Château Arnaud

The rooms are spacious and the view is great. Breakfast is complimentary, though it’s very much geared toward takeaway. Parking is really limited, and the gym was nearly empty. Room service takes a very relaxed approach.

The location and the views of the town are great. We also had a small private balcony, and there are larger shared balconies on one side of the building on each floor. The beds were very comfortable, and it wasn’t too noisy at night. Our three day stay was still a letdown. The rooms had a strong old, musty smell that remained even after we kept the balcony door open to air them out. It really affected the experience for me and my family. The rooms were technically okay, but the smell was hard to get past. There seemed to be far too few staff. One person appeared to be doing the work of three, and the woman at reception was visibly struggling as she ran around handling everything. The gym was ridiculous, just a small room with four pieces of equipment, one broken. At least the AC worked well. Breakfast was fine, but they had bacon, sausages, and eggs without any potatoes. The milk cartons tasted strange. They weren’t technically past their expiry date, but we couldn’t drink them. We told the person in charge that morning, and he said the milk was fine because the date was okay, then said he’d put the cartons back in the fridge. Yuk. We skipped the milk the next morning.

For a hotel calling itself a château, the experience was a nightmare. There was no warmth or real hospitality, and the common areas were often dirty and cluttered. The lighting was dim, the decor felt depressing and dated, and the TV had few channels with a remote that barely worked. Wi-Fi was slow and unreliable, so getting work done was difficult. Our room was shabby and poorly maintained, more like a cheap old motel than the nicely decorated corridors. The furniture was outdated, the bed uncomfortable, and the flat pillows gave no support. The bathroom wasn’t properly cleaned, with mold in the shower and a lingering bad smell. We stayed a week, and the room was never made up. They blamed this on protecting the environment, which felt like a lame excuse for laziness and poor service. If they cared about the environment, they could put recycling bins in the rooms and restaurant and cut down on all the packaging. There weren’t any recycling bins anywhere, just trash bins, even though the cups said "Recycle me." Breakfast was a disaster. The amount of plastic and over-packaging was appalling, with every slice of bread wrapped individually. Some buffet items were rotten, which is unacceptable. The coffee cups in the rooms were so tiny you got about one sip. Staff were indifferent and kept making mistakes with reservations. When we arrived, they wouldn’t take responsibility and blamed the people who booked. The customer definitely isn’t king here. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing, but they came across as condescending and showed no regard for their clients. They failed at basic hospitality and essential services. Avoid Hôtel Château Arnaud in Sept-Îles.

Breakfast was decent, but it was served in a windowless basement room that felt like a dungeon. The hotel is less than 10 years old, yet our room looked decades out of date, from the carpeting to the furniture. The shower swung from ice cold to boiling hot with little warning, then broke after a few days and wouldn’t turn off. We had to move rooms on our last night. There weren’t enough spaces out front, so we had to park behind the hotel. It wasn’t clear which spots belonged to the hotel, and reception was no help.