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Places To Stay In Wichita Falls With a Pool

Texas summers get hot enough that a pool stops is more of a requirement during a mid-summer trip rather than just a bonus. If you’re traveling to Wichita Falls and looking for a place to stay with a pool, here’s some options for your trips.

Hotels With Pools

Most of the hotel pools in town are indoor, which is useful in the dead of winter but not exactly what anyone pictures for a summer trip. They’re also shared with every other guest at the hotel, which on a busy weekend means a pool packed with kids from six other families and maybe a “pool hours” sign that shuts it down earlier than you’d like. 

If you’re picturing lounging poolside on a warm evening with the group you’re actually traveling with, that’s a different kind of pool experience than most of Wichita Falls’ local hotels can offer.

What Pool Type To Choose For Your Trip

If you’re visiting in winter, a hotel with an indoor pool is your best choice. An outdoor pool, however, gives more space, open air, actual daylight for tanning, and usually a lot less crowded, especially if you rent a short-term rental (STR, also known as a vacation rental) that has a private pool. 

One thing to plan for: if you’re not local to Texas, you might not be prepared for just how hot it is during the early afternoon. Around 2-4pm is the hottest part of the day. On a day where it’s 105 degrees and above, when you go outside during that time, the air feels like it can get sucked right out of your lungs! So definitely make sure to keep cool and stay inside during this time of day.

Our Pool

Our Texas Honey Spot Retreat (located in western Wichita Falls) has a 30,000 gallon outdoor pool with a slide, sun loungers, and free refreshments. It’s semi-private, meaning it’s shared with our guests only, not the general public and not other unrelated bookings at the same time.

We provide pool towels, a pool bag, and sunscreen. It’s not heated, so it’s weather dependent, but on a hot Texas evening that’s rarely a problem. Guests tend to spend a good chunk of the trip out there once the sun starts going down and the heat of the day breaks.

Kids And The Pool

If you’re staying at a hotel, your pool may or may not have a lifeguard. It probably also has some pretty strict rules in place. Your kids will be sharing the pool with other kids, and that germ fest is never fun! 

At an STR, you’ll usually get a private or semi-private pool experience. That means none of the stress of watching for other families’ kids or sharing limited pool chairs. But, there are some safety considerations to look out for:

  • STRs usually don’t have lifeguards on duty, so keep a close eye on your kids!
  • The pool may not be fenced separately from the yard, so it’s important not to let your children outside unless you’re with them.
  • If there’s a slide or diving board, you will need to make sure your children are practicing safety with those.
  • Some STRs, like ours, have age limits in place for swimming. At our place, we don’t allow anyone under 18 without adult supervision.

Pool Maintenance

Many of the guests who stay with us aren’t used to having a pool. What most people don’t realize is that pool maintenance needs to be done weekly or more than weekly. A pool doesn’t stay blue by itself!
Our pool maintenance team comes during the week to brush the pool walls, vacuum the pool, calibrate the equipment, clean out the filter, clear the skimmer buckets and pool robot, and balance the chemicals. 

It’s super important that nobody is in the pool during this maintenance. Especially when balancing chemicals, it takes a few hours for them to mix in and be evenly distributed throughout the pool. If you swim before this time, you run the risk of swimming into a high dose of pool chemicals, and you may end up with burns or worse! 

We also have to close our pool for maintenance when we mow the grass, and we need to remove grass from the pool.

This is every pool, not just ours. Hotel pools will close down for maintenance too. No pool is immune to maintenance. If you’re staying at a short-term rental that has to close temporarily for pool maintenance, I would recommend not getting bummed out about it. It’s to make sure the pool is clean and safe for you to swim in.

What To Pack For Your Trip

If you’ve ever gotten to a place with a pool and realized that you left your swimsuits at home, you know how awful that is. So, first and foremost, pack your swimsuit! If you’ll be in an outdoor pool, pack sunscreen. You’ll want to reapply every 60-90 minutes (of course, follow the directions on your sunscreen specifically).

If you want in on a little Texas secret, you should also pack aloe gel. This stuff is magic for cooling your skin down after the pool, and it definitely helps relieve the pain from sunburns.

