hotelHotel Impossible · Season 3, Episode 4 · Aired September 2, 2013
Hotel Iguanazul
Santa Cruz, Costa Rica
Open. The rescue stuck and it continues to operate.
What happened after
3-star bungalow hotel at Playa Junquillal; third-party reservation-network aggregator (guanacaste-hotels.com) directly fetched shows active room-booking listing.
What happened on the show
Out on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica at Playa Junquillal, the Iguanazul was a three-star bungalow hotel whose episode title, Tropical Termites, hinted at the kind of structural and upkeep problems a beach property in a humid climate constantly battles. A bungalow resort in a remote surf-and-nature stretch of Guanacaste lives on international travelers who have to want to find it, which put pressure on both the condition of the rooms and the reasons to book. Melchiorri examined the bungalows and the guest experience, then pushed ownership to fix the upkeep issues and sharpen the pitch to the eco-and-surf crowd that fills Costa Rica's coast. His guidance adapted the show's standards-and-positioning playbook to a tropical beach market, aiming to turn a rustic hotel with maintenance troubles into a dependable, well-presented base on the Junquillal shore.
After the cameras left
The Iguanazul is still bookable on the Junquillal coast. As of our 2026 verification a directly checked reservation-network listing shows the three-star bungalow hotel with active room availability, and it appears across several other travel aggregators tied to its Playa Junquillal address in Guanacaste. We could not confirm a hotel-owned official site, so the status is logged as confirmed operating with medium confidence on third-party sourcing. Last confirmed active in our 2026 check, on the same stretch of Pacific coast the show visited.
Sources
Confidence: medium. Last checked 2026-07-19.