The Old Faithful Inn is a 1904 log hotel with 327 rooms, a lobby that climbs 92 feet to the gable, and no air conditioning, no televisions and no internet. It sits a few hundred yards from the geyser it is named after. Booking one of its rooms is the single hardest reservation in Yellowstone, and whether it is worth the effort depends entirely on which room you get.
This page covers every room type, what each one actually gets you, the 2026 and 2027 season dates, what the Inn does not have, how the booking window works and how to get in when it looks full. For the other eight in-park properties and how they compare, start with our guide to lodging in Yellowstone National Park. Everything below was checked in September 2026 against the National Park Service and the concessioner.
What is the Old Faithful Inn?
It is the largest log structure in the world, built in 1903–04 to a design by Robert Reamer, and a National Historic Landmark since 1987. The lobby rises six storeys under a steep gable, framed in gnarled lodgepole pine and centred on a 500-ton rhyolite fireplace, 16 feet square at the base, with a hand-crafted clock of copper, wood and wrought iron on the chimney.
Reamer was 29 when he designed it. The story usually told is that he wanted the building’s asymmetry to reflect the disorder of the landscape around it, and whether or not he ever said that, the building behaves as though he did: nothing lines up, the balconies wander, the staircases are made from deliberately crooked branches, and the whole thing works.
The Inn opened in 1904 with electric light, which Reamer disguised in fixtures shaped like candlesticks because he did not want the modern thing to look modern. It has been added to twice — the east wing and the west wing, both under his supervision, the west completed in 1927–28 — and rebuilt more than once since. A major rehabilitation around its 2004 centennial replaced the electrical, plumbing and heating systems without visibly changing anything, which is the highest compliment you can pay that kind of work.
It is not a luxury hotel and it never was. It is a railroad-era tourist hotel that happens to be one of the great buildings in the United States, and people who arrive expecting a resort are routinely disappointed by the things it does not do.
Old Faithful Inn room types, explained
There are eight room categories across three parts of the building: the Old House (the 1904 original), the East Wing and the West Wing. The naming is not intuitive and the price spread is large, so here is the whole thing in one table.
| Room type | Where | Beds | Bathroom | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Suite / Geyser Basin View | Old House | 2 queens plus sitting room | Full | Mini-fridge stocked with soft drinks and snacks; the top of the range |
| Junior Suite | East Wing | 2 queens, small sitting area | Full | Larger than a standard room; mini-fridge |
| Deluxe / Geyser Basin View | East Wing | 1 or 2 queens | Full | Partial geyser basin views |
| Deluxe Hotel Room | East Wing | 1 or 2 queens | Full | Same room, no view |
| Deluxe Hotel Room | West Wing | 1 or 2 queens | Full | Same as East Wing deluxe |
| Standard Hotel Room | West Wing | 1 or 2 queens | Full bath, or shower only | The cheapest room with its own bathroom |
| Old House Room with Bath | Old House | 1 or 2 queens | Full | Historic fabric, private bathroom, no coffee maker |
| Old House Room without Bath | Old House | 1, 2 or 3 queens | Sink in room; communal bath and shower down the hall | The cheapest bed in the building |
Every room has heat, a hairdryer, an alarm clock and a fan. The deluxe rooms and suites add a telephone and a coffee maker. The Old House rooms do not have coffee makers, which sounds trivial until 6:00 a.m.
Two structural things the table cannot show. First, the Old House rooms are inside the original 1904 building, which means thin walls, creaking floors above you, and the noise of a busy lobby carrying up the stairwell until late. Second, “geyser basin view” means a view of the basin, not a front-row seat on the eruption. Some rooms see Old Faithful; many see roofs and trees with basin beyond.
Which room should you book?
For most people, an East Wing deluxe room. It is quiet, it has its own full bathroom, it is a short walk from the lobby, and it costs meaningfully less than the geyser-view categories for a room that is otherwise identical. You did not come to Yellowstone to sit in a hotel room looking at a geyser you can watch from a bench outside.
