Flamingo Inn

We LOVED LOVED LOVED our room and the Flamingo Inn! Darling room, clean and comfortable. And truly only 100 steps from the beach! Grocery is less than a mile away and easy access to other shopping. We cannot WAIT to come back! ALSO, huge shoutout to Erica who was there constantly with a beautiful smile to help us with every question and anything we needed. She is a ROCKSTAR!

The Flamingo Inn is close to the beach and is nicely situated geographically, within walking distance of stores and restaurants and on the quieter southern stretch of the island. By Ft. Myers Beach standards (“By Ft. Myers Beach standards” is the operative phrase here; every place on the island is expensive.), the Flamingo is reasonably priced. The rooms are decently sized and the bathroom in our room, though small, was clean and reasonably well kept and equipped. Sometimes, the staff was friendly and helpful; see my comments on this below. There isn’t much else good to say about the place. Start with the complete lack of amenities. I am not talking about the complete lack of a view in our room and the absence of a pool; we knew going in that there wasn’t a pool and that our lower-priced room didn’t have a view; hence, cannot complain about their absence. But when we were told that the Flamingo provides neither tissues nor coffee for the in-room coffee maker, we were surprised; just about every place we’ve stayed in the last, oh, thirty years or so, including some low-budget places, provides tissues and, if there is a coffeemaker in the room, coffee. Not the Flamingo Inn. While that surprised us, the attitude of the woman at the front desk shocked us. When we asked about tissues and coffee, she looked at us as if we were asking for limousine and concierge service and tea with the queen daily at 3:00 PM. She reluctantly gave us what she called a “starter” pouch of coffee and told us in no uncertain terms that that was the last coffee we would see from her. She directed us to the 7/11 across the street for tissues and any more coffee we would want. Even more importantly, THE FLAMINGO HAS NO ICE MACHINE! Lack of an ice machine is perfectly understandable if there is a refrigerator with a decent freezer provided, but the refrigerator in our room was of the dorm room variety with a tiny freezer incapable of holding an ice tray on its best day but which was encrusted with ice when we got to our room, rendering the whole ice point moot as there was just a bit more than zero ice-free space in the freezer. We were shocked to learn of the lack of an amenity as basic as an ice machine, but were directed, again, to the 7/11 across the street. How that helps when there is no freezer in which to keep a bag of ice from becoming a bag of water I don’t know. The Flamingo advertises that it has beach chairs and the like for guests to use, but there were none when we wanted two chairs for the beach. The same woman who had made us feel like we were demanding gold bars in the room when we asked for tissues and coffee and expressed amazement that we were surprised by the lack of an ice machine told us that guests had a habit of taking the chairs back to their rooms and keeping them for their entire stays, and, since it was a first come, first served situation, there was nothing she could do about it. We were again directed to 7/11 or the