We spent one night at the Kewadin Casinos Lake Front Inn in St. Ignace Michigan. We stayed on a Saturday night in late July. We rented two rooms for the casino special rate of 72 dollars plus tax per night. We received ten dollar free play vouchers for each adult. We stayed in rooms 219 and 117, which face the lake.

We hadn’t been able to get reservations at the Kewadin Casino, which is two and a half miles away. This hotel is for their overflow customers.

We found the hotel to be every bit as dated as others have written. It appears to be at least 40 years old and it has a lot of miles on it. As an example, in the indoor pool area, the pool goes from 3 to 9 feet deep. That’s something you never see nowadays.

Our rooms were big enough and clean. The bathrooms were very small, but clean. The sink and countertop are outside the bathroom. The shower/bathtub was fine and there was very good water pressure. The water didn’t have any off-smells.

Each of the rooms had a burnt-out light bulb. The mattresses seemed old and too soft.
The air-conditioning in each room is provided by a small built-in air-conditioning unit at floor level. The fan in the unit runs continuously which was fine. The cooling cycle however, seemed to slam on and off every five minutes and even my wife thought the room was a bit warm even though the thermostat on the unit had been set by someone for 66 degrees. Those air-conditioning units seemed like a cheap answer to their cooling needs.

There was an old-style ice machine that kind of sat outside on the first floor. One of the type where you have to open the door and scoop the ice into your bucket. It drained a regular stream of water into the parking lot. It didn’t seem the most sanitary place to operate an ice machine.

A big problem was the amount of insects. Since it is a waterfront hotel, and the lakeside exterior corridors are shaded after the morning hours, it was a prime place for gnats and other tiny harmless insects to rest up. At night, insects seemed to flow into the rooms every time we opened the door. They would dance harmlessly on the ceiling, which is something we didn’t want to think about while we were sleeping. Our room had a lot of marks on the ceiling from smushed bugs. Additionally, each outside room door seemed to have a thousand fly-specks on it.

The indoor pool area was nice enough, although deserted. There are a bunch of electronic arcade games in there, as well as a whirlpool. There was no one in the pool area during the time we were there. I suspect a lot of people go to Mackinac Island or the Casino during the day and only return to the hotel to sleep at night. The hotel was fairly quiet, although we were told it was a full house.

The shore is rocky, just like the rest of St. Ignace, and there aren’t any real options for swimming in the lake around there. We could see up and down the bay shore for hundreds of yards and there were only a couple of people in the water.

There was a continental breakfast in the morning. They had various muffins and sliced bagels for toasting, as well as coffee.

The Casino seems to put very little money back into the operation. There were weeds growing through the blacktop (asphalt) of the parking lot. And the lawn and landscaping, as well as the exterior of the buildings could seriously use some regular attention.

All in all, 72 dollars a night on a weekend in the height of the summer season doesn’t seem too high a price to pay, but if we stayed there again, I could probably find a better place to stay for the same money. That’s what Trip Advisor is for…