We arrived late, with other hotels in the area full, needing a room for 6, and still got a great rate. The well appointed room was pleasant and comfortable and in the morning had a real breakfast with ham, bacon, sausage, eggs, biscuits with gravy and lots more. The upstairs room had a balcony overlooking the river and we enjoyed the views. In fact, we were so pleased that we decided to stay over.

We tried the restaurant that night. No prime rib on Tuesday, but the steak was excellent with prices normal for that kind of menu. There was a reasonably priced children's menu as well.

We were delighted and plan to stay there again next year.

Yellowstone Valley Inn (YVI) is a fantastic and affordable place a short distance from the East entrance of Yellowstone National Park. The food is amazing, the employees warm and service oriented, the karoke and bar are fun, and the location is hard to beat. The rooms are modest, comfortable, clean, and very affordable. Right on the Shoshone River with mountains in every direction, the location is perfect!

If you are looking for the Ritz, you better visit NYC, remember, you are in the Wild Wild West of Wyoming. Enjoy the quiet starlit nights, scenery, hospitality, and relaxed pace of YVI.

This is a great place to stay. Good food, top notch staff, excellent rooms at a affordable price.

I based my family's decision to stay based on the YVI website and the fact it was in AAA. We stayed 5 nights here-too long in one location. What I admittedly missed in the confirmation email they sent me was that I had to pay the BALANCE DUE of 4 nights (one night paid a couple of months in advance for the reservation) when I checked in. I've stayed in anything from dives to 5 star resorts all over the US, and I've NEVER had to do that. The cancellation policy wouldn't allow a refund, so we were stuck there for 5 nights. It was further than anticipated to get all around YNP and Tetons, I would have liked to move to another location but couldn't afford to

PROs: Breakfast was AWESOME, evening meal was good as well BUT NO KIDS MENU was offered!!!! Our room had a great view of the Shoshone River. Good for a 1-2 night stay. Most all of the staff we encountered were pretty nice-except of course when I challenged the pay in advance rule. At that point I was tired from traveling all day, and didn't try to find another place mainly because I was 18 miles west of town. Had i realized the number of resorts/cabins closer to the east gate, I might have moved on and forfeited one night that I'd already paid for. However, i couldn't afford to give up all 5 nights!

CONS: The obvious, being stuck there when i wanted to move after a couple of nights. Also, this place suffers from a lot of deferred maintenance issues. Our room's sliding glass door only locked because of a wooden block in the bottom, and the glass was held in with duct tape! Our room missed one day getting cleaned. The ice machine broke. Not enough chairs in the room, and NONE on the patio overlooking the river! The boardwalk patio had nail heads sticking up everywhere-couldn't be barefoot out there w/o risk of needing a tetnus shot. There was one bench out front, which was nice, except that since there was a strict no smoking in the room policy, all the smokers (and i think all the guests except us smoked) used it as a congregating place. At least they were courteous enough to abide by the 10PM quiet time rule. There were no restrooms or changing rooms at either the swimming pool or hot tob.

I will say that it appeared that they were working on new things like new roofs, doing some painting, etc. on some of the buidlings.

They advertised that they had new beds, but I didn't think they were terribly comfortable.

i will admit that I am looking at everything I didn't like because the pay in advance thing really hacked me off.

Lesson learned: If I only wanted to stay here a night or 2, I'd return. But if I were staying longer, I would not.