Luxury at Parker Palm Springs

Parker Palm Springs is one of those luxury hotels you see and plan a whole vacation on just based on your stay there. Or wait, is that just me? Don’t get me wrong, Palm Springs is great on it’s own, but when I think of this desert destination, what I picture is the abundance of stylish hotels and AirBNBs with their decor themes and expertly designed rooms, perfect for both photo and design lovers like myself. Now a lot of these hotels come with a hefty price tag, one I’m typically not willing to splurge on, but every once in a while I can make an exception, especially if you plan accordingly and know that you’ll be spending a lot of time at the hotel itself and so it can feel more worth it. (Disclaimer: we took this trip in 2016, but I didn’t have a blog then and I do have the travel bug now that we’ve been stuck at home for over a year so I’ve decided to write some posts on older vacations.)

I love a vacation where you get up in the morning, eat breakfast and then head out for a full day of walking around and exploring, only to come back to the hotel at the end of the night to get into pjs, flip through the photos you took, relax and go to bed. Those are the vacations where I choose my hotels based on location - How far it is it from all of the things you want to do each day? Is it in a safe neighborhood?, cleanliness - no explanation needed here, breakfast - this one may sound silly, but I love when a breakfast is included (or at least offered) in your stay, that way you can get up eat breakfast and be on your way to explore without having to head out to find a spot somewhere first and coordinating the location of the restaurant with your itinerary for the day etc., and last, but not least, cost - if I’m spending all day outside of the hotel, I don’t want to spend an arm and a leg, I’m willing to pay a little more to get the location and other things I mentioned, but I don’t want to splurge on a place I’m barely spending any time in.

However, I do love interior design and there are so many beautifully designed hotels with sprawling grounds decorated to a tee. So sometimes, I do plan a trip around a hotel or splurge on a few nights at a special hotel as part of a longer trip. When I do this as part of a longer trip, I think of it as a relax or recharge part of the trip, where we can spend more time at the hotel and less time out and about so that we can really appreciate the place we’ve spent a pretty penny to be in. And same goes for a trip planned solely around a specific hotel — we make sure it has enough amenities or things to do and treat it more like a relaxing vacation where we can spend time together chatting or reading or swimming etc.

And that’s what Parker Palm Springs was for us. We had seen photos of it and fell in love and knew we just had to make it work. Typically, the hotel is very high in price, even higher than we would spend on a splurge hotel, but we had been given a hot tip. I mean quite literally, a hot tip. Palm Springs is in the desert and gets into the 100°s in the summer. It’s pretty unbearable and so that’s the off season for the area. So while normally people think of summer as prime vacation time, a lot of people avoid Palm Springs during the summer and so the prices come down. So that’s what we did! We booked a very hot summer vacation at Parker Palm Springs and it cut the price down enough for us to be willing to pay for it. We weren’t planning on spending too much time on activities since we wanted to spend time at the hotel anyway and so we figured we’d dip in and out of the pool and stroll around, in and out of air conditioning and we could handle the heat. And we mostly did. The one piece of advice I’d give myself for the next time I visit the desert in the middle of summer is to either A) figure out some stylish ways to wear my hair up and off my neck while still feeling cute or B) not worry about being cute too much, because I definitely made myself more uncomfortable than necessary with wanting my hair down the entire time.

I had to include a picture of this milkshake because we went to Palm Springs in 2016, it’s now 2021 and Brendan STILL talks about this milkshake multiple times a year. It was date and walnut milkshake from Great Shakes and it sure did make an impression.

SHOP THE POST

Outfits are all old since this was in 2016, but I’ve linked some summer vacation-worthy outfits I’ve been eyeing.