Snelling Motor Inn

I know this place has a reputation in the neighborhood as a place where most customers are not interested in spending the night, if you know what I mean. I’ll tell you why I’m giving them 5 stars. I moved to Minneapolis to work at the VA. Having no idea about the area and no car I looked for the closest place I could stay from the VA. The Snelling popped up in my search. I called and made a reservation (not necessary). I arrived in the middle of the night via taxi with several tubs of my personal belongings. The man at the desk saw my stuff and said «woah! I was going to put you on the second floor but I’ll get you a first floor room instead.» I ended up staying there for about two weeks while I found an apartment and settled in with my new job. I never heard and ruckus, never saw any riffraff. It was a cheap place to lay my head at night during a stressful transition. The room was nothing to write home about but it was warm and quiet and I felt safe. The TV had two channels but I don’t care about TV. Listen, for a $ Motor Inn, you’re not gonna get $$$ accommodations. For what I paid the place was perfect and I have absolutely no complaints. It wasn’t until later that I found out about the reputation the place has. I would have never known otherwise. The people at the desk were nice and always smiling. I’d stay there again.

I got a clean, quiet room with a fine mattress. The only thing i didn’t like was that the king bed didn’t have a fitted sheet, which isn’t good if you are a twisting and turning sleeper. The family who owns the motel tries very hard to make sure you are happy. I bet if i’d asked for a fitted king sheet, they would have rushed right in and changed the bed. It appears that they are trying to update the rooms whenever they make enough cash. As it is, this is the cheapest motel in town and the location is fantastic — right next to the airport, as well as to the freeway that will whisk you to either downtown (when it’s not rush hour). It’s almost across the street from an incredible park on the Mississippi. (The motel used to be known as the Falls Motel because it’s so close to stunning Hiawatha Falls.) I highly recommend the Snelling to anyone who needs just a place to crash or is between planes.

I will admit that I’ve never patronized this dump, but I do live shouting distance from the parking lot. I’ve wished so hard for my nearly 9 years in the neighborhood that this place would meet the wrecking ball. How it can generate enough cash to stay in business for as long as it has is beyond me. Reading the other reviews here just confirms my suspicions. I’ve also heard of at least one mugging taking place outside the building. It’s a scourge, an eye sore, a waste of good real estate. I’d give it negative stars if I could.

Horrible.
My job has this weird policy that job-​related travel expenses must be paid for by the staff member and reimbursed by our finance department. For this reason, the project manager for our work trip had to book this dump because it was all she could afford to put down, thanks to our nonprofit paychecks. We knew it would be kind of a dump from looking at the website («amenities» listed included «lit parking lot» and «dial phone»), but wow, we didn’t know what awaited us.
First of all, the place is located right on (and I mean RIGHT ON) the metro tracks, which makes it impossible to approach from any but one direction. We arrived around midnight and had to drive half a mile out of the way to make a U-​turn to get back to the motel. Upon entry, we noted that the clerk was behind bulletproof glass (always a great sign) and that the rules posted on said glass specified «No Prostitution» (also always a good sign).
We got our keys and trudged up the shaky, bad-​smelling, ugly carpet-​covered stairway to our rooms, ready to collapse. Because there were three of us, two female coworkers and myself –the lone guy — we’d booked two rooms: a single queen bed for me, two twin beds for them. We open the door to find that both rooms are single bed rooms. So back down the stairs we go, explaining to the clerk that there’d been a mistake and that my coworkers wanted a room with two beds. Considering that there were all of 3 cars in the parking lot, including ours and, presumably, his, we didn’t think this would be a problem. But the clerk got a scary look in his eye and said, angrily, «I upgraded you to a king bed for FREE. That bed is big enough for ten people!» — he flat-​out refused to change them to a room with two beds! Too tired to argue with this asshole, we go back upstairs to hit the sack.
Before bed I wanted to plug my phone in, so I unplugged the charming Dallas Cowboys alarm clock covered in South Park stickers provided by the motel and tried to plug in my phone, but the outlets were so shitty that the plug kept falling right out of the socket. I had to rig my shoes up in a pile to keep the plug from tilting and falling out. Exhausted, I laid my head down on a way too thick to be comfortable pillow, too tired to notice until the next morning that it was smeared in someone’s mascara, and pulled the horrible cheap, spongy polyester blanket over me. Alas, sleep was to be fleeting, because the metro train whizzed by the window regularly through the night and early morning.
The next morning my coworkers had slept very little thanks to having to share a bed, listen to the metro train go by, AND sleep on their pillows, which, in opposition to mine, were rock hard and flatter than pizza boxes (and also smeared with someone else’s makeup). We resolved to ask the daytime clerk to change their room again, but our business hosts took us out to dinner, and by the time we got back, Crazy-​Eyed Asshole had resumed his post. We went back up to our rooms and found that our linens had been replaced and belongings seemed to have been riffled through — no «Do Not Disturb» sign was provided, naturally. Having to just laugh at it all at this point, we entertained ourselves by comparing the grossness of our respective rooms: theirs had discarded contact lenses on the floor of the bathroom, mine had someone else’s toenail clippings next to the bed, mysterious stains on the lamp shade, and duct tape repairs to a door. All of our linens, towels and bedding, had some sort of makeup or other stains.
All of us had stayed in some pretty terrible places — one used to work for Greenpeace and stay in all kinds of hovels in underdeveloped countries, one toured with a punk band and crashed in squats, vehicles, and all manner of places, and I lived out of a car and cheap motels at a point in my youth, so it’s not like we are squeamish — but we all thought this place was a real dump.
Pros: no bedbugs that we could ascertain, free (very poor) WiFi and limited cable TV as offered by every other motel in the country, plus a roof and walls. Cons: everything, literally everything, else.
In summary, as the previous reviewer noted, a fine place to take a prostitute if you feel like breaking the no prostitution rule. Not a fine place to stay if you have any other option at all for housing. There are plenty of cheap, shitty motels by the airport that at the very least have franchise standards, like Motel 6. Stay there instead!

There was a room with a clean bed and a bathroom. That’s all we needed if you get my er… drift. Never slept the night here. Great No Tell Motel as it’s kinda out of the way & cheap.