- A video review of the Inn at Death Valley.
I'm Chris, this is the traveling princess.
And in this video,
we're gonna tell you everything you need to know
if you're considering staying at this hotel,
including the areas around the hotel,
the neighborhood around the hotel,
which is Death Valley Park
and the inside of one of the rooms.
This room, a single king bed terrace view room.
Arriving to the hotel is a little bit interesting.
The main parking lot is down here at ground level.
You don't wanna park here to check in
if you've got luggage to drive up the ramp
and stop up here, kind of on the second level
in front of the lobby, 'cause the bell staff
can help you with your bags to your room.
Then if you leave your car here for 10 minutes,
you can go into the lobby up one flight of stairs,
check in, bell staff will take your luggage to your room,
and then you can take your car down
and park it at that ground level again.
There's two ways from here to get into the hotel.
You could certainly walk up the same ramp you drove on,
or you can go through the tunnel.
There is a big tunnel that goes underneath the hotel
that will bring you to the central elevators.
It's an old mining tunnel
and really quite an interesting way to get into your room.
And you'd actually see there's an exhibit
of an old mining operation in the middle of the tunnel.
Okay, so back into the lobby,
this is actually the third floor of the hotel.
And right next to it is the dining room at the inn.
This is the hotel's breakfast restaurant,
and also dinner restaurant.
Breakfast about $20 will get you pancakes, omelets,
that sort of thing.
For dinner, this is definitely Death Valley's,
highest end restaurant dinner price.
They're gonna be between 30, 60, even $70.
There's a dress code though if you eat here for dinner,
no T-shirts or shorts allowed.
And next to in dining room is also a bar open at night.
You'll also find free coffee here in the lobby
until 8:30 in the morning.
Now back down on the ground level of the hotel
down a whole bunch of steps from the lobby
is the hotel's really neat swimming pool.
This is a spring fed swimming pool complex.
When we were here in December,
the temperature was 89 degrees.
And down at the pool level, there's a pool cafe right here
that wasn't open when we visited.
And there's also a gym right here that
has a nice view of the pool
from inside this little building.
And it's actually funny in the gym,
there were Palm trees here when they built the gym
and so the Palm trees, go through the roof out the top.
Like tennis, there's also a tennis court.
And then there's a neat garden in the center of the hotel.
The guest room floors themselves have this
really interesting green, beige kind of vibe.
Does definitely feel like something built in 1927.
It could almost feel a little bit like it was a haunted
walking through these hallways
though I do like the tall ceilings.
The Inn at Death Valley is super centrally located
in Death Valley National Park.
This is the highway 190 that comes in
from Baker, California.
Just down that way is also Dante's View,
one of the best viewpoints in the park.
This road right here is the road down to Badwater Basin.
We at an elevation of sea level,
which is what that sign says going down into Furnace Creek
just that way and about a mile is the town of Furnace Creek.
So you can have all our restaurants and amenities of the
little Death Valley town right down there.
Now that we seen everything around the hotel,
let's check out the inside the rooms.
This is room 130, a king bed terrace view room.
The traveling princess is already coming up here
to explore this bed.
It's a tall bed.
So it's hard to get up on this bed.
There are nice pictures of not the Grand Canyon,
but in fact, where are we?
Where's this hotel?
Where are we doing this review of?
Death Valley.
Death Valley right up there.
Some two interesting green chairs here on the side,
a red lamp, a fireplace.
I don't know if anybody's ever burned any wood
in this fireplace.
What looks like a place for a television, but no,
there's a picture of some flowers.
The television is in fact up here.
There's a coffee pot right down here.
What do we have in here?
We got some empty drawers in this thing,
but then hiding way in here, very nice,
there is a nice refrigerator in this room,
which is good for a place that's in the middle of nowhere.
Couple bottles of water, ice, do hickey.
There's a small desk in the room right here
with power right on top of it,
which I like in a very interesting,
just brown, rich looking leather chair.
Our room is a terrace view room
so there's a second door of the room
that goes out here.
In the daytime, you can see that this is a nice big terrace
that's shared between the different rooms.
There's some big, comfy seats on it
and it looks out all on Death Valley.
Now let me take you over to the bathroom part of the room.
It's a small bathroom, but feels very,
almost like 1920s in style, I would guess.
And I say it's 1920s in style because there's actually
a window right here in the bathroom,
which is pretty rare in bathrooms.
Now they used to have windows that actually open.
This window actually opens so that's interesting.
It's frosted glass, so don't worry.
And then the shower part of the room
is a walk-in shower, no bath.
So three quarter bathroom, only a single fixed head,
no handheld in the shower though,
the ceilings are like super tall.
They're probably 10 foot tall ceilings in here.
And the final, final part of the room I wanna show you
is the closet right by the blinking light at the front door.
I don't usually come inside the closet to show you this,
but this is actually quite a big closet.
All of our stuff you could see down here,
we were able to put in the room.
I should point out my new bag that I got.
This is my yellow eat, sleep, travel, repeat duffel.
This duffle is entirely full of food
because we're here in Death Valley.
By the way, if you wanna get one of these bags for yourself,
you can find it on the Yellow Production Shop.
Now that we've seen everything around the hotel,
it is time for you if you've guessed it, the topher review,
where we rate this hotel on a scale of one to five tophers,
give you our pros and cons,
but first let me tell you how much we paid for our room here
at the Inn at Death Valley.
$500 a night about is what we paid for this room.
