Several of the guesthouses were booked up completely from Thursday to Sunday this weekend and most weekends. These are great times to meet other guests.
Like all the gay guesthouses, there is a large complementary breakfast around the pool every morning and free cocktail hour some afternoons. It is also a pleasant and convenient place to have lunch, since there are no other simple restaurants in the area. For the time being at least, the restaurant and bar are open without extra charge to other guests in the area, and this should become a popular spot to hang out and meet people.
Rooms are very European in style, simple, clean, open, spacious, all new furniture and bathrooms. This is the only guesthouse which (thus far) offers this amenity.
You can buy sandwiches, salads, and appetizers and order drinks all day long the bar is open until 10:00 at night. And there is a restaurant and bar, which is something new. There is a nice fitness center and a spa offering manicures, pedicures, facials, massages, etc. All carpets have been removed and all floors are marble or fine stone. The property has been completely refurbished. Now the Royal Palms is fully a block long and half a block wide, with 52 rooms. The name was kept by the new owners and used to replace the old Hotel Monaco and the adjacent property. It is several blocks away from the original Royal Palms, which is now closed and appears abandoned for the moment. The first one we wanted to see was the new Royal Palms. You can carry on conversations without shouting. In all of these properties, there are no children, no women, and no heterosexual men. They have all been completely renovated in structure and furnishings, and every one we looked at was very nice. All these resorts have at least two courtyards and two pools, clothing optional areas, fitness centers, and now many are opening spas. When you have 30-50 rooms, rather than 10-12, you have many more gay men who can meet and the costs of maintenance and servicing are reduced. Today there are a number of these joined properties in this area, and they offer a number of special advantages. There came to be more and more of them.īut the trend in the last five years has been for some of the original gay guesthouses to expand by buying the properties adjacent to them, sometimes similar motels but also small hotels. They began to change to gay motels about 30 years ago, and they had great success. (This is half-way between Las Olas Boulevard and Sunrise Boulevard.) Originally, these were all little family owned motels with 10-12 rooms each. There are more than 30 gay guesthouses in Fort Lauderdale, but the greatest concentration is in an area between Miramar and Riomar Streets just a block or two inland from the ocean. When I went to visit, they suggested we walk around the neighborhood and visit some of the new and/or refurbished gay guesthouses, because there have been considerable changes in the last few years. Friends from the North are visiting in Fort Lauderdale this week and staying in a gay guest house.