Looking for one of the best hotels in London to inspire your next staycation? We found an excellent option, offering luxurious rooms and incredible views over Green Park
Reporters Without Borders and Truth Hounds found that Russia’s attacks on hotels intended to ‘discourage’ war coverage.
Russian attacks have increasingly hit hotels hosting journalists in Ukraine, in what could constitute “war crimes”, according to a new report.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Truth Hounds – a Ukrainian organisation founded to document war crimes – released the report on Friday. It found that Russian attacks on hotels housing journalists moved from being “isolated events” early in the conflict in 2022 to a “sustained threat” by 2025.
At least 31 strikes on 25 hotels being used by journalists have been recorded since Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022, the report states.
“These attacks appear to be part of a broader Russian strategy aimed at intimidating journalists and suppressing independent media coverage of Russia’s actions in Ukraine,” the report said.
The hotels hit are mainly close to the front line. Only one was being used for military purposes at the time of the attack, the NGOs said.
“In total, 25 journalists and media professionals have found themselves under these hotel bombings, and at least seven have been injured,” it stated.
According to the RSF, at least 13 journalists have been killed while covering Russia’s war on Ukraine, with 12 of the deaths on Ukrainian territory.
Types of attacks
The report highlighted that the attacks followed a clear pattern, occurring at night, using ballistic missiles launched at civilian hotels that were not “legitimate military targets”.
“Our analysis therefore suggests that these attacks are neither random nor incidental but are instead part of a broader strategy aimed at discouraging independent reporting from the front line,” the authors concluded.
Due to the safety obstacles to reporting from a war zone, 13 percent of respondents to a survey said there had been a “reduction” in assignments to high-risk areas, affecting how the war is covered.
The report called for legal measures to prosecute crimes against journalists at “national and international jurisdictions”, specifically the International Criminal Court.
A survey of 19 airport hotel brands has revealed those at the top and bottom of the table when it comes to customer satisfaction and value for money – with one in particular proving to be a ‘disappointment’
Milo Boyd Digital Travel Editor and Commercial Content Lead
00:01, 16 May 2025
BLOC Hotel was named the worst in the Which? survey (Image: DAILY MIRROR)
Despite their handy proximity to the terminals, many airport hotel brands are failing to provide good value for money and quality food and drink, according to a new ranking of the best and worst in the country.
In a survey involving over 1,600 participants, 19 airport hotel chains were judged on aspects such as customer service, cleanliness and value for money. Which? also sent undercover inspectors to two of the listed hotels – DoubleTree by Hilton and Thistle – to see if their experiences matched the survey results.
DoubleTree by Hilton – with locations at Edinburgh Airport, London Heathrow, Manchester and Newcastle – was the most impressive to travellers. The chain bagged five stars for cleanliness, bed comfort and location, achieving an impressive overall customer score of 80 per cent.
On the other end of things, Bloc Hotel at Gatwick shows that proximity to a departure lounge does not mean everything. Depite being right next to the South Terminal check-in desks, it still scored poorly on the survey with 64% overall, earning a meagre two stars for value for money, bedrooms, bathrooms, and customer service.
Have you had a bad hotel stay and want to share your story? Email [email protected]
Double Tree by Hilton was top of the list(Image: Laser1987 via Getty Images)
The average price per night is £142. Guests complain about overpriced tiny rooms, some without windows, with one survey participant noting: “The room was too small for two people. The bed was against the wall, so one person had to wriggle out to use the loo. And the bathroom was a wetroom, so the toilet area flooded when you used the shower”.
A spokesperson for BLOC Hotel noted that the survey’s conclusions “are drawn from such a small and unrepresentative sample size – which seems to be just 42 reviews. At Bloc Gatwick, we achieve a customer service score of 91% across major platforms including Booking.com, Google, TripAdvisor, and Expedia, based on more than 8,000 verified reviews over the past 12 months.”
Contrastingly, the Mirror’s own travel editor, Nigel Thompson, stayed at BLOC Hotel and praised it thoroughly, awarding it a score of 9.5 out of 10.
