Black Sands Inn

The view was outstanding. The room was comfortable and had a great little fridge and microwave. Coffee machine was easy to use. The rental team was very easy to work with and on top of everything.

Must know before you stay here, the location is great, the view is amazing, the room was mostly clean. Its very isolated and a great place if you want to disconnect from the world. Without the hotel wifi you would have nothing. Download any travel maps for the places you want to visit in the area because once you get driving there are no signals. There aren't many options for eating in the area and their websites or any info really isn't always accurate. You could walk to all the nearby businesses so that's nice because once you park your car you're going to be hesitant to move it. There is no real parking, you have to park on the street and there aren't many places to leave your vehicle. Surprisingly no real seafood options considering your at the doorstep of the pacific ocean. But you're also incredibly isolated so I would imagine its hard to get consistent deliveries. The nearby beach was great for the kids to play in and explore but its a little rough, don't plan on swimming here. You can see seals and seagulls. Lots of tidepool creatures like hermit crabs, anenomes, mussels and sea urchins to name a few. Very cool to get this close to some of these sea creatures but wear good shoes as the rocks can be rough. The website said there was a hot tub but it was covered during our stay.

The check in process was awful, granted we were two hours early but we also did ask for an early check in. We never got a response if our request would be honored or not but thats not usually a big deal. When this happens we can usually talk to the front desk agent to help us out but here there are no people to check you in, you have to do it through a qr code. This is more like checking into an Airbnb. I expected a little more service . Internet is nonexistent in this area so you have to rely on the hotels wifi to check in. When we tried to call and text customer support it took a long time to get any support. All the responses were auto generated, it seems like we were communicating with a chat bot for support. We finally got access to our room but only about 30 minutes before the standard check in time ao no real bonus there. There is no elevator here and our room was on the 3rd floor so its a little bit of a struggle to haul our bags up there. Be ware if you need help getting upstairs, especially with bags, you're on your own. Once we got to the room we were pleasantly surprised that it was well designed and clean. We asked for a junior suite for our two kids. This means the option of having a pull out sofa so they can sleep on it. We made up the sofa on our own despite paying for this "upgrade" there were only 3 pillows for 4 people in the whole place. Otherwise The master bedroom was nice. The only real downside here was that I had to sleep on a throw pillow. There are no large towels, only medium sized ones, good for toddlers and small children, not so much for adults. Luckily there were a few beach towels that were available to use at the nearby beach. There was a lot of rust on some of the bathroom fixtures (typical in coastal areas but really shouldnt be part of the room). The bath tub didnt drain very well so I suspect it was clogged. If you have a low overhead business like this these things should be automatically taken care of weekly.

Location.

No staff present. The owners, who apparently live in San Diego, never answer the phone number listed for the property. Two couples traveling with us couldn't reach the owners to get access to their rooms so stayed at the property next door. A property with staff on site. I suspect the owners will demand keeping the payment for the rooms even though they were never used. If they can't properly manage a property, staffing for example, they shouldn't be in the business. Earlier in the week, at another motel in California, we were checked in by AI. California has made wages so high that owners don't have employees, thus no customer service. We travel about half the time, in the U S. and Europe. Over the last year or so we've had so much.of the California BS now tend to if possible not visit CA. Then there is the price of gasoline in CA. In December we were in Texas. Gasoline at $1.97 a gallon. As stated earlier, there is pretty much no customer service in Calufornia and the cost of everything is inflated beyond what is acceptable. We have the money we just no longer want to support a failed state.

The view

The view, clean rooms