Description: Given my druthers, I’d stay at some place historic, rustic, or in a national park every night of an entire vacation. But the parameters for this trip were: go west, go cheap. Or at least cheaper—I promised to bring in our lodging costs at an average of $100 a night, a figure we didn’t come close to on our swing through Yellowstone, Glacier, and Grand Teton. The cabins at Grand Canyon fit perfectly—$100 a night—but Monument Valley and Bryce (~$150/night) meant looking for cheaper lodging on the other nights.
Enter brand loyalty. Having racked up enough points through Holiday Inn’s Priority Club, we cashed them in for a room here. We arrived around 5pm, with vacation fatigue clearly beginning to set in. A minority (me) wanted to spend more time at Cedar Breaks, but swimming, eating, and relaxing for an evening was a bigger draw for the majority.
This hotel is on the edge of Cedar City, not too far off the freeway, but not as easy to reach as you might expect. The area clearly was all recent construction, where cheap land was treated as an expendable resource, and ideas like traffic movement, future growth, etc., didn’t rate too highly in the planning.
The hotel is a new, standard, comfortable Holiday Inn Express. Of course, the reliability is what you expect when you frequent a chain like this. The staff were exceptionally friendly and helpful, particularly with the unexpected issues regarding our free night’s stay. Some problem with the corporate computer resulted in our receiving a bill under door the following morning; they told us to disregard it and assured us they’d sort it out. (They did).
The room was a three queen suite, perfectly suited to the five of us, and with enough space that we weren’t crawling over each other to move around. It had a nice little vertical minibar/fridge/sink/coffeemaker installation. All in all, it was a clean, comfortable room with free breakfast—a little lacking in character, but otherwise OK. (And if we’d had to pay, the bill showed that the rate would have been $79. Not bad.)
It worked well as a stop-over on way back to Vegas (we flew out the next night), and if you’re looking for a base of operations in this area, it would also be a good choice. If you’re here for the Shakespearean Festival, nothing is too far apart in Cedar City—the theatre is on the edge of the Southern Utah campus, about 2 miles NE of this hotel.
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