Frugal Lodging in Washington, D.C.

    Finding lodging in the Washington, D.C. area:  how many hours are you willing to surf the internet, trying to decide which lodging option is best for your family's frugal, budget-conscious trip to Washington, D.C.?

    When our family decided to travel to Washington, D.C. on a frugal budget, with our friend and "tour guide", Joanne, we spent many hours trying to find the best lodging for the best price.

    Joanne and I individually spent about 20+ hours looking online...or at least, it seemed like it.  We were looking for a safe location, with easy access to the Metro.  Our goal was to spend no more than about $125 per night - not an easy thing to accomplish in Washington, D.C. 

    We were searching for a motel that was clean, safe, quiet, and friendly, with free shuttle service to and from the nearest Metro station.  As well, we needed the motel to offer a satisfying hot breakfast each morning to help us save time and money as we started out each day.  It was also important to us that the rooms had interior doors to inside hallways/corridors, with no exterior doors for individual motel rooms.

    At one point, I was beginning to think that we needed to find a travel agent to help us.  There are so many motels and hotels - as well as apartments to rent - in the D.C. area.  It was overwhelming!  We used the normal online booking sites to read reviews and prices.  There was a lot of conflicting information and ratings.  Some of the guests would love a particular motel, while others would hate it!  Ugh.

    One night, Joanne emailed me.  She had found the perfect location!  Interestingly, this was the motel in which she had stayed during two other trips to Washington, D.C., but for some reason, it just wasn't popping up in her online searches.  (We think the name of the motel had changed since she had last stayed there.)

Comfort Inn & Suites, 5716 S. Van Dorn St., Alexandria, VA; Phone: (703) 922-9200

Elmer, Brittany, Kelsi, and ME!

    I must admit that I was a bit skeptical about the motel when I booked our two rooms.  First, the room prices seemed low, which was wonderful - but why?  I later learned it was because of the time of year we were staying in the D.C. area as well as Comfort Inn & Suites in Alexandria being a bit outside of downtown Washington, D.C.

Comfort Inn & Suites (not an affiliate link)
5716 S. Van Dorn St., Alexandria, VA  22310
Phone: (703) 922-9200

Exit 173 (Van Dorn Street) off I-495 Capital Beltway. Hotel is on located between I-95/495 and the exit ramps.

    Conveniently located off Interstate 495 (the Capital Beltway), the Comfort Inn & Suites® hotel is an affordable alternative to staying in downtown Washington, D.C.

    This Alexandria, VA hotel is minutes from the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA), the National Mall & Memorial Parks, the Pentagon, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Our price:

    Since I was making the reservations online, I decided to take advantage of the Advance Purchase Rate as a part of their ChoicePriveleges Rewards program, which is free to join and has no membership fees. The one drawback is that once this reservation has been made, it cannot be cancelled, changed, or refunded.  In the future, I may choose to use their regular online booking rate so I have the freedom to change or cancel the reservation, if needed.  But we decided to take a chance - and it worked out just fine for my family.

    We paid $111.20 per night (weekend rate in October 2013); and $119.20 per night (weekday rate in October 2013) for a total of 7 nights in Alexandria (plus a 12% room tax).

Private bedroom suite with bay window, full bathroom with garden tub and shower, and three nice windows for a view of Alexandria

This bedroom was spacious with a large dresser for all of our clothing (the four of us).

The type of room we selected for a family of four:

    We selected a one-bedroom corner suite for our family of four.  Here's why:

• The private bedroom has three windows, including one nice bay window
• The living room/sitting area is also fairly spacious with a sofa sleeper that folds out to sleep two people (full/double size bed).  The sofa sleeper was very comfortable for our teenage daughters, though they were skeptical the first night that they'd be able to sleep comfortably on a sofa sleeper.
• Suites have two flat screen televisions, although we didn't have much time to watch them
  
• Non-smoking!
• Two vanities
• Desk with ergonomic chair
• Microwave; small cube refrigerator to chill our water bottles each night
• Coffee maker
• Iron and ironing board
• Full closet to hang our clothes and coats, plus room to store our extra shoes and souvenirs we had purchased during the week
  
• Hair dryer
• Two bathrooms (one half bath with toilet and sink; one full bath with garden tub/shower, toilet, and sink.
• Personal safe ($1.50 per night) that is small but large enough to hold a laptop computer
  

The sitting room/living room converted to a private bedroom at night for our daughters

Elmer relaxing after a long day out and about the D.C. area

Our opinion of our stay at Comfort Inn & Suites, Alexandria:

    The real question in your mind right now probably is...how did we feel about our stay here at Comfort Inn & Suites, Alexandria?

    I must admit, sometimes I can be nitpicky about cleanliness (or lack thereof), and the level of professionalism in the staff.

    We all were truly impressed with our stay at Comfort Inn & Suites here in Alexandria! 

    If you are planning to travel with 3-4 people and will be wanting a suite, which I would recommend, the manager told me that all of their suites on the 5th through the 9th floors have bay windows.  Their executive king rooms (single room; not a suite) also have bay windows on those floors.

    Every day, our room was carefully cleaned for us.  I can't think of any lack of cleaning in our room, for seven full days and nights.  Amazing!  I haven't experienced that kind of service for years now.

    The king bed in the suite bedroom was so comfortable that I asked the manager what type of bed it was.  Let me tell you, after two nights in a motel room, my back is usually aching - and I normally don't have any back problems.  But even after seven nights of sleeping on these beds, my back was just fine.  The beds at this particular Comfort Inn & Suites are Serta beds built to Choice Hotels standards.  They contain a high coil spring count, about 50% more than a standard mattress.  The bed was topped with a 14 oz. fiber fill pad from Pacific Coast Feather, a bit heavier than retail grade, so that they have a longer, useful lifespan. 

