For 3 years, I tried and failed to book a room at the Adelphi Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York. Often sold out, this is the historic premier hotel in the posh, well-to-do wonderland of late-19th-century families from New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore.
This One Michelin Key hotel was the central stage for the town’s prestigious horse racing and spa scene, and where you’d rub elbows with Vanderbilts, former presidents, famous actors and actresses, and legendary authors.
Finally, earlier this year, I looked for a room in Saratoga Springs and found one available for my grade-school son and me on AmexTravel.com as part of The Hotel Collection. I immediately booked a 2-night stay.
Was it worth the wait?
Booking the Adelphi Hotel
Having personally experienced in years past how quickly Adelphi rooms fill up the March 2026 weekend we were planning to go, I booked in mid-October 2025 via AmexTravel.com.
Standard rooms can go for $3,000 a night in the summer, but for chill early March, a Deluxe Room, 1 King Bed, which was the only type still available, went for a much more reasonable $635 a night, making our 2-night stay $1,270, or $1,435.10 with taxes and fees.
The Adelphi Hotel is a member of Amex’s The Hotel Collection, and I paid in full at the time of booking with my Platinum Card® from American Express. I earned 5x Membership Rewards points (6,350 points), and Hotel Collection bookings receive a $100 hotel credit, early check-in (when available — it wasn’t), and late checkout (when available — it was, to a degree).
The hotel is also part of the L.V.X. Collection by Preferred Hotels & Resorts, and is bookable from 100,000 I Prefer points per night, though it is not bookable through Choice Privileges. Those with Capital One miles and Citi ThankYou Points can transfer to I Prefer at a 1:2 ratio (1:1.4 for Citi cards with no annual fee).
1. Perfect Location for Our Needs
Saratoga Springs isn’t a big city, with a population of under 30,000. Having a central spot on downtown’s main street, Broadway, means you can easily walk to most of the major spots in town, including the convention center and many of the other major hotels.
The Adelphi Hotel sits basically right at the center of town on Broadway, meaning we could get to the convention center, The Saratoga Hilton, the Kilwin’s ice cream and fudge shop, Northshire Bookstore, and the big coffee shop within a few minutes.
It was a 10- to 15-minute walk to the Inn at Saratoga, but the Saratoga Casino Hotel would’ve required a car. The Adelphi Hotel is about 1.2 miles from Saratoga Race Course, about 5 minutes by car or 25 minutes on foot.
The location meant we spent a lot less time worrying about working in extra time to make important appointments or find parking.
2. Valet Parking for Free — This Time
Speaking of parking, that’s something that can be a real issue in a relatively small town that’s flooded with visitors when you have a tight schedule during your stay. While the Adelphi doesn’t have many self-parking spaces, it does offer valet parking at $45 per day.
At check-in, the clerk at the reception desk told me that valet parking was included with my stay. Even though it wasn’t part of my suite of benefits from The Hotel Collection, that free parking proved critical to our weekend. I didn’t get all the possible booking benefits — we did get a couple extra hours to check out, but not an early check-in or room upgrade, since the place was fully booked — but the unexpectedly free valet parking actually turned out to be as useful to us as any of them.
3. Splendid Room and Bathroom, With Minor Annoyances
This was a fine room, immaculately clean, tastefully furnished, spacious for a standard room, and full of small but effective living improvements like 2 big closets.
Other features we came to appreciate included control panels that let me open and close shades or turn lights on or off in a single place (I didn’t let my kid use this, and if you’re a parent, you know why), and a minifridge stocked with complimentary alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks that we could indulge in without worrying about the price tag.
The windows overlooked a commercial side street, but the light during the day was good.
The hotel room’s age showed in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Though the bed was comfortable, I had trouble sleeping because so much light from the hallway seeped in through cracks around the old, ill-fitting door. Combined with all the lights from the doodads around the room, it made it difficult to get back to sleep when I was woken in the middle of the night.
Unexpectedly, the highlight of the room was the bathroom, usually an afterthought in hotels I’ve reviewed, except for the worst reasons. Our bathroom in the Adelphi featured heated tile floors, a fancy Japanese toilet with several bidet functions, a shower with both rainfall and handheld showerheads, an attractive freestanding tub, plush bathrobes, and great lighting.
When friends visited us in the hotel, my son excitedly made a point of giving them a tour of the bathroom features he was most impressed by. The latch on the toilet room, however, was ill-fitting, making it difficult for anyone to keep the door closed to protect their privacy when they had to use the toilet.
Our room, 317, was in a hallway off the game room. It shared this short hallway with another guest room and a utility room. The utility room was open a lot, with staff members hanging out and doing work, but was also often left unattended with the door open. It wasn’t the most attractive look, but at least the staff members using it weren’t too noisy.
4. $100 Goes Quickly for Food
One of the sticky points with perks from The Hotel Collection or Fine Hotels + Resorts is that, just as not all families are alike, not all hotel credits are alike for unalike families. For a lone parent and their grade-schooler on a scholastic event that takes up 10- to 12-hours of the day, a 3-hour session in a hammam is useless, for example. But good room service that gets you both fed after or before that long, long, sometimes grueling day without having to search for someplace acceptable to eat? That’s valuable.
Of course, the best benefits of all are the credits you can use any way you please. In my case, it’s becoming more and more common for me to use it for room service, an indulgence I rarely used to allow myself but now find clutch when traveling with a young kid.
