Great place to stay with awesome breakfast buffet. Pleasant staff and nice suites

Positives: - Very clean and spacious suite rooms. Almost as big as one bedroom apartment from New York and can accommodate family size visitors.
- Fully functional kitchen with all utensils, microwave and oven. Even provide pop corns for movies. Free, hot breakfast and they even provide quite filling food like soup, salads, wine and bread for "evening social" on weekdays. I felt guilty and felt like I should skip my dinner from outside and just enjoy crispy salads for health reason (after tons of fried seafood, chicken and french fries on road trip). Yes, this place may be 10-20$ more expensive than competitors in Gulf Shores but if you counted so many extras described above plus using your own kitchen, this is the place for family on budget.
- Friendly staffs and very welcoming lobby, common area with menus from nearby restaurants, attractions etc.
- Pool is well maintained.

Only alternative I will consider is staying in one of those condominiums over the beach. Both Gulf Shores and Orange beach have very limited public access to beach area. There are 4-5 public beach area governed by the same State Park but charging $5 to park in each place is just ridiculous. So, if you are planning to do a lot of swimming, surfing, you will want to stay in condo with private beach access.

This hotel was randomly selected for me when I placed a bid on priceline.com. Upon arrival the front desk advised us that we would be in a smoking room and could not upgrade to a room with 2 beds. Throughout the stay the hotel did not seem to be fully booked therefore it makes no sense to me why they would not allow us to upgrade. The room smelled absolutely terrible. I myself do not mind the smell of smoke, however, it smelled dirty and musty. The rooms were in nice condition besides the terrible smell. The breakfast was nice, my friends and I were running late on one of the mornings we stayed and made it to breakfast at 0928. Breakfast ends at 0930, by that time the staff had cleaned up most everything and gave us looks as if we were making their jobs difficult. We gladly went to the waffle house for breakfast. At one point I was up late doing laundry (facilities for laundry are great!) and I happened upon a mess in the ladies room, I notified the attendant and he said "ok" and did nothing about it. I did not expect to be treated like a queen at this hotel, but the staff and room assignment made it seem like since we booked online at a lower price we were pretty much "throw away guests" and they did not care if we would return or not. Which we will not. This hotel is approximately 2 miles from the beach and not suitable if you're looking for a relaxing beach vacation. There are better deals elsewhere.

Cynthia and her crew are great. We have stayed for one week for four years. This place is amazing. An pet friendly thats why we stay here!! You would never know there are pets there!! Clean and fresh!! We are going there next year!!!!!!!!!!!!