The popular travel website www.TripAdvisor.com is ranking a hotel in Mason City as Iowa’s top spot for an overnight stay. Tracy Knebel is general manager of the Historic Park Inn Hotel, which was designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright and is the only remaining hotel of his on the planet. “Out of the top 658 hotels in Iowa, we are rated the number-one hotel in the state of Iowa,” Knebel says. “We have a guest satisfaction rating of over 96-percent.” Knebel says TripAdvisor has given the hotel an award for the third straight year. They received the Certificate of Excellence Award which recognizes the top-five percent of hotels in the country.
Knebel says they support having more hotel rooms in the downtown area. She says their ballroom can hold about 200 people, but the hotel only can sleep about 60, so they’d love to be able to bring more events downtown and help other downtown businesses with more sleeping rooms downtown. Knebel says the hotel was sold out 25-percent of the time in 2013, and was one room short of being sold out another 34-percent of the time.
(Reporting by Bob Fisher, KRIB, Mason City)