We were here the week before Christmas, high season.
So I consider that to be pretty expensive.
You can find the room rates a little less expensive,
but actually when we were looking,
I was looking a couple of days before we booked,
the rates were up to $649 a night
for the same room that we stayed in.
So keep that price in context for the review
as we come to it.
Oh, and by the way, where are we standing?
We were standing right in front of the hotel.
This is at the intersection of highway 190
and the Badwater Basin road.
Okay, so first let's start with our topher rating.
We rate hotels on a scale of one to five tophers.
The Inn at Death Valley is going to get three tophers.
And we really struggled with this.
We're like, does it get two tophers, does it get three?
It's really hard to rate because it's in this national park,
but honestly as a hotel, it's just,
it's not a very good hotel, but it's not a good hotel,
but it has a really premium location,
but a really high price.
And so that's where we settled on three tophers.
So let's now walk you through the pros and the cons
of why it got three tophers.
Okay, for the first pro write-up,
super great location in Furnace Creek,
the center of Death Valley National Park.
Now it could actually be a little bit better of a location.
There's their sister property, the Ranch at Death Valley.
And actually I think that's even a better location there
because all the shops and restaurants about it.
Here at the Inn, I mean, it's a short,
just two mile drive to get down there.
But we did find ourselves doing all our shopping
at the general store and eating at the restaurants
down at the ranch instead of here at the inn.
But it was really convenient to all the sites
that we wanted to see in a great base.
Another pro the room was good size room.
It was functional.
It had everything you would expect.
The room itself was pretty clean.
But I really think the best part of the room
is actually the patio that's out here.
This is the terrace room, the ones right above,
they've got like balconies,
with that free coffee from the lobby.
You can sit out there and just admire
the vastness that is Death Valley.
And one pro from Osi girl, she's a network engineer
and she wanted you all to know that their free wifi
actually has really good speeds,
which means they probably pulled
a lot of really expensive fiber.
So if you're gonna spend your time on the Internet,
no problem here.
- And if you've got kiddos,
they'll definitely like the echo in the tunnel.
And the final pro is that the grounds
are really just quite amazing.
It does actually live up to its name, Oasis.
This is the garden in the center of the complex.
Really cool.
That cool complex is pretty nice.
So I think this hotel is really good if you wanna come
and just unplug and sit around and lounge
and enjoy the hotel, I think you'll enjoy this a lot.
If you're here in Death Valley and you're just going out
and hiking, and you're not gonna spend
a lot of time in the hotel,
then you might not be eating out the $500 a night worth
that you pay for all of the grounds for them to upkeep.
- All right, so now let's go onto the cons.
I mentioned as a hotel, it's just,
it's not a very good hotel.
And a pandemic time, so
they're still not providing daily housekeeping.
And we were here for two nights.
Daily housekeeping would have been nice.
I stayed at a whole bunch of hotels in Vegas
just a week before
and all of them were providing daily housekeeping.
While I mentioned the room was clean,
the property itself, wasn't that clean,
like the hallways weren't that clean,
the staircases weren't that clean.
There definitely needs to be some extra cleaning
in the common areas of the hotel.
The room itself was just kind of weird.
They did a recent remodel on this hotel in 2018,
but it definitely has its 1920s roots.
You know, the air conditioning
didn't really seem to work that great.
I mean, it was more heat for us,
but it's just one of these really old things
that you can choose warmer or cooler.
You can't really dial in a temperature.
The bathroom, the water pressure was like, non-existent.
I get that we're in a desert,
but it took us a really long time to take a shower.
For some reason, there was no Kleenex
or facial tissue in a room.
You know, for room that I'm paying $500 for,
I would expect for there to actually be
a box of Kleenex in the room and not having to call
the front desk staff and have them
bring me a box of Kleenex.
Now, although I didn't hear any road noise in the room
because it's quite far from the road
and nobody drives around Death Valley at night time,
the room was not that quiet.
I could hear people walking up on the floor, right above us.
We're on the first floor.
There's only a second floor above us.
And I could definitely tell it was really noisy
'cause the first night there must've not been
somebody above us,
the second night, it sounded like elephants were up there.
Also in the connecting room,
I could hear the people like coughing
in that room next door.
So the rooms are not very well isolated
from the connecting rooms or from the floors above them.
And then the final con,
you heard me say this in the beginning,
the location super centrally located to the park,
but not super centrally located
to all of the other things in Furnace Creek.
So it was kind of annoying.
There's not really a coffee shop or a gift shop
or anything here to buy stuff that we always had to go
two miles in town to do that.
The only place to really eat is that dining room
and it's super expensive.
But the question is,
would all this prevent us from staying here again?
I think next time we stayed here,
we wanna check out the actual ranch.
We haven't been there.
This is our first time at Death Valley.
Curious fellow explorers.
Have any of you stayed at the ranch?
Did you like it?
How does it compare to this one?
Have you stayed at both?
Let me know.
Are we just being too critical of this?
Is this how all national park hotels are?
And we know that we're paying a premium on the price,
but for $500, we just expected
a lot more actually for our hotel state,
not just a little bit more.
Well fellow explorers, if you're coming to Death Valley,
you might enjoy checking out our video up here,
the whole travel guide for the park.
Everything you need to know if you're coming here
or if you wanna see some videos on other national parks,
we've got a video on Zion National Park right there,
and also a video on Joshua Tree right there.
As usual, we won't say goodbye
'cause we'll see you in the next video.