A Luxury Vacation in Palm Springs
La Quinta Resort & Club in the California Desert is a 5-star Hotel
There are several top golf and spa resorts in Palm Springs CA., but La Quinta Resort & Club has the best mix of family activities and a serene, adult sense of privacy.
Palm Springs, California has several top rated luxury resorts, nearly all with golf course (or affiliated with nearby courses). After some vacation time researching stays at these best resorts (it's a tough job...) Luxury Travel can report that the favorite for deluxe family travel is La Quinta Resort & Club in Palm Springs CA.
Camp La Quinta
Most luxury resorts of this caliber offer a children's day camp, and La Quinta is no different. Sign up your children (ages 4 and up) for half or whole days, and go have fun on the golf course or in the spa. Some children prefer camps with a stronger emphasis on art projects, but this camp provides a fun time for those kids who like to be outside running around. Different days have different "themes," such as La Quinta Olympics and Wacky Water Day; if your child has strong likes and dislikes, it would be useful to inquire what the day's theme is prior to registration. After lunch a video is shown - not the best use of time, perhaps, and children 9 yrs and older may get bored. The videos skew young. Despite this, almost every child witnessed had a terrific experience at this camp.
The Golf Club
The golf courses here are already famous and lauded for their beauty and challenges; Forbes Traveler magazine rated La Quinta Resort and Club one of America's Top 10 Winter Golf Resorts, and those guys over at Forbes know their golf. Palm Springs is the official PGA West home, and the courses here include the La Quinta Resort Mountain and Dunes Courses, along with the PGA West Greg Norman, Jack Nicklaus Tournament, and PGA West Stadium Golf courses. Golf club resort fans should go see these beauties; the diversity is incredible. Pros would love the challenge of the Jack Nicklaus course, with striking elevation changes, and casual golfers would enjoy getting distracted by the knock-out views and landscape architecture of the La Quinta Mountain Course. La Quinta Resort & Club can claim its Mountain Course as one of the best courses in the region. Its Dune Course, designed by famed golf course architect Pete Dye, is ranked in Golf Digest's Top 75 Resort Courses in America.
The Resort Restaurants
The three main resort restaurants at La Quinta Resort & Club are the Adobe Grill, Twenty6, and Azur. Twenty6 is incredibly popular with hotel guests for its breakfast buffet; not at all like the cattle feed lines that some hotel buffets resemble, the buffet at Twenty6 is constantly serviced and fresh, with a pleasing variety of brunch offerings. The Adobe Grill is an authentic Mexican restaurant (while it has a menu for children). If a quiet, adult meal is sought, make a reservation later in the evening, as Adobe Grill seems pretty popular with the families staying here. Alternately, if it's a romantic high-end dinner is what you want, forgo the Adobe Grill altogether and go to Azur. With dinners starting at $125, even the most luxury meal seeking guests with children skip it. Azur is La Quinta Resort's premiere destination restaurant - with some of the most high-end Japanese entrees and sushi in the desert.
The Spa La Quinta
Voted Best of the Best as a readers' choice in Palm Springs Life, the Spa La Quinta is why many women agree to book a desert vacation at what their husbands know is a golf resort. One of Spa La Quinta's signature treatments is the Celestial Shower; it's a 10 minute private outdoor shower massage, as a prelude to other spa treatments. There's a plethora of face and body treatments here - if forced to pick some favorites, Luxury Travel would choose the 80 minute Orange Blossom Body Facial (this incorporates blossoms from the many orange trees in the La Quinta Resort gardens) and the 50-minute Detoxifying Seaweed Body Mask. Also notable are massages geared towards tennis and golf players, which target the areas most affected by both sports. If you're planning to stay at this resort during a holiday travel time, please book your spa appointment before your arrival; this is a destination spa, and slots sell out quickly.
There's some discussion that a few of the tennis courts may be converted to a large, child friendly pool with water slides. Now, there are 23 tennis courts; a few less might not make much of a difference. On the other hand, there are also 41 semi-private pools at La Quinta Resort & Club. Even as a California family vacation destination, the atmosphere here is mostly quiet and serene. If the management does decide to build a water park of sorts, hopefully it will be away from the center of the hotel. La Quinta is a perfect desert oasis in Palm Springs CA, and Luxury Travel hopes this doesn't change.
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