Several motels in my hometown let non-guests use the pool for a small fee. There was one within walking distance (20 min walk) from my parents house. They had a lifeguard and charged, IIRC $3 for the afternoon. No changing room or shower. You wore your swimsuit under your clothes. Which meant hanging out at the pool for awhile before putting them back on to walk home.
Do any motels still do this?
It was a nice side income. These small town motels rarely got booked solid. Not many guests and the pool was empty anyhow in the early afternoon. They closed it to us (teens) by 4 pm so guests could use it in the evening. Most traveller’s don’t pull off the highway until late evening anyhow.
But it also meant dealing with young teens. Insurance liability might be a concern today too.
Just curious if this is still offered.
Btw, that $3 fee was about the same as a movie ticket back then.
So I choose between using my allowance to swim or go to a movie. Once in awhile mom felt generous and surprised me with trip to the pool. Probably to get me out of the house and give her some peace and quiet. 
I remember going with my parents to a motel pool regularly during the summers when I was maybe 7-10 years old (I think we bought some kind of season pass). I’d bring a friend, they’d bring some books and board games. Great fun for the afternoon.
I haven’t found any local motels that do this, so perhaps it’s less common than it used to be. Or maybe it’s just not advertised.
In Denver there are a couple of downtown hotels that have pools and workout rooms that non-guests can access for a fee. But I don’t now why anyone would (re: the pool, not the workout room) because there are also real athletic clubs, with real pools, that also have a day rate.
I don’t know why anyone would do this, though. Unless maybe your town was so small there wasn’t a municipal pool? Motel pools are typically pretty tiny.
ETA: Actually, come to think of it, I stayed in a Holiday Inn somewhere in Kansas for one night. This place had a large indoor area with a pool and also a --maybe a foosball table? Or pingpong or something like that. And there did seem to be some locals in there. It was a small town and, for a motel, a pretty good pool. This was sometime in the last five years. I don’t know if the town had a municipal pool. It didn’t seem to have much, except for the HolidayInn, but I wasn’t into exploring the town except insofar as I had to get off the interstate to get to the motel.
There were plenty of big pools, but I assume that we went to the motel pool because it was much less expensive. Plus, now that I think of it, there might have been a bar…
Sure, it was smaller. But, as a little kid, I wasn’t swimming laps. I was splashing around with my friends, and throwing stuff down into the deep end and diving down to get it. And as I remember it, it was pretty sparsely populated, so it wasn’t obviously a worse deal than the big pools, which were awfully crowded in the middle of summer.
Related musing:
Are new motels being built which:
- Are independent Mom & Pop operations (NOT yet another chain, all cookie-cutter designs)
and/or
- Have a pool?
I’m guessing there are damned few Mom & Pops OR non-franchise. The odds of a new M&P with a pool are vanishingly remote.
I lived in a town of 20K in the 60’s, and a large city in the 50’s. Never saw a motel with a pool except on vacation travel. The big city had a YMCA; small town a municipal pool.
Are new motels being built at all? The ones in my area all appear to be decaying relics from the 50s and 60s.
As a teen with a car in 1960’s Miami, we sometimes made surreptitious entry to some of the big-name famous places like the Fountainbleu on Miami Beach. These certainly didn’t have a day use system, and actively policed their grounds against street urchins like us. But they were big, and if you handled yourself like you belonged, you were almost certain to be accepted. We could sometimes get away with the masquerade for most of a day as long as we didn’t get too wild. We could swim, and lay around on the lounges, even go out to the beach and back to the pool, pretending we were rich (or children of rich) folks on a Florida vacation. When/if they caught us they kicked us out with threats about calling the cops and charging us with trespassing. But we knew that was bluster, they just wanted us to leave quietly without disrupting the actual paying guests. Far better, whenever we could get away with it, than the crowded municipal pool we had to pay to use.
Apparently some are. A coworker mentioned doing just this with her son just a couple of summers ago.