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We Stayed At The Taco Bell Hotel!

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A fast-food chain turned a 70-room resort into a four-night fever dream, and Jeffree Star got a room key.

In August 2019, beauty YouTuber Jeffree Star and his then-partner Nathan Schwandt drove out to Palm Springs, California, for opening night of “The Bell: A Taco Bell Hotel and Resort.” Their vlog, “We Stayed At The Taco Bell Hotel!,” documents the pair wandering a boutique hotel that Taco Bell had taken over completely and rebranded down to the pool floaties. What they found inside was less a marketing gimmick than a fully operational, four-night-only theme park built around sauce packets and Baja Blast.

• Taco Bell took over the entire 70-room V Palm Springs hotel for a limited four-night run starting August 8, 2019, rebranding it as “The Bell: A Taco Bell Hotel and Resort.”
• Reservations sold out in two minutes when they opened in June, months before Star and Schwandt ever checked in.
• The property included custom sauce-packet pool floaties, a Taco Bell-themed salon, an on-site gift shop, and a hidden Mylar-covered Baja Blast Freeze lounge.

Inside a Sold-Out Pop-Up

Star and Schwandt arrived on opening night to a property that had committed to the bit at every level. The V Palm Springs, a 70-room boutique hotel, had been converted top to bottom into Taco Bell’s vision of a resort, and the two-minute sellout back in June meant every guest walking through the lobby that week was there on purpose, not by accident. It wasn’t a themed suite tucked into a normal hotel; it was the entire building, run as a Taco Bell property for exactly four nights.

The vlog captures the pair working their way through the property’s built-in gimmicks: the pool decked out with sauce-packet-shaped floaties, a gift shop stocked with hotel-exclusive merchandise, and a salon offering Taco Bell-branded nail art and hair fades. Tucked away from the main areas was a hidden lounge wrapped entirely in Mylar, built around the chain’s Baja Blast Freeze — the kind of detail that only shows up if someone points you toward it, which is exactly the treasure-hunt feel Star leans into on camera.

Meeting the Nacho Fries Architect

Beyond the decor, the trip doubled as a food tour. Star sat down with the culinary team responsible for Taco Bell’s Nacho Fries — arguably the chain’s biggest limited-time hit in years — and sampled dishes built specifically for the hotel’s four-night run that never touched a regular Taco Bell menu. These weren’t drive-thru items dressed up for cameras; they were one-off creations meant to only exist inside The Bell.

Reservations for the entire 70-room hotel sold out in two minutes.

That two-minute sellout is worth sitting with. Taco Bell wasn’t just handing out free rooms to influencers — it built genuine consumer demand for a fast-food-branded hotel stay, then let cameras like Star’s document what the people who actually won that scramble got to experience.

The Branding Was the Point

Every corner of The Bell existed to be filmed. From the neon signage to the “Currently Crunch Wrapping” door hangers referenced in guest accounts of the stay, the hotel was engineered for exactly the kind of walkthrough vlog Star produced. It’s the same instinct that drives other outsized, camera-ready stunts across YouTube — the sort of scale-for-scale’s-sake spectacle seen in videos like the World’s Largest Challenge! or the elaborate setups behind the World’s Most Dangerous Escape Room!, where the entire appeal is watching someone react in real time to something absurdly overbuilt.

Four nights, 70 rooms, one Mylar-wrapped Freeze lounge, and a two-minute sellout — Taco Bell got exactly the kind of viral aftermath a limited-run stunt like this is built for, and Star’s walkthrough became one more piece of proof that the gimmick worked exactly as designed.