For sun-deprived East Coasters, Palm Springs, California, can sound like a mythical oasis, springing up from the desert fully loaded with vacationing celebrities, sparkling swimming pools, top-notch restaurants, iconic architecture, and luxury hotels. In recent decades, buoyed in part by a resurgence in interest in midcentury modernist design, the city of around 45,000 has undergone a renaissance, with massive redevelopment of its downtown and an influx of investment from hotel companies.
In February 2026, my family and I visited Palm Springs for the first time for its biannual Modernism Week, which offers tours of several of the city’s famous midcentury modern homes and has events at art spaces around town. We tried out Bar Cecil, the Michelin Bib Gourmand, Andy Warhol-decorated restaurant that’s reputed to have the best martini in Southern California. And to rest our heads, we stayed 4 nights at the Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel, a 4-star Marriott hotel that I booked through Chase Travel, which I access with my Chase Sapphire Reserve®.
Did the Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel live up to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood’s favorite place to escape?
Booking the Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel
I’ve been a fan of American Express’ Fine Hotels + Resorts and The Hotel Collection, so I wanted specifically to try out a hotel in Chase’s newish hotel collection, The Edit. After going on Chase Travel and perusing The Edit’s lodgings in Palm Springs for Modernism Week, I homed in on the Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel because it was a Points Boost hotel
For 4 nights for 2 adults and a child, a room with 2 queen beds came to $1,582.38, or about $396 a night before taxes and fees (which totaled $226.38). The Points Boost feature let me redeem my Chase Ultimate Rewards points for 1.65 cents per point rather than the usual 1-point-per-cent value Chase Travel offers, so I could book with points instead for 95,901 points. Upgraded Points values Chase Ultimate Rewards points at 2 cents apiece.
Was this the optimal use of my Chase points? No. But I redeemed those points, which I wasn’t saving for anything in particular, and which I still had plenty more of, at that subpar rate, and my pants haven’t caught fire or anything … yet. I put the taxes and fees on my Chase Sapphire Reserve card.
1. It’s in a Convenient Location
The Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel stands about 4 blocks and a few minutes’ walk from Palm Springs’ main commercial street, South Palm Canyon Drive. It’s on East Tahquitz Canyon Way, next to the Agua Caliente Tribal Court and kind of corner to the Festival Theaters cinema.
For my wife, our grade-school child, and me, this was a great location. It was close enough to walk to Palm Springs Canyon Drive without us being right on top of the bustling tourist district. Though Palm Springs is no longer the sometimes riotous spring break destination it was decades ago, we still wanted enough peace and quiet for everyone to get enough sleep in case we had street-facing windows.
From the hotel to the base-level Palm Springs Aerial Tramway Valley Station took about 15 to 20 minutes by car. From Palm Springs International Airport (PSP), the hotel is less than 10 minutes by car. Flooding from the unusually stormy week we visited slowed down driving. It took us about an hour to get from our hotel to Joshua Tree National Park, and 45 minutes to Pioneertown, the onetime TV and movie set for Westerns that’s now a tiny tourism- and arts-based community.
There’s convenient parking pretty much everywhere. Self-parking at the Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel was free, easy, and right in front of the hotel. Because most of the events we were going to that week required driving, this proved essential.
What’s more, because there was a movie theater right across the street, I could take my son to see “Jurassic Park” for the first time on a whim after a day of house tours and sightseeing. (He said it was scary, but nothing he couldn’t handle. His minireview of “Jurassic Park” is 4 out of 4 stars.)
2. It’s Not Midcentury Modern
The main reason I came to Palm Springs was Modernism Week. (The main reason my wife and son came was the pool.) But the house tours, neighborhood tours, and museums were where the midcentury modernist immersion ended.
Though the Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel favored clean lines and functionality over unnecessary ornamentation, these were elements of the technically oriented mass-market design of any hotel chain rather than a nod to midcentury modernist architecture. In other words, there was nothing especially Palm Springsian about the hotel’s look, and it could’ve easily been plopped down in many other cities or by an airport without looking out of place.
Yes, our 7-year-old and his slightly younger cousins loved the colored-light floor display that whisked you into the lobby from the main entrance. But if you’re coming to Palm Springs to take in the midcentury modern aesthetic without a break for your entire stay, the Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel isn’t the place for you. Instead, you might want to look at Airbnb, on which you can rent several notable midcentury modern Palm Springs homes, like Villa Sierra (which was one of the Modernist Week house tours during our visit).
3. It Was a Comfortable but Unexciting Room, but Held Up Well to Kids
The hotel was clean, practical, reasonably spacious, and comfortable. We slept well, and the rooms were quiet at night despite facing the street and parking lots. The beds were comfortable, the water pressure and temperature were good, and the rooms were cleaned regularly and well.
Like the rest of the hotel, and as you’d expect from most chain hotels, it didn’t have much personality, with the little character it did have coming from the view of the red tile roofs out the window.
Did it provide everything we needed out of a hotel room for half a week? Yes. Do I actually remember much about it? Honestly, not really.