Travelodge has emerged as the most affordable choice in a recent survey, boasting an average nightly rate of a mere £74. Despite its modest pricing, the hotel chain only managed to secure a customer satisfaction rate of 65 per cent, earning itself a middling three-star rating for most features like value for money and its bedrooms and bathrooms.
However, it fell short in the food and drink department, scraping by with just two stars. Dissatisfied guests didn’t mince their words, one commenting: “Most of the items on the menu were unavailable. What was available was clearly poor quality and microwaved.”
Strategically positioned near major UK airfields such as Cardiff Airport, Liverpool John Lennon Airport, and London City Airport, Travelodge still remains a convenient option.
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Which?’s incognito inspectors visited the DoubleTree by Hilton at Newcastle airport and gave it high marks. Highlights included warm cookies given to guests upon arrival, room service until the early hours, and a generous midday checkout time.
Guests can also enjoy a continental breakfast from as early as 4.30am. The inspectors also praised the spacious rooms, blackout curtains and plush king-size beds.
The Thistle in London Heathrow Terminal 5 was the second hotel to which Which? sent undercover inspectors. With a score of 72 per cent in the survey, Thistle received a Which? Great Value award. Despite its dated decor, the inspectors found the hotel clean and convenient, offering excellent deals for park and stay. The hotel had a fairly comfy bed and a decent shower, and is just a five-minute pod ride from the airport.
At just £78 with a buffet breakfast, it was considered a bargain. Thistle also has a hotel at London Luton Airport.
Travellers seeking an airport hotel are prioritising convenience for terminal access, with a whopping 87% in a consumer survey claiming it’s essential. Luckily, food is less of a big deal.
None of the hotels surveyed scooped up more than three stars for their culinary offerings. An individual recounting their airport hotel experience grumbled: “‘I ordered a sirloin steak and it was as tough as old boots. My wife ordered a pizza and it had to go back.”
Nonetheless, airport hotels are proving invaluable to passengers travelling by car. Special package deals coupling a one-night’s stay with extended holiday parking can be surprisingly economical.
For example, Thistle at Heathrow Terminal 5 offers secure, CCTV-monitored on-site parking. An August booking for a night plus seven days of parking is priced at £210—a savvy saving of £52 compared to booking a separate hotel room and opting for the adjacent official T5 Pod Parking.
Life, death, crime, kitsch, nostalgia, immigrant aspirations and witty design — all of these elements converge in the world of motels, which didn’t exist before 1925.
Here are five facts and phenomena from the century of history.
The motel turns 100. Explore the state’s best roadside havens — and the coolest stops along the way.
Where Magic Fingers are found
From the late 1950s into the ’80s, thousands of motels proudly advertised their Magic Fingers — a little collection of vibrating electric nodes under your mattress that would give you a 15-minute “massage” for 25 cents, inspiring creators from Kurt Vonnegut to Frank Zappa. Alas, their moment passed. But not everywhere. Morro Bay’s Sundown Inn, which gets two diamonds from the Auto Club and charges about $70 and up per night, is one of the last motels in the West that still features working Magic Fingers, offered (at the original price) in most of its 17 rooms. “We’ve owned the hotel for 41 years, and the Magic Fingers was here when we started. We just kept them,” said co-owner Ann Lin. Ann’s mother- and father-in-law immigrated from Taiwan and bought the property in 1983.
Motels, hotels and Patels
Many motels and small hotels are longtime family operations. Sometimes it’s the original owner’s family, and quite often it’s a family named Patel with roots in India’s Gujarat state. A recent study by the Asian American Hotel Owners Assn. found that 60% of U.S. hotels — and 61% of those in California — are owned by Asian Americans. By one estimate, people named Patel own 80% to 90% of the motels in small-town America. The beginnings of this trend aren’t certain, but many believe that one of the first Indians to acquire a hotel in the U.S. was Kanjibhai Desai, buyer of the Goldfield Hotel in downtown San Francisco in the early 1940s.