    Aaaaaaahhhhhh!    Wonderful!
  

    If you have more than one teenage or adult woman in your family, you know how it can take some time to get ready to leave in the mornings, right?

    Well, with one adult woman (me) and two teenage daughters, we didn't think ahead about the importance of having two bathrooms in our suite.  I actually didn't realize our suite would have two bathrooms in it.  We were so surprised to find that it did, when we arrived.  YES! 

    I'm sure my husband was the most impressed with this.  Ha!

    Note:  the master bath has a full garden tub with shower.  The bathroom adjoining the living room contains a toilet and sink with a long counter and a large, long mirror - but no shower or tub.  Just so you know.

    We had l-o-n-g days sightseeing while in the Washington, D.C. area, so we didn't want to get up at the crack of dawn just so we could all hustle through the shower.  We figured out a routine to our morning that worked really well for our family. 

    We chose to use the master bathroom as our shower room, and the girls and I finished preparing for the day in the other bathroom each morning, so we could get people through the showers more efficiently.

    I personally don't know how we would have got a reasonable start to our mornings without having two bathrooms.  It would have been really tough.

Drawbacks to our room?

   There were a couple of minor concerns we had during our stay at Comfort Inn & Suites, Alexandria. 

    For some reason, the motel showed our reservation for 3 people, not four, even though I entered four people online for the room.  So for several nights in a row, housekeeping only provided three sets of towels.  I went down each night and picked up an additional set of towels, asking the front desk to correct this since we had four people in our room.  Their computer system didn't seem to be able to correct this, so I finally started leaving a note in the master bathroom each morning, asking to please have four sets of towels since we had four people staying in this suite.  That worked!

    The showerhead wasn't the most modern, up-to-date exhilerating low-flow showerhead on the market.  When the rooms were remodeled recently, I think they didn't update the showerheads.  The water pressure was low, causing it to take much longer to rinse out our hair in the shower.  With three of us with long hair, that added time to our morning routine.  I'd suggest that Comfort Inn & Suites upgrade their low-flow showerheads to ones that are more modernized and powerful.  Ours at home is wonderful, and only cost around $35.   

    The bathroom fan was one of the "silent" fans - but it didn't seem to work at all.  The bathroom mirror fogged up immediately when someone started a shower.  Instead of wiping the mirror with a towel, I used the hairdryer to clear the foggy mirror.  Not a big deal, but a minor inconvenience.  I'm used to silent fans in motels and hotels, but I still expect them to work well!

Free Shuttle Service:

    One of our main factors in selecting a motel was that we would need free shuttle service to take us to the nearby Metrorail station, allowing us to avoid the parking hassles of downtown Washington, D.C.  Trust me:  even if you have your own car, you will not want to attempt to park downtown.  If you can find a parking spot, it will be very expensive.  I know of people who have had miserable vacations in Washington, D.C., all because they chose to drive their car around town. 

    Even if we had driven our own car to the DC area, we would have still used the Metro to get around town - not our car.

    Comfort Inn & Suites-Alexandria provided us with free shuttle service to and from the Van Dorn Street Metrorail station from 7:00 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.  Nice!  The Van Dorn Metro station was only 1 mile away.  :)

    The drivers were always courteous and professional.  When we would alert the front desk that we needed a shuttle, the driver and van would show up within 1-3 minutes.  That's service!  And with a 12-passenger shuttle van, there was always ample room for all of us, plus additional guests.

    In addition, due to the location of this motel, when we rented a car for two days, we were able to almost instantly get onto the freeway to travel out of the area.  This is an excellent location if you are planning side trips outside of Washington, D.C.

Free hot breakfast:

Breakfast Room

Breakfast Bar

    You may have experienced "free" breakfasts in the past at motels and hotels.  Some are dastardly awful, with only cold cereal and stale cold muffins, and maybe some hard-boiled eggs that taste like they were boiled last year. 

    Comfort Inn & Suites in Alexandria, Virginia does not offer a miserable breakfast.  Instead, we were pleased to see the breakfast bar full of hot and cold items and delicious options.  The free hot breakfast included protein options of scrambled or hard-boiled eggs, sausage or bacon, biscuits and sausage gravy, and yogurt.  There were several types of fresh fruit each morning, as well as some canned fruit.  We also noticed hot cereal like grits and oatmeal.  We smiled when we saw the grits.  Back on the west coast where we're from, grits are never an option in a breakfast bar in a motel.  :)  The breakfast bar also included several types of cold cereal, muffins, regular waffles, blueberry waffles, donuts and pastries, English muffins, and bread for toast.

    I'm probably forgetting some of the food that was offered!  There was an excellent selection from which to choose, and all of the food tasted fresh and delicious.  I was thankful to be able to select scrambled eggs and sausage/bacon each morning since I needed to eat a low-carb breakfast.

Additional amenities:

Seasonal outdoor pool, open Memorial Day to Labor Day

Recently remodeled foyer

    Our motel also had a small business center, which I used on our last morning in D.C. to print out our boarding passes for our flight home.  There was no charge to use their laser printer and computer - nice!

    It is difficult to find safe, clean, friendly lodging in large cities far away from home.  Comfort Inn & Suites in Alexandria, Virginia, was all of this and more.  The staff was amazingly helpful and encouraging.  We loved our stay here and didn't want to come home!

    To read more about planning a frugal family trip to Washington, D.C., check out my other planning tips...with more tips and frugal travel ideas to come!

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