The honest ranking, if you have the choice:
- Old House room with bath — if the historic building is the reason you are staying here at all. You get the creaks, the crooked corridors and the sense of the place, without walking down a hallway in a dressing gown.
- East Wing deluxe — the sensible default. Quiet, comfortable, fairly priced.
- Old House room without bath — the cheapest way to sleep inside the Inn, and a genuinely good deal if you are not fussy. Communal bathrooms are clean and there is a roll-in shower. Couples and solo travellers do fine; families with young children usually regret it.
- Junior suite or suite — worth it only if you are staying three or more nights, or travelling with people who will actually use the sitting room.
- West Wing standard — fine, but check whether you are getting a full bath or shower only, and note that the first floor of the West Wing is the one part of the Inn that is not elevator accessible.
- Geyser Basin View deluxe — the category we would skip. You are paying a premium for a partial view from a room you will be in after dark.
If you have mobility needs, say so when you book. ADA rooms are available, all rooms except the first floor of the West Wing are elevator accessible, and a limited number of wheelchairs are kept at the front desk on a first-come basis.
A word on families. The Old House rooms that sleep three on queen beds look like the obvious family choice and usually are not: the shared bathrooms are down a corridor, the walls carry sound both ways, and a child who wakes at 2:00 a.m. will wake several strangers too. East Wing deluxe rooms with two queens are the better call, and the Old Faithful Lodge cabins next door are cheaper again if the building itself is not the point.
A word on noise more generally. The Inn is a wooden building full of people on holiday, and the top-floor Old House rooms sit directly under a roof that expands and contracts audibly as the temperature swings 40 degrees between afternoon and dawn. Some people find this charming. Bring earplugs and you will find it charming too.
What the Old Faithful Inn does not have
This is the section that prevents most of the disappointment, so read it before you book rather than after.
No air conditioning. None, anywhere in the building. At 7,350 feet the nights are cold and this is rarely a problem, but a July afternoon in a west-facing room under that roof gets genuinely hot. Every room has a fan.
No televisions and no radios. By design, and nobody sensible misses them.
No internet. The concessioner states it plainly: “There is no internet service at Old Faithful Inn.” Cell coverage in the Old Faithful area exists but is congested and unreliable in summer. If you need to work, this is not the building.
No pets and no cooking. Neither is permitted in any room.
No elevator on the West Wing first floor. Everywhere else in the Inn is elevator accessible.
No parking near your room, in any meaningful sense. The Old Faithful parking areas are large, shared with the visitor centre and the geyser crowds, and you will walk. Unload at the Inn, then park.
No quiet in the Old House until late. The lobby is a public space with a bar, and it is busy until closing. Light sleepers should ask for a wing.
No room service, no minibar in most categories, no spa, no pool and no gym. Only the suites and junior suites have a stocked mini-refrigerator. If a hotel to you means somewhere you can order a club sandwich at 10:00 p.m., this is not that.
No laundry for guests at the Inn itself. The nearest laundry facilities in the Old Faithful area are at the campground and lodge facilities, and the practical answer for most visitors is to do a load in West Yellowstone or Gardiner on a transit day.
None of this is a criticism. Every item on that list is a consequence of running a 1904 National Historic Landmark as a working hotel in a place where the water freezes eight months of the year, and the alternative — gutting it to install ducting and fibre — would destroy the thing you came to see. It just needs saying out loud, because a significant share of the Inn’s negative reviews are from people who booked a historic log hotel and expected a Hyatt.
When is the Old Faithful Inn open?
The 2026 season runs May 1 to October 12, 2026, and the 2027 season runs April 30 to October 11, 2027. The Inn does not open in winter — it is not built for it, and the only accommodation at Old Faithful between mid-December and early March is the Snow Lodge, reached by snowcoach or snowmobile.
Those two dates are the useful ones for planning: the Inn’s season is shorter than the park’s driving season at both ends, and the first and last two weeks are the only times you have a realistic chance of a walk-up room.
