Willoughvale Inn

This was our first visit to the Northeast Kingdom. While planning our trip, we found Lake Willoughby first, then immediately found the WilloughVale Inn. It looked great in photos. It is even nicer in person. The staff is fantastic. The rooms are bigger and scrubbed clean. The bed was so incredibly comfortable. Having access to the private beach area, dock, and kayaks was awesome. The VIEW WAS OUT OF THIS WORLD! Book now, you’ll be so glad you did!

I stayed in the Angler cottage, and it was Adorable. So clean, and filled with everything one could need, so well stocked. You just can't beat being right on the water, on the beautiful shores of Lake Willoughby, just step outside and hear loons etc. Fabulous. Comfortable bed, full kitchen, gas fireplace....just wonderful! Helpful staff too. Love it, would go back in a heartbeat, and highly, highly recommend.

When we first started staying at the Willoughvale decades ago, guests were welcomed to the inn in the afternoon by the enticing aroma of fresh-baked cookies, which were served with tea in the sitting room. Such niceties and amenities have certainly waned over the years. The cookies are gone, along with hot offerings at breakfast. The restaurant and bar have both closed, with no sign that they will reopen; the front desk is staffed only for about 8 hours a day; and the suites are no longer available for guest accommodation. But the rooms are clean and comfortable, as always. Looking on the bright side, protein has returned to the continental breakfast offerings this year (in the form of yogurt and hard-boiled eggs), the view of Lake Willoughby from the upstairs rooms is better than it was from the first-floor suite we used to stay in, and we have discovered many terrific places to eat within half an hour's drive of the inn. If your vision of a Vermont inn is shaped by Bob Newhart's Stratford Inn, this is not the place for you. If you're looking for accommodation convenient to beautiful Lake Willoughby and come with a willingness to explore this interesting area of the state, you could do worse than the Willoughvale (we have :-)

The Inn is quite nice and the person at the front desk friendly and helpful. I have no complaints about the place itself. But our stay was disappointing nonetheless for two reasons. First, though we were warned that the Inn had decided to close it’s restaurant for the season (we chose WilloughVale in part because it had a restaurant on site), we weren’t able to make other lodging arrangements at that point. Unfortunately, we assumed that it would be easy to find alternatives places to eat close by. It wasn’t. When we arrived Tuesday afternoon we were given a list of restaurants in the area, some 20-30 minutes drive each way, with a note that many were closed on Tuesday - our day at the Inn. To complicate matters, there is no cell phone reception (something else were weren’t made aware of), that made it impossible to contact restaurants to confirm if they were open. And since the front desk closed at 5PM, we had no one to consult with. This turned out to matter. After having driven to a market we found that closed to. We ended up having lunch and dinner at a pizza place 20 minutes away, which while quite pleasant was not what we had imagined. We suggest the proprietor do a better job of communicating with guests. We would have made different choices if he/she had.

This was our second visit to the Inn. This time, we got the Lupine room, and we could not ask for more. The other one last time was fine, but much smaller. The service was great, and even though the restaurant was closed (again, as it was 2 years ago), the continental breakfast was very good, and very much appreciated (great coffee). And there were several dining options open this time around: The Gap (Lake Willoughby), the Carriage House Cafe and Grill (Orleans) and the Busy Bee diner (Glover) were all excellent. We went back to the Carriage House for dinner on Friday. Love this area.

The Inn is quaint and very clean. The rooms are small, but sufficiently sized. The sheets and towels were soft. Unfortunately, the mattress in our room squeaked every time one of us moved. Breakfast was plentiful, but the muffins did not taste fresh.