Orca Inn

The rooms were clean and the staff were friendly and helpful. The hotel is close to everything. The rates are very good.

I really wanted to give this hotel 5 stars. Most of the reviews I read before choosing to stay here were positive. So being the optimist that I am, I’ll start with the positives:
1. New. Keep in mind it won’t stay new forever. In about 2 years I predict this place will be a total dive.
2. Clean. Again, it’s still new, so I don’t read too much into this.
3. Cheap. When I use A booking website to get a «deal» I expect a deal. This was listed as a deal, but when we got here, the sign out front was about the same as what I had just paid on
.
3. Customer service. Really friendly at the desk. Pretty sure it was the owner. Bent over backwards to get us into a room (we accidentally reserved the wrong night online). He is why I wish I could give 5 stars.
Now the two star stuff:
1. Size: my college dorm was bigger.
2. I think he ran out of money building it. The door trim is rough cut boards from the hardware store, the hot water heater is perched on used lumber and fully exposed. I’m not sure having the tv under the plumbing is safe. All the fixtures are the cheapest available.
3. Towels are straight from the Dollar store. I wouldn’t dry my car with them, it would probably scratch the paint.
4. Bed. Headboard isn’t bolted to the bed or wall, with every move it banged back and forth. Comforter and sheets were nice, but no mattress pad, and there was a plastic bed protector right under the sheets. Crinkles every time you roll over, and made me sweat. Oh, it’s only a double, so once you sweat in your spot, there’s no where to escape.
So next trip, I’d probably spring another $ 10 and stay somewhere else.

Stayed at this inn last night and got to say be prepared. It’s nice and comfy. Very reasonable for the price. At a very decent location. No utensils for cooking. But in all fairness it was great place to take a rest after a long day.

We were apparently among the first people to stay at this newly renovated hotel, which is rather adorable and conveniently located.
We were a bit late leaving SeaTac due to the abysmal traffic and the owner actually called us around 9 to see if we were coming, because apparently he wanted to go home. I don’t know whether there was any staff there that night at all.
The rooms were kind of special, with loft spaces for the second bed, giving us a little privacy from the kids. The steps up to the loft are VERY steep – closer to a ladder than a stairway – and the kids of course thought it would be hilarious to run up and down them until one of them fell off. No injuries, fortunately. I would not recommend the loft space to anyone over the age of 25, though. The room is narrow and the bed felt a bit small.
We were put on the second floor, which was kind of annoying, since we were the only people in the hotel and had to drag our stuff up the stairs. The office is on the second floor too.
We were given a wifi password but it didn’t activate the wifi in any way. When we went back to the office we were told that was definitely the only password. We ended up using a combination of the weak signal from a bigger hotel across the street and a phone hotspot.
Although there was a water heater in the room, the shower didn’t get very hot. The dial seemed jammed somehow, so that the water was only lukewarm. I got it just hot enough by throwing all my weight onto it, but I would have liked it hotter. The shower curtain had been improperly hung so that every time someone took a shower, the bathroom flooded. (I alerted the owner of this easily fixable problem.) We could have used more towels.
The air conditioning was kind of weird. It kept turning itself off in the middle of the night.
I guess they will be serving breakfast in the office in the future, but since we were the only guests, they just brought us McDonald’s at 8:30 in the morning. It was a nice gesture, but not what we wanted to eat.
I think once they get this newly reopened hotel going, it will be a great place to stay. It’s got tons of potential and just some basic bugs to work out.