Motels, media and murders
There’s no escaping the motel in American pop culture. Humbert Humbert, the deeply creepy narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel “Lolita,” road-tripped from motel to motel with his under-age victim. Edward Hopper gave us the disquieting 1957 oil painting “Western Motel.” In the film “Psycho” (1960), Alfred Hitchcock brought to life the murderous motel manager Norman Bates. When Frank Zappa made a movie about the squalid misadventures of a rock band on tour, he called it “200 Motels” (1971). When the writers of TV’s “Schitt’s Creek” (2015-2020) wanted to disrupt a rich, cosmopolitan family, they came up with the Rosebud Motel and its blue brick interior walls. And when executives at A&E went looking for a true-crime series in 2024, they came up with “Murder at the Motel,” which covered a killing at a different motel in every episode.
The Lorraine Motel, before and after
The 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made the Lorraine Motel in Memphis globally notorious. But before and after that day, the Lorraine played a very different role. Built as a small hotel in 1925 and segregated in its early years, the property sold to Black businessman Walter Bailey in 1945. He expanded it to become a motel, attracting many prominent African American guests. In the 1950s and ’60s, the Lorraine was known for housing guests such as Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Roy Campanella, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, Aretha Franklin, Lionel Hampton, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and the Staples Singers. After King’s assassination, the motel struggled, closed, then reemerged in 1991 as the National Civil Rights Museum, now widely praised. Guests follow civil rights history through the building, ending at Room 306 and its balcony where King was standing when he was shot.
The man upstairs in the Manor House
In 1980, a Colorado motel owner named Gerald Foos confided to journalist Gay Talese that he had installed fake ceiling vents in the Manor House Motel in Aurora, Colo., and for years had been peeping from the attic at guests in bed. The man had started this in the 1960s and continued into the ’90s. Finally, in 2016, Talese spun the story into a New Yorker article and a book, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” sparking many charges that he had violated journalistic ethics.
Listen. That’s the low hum of the highway you hear behind me, offset by the rumble of the ice machine down the breezeway. We gather today to celebrate the motel, a uniquely American creature, conceived in California through the unholy embrace of the automobile and the hotel.
Since that beginning in 1925, motels have multiplied like bunnies. They have been implicated in countless crimes and liaisons. They have been elevated by some savvy architects, undercut by assorted chain operations and frequently left for dead by the side of the road.
The motel turns 100. Explore the state’s best roadside havens — and the coolest stops along the way.
Yet certain survivors have done some dramatic social climbing, especially lately. Plenty of motels have moved from budget to boutique, often renaming themselves as inns, lodges or hotels and capitalizing on their vintage looks. Like turntables, typewriters, tiki bars and film cameras, these midcentury motels are back, seducing millennials, Gen Z and baby boomers like the character Johnny Rose on the beloved TV series “Schitt’s Creek.”
“I always saw motels as a last resort, a dreaded pit stop,” said Rose, played by Eugene Levy, pitching Wall Street investors. “But I was wrong. Motels have the potential of offering a window into the unique charm of small-town life.”
He vows “to revitalize the classic roadside motel for a new generation.”
Out here in the real world, it’s happening.
Nowadays you can spend $1,000 a night in a born-again California motel. You can order “eight-minute eggs” with your Champagne brunch (Le Petit Pali, Carmel), browse in a curated bodega (Hotel Wren, Twentynine Palms), nosh on caviar (Skyview Los Alamos), borrow a small car (Surfrider Hotel, Malibu), or ease the planet’s miseries by reaching for tree-free toilet paper (Pearl Hotel, San Diego).
The cursive yellow sign at the Pearl reverberates with ’50s vibes.
(Megan Morello / For The Times)
Yet if you’re nervous about money in these nerve-racking times, you can still find a mom-and-pop operation with high standards, a long family history and — sometimes — rates that dip under $100. You can even find one of those that features concrete teepees (San Bernardino’s Wigwam Motel, run by a family with roots in India).
In other words, it’s a wide, wide motel world out there, too broad to fit into one road trip. And so, in honor of the motel centennial, I took a road trip. Well, a few road trips.
