We stayed one night at the Holiday Inn Seattle-SeaTac International Airport. It was a really late check-in as our flight on United (boo) was late, but David had paid to get us Economy Plus seats so we were one of the first people off the plane (yay).
Getting to the hotel was the hardest part of the evening, no small feat with brains partly shut down with travel stress and legs still getting used to working again after 4 hours in the air. Seatac has changed somewhat since my days of living in Seattle and flying in and out of there; there are now “transportation islands” which are reached from baggage claim via an escalator trip upstairs, a skybridge across the traffic, then back down to the ground level (people who carry on, just carry on forward and skip the trip down one level to the carousels). Once there, you have to know where to head – the intercom boards, with direct phone lines to hotels and park’n fly operators – are discreet metal kiosks dotted along the “island,” on the side closest to the parking garage. We got in contact with the van driver originally by calling the hotel direct, were transferred to his cell, and given instructions on where to go to wait for him to come back.
Eventually, he turned up and got us on our way, and a very hard working guy he was, too.
The lobby area was small, especially considering the large amount of cruise-group traffic that seemed to be using the hotel. But it was plusher and more richly colored than most Holiday Inns. The room, once we got in it, was bigger and nicer than Holiday Inns have been (in my experience, mostly limited to locations on major highways). The bed was really comfortable, which was a bonus as I haven’t had great luck with beds or bedding in mid-priced chain hotels.
No breakfast included, so we ate a pretty nice buffet-style breakfast in their restaurant, which doubled as a cozy pub in the evenings (with some very nice offerings, judging by the beer-pump handles). The only real drawback was that we would have had to pay for parking, but the next morning when we retrieved the rental car from Avis, we knew that when we brought it back, we had 20 minutes free parking for “loading.” So we use the iPhone’s stopwatch to time ourselves (our stuff was packed up and ready to go aside from toiletries) and made the deadline with about 2 minutes to spare.
So if you decide to overnight in Seattle at the Holiday Inn, whether you’re traveling inbound or outbound, time your rental car so that you don’t have it with you at the hotel. Drop it off when you check in, or pick it up when you check out, and you’ll save.
Just don’t take longer than 20 minutes on the clock.
Via SEATTLE Hotels – Holiday Inn Hotels & Resorts SEATTLE-SEATAC INTL AIRPORT Hotel in SEATTLE | Book Direct for Best Rates
