New renovated room. New owner and management, new furnished room. highly recommended. Peaceful, clean , safe and spacious.

If your looking to stay somewhere that you’ll be left alone and want no one to bug you I prefer and recommend the harbor bay off harbor Blvd in Costa Mesa. My girlfriend and I truly believe this hidden gem in the heart of Costa Mesa does not deserve as bad of a reputation it receives. The owner is such a sweet person and the employees here all work hard to ensure guest are safe and have a comfortable stay. You can tell they really care about this place. We recommend this place for anyone just getting to know Costa Mesa and trying to save some money. It’s worth it.

Motel staff all needs to be replaced or the motel shut down completely. The motel has a rampant drug and prostitution issue. They enforce policies that their own employees don't even follow. The owner is the only good thing about this place as she is a sweet lady just doesn't have control over her staff. The motel even goes as far as offering discounts for good reviews.

My family and I visited Harbor Bay because we needed a place to stay and at first it seemed like a pretty decent place. There was a vending machine, the street looked pretty clean and the place when we first got there was pretty quite as well. We should’ve known from our first encounter with a crackhead that it was not a safe place. When we first entered the room everything seemed normal we turned the AC on, it was loud and made strange noises and besides that it would start smelling like something was burning. Then there was the small fridge, we kept some food in there and after a while it started leaking because it didn’t work and the freezer part of it was broken. Another thing was the microwave wouldn’t even heat up food and the tray you’re supposed to put your food on that spins was gone. When my sister went to take a shower she was disgusted by the bathroom. The first problem with the bathroom was that there was no toilet seat, it was completely gone and she had found specs of blood on the wall which we later learned from a Youtube video that in motels and cheap hotels, this is often found on the wall due to drug addicts cleaning the blood off their syringes after injecting heroin. Later that day in the afternoon we got a knock on our door and I realized we hadn’t locked it. Some woman had knocked and my sister had opened it, the woman was confused and she looked like she had been doing drugs for several days. We ended up changing rooms and that was a terrible decision. Our new room was all the way in the end where some guy would always be hanging around outside and he(surprise, surprise) looked like he was on drugs. The rooms all the way in the end look really shady but when we got there we had underestimated how bad it was. When we entered we saw that there was cigarette burns on the blankets and there were roaches. This time the first thing we did was look in the bathroom. Inside we saw that the shower curtains had mold on them and there was a bandage wrap around the shower head to stop a leak. Apart from that there was graffiti all over the motel including the garbage bin outside. The AC in this room was even worse that the first one and the burning smell was even more intense and it was torn apart. When night came we were disgusted by the smell of smoke coming from outside, Harbor Bay is said to be a smoking free motel but here people did heroin and smoked pretty freely. When we woke up my younger brother had a bunch of bites all over his body, when we checked the bed and removed the covers we saw a bunch of small blood stains, then I noticed something moving around and we had realized we had bed bugs, I squished one and dragged it along the blanket and saw it was full of blood. I was completely disgusted by this and done of us could sleep that night. As I lay awake I decided to go on the wifi because we had wasted extra money on it and when I went on it was extremely slow and nothing would load, it was a complete waste of money. We all woke up with marks all over our bodies and we left that same morning. Anyways if you’re ever unlucky enough to have to stay there LOCK YOUR DOOR!!! and check the sheets for bed bugs.

I am absolutely flabbergasted by the good reviews on this motel, even if they're a year old or more. Let me describe my recent nightmarish experience at this place. Pulled in after 27 hours of flying and the front office staff was friendly enough. Asked me if I smoked, to which I said no. He said not to worry, we keep our rooms pretty clean and tidy. A warning bell should have gone off when he ran down the house rules to me, repeating particular rules. I can't remember the entire list of rules, but he made sure he emphasized that there were no guests after 10pm and no extra guests in the room without registering with the office and paying a room fee. So I get my key and head out, and straight away outside the office door this guy who was obviously an absolute meth-head passes by and mutters something like hey man. This was my second warning. So I find my room, noticing that on my way there are people hanging around the building that all look shady. A lady comes out of one of the rooms on the first floor, leaving her door open behind her. I can see that inside her room are piles of clothes and things on the floor and table. It is an absolute dump, and obviously that doesn't look like a temporary tenancy. So I make my way to my second floor room... already I am pretty sure I've made a big mistake. I open the shaky doorknob lock and as soon as I open the door I am hit with the strongest smell of humid-mildew-tobacco smoke odor one could imagine. It is incredibly strong. I am tired and convince myself to get past the smell. The room has obviously been abused by previous tenants in ways normal hotel room occupants do not abuse rooms. There is toilet tissue stuffed in the door peekhole, burn marks on the carpet, stains on the carpet, scratched in graffitti on items, odd clothing stickers on the wall. It was bad. Like I said... I was tired and dropped my bags on the table (I dared lay them on the floor), and plopped down on the bed. I did not want to pull the blanket back and didn't, and at that point I decided I would just sleep on top as I wasn't at this point going to gamble on the condition of the sheets. After getting some rest I decided to get online. The signal was so bad I was never able to connect. In fact, I had to drive my car close to the front office and use the net from inside my locked vehicle. This was the only spot I could get a good enough signal. On my second day, I returned to the room after my meetings at around 11pm. I was tired again and headed straight to the shower. Before I got in, there was a loud bang on my door. After freaking out a bit, I went and looked out the window. No one was there. I had forgotten to lock my chain lock. When I went to latch the lock, I noticed that it had been pried off the wall, with the top and bottoms curved up where something had been used to pull it off the wall. It wasn't like this earlier. So I looked at the bed. It had not been made up, but the bed cover was not the way I left it... and neither was my backpack or clothes the pack was sitting on. Someone had sat on my bed and went through my pack, leaving cables and clothing strewn around it. Luckily I'd taken everything of real value with me in my car. I rang the front office and got no answer. As fast as I could I packed my bag and got out of there. There was only one reason someone would pry off the chain lock I figured, and that was to make it easier to come in when I was in the room. I went to the front office. It was locked, the attendant behind a wall of glass with a hole and vent for sound. I told him what happened in my room, let him know that I didn't feel safe and wanted a partial refund for the day as I was leaving. He seemed to barely be able to communicate and told me that there is nothing he could do right then, that I would need to come back in the morning when the office was open (even though there was an open sign clearly lit up). He muttered something like our hotel is safe. I told him I was heading out and wasn't coming back and that I didn't appreciate him being too afraid to leave the office to investigate the incident, but telling me the hotel was safe. I prefer small motels/hotels over big expensive chain hotels. I have a problem paying $200 for one night in a room. 9 times out of 10 I have good experiences at these small hotels... in fact often I have wonderful experiences. This is one of the worst, if not the worst experiences I have ever had with a small motel/hotel in my three decades of traveling. There was one other time where the room was as bad, but the staff were extremely nice and the place wasn't clearly a den of addicts and prostitutes, and there wasn't a safety issue. This was also the first time I've experienced where someone has gone into my room and gone through my belongings. The room was terrible. The hotel is clearly unsafe. The staff was unconcerned. I cannot warn you enough... DO NOT STAY HERE. Don't let the quaint Harbor Bay Motel sign fool you. This place is terrible and spooky.