Emerald Isle Motel

I stayed here recently and had a great experience. The staff was very kind hearted and the room was very clean. I loved having a full kitchenette with an oven and stove. The bed was also very comfortable. U highly recommend staying here.

The other reviews of this motel here are not really fair. Granted, it’s not loaded with the perks of a high end motel, but it had a comfortable bed, a shower, a fridge and freezer and a flat screen TV. Pretty much everything you need for a night or two. The staff was quite friendly as well. It was clean, stocked with towels, and straightened up while we were gone during the day of our two night stay. We were able to park right in front of the room, so it was easy unload and load. The price was quite reasonable as well. If you have high expectations, it’s not that kind of place, but it fits a low budget need.

My girlfriend and I made a day trip to Hamden Beach the other day, and around the evening we decided we might want to check out a cheap hotel and crash for the night and spend another day at the beach the next day. We needed a place within the hour, and wanted something relatively cheap. We looked into 1 or 2 other places and bit on the Emerald Isle because it was cheap, and it was a last resort because we would have a hard time finding vacancy anywhere because it was already a bit late. I feel a little bad about leaving one star. The front desk lady was very very nice, when we arrived she was watching tv, seemingly asleep. We rang a buzzer for service and she made her way over to us to help us. It looks like the office to the place is connected to the back of her house, so she lives there. This is all fine with me but it makes me wonder how just one 50 year old lady can run the whole establishment. In the daytime the place looks fine, okay landscaping, theres a pool. We payed $ 85 plus tax for one night. She asked for 107 plus tax but i made an offer at 85 and she took it. So here is the story of you get what you pay for. Inside the room a few things will catch your eye within your first 10 minutes. The first thing you might think is they have a mini fridge, a stove, pots and pans, and a neat little table for 2. There is a nice tv with a cable box under it. A few nice things that a lot of chain hotels dont offer at the base price. In my opinion these things are a cheap trick to distract you from the outdated and dingy details of the room. The floorboards are uneven, and sink down and pop up a little. The light switches are outdated and old, they have a very small switch build into an electrical outlet which controls the lights, I have never seen that before. The bathroom is very unappealing. The tile doesn’t even cover the area of the bathroom, so there are gaps between the edge of the room and where the tile cuts off. The toilet was molded to the ground in some half assed way that looks bad, and again the tile is cut back a few inches, Making it seem like the work was done by people who are not professionals. The mirror/​cabinet is an old rusty metal box and I remember seeing something leftover from somebody else that we found in that box. The window panes in there are mismatched, cracked, discolored, and they block sunlight, giving it an eerie feeling, especially combined with the very old and crappy detailing in there. The room she gave us had 2 king size beds (i think king size) because they didn’t have a room with only one bed for us. I rolled back the covers on the first bed and found hair from a previous guest, making it seem like they might not even wash the sheets all of the time. The beds sink in in the middle, my girlfriend didn’t sleep well at all. There were 2 flies in the room the whole night, but there were actually no bed bugs. Other reviews mention bed bugs a lot but we did not have that problem, however I would not be surprised if we did. The couple next to us seem a bit sketchy. They were very reluctant to make conversation and all they did was sit outside drinking beer and smoking pack after pack of cigarettes. In conclusion: The place was cheap and outdated, and seemed dirty, and has crappy beds. I wouldn’t recommend staying here unless its a last resort, and you get good and drunk enough to sleep on the beds. It is not absolutely terrifying like other reviews say, but it sure is cheap and dirty. Again I feel bad because the lady was very nice at the front office, but this place is very unkept.

1 star is an over rating… Any hotel that charges your card at noon before you check in should automatically raise a red flag. Initially it looked like a quaint New England Motel but once we pulled around back the scene changed drastically. The residents (yes, residents) of the hotel were enjoying drinks around the questionable pool. Our neighboring room was donning an eviction notice (interesting choice for art work) and then we opened the door to what we hoped to be luxurious accommodations (or at least suitable to sleep and walk in). At first glimpse we saw a tv and cable box with wires strewn about, fake flowers in a vase (both with UPC tags in place) and an air conditioner from the 70s that was noisy as all get out. Too afraid to take off our shoes and in desperate need of a drink we scoured our room for some cups. In the absence of cups we decided to drink our wine from the bottle. Too afraid to sit down, we stood around taking in the scenery of our pieced together bathroom, dirty toilet and stained carpet. Upon further investigation we discovered our bed skirt was the plastic wrapping around our box spring. When contemplating where we would sleep we realized the other bed still had the mattress and box spring wrapped in plastic. You might be saying to yourself, «well at least it’s clean», however the sheets were stained with questionable colors and appeared to be more of a shade of yellow than white. Our solution was to sleep on top of the bed spread and use the other bed spread for our blanket. The bed spreads earned the 1 star as they looked new and less scary than the rest of the room. Our belongings occupied all flat surfaces, out of legitimate fear of putting them on the floor or the lovely yellow sheets. When I was offered my hair tie from the floor I had to hold back some throw up because it was not mine. Let’s move on to the bathroom which made a construction site port-​o-​potty look like 5 star hotel bathroom. Immediately, showering was out of the picture, there were wrappings on some of the fixtures and the bathroom was pieced together with random boards. The door was a latch door like something you would see in a camp site bathroom. When leaving for the evening we found that we could not dead bolt our door and feared for the safety of our belongings. After a night of drinking we passed out, still hyper aware that we do not lay our heads directly on the pillows. When we awoke we realized that our shower drained directly to the ground… Yes, it was basically a hole in the ground where someone could hang out under our shower and watch us. Whoever gives this hotel more than one star must be homeless which surprises me because I would feel safer and cleaner taking my chances on the streets of Hampton Beach. I’d also like to add that we paid $ 140/​night for these outstanding accommodations!

Arriving at night I doubt I would have found the place without my GPS telling me I was there. It is in a neighborhood that made me a little uncomfortable and the unsavory looking characters hanging about in the shadows of this dimly lit hotel was more than a little unnerving.
Walking into the office should be enough to tell you that if you value hygiene or cleanliness this is not a place you would want to stay. The inept and rude staff was enough to make me decide it was better to find the first place on the strip with a vacancy sign and pay the going rate for last minute guests than to risk staying the night.

People tend to judge motels as a lower class place to stay. My room was $ 85 for the night, on a Saturday in the middle of the summer and had more amenities than most big chain hotels do. Mini fridge filled with bottles of water and microwave in the room, as well as a pull out couch. The woman at the front desk was SUPER nice and filled up a bucket of ice for us because there was no ice machine. The motel also had a pool, which was awesome. It’s a couple miles from the main Hampton drag, and the cab was only $ 15 but definitely walk-​able too. Compared to spending $ 300 for something right on the strip of the same quality stay, I would absolutely stay here again.