hotelHotel Hell · Season 2, Episode 5 · Aired August 18, 2014
Calumet Inn
Pipestone, Minnesota
Good outcome here: the business is still trading today.
On the show
Season 2, Episode 5 · August 18, 2014 · inn
Some sources describe it as a 'historic hotel'; business name itself is Calumet Inn, normalized type as inn.
What happened after
Historic hotel, restaurant, and bar actively operating under the same name since 1888.
What happened on the show
Two sisters, Rina and Vanda Smrkovski, had been handed the historic Calumet Inn in Pipestone, Minnesota by their father, and neither was equipped to run it. They deflected every shortcoming onto everyone but themselves, the hard-working staff included. Ramsay laid out three blunt options: shut the hotel down, sell it, or turn operations over to a real general manager. The sisters chose the third path. He worked to lift staff and guest morale and to improve the hotel and its restaurant, and he sent the sisters away, in his framing, to grow up. The inn had stood since 1888, and the fix here was less about the building than about getting the people who owned it out of the daily operating decisions they kept getting wrong. For a property with that much history, the liability was the ownership, not the walls.
After the cameras left
The years since have been turbulent. The Calumet reopened under new ownership after the episode, was briefly shut in March 2020 over fire-safety violations, then reopened a month later once they were corrected. A tougher stretch followed: financial strain and a legal fight with the city of Pipestone over a condemnation, which a judge ultimately decided in the city's favor in late 2024. Through all of it, as of our latest verification pass the Calumet Inn's official presence is live, listing current contact, rooms, and dining, and the hotel is recorded as operating under its own name. We flag the rocky legal history honestly, but the verified spine points to a property that is trading again.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.