Any nice hotels on nice lakes?

Ludovic
Fri, 14 Nov 2025 21:37:14 +0000
In My Humble Opinion

Up until this year, I thought there must be quite a lot of decent hotels that are right on a good looking lake. After all, I knew about American and Canadian wilderness resorts that have at least one example of this, and I had stayed at and enjoyed the Wilderness Lodge at Disney World that was successfully modelled off of them. (I don’t count the other Disney World resorts since the lake is most appealing from the Wilderness Lodge, since it was built to echo a natural shoreline.)

And I had already stayed at The Breakers at Cedar Point on Lake Erie, and was already familiar with quite a few lakeside hotels in New York State, even though the view in the former situation wasn’t that great and I’ve never stayed at the latter hotels to know how good they are. But I could think of so many near-examples that I thought that surely there would be quite a few at least classy hotels on truly beautiful lakes.

But I can’t actually find any just from hunting on Google Maps. Probably because I prefer my lakes on the small side. If a lake is small enough and wild enough to be beautiful, then the most that will be around there is a no-frills motel, or sometimes just an RV park. And sometimes it’s difficult to tell from Google Maps since resorts are sometimes set up like apartment complexes, and it’s difficult to tell from that setup how nice the resort is.

And if a lake is small enough but not in a wild area, then it is usually surrounded by so many other developments that it becomes no longer beautiful. For instance, the Embassy Suites on Cranes Roost has a great looking lakefront, but the view is spoiled by the surrounding buildings, including the infamous I-4 Eyesore.

One probable example is Legoland/Cypress Gardens. The beauty of the lake and closeness definitely counts as seen here. The hotel itself is probably at least acceptable enough that in total it counts because of how nice the lake view is.

Any examples you can think of? I know that natural beauty and classiness are subjective, but I personally like hotels that have at least some services so I don’t have to bring everything I’m going to be using with me. You are of course free to apply your own criteria.

35 posts - 29 participants