But the $100 The Hotel Collection credit goes quickly for room service at hotel prices, like $6 English muffins, $12 sticky buns, $13 yogurt parfaits, and $22 eggs Benedict. The room service server who came up from the hotel restaurant, Morrissey’s, was excellent, courteous, and friendly. But the food, though good, wasn’t quite $6-per-muffin good.
5. Crowded Restaurants, Slow Service During Our Stay
We visited during a large convention that drew hundreds of families and thousands of visitors to the relatively small city of Saratoga Springs. Every year, I’ve witnessed the local economy struggle to handle the extra strain on its resources, especially in terms of space and manpower.
This was evident even at the Adelphi, the town’s premier hotel, where the hotel’s main restaurant, Morrissey’s, regularly had to spill out into the lobby, and the sushi bar, which was always packed, day or night.
The service was always friendly and knowledgeable, and we were more than willing to take a lobby table, especially given how busy it was. But the surging waves of hungry families broke upon the Adelphi just as they did at every other restaurant in town, and our servers and food arrived almost immediately for one course, only to face seemingly interminable delays for another.
Again, this is an issue I’ve noticed at nearly every place I’ve eaten in Saratoga Springs on this particular weekend over the last 3 years, not just the Adelphi. Under the circumstances, our server, clearly overburdened, performed admirably.
6. Eclectic Restaurant Menu
Almost every hotel restaurant I’ve ever been to, especially the ones that also handle room service, has a couple of mainstays on the menu no matter what: a hamburger with fries, some sort of pasta with a choice of marinara or Bolognese, and some random dish named after the hotel, the city, or some nearby landmark.
On our dinner visit to Morrissey’s with friends, we hit the trifecta: garganelli Bolognese ($32), a hamburger with fries ($25), and something called the Adelphi maki ($24).
The dishes were all good enough, especially after a long, hard day, but the mango-and-passionfruit cheesecake ($15) was perhaps too dense and somewhat chalky. And though the spicy tuna roll and California roll (both $14) hit the spot, the Adelphi maki was just … too much. Described as “crispy spicy tuna and cucumber, avocado, topped with seared mixed sashimi and tobiko, tempura flakes, micro greens & teriyaki sauce, spicy mayo, wasabi mayo,” I felt more like I was trying to stuff all the Muppets into my mouth while Miss Piggy and Kermit were having a disagreement.
6. Much-Appreciated Game Room but Poorly Cared-for Equipment
The third-floor game room was seemingly hidden away toward the back of the hotel (but right by our room), so maybe that’s why this delightful oasis of activities wasn’t always packed. Inside was a table tennis, a pool table, several poker tables (and cases with packs of cards and nicely heavy clay chips), and 2 foosball tables. Wall-mounted TVs were set to various live sports events, and there were nongaming tables and couches off to one side for quieter pursuits.
We had fun here for a couple of hours more than once during our stay, but clearly no one has been updating or tending to the equipment as they should. The tip of at least one pool cue had been worn to uselessness; all of the decks of poker cards were worn and had lost all of their stiffness, making it them difficult to shuffle and deal; and the foosball tables, though featuring an interesting design involving monolithic stone slabs, were badly engineered, with too many too-wide gaps between the figures, making for a lot of stopped plays because the ball just sat there.
Even worse, a few of the slabs had become completely detached from their rods, meaning that if a player tried to manipulate one of his or her offensive or defensive lines, the figure would just hang uselessly. This made one of the foosball tables pretty much unplayable, and the other hardly fair to one of the players.
A game room was certainly a pleasant and much-appreciated extra, especially for those of us traveling with kids, but merely installing one was just the first step. If you want your guests to get the most out of it and credit you for it, you have to maintain it, too.
7. Friendly and Thorough Service
The hotel staff was upbeat, helpful, polite, and informative every step of the way, from check-in to room service to cleaning to checkout. When we asked for extra time to check out, they managed to squeeze a couple of extra hours for us, even though the hotel was packed. After we left the room, they kept our bags safe until we were ready to depart from Saratoga Springs.
The daily turndown included 2 chocolate candies, 2 bottles of water (Saratoga, of course), and a weather forecast that proved quite useful.
8. Understated Aesthetic Throughout, but Only 1 Elevator
Some hoteliers think a beautiful property is all about grandiosity, splashing gold paint everywhere they can and making everything else rococo. The Adelphi Hotel, on the other hand, favored clean lines, good lighting, and subtle shades in ways that evoked its upper-crust, racing-season history without turning itself into a museum. And it’s all without being sterile. I dug it.
The apparent downside to being a piece of living history, however, is that you only get 1 small elevator for guests.
9. Spa and Other Services Went Unused
Though the Adelphi lists several other amenities, such as yoga classes and various spa services, these spaces seemed unused during the weekend we visited.
The Adelphi also has full-time residences, and we saw offices for these both off the lobby and on a higher floor of the hotel. The amenities listed for residents, like the library, fitness room, and game room, were the same ones we used as hotel guests.
Final Thoughts
After 3 years of trying to book a room at this historic hotel, I finally got to stay for a weekend. What I found was excellent, friendly service, good but not amazing food, fun amenities, and a solid room that still needed touches of maintenance. All that said, the Adelphi Hotel is now my preferred place to stay in Saratoga Springs — if I can find a room.