Yosemite offers an incredible diversity of lodging possibilities, from the palatial Ahwahnee Hotel to the barebones "Housekeeping Camp."  Where you wind up depends as much on your budget as on your timing. Between the Wawona Hotel near the south entrance of the park to the tent cabins at Tuolumne Meadows, the park's lodging possibilities reflect the tastes and personalities of Yosemite visitors.

Of course, while there are hundreds of room in the park, the popularity of Yosemite requires that you make your reservations many months in advance if you wish to be in the park in the room of your choice on the dates of your choice. You can, however, find plenty of wonderful accommodations in the landscape surrounding the park.

Managing much of the in-park lodging is concessioner Aramark Destinations, offering the gamut from tent cabins, to wood cabins, to motel rooms, to palatial suites.

The tent cabins that you'll find in Curry Village in the Yosemite Valley, White Wolf Lodge, and Tuolumne Meadows are just that: canvas tents large enough to hold a bed or two and a table set on a wooden platform. Curry Village has electric lighting but no electrical outlets and a few cabins are heated but available only during the winter months. The other tent cabin lodgings offer wood-burning stoves but no electricity. Showers and restrooms are in separate buildings at all of these lodgings.

Curry Village tent cabins, Yosemite National Park / Rebecca Latson

Though Curry Village has a long-favored status with many Yosemite visitors, no doubt in large part due to its valley location, these facilities are over-rated. What you have is a crowded city of tents and cabins with little privacy, the sounds of shouting and laughing kids, and community bathhouses that struggle to handle the traffic.

Rates start at $164 a night in Curry Village (depending on the season) for a tent cabin (there are 403 of them). The Village also offers 18 standard motel-style rooms for $279 per night, and 14 Curry Village Cabins (aka Yosemite Cabins) go for $210 (without bath) -to $283 (with bath) per night. ADA accessible tent cabins, wood cabins, and rooms are available.

The facilities at White Wolf and Tuolumne Meadows, while the same tent cabins found at Curry Village, offer a more relaxed, less crowded feel. The 69 tent cabins at Tuolumne Meadows Lodge start at $142 per night, White Wolf Lodge’s 24 tent cabins and 4 traditional cabins start at $138 per night.

Note: The National Park Service has mandated the closure until further notice of White Wolf Lodge due to severely-damaged sewer lines.

Housekeeping Camp’s units are more rustic, consisting of three concrete walls, a concrete floor, a canvas ceiling, and a canvas curtain you can pull across the opening. there are 266 of these units, with rates around $110 before taxes.

The Yosemite Valley Lodge offers 245 traditional motel-style rooms, some ADA accessible, in a series of one- and two-story motel-type buildings centered around a registration building and a small commercial area. Rooms start at $339 per night. The buildings at Yosemite Lodge are fairly close together, but not to the extent of those at Curry Village.

The Ahwahnee Hotel, Yosemite National Park / Rebecca Latson

The Ahwahnee, open year-round and considered by many travelers as the crown jewel of national park lodges, is Yosemite’s flagship property. Opened in 1927 as a luxury hotel and used during World War II as a naval convalescent hospital, the Ahwahnee has 121 rooms combined (main hotel and nearby cottages) renting for $536 to almost $1,300 per night during peak season.

Note: according to the website, the Ahwahnee is currently in the midst of an extensive seismic retrofit renovation project through the remainder of 2024. While the hotel remains open, there will probably be construction noise between 7 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

The Ahwahnee Hotel, Yosemite National Park / Rebecca Latson

The Wawona Hotel features 104 guest rooms, about half with a private bathroom ($248 per night before taxes) and half without ($164 per night before taxes). The main building with the registration desk, lobby, and dining room has 28 guest rooms, all but one on the second floor.

Note: Beginning December 2, 2024, the historic Wawona Hotel within Yosemite National Park will close to allow the National Park Service (NPS) to conduct a comprehensive condition assessment on the hotel complex. The NPS recently undertook a roof replacement project on the main hotel building which revealed the need for more intensive investigation and assessment of the hotel.

There's also a more unique lodging option in Yosemite, but you have to hike to reach it. The High Sierra Camps offer a nice alternative to sleeping on the ground when traveling through the park's backcountry. These camps -- Glen Aulin, May Lake, Sunrise, Merced Lake, and Vogelsang -- are roughly 5.7-10 miles (9.2 - 16.1 km) apart from one another. Once you reach camp, you have a tent cabin for sleeping and a main tent to take meals.

To land a cot in one of these camps, though, you must enter a lottery.

Now, there are other lodgings in the park that you can call home during your stay. The Redwoods in Yosemite offers year-round vacation rentals in Wawona, California, inside of the national park. Whether you are looking for a cozy cabin for two or a large home for the entire family, Redwoods in Yosemite offers all types of Yosemite lodging.

