California’s Kitsch Motels Went Viral. Did the Guests Follow?

On any given evening at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, you’re likely to bump into a wonderfully eccentric cast of characters. Old-timers, quick to tell you that they’ve stayed in most of the 110 themed guest rooms, sit elbow-to-elbow at the bar with twentysomethings filming Reels about retro cocktails topped with glacé cherries. In the hotel’s steak house restaurant, content creators snap photos of themselves in the squishy pink leather banquettes, while retirees shuffle across the adjoining dance floor to the swinging sounds of the house band.

Situated halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Madonna Inn was built in 1958, during the midcentury heyday of the great all-American road trip. Motor lodges began opening along American roadsides in the 1920s and ’30s, but it was during the postwar decades that they really entered their golden age thanks to a rise in leisure time and car ownership among the population, and the expansion of the highway system. At their peak in 1964, around 61,000 motels were operating along the country's highways and byways. California is credited as the birthplace of the motel concept, after the Milestone Mo-Tel Inn swung open its doors to road-weary motorists in 1925 just a few miles from where the Madonna Inn would eventually be located. The Golden State swiftly embraced motor courts with zeal, often incorporating Googie architecture, fantastical themed rooms, and flashy neon signs. 

Motel mania cooled from the 1970s onward as chain hotels were rolled out, faster interstates bypassed smaller towns, and the growing accessibility of air travel meant tourists could venture further afield. In the dusty desert outpost of Amboy, California, once a hotspot for Route 66 road trippers, Roy’s Motel & Café shuttered its guest rooms in 1972. The Tropicana in West Hollywood, a former hangout for The Beach Boys, Van Morrison, and Andy Warhol, was demolished in 1987. Rochelle’s Motel in Long Beach, star of many a Technicolor postcard in its heyday, enjoyed a brief second act in the movie Home Alone 2 before the wrecking ball came calling in 1995.

But over the past couple of decades, a revival of America’s vintage motels has taken shape as a growing number of once-forgotten motor lodges have been renovated and reinvented as design-conscious boutique hotels, plenty of them across California and Texas, but also throughout the country from Wyoming to Louisiana to the Northeast. A few years ago, when I reported on the growing influence of social media on California motels, there was considerable optimism that Instagram and influencer visits were bringing a new, digitally savvy crowd to these vintage accommodations. Now, I wanted to revisit that promise and find out whether online enthusiasm was translating into actual bookings.

Lyndsey Goldwyn, director of marketing at the Madonna Inn, says the hotel has seen "tremendous growth" in its online community, particularly on Instagram, where it has more than 195,000 followers. Much of that visibility comes from the hotel’s own content (an August post celebrating its steak house booth named for Dolly Parton, a frequent visitor, racked up 124,000 likes) and guests posting on their accounts. Lifestyle influencer Kiara Marie recently shared a hotel tour Reel with her 214,000 Instagram followers; singer Sam Smith gushed over the restaurant’s filet mignon and famous pink cake to the 590,000 followers of their food finsta, @samserved. The hotel has also hosted primed-for-social-media events, such as a performance by Dasha, a country-pop singer with more than 938,000 TikTok followers, for a party from Amazon Music and Listerine.

"We are fortunate that many of our paying guests, including everyday visitors, influencers, and celebrities, naturally enjoy sharing their experiences at the Madonna Inn on social media," says Goldwyn. When it comes to working directly with influencers, she says the hotel has " recently become more selective." They still occasionally host influencers when they feel "their content aligns with the Madonna Inn and has the potential to introduce our property to new audiences," but, Goldwyn adds, "influencer partnerships have never been a major focus of our marketing strategy."

Exactly how the Instagrammability of the Madonna Inn’s flamboyant charms—its floral carpets, gilded cherubs circling overhead, and cavernous rooms with cascading rock showers—impacts the number of actual bookings is hard to pin down, Goldwyn says: "The guest booking journey isn’t always straightforward. Someone might discover the Madonna Inn through Instagram, follow our account for several months, and eventually book a stay directly through our website. That makes it difficult to capture the full influence social media has on booking decisions." Perhaps the old advertising rule that a customer needs to see something seven times before making a purchase comes into play.