College Inn

Absolutely awful. No parking (not mentioned on website). Shared bathroom (also not mentioned on website). No TV. WiFi barely reaches my room. To top it off the furniture is awfully damaged.

I booked here while moving in my daughter to the UW dorms. I should have read the blurb more carefully. I was worried about no parking but I figured I could park on campus. What I was not counting on was no bathroom in the room. I checked in, at the convenience store (huh?), went upstairs and nearly had a stroke! The ladies bathrooms — two very worn stalls and two showers — no dressing area — in a storage room, full of buckets, brooms etc. My room had a ceiling fan going which I could not turn off. The wifi did not reach the room. I tried to convince myself it would be ok, a bit of an adventure, etc. Took my computer and went over to Starbucks to work. Came back, sat down, and then I saw the hole in the wall. Literally a hole 5 – 6 inches wide right next where the elderly electric wall heater is mounted. Mouse hole anyone? Luckily I was able to get a room at the nearby Travelodge so I packed my bag and got out just before midnight. $ 258 poorer. Yes, all this for $ 126 per night (prepaid, not refundable). I would definitely stay away from this place. There are plenty better options in the district. 2 stars because it’s so close to campus. I would rather stay further way and drive/​walk/​take a bus if I had to.

I originally gave this place one star because they accidentally overbooked their rooms (we had booked this place months ago through the Lonely Planet website) and moved me unilaterally, without any advanced notice, to a Travelodge by the space needle. This was very inconvenient for us since we were visiting my sister near the college inn and didn’t have a car.
But once I spoke to the manager he paid for a taxi to and from the U district to the Travelodge and made sure we didn’t pay more than the original reservation. I think he did his best to right the situation. They apparently are working with Lonely Planet to resolve the overbooking issue.

What an interesting place. To get there you walk around the building and down some steep dark stairs into this speak easy type dark hole in the wall. Not much excitement or hospitality here, however, the beer was cold and they have old school dart boards. Great place to hide of you don’t want anyone to find you… EVER!
I would go back if I was in the neighborhood to play darts and have a cold one.

Love this place, I’ve stayed here three times now. It’s clean, comfy, safe, and really convenient. The staff are always friendly. This is the best place to stay around campus if you’re looking for an inexpensive hostel experience.

I have gone to College Inn for years but it’s going downhill. There used to be a manager but no more, you sign up with little store below. Little quality control now. Lighting is dim to poor. The newspapers are gone on the weekend although they do get them.
Advantages– cheap, easy to book on website, close to restaurants and UW campus, Beds are very comfortable. The breakfast is ok except the time they used flavored coffee! There is a really great espresso place downstairs right next door which is open on weekdays if you need a bagel and espresso fix in the morning.

Okay, this place is really more like a hostel with private rooms than a hotel. No private bathrooms, the décor is very old and worn, the single pane windows don’t keep out any of the noise from the busy street below, there is no elevator, breakfast is mostly coffee and toast… so why four stars? Well, it’s clean, half the price of the next cheapest place, way closer to UW than anything else (practically on campus) and the bed are surprisingly comfortable. If that is all you need, then this might be the place for you. Just know what to expect when you book it.

You can’t beat the location at the price. That said, this hostel — not hotel/B&B — leaves much to be desired.
The first thing I should note is how hot it was in the summer We are graduate students and were in Seattle for a conference admittedly during a heat wave (85 – 90 degree highs), which is unusual for Seattle. The old building has only a ceiling fan to cool the rooms, which made it extremely difficult to get to sleep at night and stay asleep. It may have been easier to get to sleep if we could keep the windows open, but the tremendous amount of noise outside made us want to keep the windows closed. I would strongly suggest not staying here if the weather will be hot during your visit.
The shared bathroom situation was okay. If you’re under 30, or enjoy reliving the experience of a dormitory, then you can handle the shared (sex-​segregated) bathrooms. Still, each bathroom has only one stall and two showers for an entire floor, which was a bit tight, especially when everyone wants to use it in the morning. And while I saw cleaning staff in the bathrooms each day, flies were a problem due to lack of screens.
We had to change rooms three times over our stay, so we got to see how unstandardized the rooms are. I’m not speaking about the charming variation you’d expect in a 100+ year old building. I mean that our first room had no working surface (i.e. desk) but had a robe so you didn’t have to walk naked down the hall to the bathrooms, but the second room had a desk (which was broken) but no robe. Our third third room was good — it had both a robe and a stable desk — but the towel meant for showering was a hand towel, so I had to pilfer a proper one from the housekeeping cart. All that said, I was happy to find no evidence of bed bugs in any of the mattresses, which had been a problem in Seattle for a while.
The whole outfit felt rather haphazard and disorganized. The people in charge of check-​in and other services were all college students, who, bless them, didn’t really know what they were doing. It would have been nice to have an ‘real’ adult whose career was hospitality to turn to with questions/​complaints (like, for example, when we discovered the apple juice that had been served on several mornings for breakfast had fermented). This building does not have a front desk where you can just go see the manager; the manager, another student, when present, is closed up in a room on the top floor, which doesn’t exactly scream ‘come to me for help’ like a front desk would.
The most obnoxious thing for me was the fact that the information booklets in the rooms are not up to date. For example, the password for the weak and inconsistent wi-​fi printed in the information booklet did not match up to the one found on our key fob, and, one Sunday, we decided to sleep in and get breakfast at 9:30 only to find the breakfast had been cleared away before we got there (the booklet — and the laminated sheet in the breakfast area itself — said breakfast until 10 on the weekends). This screwed up our schedule for the day and cost us more money.
Staying at the College Inn might have been fine, perhaps even charming, for a short stay, but the inconsistencies, lack of amenities, and poor organization of the business as a whole made us more than ready to leave this place behind after our 11 night visit.

