HOTEL La Quinta

For a king bed room at 400 MXN, this is a really good deal. The room is large, with a sitting area for relaxing or putting down suitcases, long side tables, a table and seat in front of a big mirror, a cabinet, a safe, and a separate table and chair for eating or using a laptop. The bathroom is also larger than those in renovated colonial buildings. The location is okay: it's behind a Dominos Pizza and near restaurants, pharmacies, and grocery stores, so you can get food or necessities even after midnight. There are some expected drawbacks at this price. The beds are really hard, like in many Mexican hotels under $100 a night, and the sheets are thin. Even if you ask, they don't really provide an extra towel. With two guests, one gets a regular towel and the other a small one, and both are rough. There's no air conditioning. It gets cold in the rainy season, and on hot days they might provide an electric fan. Ground-floor rooms may be cooler. The front desk staff are nice, but they don't understand or speak English, so foreign visitors should be ready to use Google Translate. There’s no key and the door autolocks, so you need to notify the front desk whenever you return. They come out as soon as they see you. The fixed showerhead is frustrating because it spreads the water too widely, wasting most of it. The toilet is a much bigger problem. Small bowls and low water pressure are common in Mexico, so you have to be careful not to flush wipes everywhere, except maybe at McDonalds and places like that, where they have big bowls and strong flushes. But here the bowl is so small and the hole so narrow that even toilet paper used after peeing wouldn't flush right away. You have to hold down the flush to keep the water running, flush again once the bowl has filled, and might need a plunger too. We had to ask for one and kept it. It was even worse after my small wife did the #2. I'm a big man, and I couldn't go for days because I was afraid I'd clog it completely. I finally got some relief when we found the good old American industrial-sized toilets at McDonalds. The other restaurants we visited also had smaller toilets, and I was afraid and embarrassed to clog them. Fancier hotels nearby had better toilets, but not all of them. If this is an issue for you, ask about the toilets first, avoid cheaper hotels, or plan to use bigger chain restaurants.