Places to Stay

This TikTok Account Celebrates America’s Kitschiest Hotels

‘A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour’ features rooms decked out with heart-shaped tubs, Roman chariot beds, and more.
woman looking out window
A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour

In a viral TikTok from June 2021, Margaret Bienert ascends a flight of stairs to the top of a 7-foot-tall champagne glass, which also happens to be a bathtub. The video amassed over 10,000 comments, with followers asking: Where is this fantastical tub?

The Champagne glass tub at Cove Haven

A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour

Heart-shaped tubs are a recurring feature on Biernet's feed.

A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour

The tub, it turns out, is at Cove Haven, a couples-only resort in the Poconos established in 1958 alongside a wave of similar hotels that temporarily morphed the region into the “Honeymoon Capital of the World.” When Bienert visited for the first time in 2018, she found the experience to be transformative—and left with a hunger to see more funky hotels. “It was literally like a world opened up that I had no idea existed,” she says. “I was emotional. I was like, ‘Why has no one told me about this?!’”

Bienert and her husband Corey, co-owners of production studio Marginal Creative, have since visited 60 of the country’s most unique hotels and getaways, turning their travels into the project ‘A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour.’ They’ve stayed in a Roman-inspired suite featuring a chariot bed at the Victorian Mansion Bed and Breakfast in Los Alamos, documented red heart-shaped tubs at unassuming Days Inns, relaxed in clamshell-shaped beds that close on top of them as they sleep, and had pizza delivered below sea-level at Jules Undersea Lodge's underwater suite in Florida. The Bienerts even checked out the infamous Love Cloud, a private plane touting its own romantic suite and mile high club access, during an hour-long “stay” as it flew over Las Vegas. “That’s the type of thing that the hotel tour leads us to,” says Beinert, who seeks out experiences that she deems “really cool and fun and weird.” Ultimately, ‘A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour’ is on a mission to show us that not all trips or ideas of comfort and romance look the same.

Bienart, who is also a photographer, began sharing her discoveries on Instagram in April 2020. While some followers commented that the rooms looked outdated, others shared Bienert’s excitement. It helps that their designs aligned with the trends of the time: maximalist and often kitschy spaces that almost appear designed for social media. In 2021, Bienert’s content exploded on TikTok where her most popular videos often feature the unexpected. One such video, featuring a sex chair, was flagged and taken off the platform. Bienert blurred the chair and reposted the video, which now features her facial expression and a blurred out chair, deemed appropriate by TikTok's standards.

The clam shell bed at a Best Western in Galena, Illinois

A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour

The Pink Flamingo Motel in Rosemead, California

A Pretty Cool Hotel Tour

It’s not all bubble baths and velvet cloud-beds, though. This type of travel requires preparation. Some of these spots haven’t changed much since their opening 40-plus years ago; that’s their simultaneous charm and downfall. Bienart always packs wipes and bathtub cleaner or sanitizing spray. She knows how to check for bedbugs. Followers seem equally intrigued by this side of the project, too, eager to watch and comment as Bienart walks them through her arrival routine.

Beinert believes there is one of these hotels for everyone. While Beinert and her husband tend to go for more retro romantic experiences, they’ve also stayed at contemporary takes on the trend, like the Graduate Hotel’s Home Alone suite, a room at the hotel group’s Evanston, Chicago, location that includes a reproduction of the movie’s iconic bedrooms and a minibar stocked with Kevin’s favorite snacks—a good entry point for the novice “unique” hotel-goer, she says. According to Beinert, the most important thing is to know your own comfort levels and boundaries. The couple created a map featuring extensive reviews and ratings, including cleanliness, comfort, and design, to help people rediscover these places on their own. Interest seems to be growing as some of Bienert’s favorite spots are now at full capacity when she reaches out to book with them.

“I think everyone should try something like this," says Beinert. "It really pushes you out of your day-to-day life.” That, after all, is a goal of traveling for many. To stay at a “pretty cool hotel” is an opportunity to occupy another world and sometimes a different era. It’s a chance to step out of your life and wonder, “Whose world am I in right now?” says Bienert.