Yosemite’s Scenic Wonders offer rental options including houses close to the park, and you can also check this website for many other lodging options in addition to these listed here.

Elsewhere, outside the park's Tioga Road entrance station, you'll find the Tioga Pass Resort (currently closed due to structural damage from flooding in 2019 and with no access to the resort’s website).

The Tioga Pass Resort lies just 3 miles east of the Tioga Pass Entrance Station, Yosemite National Park / Kurt Repanshek

Although this resort is closed, you can read of Traveler editor Kurt Repanshek’s visit to this resort in the early 2000s, below.

This historic way station is rightly part of the park experience if your visit at all touches on the eastern side near Tioga Pass. Dating to the early 1910s when it didn’t take a hardscrabble miner too long to realize he could make more money from the fledgling tourist industry than from hard-to-find ore bodies, the Tioga Pass Resort is a rustic melting pot of travelers.

Hunters and anglers, travelers who speak more comfortably in foreign languages than English, and folks going from Point A to Point F with a side trip through the park are likely to wind up elbow-to-elbow with you at the historic cafe that offers three hearty meals a day for a relative pittance. 

Perhaps it's the fact that accommodations on the eastern side of Yosemite are so infrequent, or maybe it's the location of Tioga Pass Resort just three miles from Yosemite's Tioga Entrance, or maybe it's due to the scrumptious pies that greet you when it's time for dessert, but this log lodge and its scattered cabins is a pretty good place to use as a base camp for exploring the area immediately surrounding Tuolumne Meadows in the park.

Now, bear in mind that the accommodations are nothing terribly special.  But if you don't mind a touch of rustic, a place set at 9,600 feet in elevation with a rushing creek out the front door and a cliff band out the rear window, then these log cabins won't disappoint. Oh, some have bathrooms, others require a short walk to communal facilities, and some have kitchenettes, while others offer no more than bed and bath. But they’re weather-tight, charmingly rustic with thick log walls and plank ceilings and floors, and close by some of the finest hiking in Yosemite's High Sierra.

You'll find no fireplaces in the cabins, just space heaters and thick quilts and comforters. Some cabins are equipped with mini-fridge, gas stove, and microwave. Although, with the lodge’s restaurant less than a two-minute walk across the plank-bridge that spanned the unnamed tributary to Lee Vining Creek, you might not need the cooking options.

But there are some things you need to come prepared for. For example, a flashlight or two are wise to pack for middle-of-the-night excursions, be they to the bathroom, the cafe, or to enjoy the stars, and for those odd occasions when high winds temporary knock out the resort’s power. They say mice can be an issue -- cabins contain plastic tubs for food storage to foil the rodents, and there’s a supply of traps under the sink -- though we didn’t encounter any. Some cobwebs did hang from nooks in the overhead beams and in one window pane, but all-in-all the place was clean and suitable.

There's no daily maid service, so be prepared to make your own bed and sweep the floor if you tracked dirt or pine needles in from your hike. And more than likely if you're staying here you'll be doing some considerable hiking. The Tioga Pass Resort is less than a half-hour’s drive from trailheads that access the John Muir Trail, the Ansel Adams Wilderness, Unicorn Peak, Cathedral Lakes, Gaylor Lakes, Cold Canyon, and the Canyon of the Tuolumne River.

Now, the main drawback to the Tioga Pass Resort is landing a reservation. With no phone service outside of a satellite phone, you contact the lodge via email to make reservations. There are times when it seems your email goes off into cyberspace. It can be frustrating.

No money passes hands until you reach the lodge; they operate on an honor system that, understandably, places a great deal of trust in you upholding your end of the bargain. The restaurant reflects this same laid-back atmosphere, taking you on a first-come, first-served basis. While you're waiting, you can enjoy a drink around the fireplace that sometimes attracts a passing musician, admire the photography of Tony Rowell (Galen Rowell's boy), or lose yourself in a book or writing postcards.

While the cafe's tables line the walls of the small dining room, the heart is a crescent-moon-shaped wooden counter that you address while seated on hefty rounds of tree trunk topped by a padded seat. With a steady flow of customers both from the cabins and the nearby Tioga Junction and Ellery Lake campgrounds, the wait staff has no time for chit-chat or your dallying over the menu.

Hopefully, Tioga Pass Resort will eventually reopen. Until then, the small town of Lee Vining – 12 miles (19.3 km) east of the Tioga Pass Entrance Station - is the closest option for some very limited lodging near the eastern side of the park.

Before you decide to spend a night at any of these lodges, remember to check out the reviews. TripAdviser is a great place to start and will help you determine where you might wish to stay while visiting Yosemite.