Shoulder-season caveats worth knowing. In early May the geyser basin is often still patchy with snow, some park roads have not opened, and the dining room may run reduced service. In October the evenings are cold, the building is draughty by design, and several outlets shut before the hotel does. Both are wonderful times to be there, and both are noticeably less comfortable than August.
Dining at the Inn
The Old Faithful Inn Dining Room is the main event: a high-ceilinged log room under the same roof structure as the lobby, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner through the season. Dinner reservations are required, and they open alongside your room booking — make them at the same time, because walking up at 7:00 p.m. in July does not work. The 2026 dining room season runs May 1 to October 12, matching the hotel.
The Bear Paw Deli off the lobby does sandwiches, salads and ice cream for people who do not want a sit-down meal, running May 1 to October 12 in 2026. The Bear Pit Lounge, with its famous carved wood panels, runs to October 11.
Within a few minutes’ walk you also have the Snow Lodge’s Obsidian Dining Room and Geyser Grill, and the Old Faithful Lodge cafeteria and bake shop, which is the cheapest hot food at Old Faithful and perfectly decent. Between the five outlets you will not go hungry, but you should expect national-park prices and national-park queues at 6:30 p.m.
The one piece of advice everyone gives and few people take: eat early. Dining rooms at 5:00 p.m. are half empty, and you get the long evening light on the basin afterwards instead of sitting inside for it.
On the food itself, an honest assessment: the dining room is good rather than great, the room it is served in is extraordinary, and the gap between those two facts is where most of the online complaints live. Breakfast is the best value meal of the day and the buffet is genuinely useful if you are trying to be on a boardwalk by seven. Dinner is a proper sit-down service with a wine list and prices to match, and you are paying partly for the logistics of feeding several hundred people a day at the end of a very long supply line. If you want a memorable meal in Yellowstone rather than a memorable room to eat it in, the Lake Hotel dining room does it better.
Vegetarians and anyone with allergies will be fine — the kitchens handle this competently and have done for years — but say so when you make the reservation rather than on the night.
How do you actually get a room at the Old Faithful Inn?
Through the concessioner’s 13-month rolling window, on the 5th of each month, when the whole of the same month in the following year is released — online from midnight Mountain Time and by phone from 7:00 a.m. Peak summer dates at the Inn are among the first things to disappear, often within the day.
That is the mechanism for 2026 and 2027 stays. In practice, four things matter:
- Know your release date. A stay in July 2027 opened on 5 July 2026. A stay in May 2028 opens on 5 May 2027. Our page on when Yellowstone reservations open has the full calendar and the campground rules, which are different.
- Be online at midnight, not at 7:00 a.m. Online release beats phone release by seven hours.
- Be flexible about room type. Old House rooms without bath and West Wing standards survive longer than the rest. Book anything, then watch for an upgrade.
- Cancellations are real and constant. The deposit is the first night, refundable in full 30 or more days out; inside 30 days you forfeit the deposit plus a fee. That structure pushes a steady stream of rooms back into inventory about a month before each date. Checking daily in the four weeks before your trip is the single most effective tactic there is.
Two warnings. Reseller sites rank well for “Old Faithful Inn” and are not the hotel; book through the concessioner or by phone. And if the Inn is genuinely full, Lake Yellowstone Hotel is the other great historic property in the park, usually easier to book, and by some measures a nicer place to sleep.
What it is like to stay there
You come down in the morning into a room the size of a church, with a fire going and about forty people quietly drinking coffee in mismatched armchairs, and it is genuinely one of the pleasures of travel in the American West. The second-floor balcony is the best seat in the building. The staircases are made of twisted branches that someone in 1903 chose individually.
Stairs climb from the second balcony up into the roof framing to a platform called the Crow’s Nest, where musicians once played to the lobby below. Above that, a roof walk crowns the whole structure, which once carried searchlights used to illuminate Old Faithful at night. Neither is open to guests today, for straightforward structural and safety reasons, but you can see both from the lobby floor and the shape of the building only makes sense once you have.