All told, I covered about 2,500 miles, all within California, stalking properties born between 1925 and 1970, avoiding the big chains, sleeping in a new room every night. The way I defined a motel? If a lodging’s guest rooms open directly to the outdoors and there’s a parking lot handy, industry experts say, it probably was born as a motel or motor lodge. Especially if it’s a low-rise building with fewer than 60 rooms, brick walls and a VACANCY sign visible from the street. But owners can call their lodgings what they like — or turn them to other uses.
On the way, I found a few landmark motels that don’t take overnight guests at all. I also learned how the state’s Project Homekey — conceived to house people at risk of homelessness — bankrolled the purchase and conversion of more than 30 Southern California motels and hotels from 2020 to 2024, with mixed results.
Now, buckle up and let’s roll the montage of old postcards, weathered neon signs and swooping Googie rooflines, then zoom to the spot where motel history began.
The Mo-Tel is born
The first stop, I knew, needed to be a scruffy lot alongside U.S. 101 at the eastern edge of San Luis Obispo.
This is where a car-loving Pasadena architect named Arthur Heineman opened his first roadside lodging in December 1925, less than a year before Route 66 connected Chicago to Los Angeles. Having seen the first vacation camps and motor courts spring up across the country, Heineman hatched the idea of building one midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
After a few false starts, he called his place the Milestone Mo-Tel, combining motor and hotel. Later it became the Motel Inn. Heineman gave the buildings Mission Revival features and planned to build 18 statewide, his own mission system.
That never happened. But Heineman’s lodging endured for decades and the word motel caught on. As the automobile transformed American life and roadside commercial culture lit up like a new neon light, that word spread.
But we’re not lingering at the Motel Inn. It shut down in 1991 and much of the old complex has been leveled. Despite a proposal for a new hotel that got local planning commission approval in 2023, the site remained idle as of March 7. An uninspiring sign still stands, along with a Mission-style office building, bell tower and a single wall from the old restaurant. For someone who prizes roadside Americana, this is the visual version of the sad trombone sound.
Fortunately, the Madonna Inn — the visual version of an accordion orchestra — is just three miles away. Under a big pink sign.
When one California castle is not enough
At he Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, Alex Madonna drew on his Swiss background and gave the inn a mountain-chalet look.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
Nowadays the Madonna Inn is a vast enterprise with restaurants, bakery, bar, stables next door and 110 guest rooms — each different, each with its own postcard in the inn’s three gift shops. It’s so ornate, so frothy with kitsch, you have to smile. But when Alex and Phyllis Madonna opened in late 1958, the inn was a 12-room experiment.
The timing must have seemed right. Motels had been multiplying nationwide for more than 30 years, often adding swimming pools to lure more families or adopting elaborate themes to stand apart.
On Columbus Avenue in San Francisco, a circular Villa Roma motor hotel rose up (until it was leveled in the ’80s). Farther north in Crescent City, a man named Tom Wyllie built the 36-room Curly Redwood Lodge out of a single redwood tree in 1957. You can still sleep there, often for less than $80.
But here’s what gave the Madonnas a crucial boost on their motel in San Luis Obispo: Earlier that year, the state of California had opened the ornately furnished Hearst Castle in nearby San Simeon as a tourist attraction. Once the Madonna Inn opened that December, a traveler from L.A. could sleep at one lavishly decorated only-in-California castle on the way to another. Legions still do.
Scenes from the Madonna Inn. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
(Nic Coury / For The Times)
“It is the grandest motel of them all,” roadside design expert John Margolies once wrote, “and it is the definitive expression of an individually owned and operated hostelry — light-years removed from the almost scientific sameness of the large franchised chains.”
Boom, bust and boom again in San Francisco
From San Luis Obispo I drove on to San Francisco, ignoring Union Square, North Beach and Fisherman’s Wharf, heading for the straight part of Lombard Street. That’s the part that carries U.S. 101 traffic through the Marina district on its way to the Golden Gate Bridge, and it’s full of old motels. In their vintage signs and often-weary façades, you can see proof of the industry’s boom and the decline that followed.
How ubiquitous did motels get? By 1964 there were 61,000 motels across the U.S. It’s hard to imagine there were ever so many, until you peek at @deadmotelsUSA or @merchmotel on Instagram or you’ve come across Heather M. David’s splendid 2017 coffee table book, “Motel California.”
