Grand View Lodge

CITY GUIDES | MIDWEST

The Best Minnesota Hotels for an Epic North Star State Trip

By Jamie Dutton | April 2, 2026

AUTHOR BIO: With family spread across the Midwest and a job that has her in airports near daily, Jamie Dutton finds herself across the Heartland regularly. She’s partial to BPTs a Bell's.

For a while, I thought I had Minnesota figured out.

Work kept sending me back to the Twin Cities, and I was perfectly content to keep the whole relationship there. I had my routines, my restaurants, and my preferred places to stay, and I saw no real reason to complicate things by wandering farther out. Minneapolis and St. Paul felt like enough, the way a second home often does when it starts to give up its best corners slowly and on your schedule.

Then work did what work does and ruined my nice little theory. Assignments started pulling me across the state, up to the North Shore, down through bluff country, out to lake towns and old river cities. What I found was a state with a surprisingly deep bench of hotels, the kind of properties that know exactly where they are and don’t try to dress themselves up as somewhere else.

Here then are the best hotels in Minnesota right now, the kind of places that will headline a trip to the North Star State.

Bluefin Bay on Lake Superior Minnesota Best Hotels

Bluefin Bay on Lake Superior, Tofte

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Bluefin Bay has the easiest pitch in Minnesota: it sits right on Lake Superior in Tofte, about 80 miles up the shore from Duluth, and most of the property is built around those stunning views. The place has lakefront rooms and suites, a year-round heated outdoor pool and hot tub facing the water, an indoor pool and whirlpool, two saunas, a spa, and three on-site dining options, which is another way of saying this is the North Shore hotel for people who want everything right where they’re staying.

Best for: A North Shore escape with real comforts

Chase on the Lake Resort Walker Minnesota Best Hotels

Chase on the Lake, Walker

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Chase has been on Leech Lake since the early 1900s, and it still knows the point of a Leech Lake hotel is to make the lake easy to enjoy, not merely admire from a lobby chair. The property has hotel rooms plus condos, a private beach, boat docks, an indoor pool and hot tub, the Copper Door Spa with Aveda products, and The 502 for lakeside drinks and dinner, which is a pretty convincing case for spending a weekend in northern Minnesota without pretending anybody came to rough it.

Best for: A polished Leech Lake weekend

Fitger’s Inn, Duluth

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Fitger’s Inn gets a lot of mileage out of being in the old Fitger’s brewery complex on the shore of Lake Superior, but in this case the history is not some thin little backstory tacked onto a generic hotel. The place has 62 rooms and suites inside the 1880s building, and the best of them come with details like exposed brick, stone walls, fireplaces, whirlpools, balconies, and lake views, while the rest of the complex gives guests restaurants, bars, and shops that mean you might just spend the whole trip not far from the room.

Best for: A historic Duluth stay that earns the word historic

Four Seasons Hotel Minneapolis Minnesota Best Hotels

Four Seasons, Minneapolis

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The Four Seasons is the place to book when the assignment, the expense account, or plain old self-interest calls for doing Minneapolis the expensive way. The hotel fills the top floors of the RBC Gateway tower downtown with 222 rooms and suites, Mara and its bar from Gavin Kaysen downstairs, a full spa and wellness floor, and both indoor and outdoor pool space, which is another way of saying this is the city’s clearest argument for staying in instead of merely using the room as a staging area.

Best for: A full-bore luxury stay downtown

Grand View Lodge, Nisswa

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Grand View Lodge has been on Gull Lake since 1916, which means it has had more than a century to figure out what people want from a Minnesota resort and then keep adding to the list. The place now spreads that answer across golf courses, a large spa, multiple restaurants and bars, cabins and hotel rooms, and enough lake access to make it work for the anniversary trip, the family getaway, and the group that showed up with clubs before anything else.

Best for: A classic Gull Lake resort weekend

Hewing Hotel North Loop Minneapolis Best Minnesota Hotels

Hewing Hotel, Minneapolis

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Hewing Hotel got in early on the North Loop and had the good sense to build the whole thing around what was already there: a century-old warehouse with brick, timber, and enough heft that it did not need a designer inventing character for it. The hotel has 124 rooms and suites, a rooftop with a spa pool and sauna, and Tullibee downstairs, which is part of why this remains one of the better places to stay in Minneapolis when the goal is to feel tied to the neighborhood instead of sealed off from it.

Best for: A stylish stay in the North Loop

Hotel Crosby, Stillwater

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Hotel Crosby opened in downtown Stillwater in 2018, and it brought a kind of big-city boutique-hotel energy. There’s 55 rooms and 13 suites, a year-round rooftop hot tub, and Matchstick downstairs, a restaurant where the whiskey list is serious enough to turn a simple overnight into a very good excuse not to rush back home.

Best for: A polished weekend in Stillwater

Hotel Landing, Wayzata

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Hotel Landing sits a short walk from the shore of Lake Minnetonka and understands exactly what people want from a Wayzata hotel: something polished, comfortable, and close to the water. The place has 92 rooms and suites, a Nordic-style spa, complimentary bikes, a house shuttle around town, and nine twenty five downstairs, which is a pretty good setup for a weekend built around the lake and not much urgency.

Best for: A polished Lake Minnetonka weekend

Hotel Lanesboro, Lanesboro

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Hotel Lanesboro has only nine rooms, which is just the right size for a place known as the "Magical Hamlet" in Minnesota bluff country. Set in a 150-year-old building downtown with the Root River behind it, it’s within easy walking distance of the trail, shops, and restaurants, and that smaller scale ends up being the whole charm: this is not a hotel that tries to compete with Lanesboro, just one that knows how to drop you neatly into it.

Best for: A low-key bluff country weekend

Madden’s on Gull Lake, Brainerd

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Madden’s is the big old Minnesota resort fantasy done at full scale, spread across a 1,000-acre peninsula on Gull Lake with enough shoreline and infrastructure to make a family trip feel like a minor operation. The place has four golf courses, a marina, beaches, multiple restaurants, a spa, and enough summer programming to keep three generations busy without anybody having to work very hard at planning it.

Best for: A full-on Gull Lake family trip

The Saint Paul Hotel Best Minnesota Hotels

The Saint Paul Hotel, St. Paul

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The Saint Paul Hotel opened in 1910 overlooking Rice Park, and it still carries itself like a place that expects guests to arrive with a dinner reservation and maybe a decent coat. Upstairs there’s 255 rooms and suites, and downstairs is The St. Paul Grill and the Lobby Bar. But no matter where you are, there’s enough old-school polish to remind you that St. Paul has long preferred its luxury a little quieter and a little more formal.

Best for: Classic luxury in the capital

St. James Hotel, Red Wing

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St. James Hotel opened in 1875, back when Red Wing was booming as a Mississippi River town, and it still has the kind of old-world confidence newer places spend a lot of money trying to fake. The hotel has 67 rooms and suites, sits downtown near the river and the bluffs, and keeps the whole thing feeling properly self-contained with Scarlet Kitchen & Bar and The Port downstairs.

Best for: A historic river-town weekend