Free guided tours of the Inn run daily through the season, given by the concessioner’s staff, and they are worth 45 minutes. So is simply sitting on the front deck at eruption time: Old Faithful is about 100 yards away, currently erupting at a median interval of about 102 minutes give or take 10, and watching it from the Inn with a drink beats the boardwalk benches for atmosphere if not for the view. The eruption schedule and the rest of the basin are covered on our Yellowstone geysers page.
What surprises people: how cold the building gets at night, how much noise travels in the Old House, how early everything closes, and how completely the crowds drain away after 7:00 p.m., leaving the basin to the people staying there. That last one is the real reason to book a room here.
A good evening at the Inn goes roughly like this. Eat at 5:00, walk the Upper Geyser Basin boardwalks from 6:30 while the light goes gold and the day visitors thin out, catch whichever of Grand, Riverside, Daisy or Castle is predicted, and come back to the lobby at dusk. In June and July that is a two-and-a-half-hour window of genuinely empty boardwalks within walking distance of your bed, and no day-tripper from West Yellowstone gets it.
A good morning goes the other way. The basin is coldest and steamiest at dawn, the thermal features throw far more visible steam in cold air, and photographers have the boardwalks to themselves until about 8:30. If you only have one night at the Inn, the morning is the better half of it.
Practical notes. Check-in is at the front desk in the lobby, which is chaotic between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m.; arriving either side of that saves twenty minutes of queueing. Luggage carts are limited. The gift shop is better than most national park gift shops and stocks the Yellowstone Forever titles worth reading. And the front deck, with its rows of chairs facing the geyser, is open to everyone and is the single best free seat at Old Faithful.
A short history of the building
1894. The only hotel in the Upper Geyser Basin burns down.
1902. With official pressure mounting for a replacement, financing arrives from the Northern Pacific Railroad, and Robert Reamer is hired.
1903–04. Construction, largely through a Yellowstone winter, using rhyolite from the caldera for the foundations and local lodgepole pine for the frame. The Inn opens in 1904.
1913–1928. The east and west wings are added under Reamer’s supervision, taking the building to its present size. Sources differ on the east wing’s date, with the National Park Service giving 1919 and other accounts 1913–14; the west wing was completed in 1927–28. As built, the original house held 120 rooms, the east wing 100 and the west wing 150.
1959. The Hebgen Lake earthquake shakes the Inn partly off its foundations, collapses the dining room chimney and damages the lobby fireplace, cutting the usable hearths from eight to two. The dining room fireplace is not rebuilt until 1985; the lobby chimney is replaced internally with a single steel pipe.
1987. Designated a National Historic Landmark. A rooftop sprinkler system is installed.
1988. The North Fork Fire, part of the summer that burned roughly 36 per cent of the park, reaches Old Faithful. The Inn is saved by firefighters, volunteers and that year-old sprinkler system. Photographs of the smoke column behind the building are among the most reproduced images of the 1988 fires.
2004–2008. A centennial rehabilitation replaces the electrical, plumbing and heating systems and stabilises the structure.
Two threads run through that timeline and both are worth carrying with you into the lobby. The first is that the building has nearly been lost more than once, by earthquake and by fire, and what is standing is the result of deliberate and expensive decisions to keep it rather than replace it. The second is that almost every feature people photograph — the crooked branch railings, the candlestick fixtures, the clock, the asymmetric roofline — was the work of one architect in his twenties who was given an enormous amount of freedom and used it well. Reamer went on to design the Canyon Hotel, the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel and much of the park’s other built fabric, but the Inn is the one that made his name.
It is also worth knowing what you are not looking at. The famous roof walk has not been open to guests for decades, the Crow’s Nest has been closed to musicians since the mid-twentieth century, and six of the fireplace’s eight original hearths have been out of use since 1959. The building you visit is a survivor, not a preserved original, and the repairs are part of its history rather than a blemish on it.
Is the Old Faithful Inn worth it?
Yes — for one or two nights, in the right room, if you understand what you are buying.