Alas, by 1964, they were already beginning to get less interesting. Once the first generation of mom-and-pop motels prospered, the first chain operations arose and followed, targeting travelers who wanted no surprises. Two of the biggest chains, in fact, were born in Southern California — Motel 6 in Santa Barbara and Travelodge in San Diego.
As the national freeway system grew through the 1960s and ’70s, more chain operations positioned themselves to collect freeway drivers. Along the now-much-quieter highway, the old mom-and-pop operations died off or were gobbled up and “reflagged” by the chains.
By 1980, the freeway system and the chain hotels were thriving. Motels, not so much.
But in 1987 — in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, of all places — a 26-year-old Stanford MBA named Chip Conley tried something that changed the motel narrative. He bought a bedraggled old place called the Caravan Lodge and dubbed it the Phoenix, with Miss Pearl’s Jam House as its on-site restaurant and bar. Then he positioned the property as a hotelier’s version of Rolling Stone magazine, all wrapped around a playfully painted pool. And he offered free massages and bus parking to touring musicians’ road managers.
The Phoenix Hotel is part of the hipster-friendly Bunkhouse hotel group. (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
And lo, the bands came, including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sinead O’Connor, M.C. Hammer, k.d. lang, Laurie Anderson, Etta James, David Bowie, Bo Diddley and Deborah Harry. As the Phoenix flourished, Conley revived dozens more motels and small hotels, conceived a brand called Joie de Vivre, then sold it to Marriott.
The Phoenix has less momentum now. Its restaurant opens only for special events and the Tenderloin’s crime and blight persist. If I were in the city with children, I’d sooner stay near Lombard Street at the Motel Capri or Hotel Del Sol (which charges a staggering $45 for parking but has a pool).
Then again, a new owner took over the Phoenix last August — Michel Suas, a celebrated Bay Area pastry chef. If any Phoenix can rise from the ashes twice, it’s this one.
Rethinking rooms for a new generation
Meanwhile, up and down California, there’s a new generation of motel entrepreneurs and designers following Conley’s lead, rethinking what it means to be a motel. Though the nationwide number of motels dwindled to an estimated 16,000 by 2012, reclamation projects have been multiplying.
Kenny Osehan’s Ojai-based Shelter Social Club manages six reclaimed California motels in Ojai, Santa Barbara, Los Alamos and Solvang.
The Beverly Hills-based Kirkwood Collection includes 11 redone California motels and hotels.
The Southern California-based brand Casetta has opened four redone Southern California motels and hotels, with two more opening soon in Los Angeles and Taos, N.M.
The San Luis Obispo-based Nomada Hotel Group has relaunched five motels and hotels along the Central Coast.
None of those companies existed before 2012. All are still growing and trading on the idea that a lodging with 30 rooms feels friendlier than one with 300.
Drive south from San Francisco with a motel geek — which you’re now doing, by the way — and the born-again motel variations roll past like Kodachrome images in a slide show.
At the Glen Oaks Resort Adobe Motor Lodge in Big Sur, the rooms huddle at the edge of a thick forest. You turn an old-school metal key in your door and find a room full of stylishly recycled furnishings — woodsy but luxe, with yoga mats leaning in a corner.
A vintage-style key at Glen Oaks Motor Lodge in Big Sur.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
At the Cambria Beach Lodge, where once you might have found a bedside Gideon Bible or a Magic Fingers vibrating mattress, now you borrow a bike to ride by Moonstone Beach or bathe with some of the motel’s goat’s milk soap.
Rolling through Paso Robles, you confront a generational motel choice. You can seek reassurance at the Melody Ranch Motel with its tidy, basic rooms, Gideon Bibles, second-generation family management and rates around $100 a night. Or you can head to Farmhouse Paso Robles or the River Lodge, both of which have been updated dramatically by the Nomada Group.
“It’s not that we set out to refurbish motels, necessarily,” Nomada partner and creative director Kimberly Walker told me. “One thing we are passionate about is giving old buildings a new chapter. We can’t ever see ourselves buying a piece of land and starting from scratch.”
