On my recent trip through Minneapolis, I spent one night at Le Bourget Aero Suites:

American Aviator, Charles A. Lindbergh amazed the World in 1927 by landing in Paris after a solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. When he landed at the Le Bourget Aéroport he was met with one of the warmest receptions the World has ever seen. All Parisians cheered and welcomed the young, previously unknown, U.S. mail pilot…this is hospitality at its finest and the spirit of Le Bourget Aero Suites.

I like this place.

There are a few drawbacks. Shuttle service is free and friendly, but not necessarily as prompt as it could be. I called for a shuttle around 11 PM and was told to expect it in 20 minutes; when 40 minutes had gone by, I checked in; the front desk apologized, explained politely that it was a busy time of night and said the driver should be along soon. He was, in fact, and the service was so friendly that I couldn’t resent this too much, but if I’d had tired, cranky children in tow, or just come in from Europe, I would have been eager to get into my hotel room a little more efficiently.

As for the hotel itself, it’s built in a building that plainly used to belong to a less ambitious property. The hallways and to some extent the bathrooms betray those origins. The baths aren’t an especially generous size. The word “suite” is a tiny bit misleading as well — my suite had separate areas for sitting and sleeping, certainly, but there was no connecting door. If you want a suite for the extra space, Le Bourget delivers: the sitting area is generous and the ceilings are high. But if you want one person to be able to use the sitting area while the other sleeps in a dark, quiet environment, this isn’t the place for you.

To make matters worse, the flat-screen LCD TV is positioned on a countertop-desk that runs along both the sitting and the sleeping areas, and it’s put right at the divide — so that one could see it from either room, but watch comfortably from neither. Bad TV placement is a pet peeve of mine. So many hotels advertise their fancy new flat-panel televisions but don’t have room furniture really designed to hold such a thing, and have put them in stupid locations so that they’re hard to see comfortably from the bed or any of the chairs in the room. I’ve stayed in a $320-night room (not Le Bourget) whose flat screen could only have been watched comfortably by someone sitting in the closet. I don’t care passionately about being able to watch television in my room, but this arrangement is so clumsy — and so often wrong — that I have to wonder. Who installs these things in such stupid places? And why? In any case, Le Bourget is not unique in this failing.

Finally, there’s no minibar in the room, and room service stops at 10 PM. I think this is a little unfortunate in a hotel specifically catering to travelers coming in by plane: in the current circumstances, many airlines don’t serve food and it’s impossible to bring a bag meal through security screenings; so it’s extremely easy to miss meals due to travel, especially if your flight is at all delayed. A little more provision for guests arriving tired and hungry, even after hours, would be a nice touch.

But, like I said, I did like the place. Other reviewers have complained about noise in the hotel (I didn’t notice it being too bad, but then I’m a pretty sound sleeper) and about problems with the cleaning (this I would definitely have noticed, but my room was spotless). So neither of those things bothered me at all.

The “Le Bourget” theme struck me as possibly a bad idea when I was first looking at the hotel. It’s hard to carry off faux-Paris when in fact you’re on the outskirts of Minneapolis and the nearest point of interest is the Mall of America. But somehow it works here: the furnishings are spare and the rooms feel designed, but not in the all-white mode. The color palette is pale-blue and chocolate, vintage without being overbearing. The bedding is downy white with pale-blue embroidery. Here and there on the walls there are old-fashioned prints of airplanes. Even the L’Occitane toiletries seem selected to fit. They’re generously sized, too: the bath soap is a big bar that you can really use, rather than the dinky toy soaps you often get at a hotel.

My favorite decorating touch is the treatment of mirrors as furniture rather than wall-covering. Tall mirrors in dark wood frames are propped against the walls, both in the lobby and in guest rooms. The effect is theatrical but appealing, and the slight tilt makes it easier to see your entire outfit. Whoever did the design and planning took the vintage-French theme just seriously enough to give the hotel character, but interpreted it freely and avoided the more ridiculous possibilities.

Also nice: the free, non-minibar-charge bottles of Evian water; decent coffee; packets of Numi tea in both evening and morning varieties. The L’Occitane moisturizer was a useful thing after hours being dehydrated on a plane. Wireless internet is free and has a strong, reliable signal. Aside from the television problem, rooms are conveniently laid out, with bright reading light at the sitting room sofa and both sides of the bed, and more subdued lighting for the room as a whole. And the alarm clocks and wakeup calls are effective, just as you’d want in an airport hotel. Excepting the lack of after-hours snacks, they seemed to have put a good bit of thought into the needs of the airport traveler who is likely arriving late and/or leaving early.

As for the service, I had no special requests and wasn’t in the place long, so I didn’t have a chance to interact with them too much. But everyone I did speak to was extremely pleasant and seemed knowledgeable.

The upshot: you probably don’t stay in an airport hotel at all unless you have to. And I’m sure there are more luxurious places in Minneapolis proper. But Le Bourget offers a charming, comfortable alternative to the dreary chain hotels in this area. It’s also priced better than you might expect if you’re used to boutique hotels in New York or LA. (Or even Seattle.)