Tyla and I stayed at the Loews Coronado Bay Resort when we went down to San Diego a couple weeks ago. Tyla had picked it out of a list of the best places for families with young kids. The resort is very nice and normally would be out of our price range, except since we were traveling with such a young child, we knew that we would spend a lot of time at the hotel. So we thought it made sense to devote more of our budget to the hotel.
When you arrive, you’re greeted by valets, bellhops, etc. Be ready to tip because you’ll feel the need to do it a lot during your stay. Tipping outside of a restaurant isn’t something I’m super familiar with so it always adds a little bit of stress for me. I just don’t encounter those situations a lot.
The website makes it sound like the resort is ready to provide you with everything your child needs to thoroughly enjoy their time. Thankfully, Tyla called the concierge desk ahead of time to figure out exactly what they had. While they do have beach toys (there’s a locked trailer that they park at the beach) and they had a nice crib for the room, there were other things on the list that just didn’t exist when we got there. And beyond those things, we didn’t see much difference in the kid-friendliness of the hotel. But to be fair, we were there in the off season and I think they have more kid programs that run in the summer months. Oh and make sure that your kids can’t get into the snack stash in the room or you’ll be shelling out $10 for a tiny bag of expired gummy bears and $8 for a bottle of water.
The location was nice. It’s on the east side of what is basically a sandbar so it was a little bit protected from the wind coming off the ocean. The resort is surrounded on three sides by water so there are lots of nice views. You can get to the beach with a quick golf cart ride from the valet or a 5-10 minute walk. The resort is about a 10 minute drive from Coronado which has shops, a grocery store and some restaurants. There’s an hourly shuttle from the hotel but we just used our rental car. Don’t forget to factor in parking when you’re budgeting out your trip. We paid $29/day to self-park! Valet parking adds a few bucks on top of that.
There are three pools, all of which are heated to 80 degrees. There’s a kid pool, a large family pool, and then an adults-only pool. We pretty much had them to ourselves since the hotel was mainly filled with conference attendees during the week.
Overall, the resort wasn’t bad, but it didn’t blow us away. The staff was nice enough, but they never went out of their way to help us out and regularly looked at us like “that’s not my job, go ask someone else.” Again, it’s not terrible, but it’s not stellar.
It was a nice place to stay and I’m glad we tried it. We do hope to go back to San Diego to visit Sea World, Legoland, and the zoo (again), but we’ll probably consider other hotel options next time.