Recollettes is between an Olympique Marseille boutique and a “Marseille-Provence 2013” tourism office.

To be honest, Rue des Recollettes looked pretty rough at first sight. A large bin was overflowing with waste and a variety of unwanted household items (furniture, suitcases, clothing) had been dumped on the sidewalk. This proved to be an attraction for the local homeless population, one of whom had seemingly over-indulged in alcohol that day and was passed out besides the waste, right opposite the hotel. The hotel and the adjacent buildings were largely obscured by scaffolding.

Bedroom

Our double room was tiny, but it was adequate for the short time that we spent in there.

The room contained a bed, a small wardrobe, a TV (with half a dozen local channels), a couple of shelves and, blissfully, a good powerful air-conditioning unit (complete with remote control for setting the desired temperature).

The room was clean and it was brightly and imaginatively furnished – a bright yellow bedspread, blue and yellow curtains, an oddly-shaped wall mirror, paintings above the bed and plenty of light made the room rather pleasant.

Naturally, the en-suite shower room was even more tiny, but it too was clean and bright. We were provided with two towels each (a small one…and an even smaller one!) and rudimentary toiletries (bars of soap and sachets of shower gel). There was plenty of hot water in the shower, the water pressure was fine and the only slight problem was that the water took an age to go down the plug, leaving us ankle deep in water in a matter of seconds and causing us to worry about flooding the bathroom. Only a small problem though, no big deal.

Despite the scaffolding immediately outside our window, there was no work taking place the weekend we stayed there so our sleep wasn’t interrupted at all.

General

The hotel has no lifts, but as we were only carrying small backpacks this wasn’t a problem for us. Reception is located one floor above ground level and our room was located two floors further up.

Breakfast isn’t included in the room rate but you can purchase a Continental breakfast for 5 Euros per person, per day. We didn’t do so, but I must say that the large croissants looked very tasty when we passed through the breakfast area in the morning.

A basic hotel with a very central location. No frills, but clean and bright rooms at good value prices. Ideal for a short stay. 

139 members live in Marseille