My family always packs water shoes. They help our feet deal with any rough spots in the pool, and it helps settle my worries as a mom when I think about all the gross stuff my kids could step in at a public pool.

Lastly, a change of dry clothes for the way back to the hotel room, and one pool towel per person, keeps your group from sitting around in wet swimsuits longer than necessary.

Planning A Trip At A Hotel or Vacation Rental With A Pool

If you want the whole pool to yourselves rather than sharing one with strangers, that’s really the core difference between a hotel pool and one at a short-term rental. 

If you’re traveling to Wichita Falls and want the experience of an outdoor, private pool, shared only with your hosts, checkout our calendar. If we have open dates that line up with your trip and the seasonal opening of our pool, send us a request to stay. We’d love to have you.

Outside Pool Season

It’s best not to assume that the pool at the place you’re staying will be open, even in the summer. Make sure that you check beforehand what hours and months the pool will be open, and if there are any expected closures.

If you’re coming to Wichita Falls, you’re probably not planning a trip specifically around swimming, but if it is something you expect to spend time doing, make sure you do your research.

Alternatives For Hotel Pools During Your Wichita Falls Trip

Wichita Falls does have some fun places to swim or have a day in the water outside of a hotel or STR.

Where Is The Best Pool & Lodging In Wichita Falls?

We’re pretty biased, but we think that the Texas Honey Spot Retreat is a great choice for smaller groups looking for a place to stay with a pool. The a semi-private pool is shared only among your own group, so there’s no need to stake out chairs early or work around anyone else’s schedule. If you’re interested in staying in Wichita Falls and want to have a great pool to chill out in during the hot afternoons, take a look at our calendar to see if your travel dates are open.

Best Places to Stay in Wichita Falls, TX: Hotels, Motels & Airbnb Rentals Compared

Welcome to Wichita Falls, TX! You might have noticed that your lodging options look a little scarce compared to those in some other cities. Under the surface, though, there are actually tons of unique places to stay that don’t cost a fortune. Which one is right for you depends more on what you’re doing here than on simple ratings and reviews.

Hotel Chains In Wichita Falls, TX

Wichita Falls has a normal spread of the national names. You’ve got Comfort Inn, Holiday Inn Express, and a handful of Marriott and Hilton-branded properties near the interstate. You get exactly what you expect from these. Standard rooms, possibly breakfast, and some even have indoor pools. If you’re passing through for one night on a drive and you just need a bed, one of these can be an easy choice.

Local Hotels in Wichita Falls

You’ll notice that there are no luxury or 5-star hotels here in Wichita Falls. At a population of about 100,000 people, most of which have something to do with the nearby Sheppard Air Force Base, there’s not much demand for a luxury resort or spa, so these hotel chains will have to do.

Where Hotels Might Not Be The Best Choice

Where these chains fall short is if you need to stay for anything longer than a night or two, or if you’re traveling with a family or a pet. A family of five in a hotel room means someone’s probably squishing in there, or you might have to get two rooms. Traveling with a dog is very tricky when you’re trying to stay in a hotel, as most have breed or size restrictions and unreasonably high pet fees.

Amenities are also quite thin in hotels. If you’re like me, when you stay at a hotel, you’re not expecting anything crazy. Most hotels have a workout room, and several have pools (although you’ll be sharing both with every other guest). None of that is a knock on the hotels themselves; it’s just what a standard room is built to offer, and it’s not much.

Motels & Extended Stays

When we first moved to Wichita Falls in 2021, we stayed at a motel in northern Wichita Falls for one night. We were so scared. It was the stuff of nightmares. Maybe if you’re a single guy traveling alone and budget is the only thing that matters, you can make a motel work. But for families, I definitely recommend against staying in any of the local motels.

The extended stays are a similar story. There’s not much to differentiate the extended stays from the motels in this town. If you’re a traveling worker looking for a home base or a family in between moves, you’re better off with other options. Take it from a local.

Where A Short-Term Rental Fits In

Short-Term rentals (STRs, also known as vacation rentals) are the type of lodging that you’d find on Airbnb or VRBO. Airbnb gets a bad rap, but properties on Airbnb are highly regulated and can provide a better experience in ways that hotels cannot. 

