Accommodations

Apocryphal or not, with the generally accepted belief around here that the population doubles in high season, you can be sure things feel a lot more frenetic come the Ides of March than the dead of summer. Since a good number of seasonal “visitors” are second-home owners or arrive turtlelike with their own mechanized shell, you won’t go lacking for a place to bunk down. Trust us. At last count there are nearly 20,000 hotel rooms in the valley.

How much you pay for that place will vary wildly, from rock-bottom rates at small motels in the middle of summer to sky-high prices at megaresorts in February. If you can plan your visit for November, December, April, or May—shoulder season—you’ll have a good chance of getting good rates and good weather at the same time. If you don’t mind 100-degree-plus days and want the best value, book June through October, though the edges of “low” season have been compressing inward for some time.

Palm Springs has been a vacation mecca for almost a century. And it could almost be argued that the Cahuilla wintering springs-side qualifies as a high-season respite. Virtually every national and international hotel company is represented here, from budget places like Super 8 and Howard Johnson’s to super-luxurious hoteliers like KSL, Ritz-Carlton, JW Marriott, and Waldorf Astoria. Midsize, mid-priced hotels such as the Embassy Suites and Hilton are a good value for business travelers and others seeking solid amenities and a predictable level of quality.

The valley has its share of small inns and boutique hotels, as well as accommodations catering to specific niche markets such as gay men, lesbian women, and travelers looking for clothing-optional places.

Hotels number in the hundreds in the desert. We have not listed every single one but rather have chosen to highlight those that are outstanding in some way and are consistently recognized as clean, comfortable, and reputable, perhaps special, and often nicely unique. Instead of listing hotels by city, we are listing them by type of accommodation. Please note that if you are looking for familiar national chains, at whatever level of the hierarchy, such as Super 8, Motel 6, Howard Johnson’s, Courtyard by Marriott, and Embassy Suites, for instance, these are well represented in the desert.

“Boutique” hotels and inns include those that are small—almost all have fewer than 100 rooms—and offer a high level of individuality, personal service, and quality. These are “personality places” with lots of charm, good locations, and often an intriguing bit of history, if not the entire laundry list of amenities of a full-scale resort.

As a result of economic forces that first came into play in the 1980s, the overwhelming majority of boutique hotels and inns are in Palm Springs. During the 1980s megaresorts were the trend in hotel construction. A lack of empty land and a restrictive building code kept these huge resorts out of Palm Springs. For years the city was passed over in favor of cities to the east when it came to any new hotel development.

Then, when Palm Springs was “rediscovered” as a hip and charming little village in the 1990s, little mom-and-pop inns found that they were suddenly very attractive, to both visitors and developers. A renewed interest in mid-century architecture and a tourism trend that saw more travelers looking for a personal touch all came together to lift the little hotels out of obscurity and into the level of “caliente, caliente, caliente.” Today many little places that were first opened in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s have been restored, revamped and recharged so as to appeal to a new generation of traveler.

The Hotels category includes hotels that are in the 100 or so rooms range and larger, and offer a level of service and amenities above that which would be found in a basic motel. They have restaurants and room service, and often such extras as concierge service, gift shops, and valet parking.

Resorts are destination spots, places where you could spend your entire vacation without ever stepping outside the property. They have full concierge service, gift shops, restaurants and room service, spas, and fitness centers. They either have full business centers or offer basic business services such as faxing and copying. They also often feature tennis courts and golf courses. The desert resorts are like cruise ships: If you want to take a “shore visit” to see the rest of the area, fine; if you want to leave your car in the parking lot and call the hotel home, you will want for nothing.

Finally, the desert has a good number of accommodations that fall into the Specialty Lodging category. These include hotels that cater specifically to the GLBT crowd, places that are clothing optional, and RV resorts. Condo and home rental companies and portals—like www.vrbo.com—will offer a variety of varied-term (from a few days to several months) options, from celebrity homes to simple studios on a golf course.

Because the desert is such a seasonal destination, hotels are highly competitive with rates and packages, and they spend a lot of time checking rate structures and offerings at comparable places. This means that you may not find a great deal of variation in rates if you’re comparing hotels of roughly the same size and level of quality. Still, it pays to shop around, particularly at the larger resorts that do a lot of convention business. Cancellations or group confirmation numbers that are smaller than expected will open up space for leisure travelers and give you some bargaining power. If golf, spa, or some other resort amenity or offering figures to be part of your desert experience, check out package pricing. With so many third-party providers picking up blocks of rooms and offering them at discounts, hotels and resorts have in recent years gone to great lengths to re-capture that business, so inquire about rate-match guarantees; the Internet revolution, indeed. And don’t forget all the usual suspects when it comes to discounts, from your credit union affiliation to AARP, AAA, and government/military.

As for the when of it all, you take your chances by waiting until the last minute, and we wouldn’t advise doing that in high season, but you may get a great 11th-hour bargain.

Another quirk that Palm Springs shares with many resort destinations is the ebb and flow of visitors during the week. Weekends are almost always busy, even in summer, when travelers from Southern California leave the urban areas to spend a few bargain days in the desert. If you’re staying just a few days, try to make those days Monday through Thursday—you’ll get a better rate. Finally, if you’re visiting during high season, you may find that hotels require a minimum stay of two or even three days.

The hotel tax—or Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT)—is not included in the quoted rates when you book a room, so be sure to factor that in. TOT typically runs about 10 or 11 percent, though Palm Springs levies at a rate of 13.5 percent on “Group Meeting” or business hotels; it’s 11.5 percent on other hotels. TOT is one of those rare taxes in California that is both left to the local prerogative and relatively easy to enact since no super-majority vote is required, hence the variation city-to-city. If you feel like you’re being singled out as a visitor, remember every vacation destination in the land levies hotel taxes, so some of your back-home services are being funded by others. TOT is applied on all vacation rentals of fewer than 29 days. If you’re staying in any rental accommodation for more than 29 days, you’ve just saved yourself a nice piece of coin.

Another levy that’s not likely to be openly advertised at some properties is the so-called “resort charge” or “amenity fee,” that little exaction for the paper, parking, morning nosh if offered, the gym you don’t plan to use, or some other goodie that logic would dictate is just part and parcel of a stay at that particular hotel. If your Web search or phone chat with a reservation clerk doesn’t include an overt mention of such a charge, be proactive and ask the question.