My Los Angeles-based cousin rented a room on the same floor with her 2 young boys, and their room served as a base for 3 high-energy kids for a few hours. Shockingly, our son decided he preferred staying in the hotel room and playing with his cousins rather than coming with a bunch of old people on a tour of the self-designed home of Swiss-born architect and Le Corbusier disciple Albert Frey.
A room with 2 queen beds was not only enough to contain the chaos, but it also stood up to all the abuse 3 grade-school combatants could mete out to it and each other.
4. We Wished We Could’ve Used the Pool and Outdoor Spaces More
An unusual storm that hung out over Palm Springs for almost our entire stay meant chilly temperatures (in the 50s Fahrenheit during the day), high winds (gusts of up to 65 miles per hour), and long bouts of rain.
Still, we managed to make use of the big pool, as did a handful of other people in the hotel, who I assumed were Northeasterners or Midwesterners like us and found it positively balmy compared to the below-freezing weather back home.
Besides being a little nippy, it was great fun floating in the pool and seeing the San Jacinto Mountains looming dramatically over us, with the palm trees holding up the blue skies and clouds like botanical Atlases that had come into town for spa treatments and maybe scope out places to stay for Coachella.
The cool temperatures and high winds ultimately meant we spent more time bundled up and hiking in Joshua Tree during the week, but if the weather had behaved as it normally does in Palm Springs, we would have clearly spent more time hanging out poolside. It was well-maintained, there were fresh towels for the few people who were out, and even if half the hotel had shown up, there would probably have been enough room.
We didn’t try the hot tub because it was restricted to adults, and we had our child with us. The kids pool was for very young kids — very shallow and unexciting for anyone older than a preschooler. The pool bar was closed, so we didn’t get to try it out.
5. The Hotel Restaurant Was Well-Serviced and Efficient
Breakfast was simple and good enough to fill up and move on with our day.
The hot foods section featured a daily rotating buffet of dishes (pancakes, French toast, bacon, sausage, and so on). A staff member manned an omelet station for made-to-order eggs with mix-ins like chorizo and Hatch chiles (though they were baffled and amused when I asked for them Christmas-style). The cold foods included the standard-issue continental breakfast buffet fare: sliced breads, packaged bagels, cereals, muffins, pastries, milk, oatmeal, and jellies in little, peelable plastic containers.
The staff led us to our seats, filled our coffees, and took our juice orders, but everything else was on us. They were fast, friendly, and efficient, and we never had to wait for a table (despite it being relatively full most mornings with Modernism Week and a couple of conventions) or for our beverages.
We made it to lunch or dinner (usually skipping lunch, actually) without any of us dying of starvation. So a win all around, by that standard.
6. The Laundry Room Was a Mystery
Though free self-service laundry was listed as an amenity in our welcome note and on an information sheet at the front desk, the laundry situation turned out to be a minor mystery.
It took some sleuthing to actually find it, as a couple of the staff members I asked didn’t seem to know where it was or could only give vague directions. I finally found it in the inner courtyard, accessible only from the outside, where it lay almost hidden behind an unremarkable, scarcely marked door to an empty part of a patio.
Though the sheets clearly stated that wash and dry were complimentary, a sign inside the laundry room stated that each wash and dry was $2.50. But I didn’t see anywhere to pay $2.50 to use the machines — they looked like standard units you might have in your basement or laundry room, and there was only 1 of each. Plus, there were no detergents or dryer sheets to use or buy.
If you had questions about this arrangement, you were presumably supposed to follow the instructions on another sign that encouraged you to use the handset to ask for assistance. But that sign was above an empty telephone jack, with no phone or any other kind of handset in sight.
7. It Has a Fitness Center and Market
The Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel has a large, reasonably well-equipped fitness center, though no one was using it when I visited.
Off the lobby was the pantry, the small store where you could buy necessities, toiletries, snacks, and drinks. I don’t remember seeing laundry detergent here, but I could’ve missed it.
8. Conference Space
The Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel looked like a popular place for corporate retreats and conventions, and there was apparently a White Claw corporate meeting here during our stay. A whole wing of the hotel was dedicated to conference rooms, and it looked like, proportionally, more of the space of the hotel was about these kinds of guests than I normally see at other hotels.
9. Bar Cecil Made the Best Martini I’ve Ever Had
Yes, it was worth it, even at up to $50 a pop.
Final Thoughts
It would be a lie to say that my family and I will remember much about the Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel in a few years. That doesn’t make it a bad hotel — in fact, quite the opposite. We will remember the glitzy, chintzy fun of downtown Palm Springs, the beautiful homes, the views from the tramway, the surreal landscape of Joshua Tree, and the fun times we shared with our family and friends in California.
That the Renaissance Palm Springs Hotel gave us a well-located, comfortable, and safe place to experience all those memorable moments — all without overshadowing any of it for good or ill — is a subtle testament to a chain hotel that knows that it’s just the setting to the jewel and knows how to get the job done without overdoing it.