Best Family-Friendly Stays in Winston-Salem

Suites and Free Parking Win With Kids

Fairfield Inn and Suites by Marriott Winston-Salem Hanes Mall and Residence Inn by Marriott Winston-Salem Hanes Mall both pair suite layouts with free parking and an outdoor pool, a combination that suits a family driving in for a Hanes Mall weekend without paying for valet. Both sit within a few minutes of the mall's food court, useful for a family that doesn't want to plan every meal around a sit-down restaurant, and both include breakfast in the room rate. The pool at each stays open through the warmer months, giving kids somewhere to burn off energy before an evening at the mall.

Summit Street Inns, in a residential stretch near downtown, lists family rooms with private bathrooms and free parking, a quieter alternative to the larger chain properties for a family that wants a smaller, independently run stay. Its side-street address also means less traffic noise than the Cherry Street hotels a few blocks over, a detail that matters with young kids trying to nap in the middle of a busy travel day. The included breakfast here runs to continental and gluten-free options, useful for families managing a dietary restriction on the road.

The Historic Brookstown Inn on Brookstown Avenue offers family rooms within a nine-minute walk of Old Salem Museums and Gardens, letting families skip the car entirely for a morning of living-history exhibits. The included hot breakfast also cuts one meal a day from the trip's logistics, useful when mornings already run tight with kids to dress and feed before a full day of walking. Free parking here removes one more thing to plan around, unusual for a historic downtown property of this style, and the evening wine and cheese gives parents a quiet moment once the kids are settled.

Hawthorne Inn & Conference Center downtown carries a family-friendly tag alongside a fifteen-minute walk to Old Salem and on-site parking, a practical middle ground between the downtown boutique hotels and the Hanes Mall suites. Its large review count, over a thousand on Booking.com, gives families more data points than most properties on this list before booking a multi-night stay with young kids along. The on-site parking also means no valet line to navigate with a stroller and a tired toddler in tow, and the on-site conference space doubles as overflow room for a larger family gathering.

Winston-Salem works well for a family trip because the two hotel clusters map onto two different kid-friendly days: Old Salem's living-history streets and SciWorks downtown, or Hanes Mall's shopping and food court on the west side, both reachable from either cluster in well under twenty minutes by car.