What you are buying is the building and the location. Staying inside the park at Old Faithful means you are on the boardwalks at 6:30 a.m. with nobody else there, and back in the lobby with a drink while the day visitors queue to leave. That is worth a lot, and it is not available at any price from a hotel in West Yellowstone.
What you are not buying is comfort, quiet, connectivity or value for money as a hotel room. Compare the nightly rate to what the same money buys in Bozeman and you will conclude you have been fleeced. Compare it to being outside the park at 6:30 a.m. and you will not.
Our clear verdict: book the Inn for two nights and stay somewhere with hookups, wifi or a bath tub for the rest of the trip — our full comparison of all nine in-park lodges sets out the alternatives with their seasons and price bands. Skip the geyser-view premium. Take the Old House room if the history is the point and the East Wing if sleep is. And if you cannot get in, do not spend the trip resenting it — the Inn is open to everyone during the day, the lobby is the best room in Yellowstone, and you can have the coffee and the fire without paying for the bed.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to stay at the Old Faithful Inn?
The concessioner does not publish rates outside its booking engine, and they move by season and room type. Third-party estimates for 2026 put the Inn broadly in the $200 to $400 range per night in peak season, with suites well above that. Treat any figure you find online as an estimate and check the booking engine for your dates.
Can you stay at the Old Faithful Inn in winter?
No. The Inn closes in mid-October and reopens at the start of May. The only lodging at Old Faithful in winter is the Snow Lodge, which is reached by snowcoach or snowmobile because the interior roads are closed to wheeled vehicles.
Does the Old Faithful Inn have wifi?
No. The concessioner states there is no internet service at the Inn, and there are no televisions or radios in the rooms either. Cell coverage exists in the Old Faithful area but is heavily congested in summer.
What is an Old House room?
A room in the original 1904 building, available with a private bathroom or without one. Rooms without a bath have a sink and use communal bathrooms and showers down the hall, including a roll-in shower. They are the cheapest rooms at the Inn and by far the most atmospheric.
Can you visit the Old Faithful Inn without staying there?
Yes. The lobby, the dining room, the Bear Paw Deli, the Bear Pit Lounge and the gift shop are open to everyone, and free guided tours of the building run daily through the season. You do not need a reservation to walk in and sit by the fire.
How far is the Old Faithful Inn from the geyser?
About 100 yards. The front deck looks directly onto the geyser, and the eruption is visible from the deck and from some upper-floor rooms on the basin side. Predicted eruption times are posted at the visitor centre and in the Inn.
Is the Old Faithful Inn haunted?
Staff tell stories about a headless bride on the third floor and there is a small industry of ghost tours built on them. There is no evidence for any of it, the tale appears to date from the mid-twentieth century, and the building creaks constantly because it is made of logs. Enjoy the story; do not plan a trip around it.
How many rooms does the Old Faithful Inn have?
327 across the Old House, the East Wing and the West Wing. As originally built the three parts held 120, 100 and 150 rooms respectively; subsequent remodelling, bathroom additions and conversions to public space account for the difference.
Sources
- National Park Service: Old Faithful Inn
- National Park Service: exploring Old Faithful
- Yellowstone National Park Lodges: Old Faithful Inn
- Yellowstone National Park Lodges: reservations and booking window
Image credits
| Photo | Credit |
|---|---|
| The Inn sits about 100 yards from the geyser, with the front deck facing straight at it (top of page) | Nikolay Makarov, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons |
| Robert Reamer’s front elevation, crowned by the roof walk that once carried searchlights | Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons |
| Crooked branches, wandering balconies and electric light disguised as candlesticks | Yellowstone National Park from Yellowstone NP, USA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
| The ironwork clock on the upper chimney, above a fireplace 16 feet square at the base | Yellowstone National Park from Yellowstone NP, USA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
| Dinner reservations are required | Jrozwado, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons |
| The Bear Pit Lounge and its carved and etched panels, open to anyone, guest or not | Acroterion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons |
| The Inn in its railroad era, when Northern Pacific money had just paid to build it | Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons |