Hotel Impossible · S5 E12
Empress Hotel
New Orleans, Louisiana
Open. The rescue stuck and it continues to operate.
The short answer
Budget hotel near city center; actively listed with current pricing across OTAs.
What happened on the show
Near the center of New Orleans, the Empress was a budget hotel operating in one of America's most-visited tourist cities, and its episode title, The Big Sleasy, left little doubt about the conditions Melchiorri found. A cheap hotel in a city drowning in visitors has no shortage of potential guests, which means a bottom-of-the-rankings property is failing on its own operation, not its market. Anthony scrutinized the accommodations and the front desk, then pressed ownership to clean up and tighten a property that had sunk to the bottom of the city's hotel rankings. His counsel circled back to the show's line for a struggling value property in a strong market: the tourists will come to New Orleans regardless, so a budget hotel's entire job is to give them a clean, safe, honest room, and getting that right is the difference between survival and closure.
After the cameras left
The Empress is still operating in New Orleans, at the low end of the market. As of our 2026 pass the budget hotel is actively listed with current pricing across booking platforms, though it sits near the very bottom of the city's hotel rankings, the profile of a property that is open for business but still fighting the conditions the show flagged. With sourcing at the listing level rather than a first-party confirmation, we log the status as confirmed operating with medium confidence. Last confirmed active in our 2026 check.
Location
New Orleans, Louisiana
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Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.