We bought the worst-rated hotel in Page. Here's why.

Not a typo. But the worst-rated hotel in town is only the most recent chapter of this building, and it is not the chapter that explains why we bought it.

Before Page, Arizona was a city, it was a construction camp. The men who built the Glen Canyon Dam, the dam that created Lake Powell, needed somewhere to sleep. This building is where they slept. It was the first hotel in Page, and it went up before the town did.

After the dam, it became the Page Boy Motel, and it had a long and genuinely good run under that name.

More recently it was the Lake Powell Canyon Inn. It slid slowly, the way these places do, and it never really bounced back after Covid. That is the version most people remember, and it is the version we bought.

The reviews weren't wrong. Tired rooms. Promises the place couldn't keep. A sign out front still advertising a continental breakfast that the previous owners had long since stopped serving. The breakfast was real once. They served it for years and cut it when they started losing money, and then nobody took the sign down. That is the ordinary way a hospitality business fails: the promises outlive the ability to keep them, and nobody wants to be the one who climbs up and removes the sign.

If you stayed here back then and left one of those reviews, we'd like you to know something: we read them. Most of them twice. They became the to-do list.

Why buy a hotel everyone warned you about

Because it sits in the best small town in canyon country.

Page is 10 minutes from Horseshoe Bend, 15 from Antelope Canyon, 15 from Lake Powell, and it's the only place on Earth where you can enter the Wave's daily lottery and then go get a milkshake. Millions of people pass through every year. And until now, the town has never had a boutique hotel. You could get a clean chain bed or a tired motel bed, and that was the menu.

We bought it for the location, and for the chance to give Page the first boutique hotel it has ever had. A building with this much history, in a town this good, isn't a warning sign to us. It's the whole opportunity.

What we're doing about it

We committed $2 million to rebuild this place, and we're partway through spending it the slow way: room by room, with our own hands more days than not.

We said twenty rooms would be ready by Memorial Day. We delivered two. We changed contractors and have been running to catch up ever since. Renovated rooms are open and bookable now, and more come online every few weeks. Everything gets touched: new beds, new bathrooms, new mini-splits, new everything down to the studs where the studs deserved it. The rooms that aren't done yet don't get sold as if they were.

The name changed too. The Wesley, after John Wesley Powell, the one-armed explorer who ran the Colorado River through these canyons before anyone had mapped them. The property pays homage to the place instead of pretending to be somewhere else. Local art, canyon lines, red rock colors. You'll see.

What we're not going to do

We're not going to tell you the renovation is finished. It isn't. Our Grand Opening is September 25, 2026, and until every room meets the bar, you'll see exactly what's available and what's still behind plastic sheeting.

We're not going to promise a breakfast that doesn't exist. The sign out front taught us that one.

And we're not going to pretend the old reviews aren't there. They are, and they're accurate history. We'd rather earn the new ones.

The part where you come in

If you're planning a Page trip this summer or fall, you can stay in one of the new rooms while we finish the rest. You'll get an honest room, a phone line at (928) 612-3300 that is answered any hour, and two owners who will absolutely over-answer any question about Antelope Canyon tours.

Check dates and rates. Booking direct always gets our best price.

And if you stayed at the old place and got burned: come see us. We have something to prove, and we know it.

Adam Walz is one of the two owners of The Wesley. The other one, Micah Thomas, is probably holding a paintbrush right now.

Keep reading: The perfect 48 hours in Page, AZ (built around real tour times)