The Artesian Hotel Casino, Oklahoma, United States

3RedOnions 5:00 PM Jan 10, 2020

Actually, mediocre
During a trip to the southern part of Oklahoma, we had lunch at the Artesian Hotel with friends in the large area named The Springs. The restaurant reminded me of a cafeteria, and the furniture was cheap-looking and uncomfortable. Two sides of the room had windows, which brought in natural light, but not much to see from where we were sitting, which was at the long center table. Nothing much on the menu appealed to me, so I had the soup of the day, beer cheese. It had the consistency of something that had been sitting around for a long time, maybe more than a day, and was fairly tasteless. With lunch out of the way, we decided to explore the hotel, which is fairly new. The original Artesian was a landmark in Sulphur from 1906 and a luxurious playground for the rich and famous until 1962, when the entire building burned down. It was eventually rebuilt to its current state in 2010, but when I compared it to photos of the grand old version, it just made me sad. Replicas can never quite replace lovely original things. Considering how large the Artesian is, there wasn't much to see except a great many long corridors, an enormous indoor/outdoor swimming pool (too cold to swim that day even if we had wanted to), and the Chickasaw casino, which was practically deserted. I played the slots. The house won every time, so I gave up after three tries. I understand that there are shops and a fitness center, but we never saw them during our visit. The hotel in general had a sterile, empty feel to it and we didn't encounter very many friendly people working there. I would not want to stay there, especially if I was alone. It's too big and too isolated. I would have loved to have seen it during its glory days, but those days are long gone.

3Brandy_N1234 5:00 PM Oct 4, 2020

Pros and Cons
I’ll start by saying we do plan on giving the hotel another try. With that being said, there were ups and downs. Checkin was fast and FD agents friendly. Hotel lobby very inviting. Bath house and pool very nice looking. (We did not get the chance to use though) Dinner at the restaurant was great. As for the room, it could have been cleaner. Dust all over the side tables and desk. This left me to believe they weren’t taking extra Covid cleaning precautions if they didn’t wipe down those common surfaces, or even normal cleaning for that matter. There was someone’s long brown hair in the shower and it wasn’t ours. We were only there for 1 night and I had Lysol wipes with me so I didn’t bother the front desk because frankly, I didn’t have time to mess with it or move to another room. After our event we came back and stopped by the casino which wreaked of cigarette smoke. And there were some seriously shady looking people in there. One woman was constantly coming by all the machines checking to see if there was any money left in them. Another man who came to sit next to me was then approached by security and asked to leave (not sure what happened). The machines are very tight which is the risk you take when gambling, but I’ve been to better casinos. Drink service was closed but if you were lucky, someone would come around once in a blue moon asking if you wanted something. The one time we did ask for a water they never came back with it.