Aloft SFO Airport Hotel Review: Fine for a Night

Rating: 3.5/5 (Gets the job done for what it is: an airport hotel. However, the room resembles the interior design of what I imagine a Scandinavian minimum security prison looks like)

Price Paid: $140 per night (booked with my Capital One Venture X, which earns 5x on hotel stays booked through the portal. I also used my annual $300 travel credit on this booking so I paid $0 out of pocket. If thinking of getting the card – read my review here)

Introduction

I was in the SF Bay Area for a work trip. I came early to spend the weekend with friends, so I needed a place to crash for a night transitioning between friend’s place and my work-paid hotel. That brought me to the Aloft SFO. This property was decently cheap and I had my Capital One Venture X credit available, so I decided to just use that for a free night here. Aloft is part of Marriott, and is marketed as a “vision of W hotels.” Basically just a watered-down W. Kind of?

Overall this hotel was decent – although I wouldn’t go out of my way to stay here in the future. The location is what you’d expect in an airport hotel: there’s basically nothing nearby. However, I will say if you’re an aviation nerd, there is a great park right across the street to watch planes land on runways 28L/R at SFO. I used to come here a lot as a kid, so I always like being back here. Also, there is an In-n-out burger nearby, although you have to walk over the 101 highway overpass to get there which isn’t super pleasant. It takes around 10-15 minutes to walk to the the In-n-out (there are also a bunch of other restaurants nearby). You can also walk to the Millbrae BART station in about ~20 minutes. Again though, not a pleasant walk since it’s walking through major thoroughfares and not suited for pedestrians. To get anywhere, you’ll realistically have to uber / drive from the hotel, which is not ideal. This is an airport hotel though, and it achieves objective #1 of an airport hotel: it’s literally next to the airport.

In this post, you’ll find:

Property Tour

My trip began at the rental car pickup at SFO for a weekend rental. Side note: the rental car garage at SFO is a great place for SFO planespotting.

The Aloft is around a ~10 minute drive from SFO. Maybe less depending on how you hit traffic lights. The airport offers a complimentary shuttle that operates every 15 minutes from 4:00am to 12:30am. On-call shuttles are available from 1:00am – 3:30am, if you’re unlucky enough to need to go to the airport at those times.

If you’re coming with a car, parking goes for $48/night currently (ouch).

Here’s the entrance to the hotel:

The lobby has a cool design – kind of feels like a modern sports bar.

There’s also an indoor pool:

For an airport hotel, the common spaces were actually quite decent. It makes for a fine place to hangout for a day if you’re stuck around here.

Room Review

My room was on the fifth floor, down this long hallway:

The room itself was very … minimalist?

I had an airport-facing room. The airplane noise wasn’t too bad, and it was nice to watch the planes takeoff from the window.

The bathroom was pretty large, but otherwise standard:

Conclusion

Overall, this airport hotel is fine. If you need to stay here for a night and prices are cheap, it works. Just note there’s not much to do nearby except go watch the planes (which I love doing, but not everyone does) or go to In-n-out.