If all you need is a bed to crash on next to UW campus, this is a great place to stay.
Pros? The service is great – although the two guys who run it seem over worked., they’re always very helpful and friendly. The beds are super comfortable, and the continental breakfast is not bad (bagels, toast, cinnamon bread, cereal, coffee, different spreads, etc). And it really is convenient.
Cons? Shared bathroom (only some of the girls bathroom doors close!). The office hours don’t include 11:00 am to 3 pm! So sometimes no one will be there if you arrive during this lunch period.

Anything that advertises «European-​style» makes me immediately suspicious. Part of it is me being a pretentious hipster and being like «Oh, nothing could compare to Euuuurope» (imagine me putting an unnecessary accent over the ‘u’). The other part is that when something, be it a bakery, bar or hotel, slaps that label on, it means they’re trying to cover for something. It’s like calling a tiny shit apartment «cozy».
In this case, it’s masking the fact that it’s a hostel for $ 80. Yes, you get a private room. Sure, the room is nice. But you share a bathroom (a kind of crummy one) and their «breakfast» is the same toast and jar of jam you’d get at a $ 10 crash-​shack.
Honestly, it’s about location. I stayed for a conference and if I had another conference here I’d probably stay again. But if I wanted to enjoy a hotel/​impress a girlfriend, I would spend hotel-​stay money far away from this place.

This place isn’t all that bad. It’s a typical European style hostel. It’s in a cool location with lots of great shops and bistros. The rooms are spacious and the building appears to have all new carpeting. The one gripe I have is the common bathroom was dirty. I checked in on a Monday evening and noted that some trash and Ajax powder was on the floor in one of the stalls and remained there until I checked out on Thursday. The same goes with the two shower stalls. Therefore, the bathroom was never cleaned in over three days. I took some pictures and intend to email them to the management.

I stayed here about a month and a half ago while I was in Seattle for the weekend accompanying my brother to an audition at UW.
We initially reserved the room because it was close to campus and we weren’t sure how to get around, although we did end up renting a car. I was worried about parking because of what other reviewers had said, but maybe the time of year we went just wasn’t that busy. We managed to find parking on the street both nights close to the hotel. The only bummer was having to wake up early on Saturday to feed the meter.
I would advise when you first check in to leave your bags downstairs before you know where your room is because the office is all the way at the top on the fourth floor. The continental breakfast wasn’t anything special — juice, coffee, cereal and pastries. But you can’t complain if it’s free!
The bathrooms are communal, which I know is bothersome to some people, but I didn’t find that to be a problem because I’ve stayed at places like that before, and the bathrooms were clean. And there was never anyone in there when I was using it. The hotel provides bathrobes in the rooms to walk back and forth to the bathroom.
Next time I go to Seattle (which will be soon since my brother will be attending there for school) I’ll probably chose to stay in a hotel downtown instead, but nothing about my visit here was displeasurable, and I’d recommend it to anyone who is looking for somewhere cheap to stay in the area.

I have stayed here three times now and like it. I went to book a room for New Year’s Eve and found the single room is $ 142 a night? This is the type of room I have stayed in before and know it is $ 60 a night. They must have jacked the price WAY up because of New Years. Ugh
I work at the UW and my place is being remodeled so that is why I have stayed here and I like it

I live in the Seattle area and work at the UW. I was just looking for place to stay for the night other than home, someplace to get away that was quiet and where I could finish up some of my work. I decided on the College Inn and I am very glad that I did! What a nice place, very quaint, comfortable beds, free good wifi, quiet room and nice staff. The only downside, and I knew it when I booked the room, is the parking. Well, what parking? There is no parking unless you want to get up and feed the meters every 2 hours. I really wish that they could offer some type of parking accommodations. Other than the parking, the place is good. Also, a discount for being a UW employee would be nice! :) I will return.

