The Explorers Hotel Disneyland, Marne-la-Vallee > Reviews (10)

On visiting Disneyland Paris is January 2008, I researched hotel and travel options extensively in order to make sure I got my term-time holiday (the kids being preschoolers) at the best possible rate. Reading up on www.disboards.com and trip advisor this hotel kept coming up as being good value and also being the only one I could find to have a family room with and adjoining children's bedroom as opposed to curtained bunk beds.
For this reason I decided to book it, at the time it was a reasonable £70 per night for a "crew room" which had a double bed, two twin and bunk beds in an adjoining room. We were provided with a travel cotin addition to this for no further charge. Current rates are vary but start at the £84 rate.

This hotel is a 3 star one and is situated a short drive from the main park. The hotel is grouped with other similar non-disney hotels and there is a free shuttle bus from the train station and park, which we found was fine. We did not have to wait at any point on our 5 day visit, though of course this may not be true in busier periods.

The room:

The room was nautically themed and very clean. The beds were comfortable and the bathroom was fine. There was a tv with a few channels, only two of which were in English but we didn't spend much time watching tv, neither did we avail ourselves of the playstation which was available for an extra fee.
Our room had one big downfall and that was that it was situated on the side of the hotel and looking over the indoor pool, which would have been fine only there was a water shute which snaked out of the building and right under our window. The pool was open until surprisingly late, around 11pm. Luckily we were tired most nights but still the sound of people shouting "wheeeee" in varying accents every few seconds as they whizzed past your window grated after a while. I think this was probably the case for only very few of the rooms, but still annoying. It was a plus that we didn't have to sit in the dark once the children were asleep due to the adjoining room.

The facilities:

Apart from the indoor pool there was a soft play area, two bars, a restaurant, a shop, a sandwich stall, an arcade and also a mini-gym for children.
The soft play was a little run down but fine, and proved useful at about 3am when the youngest (then under two) decided she was wide awake and wanted to see Mickey some more!
The other facilities were as you would expect; the pool was quite nice and had a giant pirate ship in it and during our stay it was being upgraded and I think extended to outside. One bar was allegedly English themed, and the other provided chips (good) and oven cooked pizzas (actually warmed up supermarket ready-made style and expensive for what they were). We didn't sample the all-you-could-eat buffet but had breakfast in the restaurant every morning as this was included in the room tarif.
Breakfast was a bizarre affair. Apart from the fact that the eldest insisted on dressing up as snow white each day, the hotel provided the worst croissants I have ever had in France (cooked from frozen) and also bread rolls and "ham" and cheese.

I think maybe they thought that guests would pinch the food for lunch, given the extortionate price of food in the park, so they cut up the ham and cheese into teeny-tiny pieces. This was quite strange really!

Overall:

I didn't feel we missed out on the park by staying in a non disney hotel, it was a lot cheaper though did mean we could only enter the park later than disney guests. Access to the park was good, and for what it was the hotel was fine, with a large hotel like this you are not going to get the personal touch, and basically when staying at disneyland you just need a place to sleep at the end of a busy day. This fitted the bill, though I could have done without the water slide!