Most Airbnb hosts are independent hosts with 1-2 listings, usually their own house or a room in it. The rest are run by boutique property management companies or commercial/large-scale management companies.

For example, the Texas Honey Spot Retreat is a guesthouse that we offer as a short-term rental. Instead of a busy hotel shared with several other families, it’s a 1,000sqft standalone building on a quiet rural property just outside town. 

Benefits of Choosing a Short-Term Rental

Short-term rentals like ours are usually equipped with their own kitchen, washer and dryer, and even a private fenced yard. Oftentimes, you can find a place to stay that is comparable in price to a hotel (and maybe even cheaper after all the resort fees). You’ll get your own space that actually works for a family, a larger group, or anyone who wants an experience that feels more like home.

Which Option Is Cheaper? Short-Term Rental vs. Hotel

A single hotel room might list for less per night on paper than a short-term rental. But when you start tacking on extra rooms required for a family of 5+, processing and resort fees, pet fees, parking fees, and eating every meal out because there’s no kitchen, the costs add up fast. A rental with a full kitchen and enough beds for everyone tends to come out cheaper per person for any group bigger than a couple, once you actually total the trip rather than just the nightly rate.

But What About Cleaning Fees?

Since over 80% of short-term rentals are host-run, a large share of their revenue goes to cleaning overhead.

It costs money to hire professional cleaners, plus the cost to replenish items used during a stay (coffee, toiletries, etc.). Guests hate seeing a cleaning fee. It’s one of the most overhyped parts of what makes short-term rentals so bad. So what about booking a place without a cleaning fee?

Are Rentals Without A Cleaning Fee Cheaper?

I’ll let you in on a trade secret: there’s always a cleaning fee, even if you can’t see it! Hosts either charge a flat cleaning fee and use it to cover the costs that we talked about above, or build it into their nightly rate. So you could pay $100/night for two nights plus a $100 cleaning fee, which comes out to $150/night, or you can book 2 nights with a host that doesn’t charge a cleaning fee and just charges $150/night. Simple, except…

What if you are staying 7 nights? All of a sudden, that $100 cleaning fee is looking more reasonable. You’ll pay $800 total for those 7 nights, whereas the host with the cleaning fee “built into their nightly rate” will be charging you $1,050. Great for the host, not the guest. This is where guests are getting tricked into spending more money just because they didn’t want to see that cleaning fee as a line item.

This is why Dream Home Design Studios is transparent with our pricing. When you book, you’ll see what goes towards cleaning and see our normal nightly rate underneath that.

What To Check Before You Book

Whichever option you’re leaning toward, a few things are worth confirming before you book a place to stay. 

  • Check how recent the reviews actually are, not just the overall rating, since a property can change a lot over a year or two and stale reviews don’t tell you much about what to expect right now. 
  • Look at the actual bed count and layout rather than assuming from the headline photo, since “sleeps six” can mean very different things.
  • It’s also worth checking cancellation policies before you book, especially if your trip depends on something that could shift, like a training schedule or a closing date. 
    • A flexible policy costs you nothing if your plans don’t change, and saves you a headache if they do. Consider booking travel insurance as well.
  • For short-term rentals, make sure you check the house rules and checkout tasks. At The Texas Honey Spot Retreat, there are some baseline rules about quiet hours and no smoking, but we don’t have any checkout tasks. Just like a hotel, you should be able to get up at 4am to catch a flight and not have to worry about doing the dishes or making beds.

Booking During Busy Times

Wichita Falls has a few predictable busy stretches. If your trip is flexible, we recommend planning around them. Sheppard AFB graduation weekends, home football weekends, the Hotter Than Hell One Hundred bike race, and the holiday season all tend to fill up lodging across the board, hotels included. 

If your dates line up with any of those, booking a few weeks earlier than you normally would is worth the extra effort, since good options and best prices tend to disappear first.

Hotel, Motel, Or Short-Term Rental: Which Is Right For You?

Are you spending a quick night passing through? A hotel is probably the simplest choice. A weekend with the family, or a week visiting Sheppard AFB, or any trip where you’d rather have the comforts of home? That’s exactly the gap a short-term rental like ours is built to fill. Cheaper per person once you’ve got more than two people, more space, and a kitchen, which means you’re not eating out for every meal.

