New Horizons 3.0 update hotel guide

Arguably the biggest feature of the Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0 update is the addition of the resort hotel on the pier. Run by Kapp’n and his family, the hotel can temporarily house villagers on the island as tourists, and it’s up to players to help with decoration and attracting visitors.

In this Animal Crossing: New Horizons hotel guide for the 3.0 update, we’ll explain everything you need to know about decorating rooms, attracting guests, hotel-specific rewards, and more.

How to unlock the resort hotel in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

In order to unlock the hotel in New Horizons, players need to have unlocked Kapp’n and his boat tours. To do this is a multistep process:

The next day, Isabelle will announce that boat tours are now available from Kapp’n. Once Kapp’n is unlocked, during Isabelle’s next announcements, she will tell the player that a hotel has opened on the pier.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ resort hotel, explained

Gameplay in the hotel is very similar to the Happy Home Paradise DLC. Players will be tasked with decorating hotel rooms to a certain theme, like Modern or Japanese, to create more options for guests. Much like the DLC, players will pull from their own catalog to decorate these spaces, and New Horizons will make some new items that are on-theme available to players even if they aren’t in their catalog. Though there is a theme to adhere to in theory, players still have the freedom to make these rooms whatever they’d like.

Completing hotel room designs and DIY requests will earn players tickets, a hotel-specific currency that can only be redeemed at the hotel souvenir shop in the lobby, run by Gran. For each hotel room designed, players will receive 200 tickets.

An Animal Crossing: New Horizons character looks at a board with DIYs they can trade in.

Players are limited to designing two hotel rooms a day, but can continue hotel-related tasks via the DIY requests box. Here, Tom Nook has outlined items for the player to craft (which is made much easier by the new batch crafting system) that Kapp’n will then ship out to help spread the word of the island far and wide and entice more guests. The first four items you ship out every week will yield doubled tickets, with this bonus resetting on Mondays.

Unfortunately, unlike campsite visitors, villagers that stay at the island hotel cannot be asked to move in permanently. However, during their time on the island, they do essentially function as temporary villagers. They aren’t confined to their room, and can be found wandering around and mingling with the residents. However, they sadly can’t stay forever as visitors swap out every day.

The mannequins in the hotel lobby serve as borrowable outfits for guests visiting the island — both animals and humans. Players can set these outfits to anything they’d like by utilizing a mix of their own cataloged clothing and hotel-specific clothes. To change the outfit, players simply need to approach the mannequin and interact with it. Hotel guests may be seen out and about in one of these two outfits, and players visiting other islands can also interact with the mannequins to borrow an outfit temporarily.

Resort hotel exclusive rewards

An Animal Crossing character looks at the wares at Gran's store in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

There will be two featured items each day in the souvenir shop, as well as a catalog players can access via Gran that will expand as they complete more rooms. Items ordered from the catalog will cost more than when they’re the featured item in the shop. There are several new full sets of furniture, like the Artful, Tubular, and Kiddie items, as well as several more souvenir-esque items themed to the hotel, and some items that don’t quite belong to any set.