For what it is, a solid place to stay if you’re only looking for a bed, bathroom, and warm room. Honestly, I was looking for a cheap option close to UW campus so this fit the bill. BEWARE if you’re not OK with this that there are communal unisex bathrooms for showers and toilets. Individual rooms have their own sinks but that’s about it. Each room has just the basics: bed, sink, nightstand, and probably a desk with a chair. Some of the rooms didn’t have completely closing windows… I had to request a room change because the original room I reserved was super breezy … and when I looked at the windows I discovered that one just wasn’t able to close fully and that left a sizeable gap for cold drafts to come in. In mid-​December that just didn’t cut it for me. You can’t really beat the price and convenience of this location though for the University District. I only spent one night there and was in my room minimally so it wasn’t a big deal for me that the furnishings were pretty bare minimum. I’m not a huge fan of the communal bathroom thing but for one night it was tolerable. I guess you can try to get more privacy but showering at an off-​peak time. Another thing to be aware of is that there are no elevators… check-​in is on the 4^th floor and rooms are on floors 2 and 3. Also, if you’re in town for UW business and you mention that, there is a small discount you can get applied to your room charge.

This place is a nice simple place if you’re looking to spend some good nights out in the U-​District. On the other hand, it’s definitely NOT a family place or a luxuious long stay sort of place.
The rooms seem very dorm-​like. A good throw back to the old days of living of the now demoslished Mercer Hall. The rooms are very spartan, lots of room, but not much to do with it. There’s no TV. A set back? Nope.
The lack of a TV got my wife and I to get our bums outside to see a rally and bum around on the Ave. If we had a TV inthe room, we might have spent the night be lazy in fron tof the TV.
Parking ain’t always easy, but there is a giant parking lot a few blocks away that is super cheap. Go up Brooklyn to by the Hotel Deca and hit up that parking lot. It’s only $ 8/​24hrs.

I really like this place! It’s so cozy, and I honestly believe it’s the best value in Seattle. I’d have to pay twice as much for a room in a conventional hotel, and I’d much rather stay here anyway!
I’ve stayed here twice … the second time, my room had a window seat. :) The shared bathroom was clean, and the staff were personable and helpful. However, I thought the breakfast leaves a bit to be desired, so I’m dropping one star.

Euro style bathrooms. NO PARKING ANYWHERE NEAR HERE EXCEPT ON STREET WHICH IS ALWAYS FULL!!!
The reception desk isn’t always open either. So if you arrive at say, noon you might have to stick around till 3pm waiting for them to open.
Otherwise it was clean and comfortable.

Extra half star if they can get rid of the old pizza smell in the stairwell (luckily not in the room I stayed in), but an overall good option if you need a convenient place to stay near UW. Good price, clean, kinda old and musty feeling though I’d just come from staying at the Ace hotel in portland so anything after that is pretty much sure to be a letdown.
My stay here was the tail end of a month long interview of the US for residency positions (this was my 7^th of 7 this month) so 1) I was tired and 2) this month included Xmas, which meant traveling with Xmas gifts I didn’t have when I started the month meaning heavier bags than I normally have.
Problem #1 with this place, the office is on the 4^th floor and there are no elevators, this being an old charming european style thing, so those with lots of stuff better beware. Problem #2 mentioned already, the office is open 7am-​11 and 3pm-​11 or something like that. My day started pretty early, so this was not ideal. Luckily the manager was nice and let me just check out late since no one was checking into my room, but if it were a busier season I might have been out of luck.
The good: room was clean, grandparentsy charming, and the manager was very nice and gave me a free upgrade since the place was not very busy. Location was great — easy walk to campus and right near the main drag with plenty of cheap eats and stuff. Steps from bus lines to downtown as well.

Having enjoying the pub downstairs many nights in my UW time, I decided that I would just stay right above it on my next Seattle visit.
My room was well laid out and clean. It was the smaller of two room sizes, but plenty for two people. The bed was really comfy. Not too much noise from the bar or adjacent rooms.
The guys bathroom was clean enough for me, but the ladies shower was not well-​lit enough (or something along those lines) for the person who shared my room. Clearly there are exacting standards at work here! I will add… I have stayed in a few shared-​bathroom hotels (the Mosser in SF, a place downtown in SLC), and the CI was as clean as any of them. So: no worries, particularly if you are a guy.
Worst thing was waking up at 7:55 am to feed the parking meter.