If you’re actively searching for places to stay in Wichita Falls, take a look at the Texas Honey Spot Retreat’s calendar and see if your travel dates line up, and get a price for your stay quoted instantly. And I mean instantly. No gatekeeping emails or “see price on the next screen.” Choose your dates, and an itemized price appears below the calendar.

Travel Advice For Wichita Falls

No matter how long you’re staying, I recommend checking out our Wichita Falls Travel Guide. When you’re not local to an area, it can be difficult to sort through the food and coffee options. Since we’re locals, we’ve already done that work for you. Stop and grab a bite at one of the places in our travel guide, and your stomach (and wallet!) will be happy.

Welcome to Wichita Falls, and if you’re staying at the Texas Honey Spot Retreat, we’re excited to host you soon!

Pet-Friendly Places To Stay In Wichita Falls, TX

Traveling with a dog turns a simple hotel booking into a research project. Which chains allow pets, which cap it at one small dog under 25 pounds, and which charge a fee that doubles your room rate?

What Most Wichita Falls Hotels Actually Allow

A handful of the chain hotels here do allow pets, usually with a per-night fee and a weight limit. Some cap it at two pets per room. Almost none of them will let a dog roam off-leash anywhere on the property, which makes sense for a hotel, but it means your dog is cooped up in a small room the entire stay, outside of walks.

If you’ve got a bigger dog, multiple dogs, or a dog that gets anxious in tight spaces, that’s doesn’t make an enjoyable trip. And don’t forget about the walk across the parking lot at 6am (in a city that you don’t even know!) because there’s nowhere closer for a bathroom break.

Questions Worth Asking Before You Book Anywhere

Whatever you end up booking, confirm a few things ahead of time rather than finding out at check-in.

  • Is there a hard weight limit, and does your dog fall under it?
  • Is the pet fee per night or a flat one-time charge?
  • Are there breed restrictions?

A five-minute message or phone call to the place before booking saves you from the stressful moment of showing up and learning your dog isn’t allowed later on.

Places To Stay With Room For Dogs

A short-term rental (STR), or vacation rental, is a go-to for travelers with pets. Pet-friendly STRs are abundant and usually reasonably priced compared to hotels. Some even have fenced yards for your furry friends to run around in off-leash.

At our short-term rental, the Texas Honey Spot Retreat, dogs are welcome with a pet fee. While we do have some breed restrictions (due to insurance reasons), almost all of our travelers can bring their doggy friends. The yard is fully fenced with a 6’ privacy fence, and there’s a doggy door your dog can use on their own schedule instead of waiting on you for every bathroom break.

A setup like that makes a huge quality-of-life difference on a trip. Your dog isn’t stuck staring at a hotel room door all day. They’ve got a yard to use, which matters if you’re planning full days out and don’t want to feel guilty leaving a dog cooped up in a room the whole time.

A Few Things to Know Before You Book With A Pet

Before you stay in a short-term rental with your dog, there are a few things that you should figure out first.

  • What areas of the property are pets allowed on?
  • What sort of cleanup do I need to do, such as picking up dog poop?
  • Will my dog be around other dogs or animals?
  • Is the neighborhood safe enough for me to leave my dogs outside?
  • Do I have to crate my dogs when I’m not at home?
  • Are dogs allowed on furniture?

One of the questions that we oftentimes get is if dogs are allowed in our pool. The State of Texas does not allow pets in the pool due to health hazards, but we also don’t allow it for their safety (our deep end is 9’!) and for basic pool hygiene.

Outside of that, choosing an STR that allows you to disclose and bring your doggy friend is about as easy as traveling with a pet gets. No sneaking a dog past front desk staff, no wondering if housekeeping is upset about pet hair, no leash walks around a parking lot before sunrise. Your dog gets a yard, and you get to relax instead of managing a hotel stay around them.

Keeping a Routine on the Road

Dogs do better on trips when their routine stays close to normal: same feeding times, similar exercise, a familiar bed if you can bring it. A private yard makes that easier than a hotel room does, since your dog can get outside on their own terms instead of waiting on your schedule for every walk.

