The best vintage hotels to visit on Route 66's 100th anniversary

From the Blue Swallow's unbroken neon since 1939 to Arizona's oldest hotel at the gateway to the Grand Canyon

Credit: Americana Motor Hotel

Route 66 turns 100 in 2026. The highway that connected Chicago to Santa Monica, when it officially opened in 1926, did something more than link two cities across 2,400 miles of American landscape: it created the template for road trip culture, fueled a generation of car sales, and transformed towns that would otherwise have remained invisible into thriving roadside destinations built specifically to serve the American traveler passing through. The neon signs, the motor courts, the diners, and the communal firepits of Route 66’s mid-century peak represent a specific and unrepeatable moment in American life, when the car was new enough to be genuinely thrilling, and the open highway was still an adventure rather than a commute.

The centennial gives travelers a specific reason to make the journey in 2026, and enough of the original infrastructure survives to make the trip historically coherent rather than nostalgic in a manufactured way. Original neon signs from the 1930s still illuminate at night in towns along the route. Auto courts and motor lodges that closed in the 1960s and 1970s when the interstate system bypassed Route 66 have been restored and reopened with the kind of careful attention that distinguishes genuine preservation from theme-park recreation. Some properties carry National Register of Historic Places designations that reflect the degree to which the structures have been recognized as cultural artifacts worth protecting in their own right.

The nine hotels below appear in Travel Leisure, covering the length of the Mother Road from Missouri to Arizona. Each has been restored or reimagined to preserve the original character of Route 66’s roadside hospitality while offering the comforts contemporary travelers expect when they book a night away from home. Each has become a destination in its own right, celebrated as much for its historical standing as for what it offers guests today.

1. Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari has been continuously operated since 1939

Credit: Blue Swallow Motel

The Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico, has operated continuously since 1939, making it one of the longest-running original Route 66 properties along the entire highway. Its neon sign, depicting a blue swallow above the tagline “100% refrigerated air,” has become one of the most recognized images in Route 66 photography, appearing in countless books, documentaries, and travel articles as shorthand for everything the highway’s roadside aesthetic represented at its peak. The sign’s survival and the motel’s unbroken operation give the Blue Swallow an authenticity that restored properties, however well-executed, cannot claim in the same terms: this building has been sheltering Route 66 travelers since the Roosevelt administration, and it continues to do so today.

The restoration that brought the motel to its current condition preserved the pink stucco walls, the vintage neon across multiple signs on the property, the individual garages attached to each room, and the charming interior design that established the original roadside motel’s character for American travelers. The garages are a specific and meaningful architectural detail: the original motor court concept was built around the idea that the car and the traveler shared an intimate relationship with the same space overnight, which the attached garage enacts in a way that parking structures and lots at modern hotels do not. The property’s family ownership through much of its history has given the Blue Swallow a continuity of care and character that institutional management rarely produces.

The National Register of Historic Places listing gives the Blue Swallow formal recognition of its cultural significance, validating what dedicated Route 66 travelers already understand: this is not merely an old motel preserved as a curiosity, but a specific and irreplaceable document of mid-century American roadside culture whose value increases as comparable properties disappear. Tucumcari’s position along the New Mexico section of Route 66 makes it a natural stopping point for travelers making the full journey, and the town’s collection of surviving neon signs and Route 66 vernacular architecture adds genuine historical depth to the overnight stay beyond the motel itself.

2. La Posada Hotel in Winslow operates as a living museum of the Harvey Company luxury

La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, opened in 1930 as one of Fred Harvey’s luxury railroad hotels, a chain whose properties set the standard for hospitality in the American Southwest during the rail travel era. The hotel benefited from its dual position along both the Santa Fe Railway and Route 66, drawing travelers from both transportation systems during the years when both were at their height. Its rise and fall happened with brutal speed within a single generation: the hotel closed in the late 1950s as declining railroad traffic removed the passenger base that had sustained it, and the building deteriorated through the following decades before a revival approximately 40 years later gave it its current identity as a “living museum” just off the Mother Road.

The Spanish colonial architecture that defines La Posada’s exterior and communal spaces reflects the Harvey Company’s deliberate effort to express the Southwest’s cultural complexity in built form, creating properties that acknowledged Spanish, Indigenous, and American architectural traditions simultaneously rather than defaulting to a generic accommodation style. The guest rooms are adorned with vibrant Southwest decor that continues this regional design philosophy, using........

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