Before signing up for a multi-day trip like our guided Route 66 or Southern adventure car caravans or bus tours, it’s pretty common to have a few questions about the hotels.
How do you go about picking the hotels for the trips?
We consider multiple factors when choosing hotels for our Guided Route 66 Caravans, Route 66 Bus Tours, Southern Adventures, and other tours.
Obviously, guest comfort is a major priority. For some cities, secure parking is another factor.
We also lean heavily on hotels we’ve had relationships with for extended periods of time in an effort to ensure our needs are given priority.
For most nights, it’s also important for us to have hotel locations walkable to city centers, food, and activities. Sometimes, this isn’t possible, but we do try our best!
Obviously, price is also a factor… We want our trips to be as affordable as possible without sacrificing the quality of the hotels. Some brands rigidly stick to a star rating promise, but we’ve found that in some towns/cities, the 2-star hotels can be even nicer than the 3-star hotels.
What are the rooms like?
All rooms are standard doubles or kings. We try our best to honor preferences here, but sometimes the hotels just don’t have space. Most rooms have refrigerators.
If guests ever discover their room has a problem or defect, we encourage them to contact us immediately to get switched to a different room.
What are the breakfasts like?
Every hotel has a slightly different breakfast, and even now, Covid is impacting the array of breakfast options at each hotel. Overall, every hotel we select offers a hot breakfast. The breakfasts, however, can vary in terms of style and offering.
Some of our hotels provide full menu or buffet breakfasts. Others have a more limited offering of eggs, waffles, etc.. We try to include at least 1-2 full menu/buffet breakfasts on every trip.
Is there laundry?
Yes! Our Route 66 Car Caravans and Route 66 Bus Tours have laundry available at the majority of the hotels we visit. Our other trips also feature at least 1-2 hotels with laundry available.
Our tour guides will do their best to point out good spots in the itineraries to do laundry. We also carry laundry detergent and often have quarters. If we don’t have either at the moment, the hotels can provide this for you.
Do you use one particular brand of hotel?
We are not brand-specific in our hotel selections for many of the reasons discussed earlier.
Why not more vintage motels on your Route 66 trips?
One of the more common questions we get about our Route 66 trips. We LOVE the many beautiful vintage motels on Route 66. For our schedule, however, most of them fall in awkward spots on the itinerary that make staying in them prohibitive.
For others, the small size of the properties is a challenge in terms of room availability.
For our Route 66 trips, we do stay in 2 historic hotels, the Palmer House in Chicago and the La Posada in Winslow, Arizona.
Keep in mind, we may not STAY at the vintage motels much, but we do VISIT them. We hope you’ll support these wonderful innkeepers by purchasing things in their gift shops.
Can I use my loyalty points? Will I get loyalty points?
Unfortunately, group stays are exempt. We DO encourage you to still give the front desks your rewards/loyalty numbers if you have them. You can get points for money spent at on-site restaurants. Some hotels will also award you points for forgoing housekeeping. So we say it’s always best to go ahead and give them your name/loyalty numbers!
Overall, we try our darnedest to provide good, clean, comfortable hotels in good locations for all of our trips!