Packing for a Dog on the Road

A few things make a pet-friendly stay go smoother, regardless of where you land. Bring their regular food rather than switching brands mid-trip, since a new environment is enough of a change for one week without also upsetting their stomach. A familiar blanket or bed helps a lot with settling in somewhere new. It’s worth packing more of their regular treats than you think you’ll need, since they’re a useful tool for a nervous dog adjusting to a new space.

What Guests With Dogs Tend to Mention Most

Looking back at what pet owners bring up most after a stay in one of our rentals, it’s almost always the yard and the doggy door. Not having to coordinate a walk schedule around a hotel checkout time, and not worrying about a dog barking at every hallway noise through a thin wall, comes up again and again. If you’re planning a longer visit around a family trip too, our Best Family-Friendly Places to Stay post covers how the same yard works for kids.

Traveling With More Than One Dog

If you’re bringing more than one dog, mention that when you reach out to book, since it changes things for some hosts and may also change your pet fee. We have had people with up to 6 dogs stay with us before! But it was good to know that so we could close an extra day off after they left for a deep cleaning.

Multiple dogs in a hotel room is a hard setup. Two dogs sharing one small space with no yard tends to mean more barking, more stress, and less patience all around. A fenced yard helps even more once you’re past a single dog.

Booking With Your Pet

When you book a short-term rental and are planning to stay with a dog, message your pet’s breed, size, and temperament when you book, so the host can feel comfortable about your dog specifically. Most of the time, if the listing says that pets are allowed, it’s a quick yes. If you’re traveling through Wichita Falls, TX, we would definitely love to have you. Check out our availability here.

Considering Turning Your Guest House Into a Short-Term Rental? Here’s What You Need to Know

If you’ve got a guest house, casita, or finished space over the garage sitting mostly empty, it’s a fair question: why not put it to work? Turning an existing structure into a short-term rental is one of the more affordable ways to add income to a property, since you’re not building anything new. But it’s not as simple as putting a lockbox on the door and listing it on Airbnb. Here’s what to actually check before you do.

Start with zoning and permits

Short-term rental rules vary a lot from one city or county to the next, and they change often. Before you list anything, confirm that short-term rentals are allowed on your property at all, whether you need a permit or STR license, and whether there’s a cap on the number of nights per year. If you’re in an HOA, check its rules too — some allow long-term tenants but prohibit anything under 30 days.

Give it its own access and utilities where you can

Guests want privacy, and so do you. A separate entrance, driveway or parking spot, and ideally separate (or at least clearly divided) utilities make the arrangement smoother for both sides. It also matters for insurance and for how cleanly you can track expenses if the guest house is ever treated as its own unit for tax purposes.

Get the right insurance

A standard homeowner’s policy typically does not cover short-term rental activity. You’ll usually need a short-term rental endorsement or a separate landlord/STR policy that covers guest liability and property damage. This is one area worth a quick call to your insurance agent before you ever accept a booking — it’s a lot cheaper to ask up front than to find out after a claim.

Furnish and stock it like a small hotel would

Guests are comparing your space to a hotel room, whether that’s fair or not. That means fully making the beds, stocking the basics (toilet paper, paper towels, coffee, dish soap) generously rather than leaving a single starter roll, and making sure the space is genuinely move-in ready. This is the difference between a five-star review that says “they thought of everything” and a guest who dings you for feeling unfinished.

Photograph and list it well

A guest house often has real advantages over a whole-home listing — more privacy, a lower price point, a cozier feel — but only if the listing shows that off. Good photos, a clear and honest description, and pricing that reflects the space (not just a guess) all make a measurable difference in how often it books.

Decide how hands-on you want to be

Managing a short-term rental is a second job: messaging guests, coordinating cleanings and turnovers, handling maintenance, and adjusting pricing as demand shifts. Some owners enjoy that. Others would rather hand it off. If you’d rather not handle every guest message and turnover yourself, that’s exactly what our Local Property Management service is for — hands-on, local management for short-term rental owners in the Wichita Falls area.

Thinking about converting your guest house? Tell us about your property and we’ll help you figure out whether it’s a good candidate, and what it would take to get it guest-ready.