Parisians seek refuge from heatwave in air-conditioned hotels

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Parisians grappling with the hottest nights on record have fled sweltering flats and sought refuge in air-conditioned hotels, pushing up reservations across the French capital.

Hotel managers throughout the city confirmed a surge in last-minute bookings in recent days and a flood of requests, including from workers wanting to use rooms during the day, as a lengthy heatwave grips Europe. 

In densely populated Paris, police banned drinking alcohol in public spaces from midday on Friday to take the pressure off emergency workers, with hospitals already warning they are at full capacity. Pride festivities originally planned for Saturday have been postponed to September, and a big music festival in Paris’s hippodrome has been cancelled.

Since Monday, night-time temperatures have blasted through one record after another, dropping no lower than 26.4C in the night of Wednesday to Thursday in the city, while reaching 40C during the day. Daily temperature highs are not forecast to drop below 35C until Sunday.

“As the heatwave became more intense, we started to see reservations from people who lived in non-air-conditioned homes and couldn’t bear it anymore, who have children and were looking for cooler hotels to sleep,” said Frank Delvau, the head of the UMIH association of hotel and restaurant owners in the Ile-de-France region around Paris.

“We’ve had elderly people doing it too, or people trying to work.”

France has recorded a series of heat-related deaths in recent days, and even hospitals have warned some patient rooms are not cool enough. 

Paris’s picturesque zinc rooftops are heat-absorbing, adding to the discomfort, and many retailers have sold out of fans. 

At an Ibis hotel in eastern Paris on Friday, one family of four said they had fled a stifling temporary apartment they were staying in during renovations to their own flat. Parents Jordi and Mia, who did not want to give their second names, began looking for an air-conditioned hotel when their two-year-old developed a fever on Monday. 

“We were supposed to be here until Friday and we’re extending,” said Jordi, in the pleasantly cold breakfast room, with a two-month old baby strapped to his chest. “While we’ve been here it gets even busier during the day, there’s been a lot of day use. We’ve seen many people turned away for rooms too.”

The owner of one hotel by Paris’s Austerlitz train station said several people had come to book rooms during the day to cool off instead of waiting in the overheated station, which is in the middle of a big renovation. But nights were already fully booked, the owner added. 

June is already peak tourist season. The heatwave has coincided with men’s fashion week in Paris, filling high-end hotels too. Delvau said hotels were already about 80 to 85 per cent booked before the heatwave hit.

The city has resorted to other unusual fixes to cope with the high temperatures. Many schools and nurseries have closed but the mayor of the ninth arrondissement said this week that some schoolchildren in the district had been allowed to use Google’s premises in the area, at the town hall’s request. 

Some hotels have also opened their doors to primary school children, who attended makeshift classes in eating areas or conference rooms. City halls in several districts have opened “cool rooms” to the public. The Paris city hall has ordered 20 tonnes of extra ice, being stocked in an ice rink, to distribute to emergency services to help treat people with heatstroke.

On Friday, France’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu urged people to avoid sports like running, saying too many were still putting themselves in danger. 

Paris police chief Patrice Faure has warned that “drinking alcohol in full sunshine can have devastating effects,” adding that it was straining ambulance services and first responders.

Sales of alcohol in stores will also be banned from six o’clock in the evening on Friday, although restaurants can still serve it. 

“Here too we want to avoid that people wanting to quench their thirst because of the extreme heat do so with alcoholic products, leading to those same effects,” Faure added on Thursday evening.