Our Room at the Casino Magic Hotel in Bay St. Louis
Room: The Casino Magic in Bay St. Louis is our favorite hotel along the Mississippi coast. The rooms are nice and we can usually get it for $59 or less – much better than a Hampton (my yardstick for all things ordinary in the hotel world) and we often get upgraded to a junior suite at no cost. Be sure that if you go play in the casino that you get one of their membership cards as many of the perks comes from the level of play – we get something in the mail just about every month from some of the casinos we visit offering free (or almost free) rooms, free buffets or food credit at their restaurants, and free play money. We aren’t even casino people really — we just stay at their hotels because when we travel during the week on business, they aren’t busy, and their rooms which would otherwise go for a couple/three hundred dollars on the weekends are less than $100 during the week. And many times, much less than $100. So, same room, just different timing.
Lobby: The lobby here is pretty average.
Service: We’ve always gotten great service here for anything we’ve asked for.
Food: I think that we have only had the buffet for breakfast here, but it was average. We haven’t been to any of their *real* restaurants because we like to eat outside along the beach at the independent restaurants.
Spa: The spa here is nice but not ultra, ultra fancy. I’ve gotten my hair trimmed here a time or two as has Av.
Extra: It’s just…I don’t know…maybe 30 or 45 minutes from New Orleans! Yay!
Our experience is this: We have stayed here several times over the last couple of years – probably around eight or ten times, so it really is our favorite hotel along that part of the coast. The Casino Magic in Bay St. Louis is not related to the Casino Magic in Biloxi – I asked (because the one in BSL is so much nicer than the one in Biloxi) and was told that they used to be, but aren’t any longer. There are actually two hotel buildings in BSL – the Bay Tower Hotel (which is joined with the casino) and the Casino Magic Inn (which we haven’t stayed at), right across the parking lot. The CMI is less expensive, although there is a shuttle to get back and forth from that hotel building to the casino proper.
The hotel/casino property is not actually on the Gulf – it would be about a three minute drive to the beach, I think. When you go to a MS casino, one of the things that just really doesn’t happen a whole lot is people going to the beach. Now I **love** Mississippi for about a million different reasons, but the beach isn’t one of them. Truth be told, the beach in Gulf Shores (AL) or Pensacola (FL) are just…..better. The sand is whiter, and parts of the MS beach have these giant pipe-things going from the land to the water (which….I don’t know what those are doing there…..), and so if we do want to play around on the beach we just park at one of the public beach spaces and go from there.
A lot of little shops, including antique shops, are located in Old Town Bay St. Louis.