Clockwise, from above: In April 2024, River Lodge reopened as a retro-chic boutique lodging.(Jacob Tovar / For The Times)Melody Ranch Motel has a prime spot on Spring Street, the main artery of Paso Robles.(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)A cocktail at the River Lodge.(Jacob Tovar / For The Times)
With the best old motels, “There was just so much personality and thought put into what these buildings look like that they’re able to be reconceptualized again,” Walker said. “You can always find one thing to start your design journey with, and then build off of that.”
Two of the biggest challenges, Walker said, are parking and bathrooms. At the River Lodge, Skyview Los Alamos and Hotel Ynez in Solvang, Walker’s team moved the parking area farther from rooms, making more space for greenery and patios. In small bathrooms, the team has deployed fancy tiles, lots of light and glass partitions instead of shower curtains.
Especially at Skyview, the combination of Modernist and farmhouse design elements yields entertaining results. Agrigoogie, anyone?
And then there’s the question of those cool old signs that say motel.
“When we first bought Skyview, and I hate that I did this, but I was like, ‘Maybe we should change the sign from “motel” to “hotel,”‘” Walker confessed. “I’m so glad that I didn’t follow through with that, because the motel sign is the beacon. Guests love taking their pictures with the sign.”
In Cayucos, design veterans and hospitality newbies Ryan and Marisa Fortini faced a similar question when they bought and renovated an old motor inn on the main drag. They chose to lean even harder into the m-word and called their project the Pacific Motel. It opened in 2022.
And now the Fortinis are doing it again. In 2023 they bought the nearby Cayucos Motel. So far, that still-open property remains as beach-rustic-plain as the Pacific Motel is beach-rustic-chic. But more changes are coming and Ryan Fortini shared with me a new word that may help describe them.
The Pacific Motel in Cayucos. (Jacob Tovar / For The Times)
(Jacob Tovar / For The Times)
Motel variations: Hot springs, beachfront perches and iconic signage
The farther south you go, whether on the coast or in the desert, the wider the variety seems to get.
At the Surfrider Malibu, guests ordinarily have exclusive access to a roof-deck restaurant, several loaner surfboards and a pair of Mini Coopers — but some amenities are on hold as the hotel accommodates many guests displaced by the Palisades fire in January.
In the boulder-strewn hills between San Diego and Calexico, the revivers of the once-moribund Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel have rebuilt that resort (which opened in 2023) with geothermally heated pools and a global desert theme.
On a pier in San Diego’s Pacific Beach, there’s been no dramatic rebirth — because none was necessary. The tidy cottages of the Crystal Pier Hotel, run by the same family since 1961, still look much as they did in the 1930s, tide lapping below, reservations required months ahead. (And you have to make them by phone or in person.)
“The motel thing is coming back,” said general manager Julie Neal, sounding surprised. “It’s actually kind of cool now.”
Out in the desert, where Midcentury Modern design has never gone out of style, there were revived motels left and right.
The most subdued of those was one of the most tempting: Hotel Wren in Twentynine Palms, which only opened in March, a 12-room, high-end retreat with muted colors, enormous rooms, custom furniture and poolside mountain views.
The least subdued? That would be the former Ruby Montana’s Coral Sands Inn, in Palm Springs.
My family and I booked most of the place with friends several years ago, and I was struck then by how entertaining it was to sleep, read and play in a seven-room motel that had been painted pink and filled with thrift-shop tchotchkes and vintage furnishings.
Well, Ruby’s gone now, and the Trixie Motel (its name since 2022) is proof that even if one hotelier goes wild, there’s still room for the next one to go wilder. Especially if that next owner is a drag queen.
The motel is still pink, but now staffers wear pink outfits, every room has its own custom thematic wallpaper (Atomic Bombshell, Pink Flamingo, Yeehaw Cowgirl). Barbie dolls cavort in the office and trendy persons fill the motel’s Barbara bar. Next to all this, the Madonna Inn looks like just another Ramada.
Drag queen Trixie Mattel, David Silver and Team Trixie (including interior designer Dani Dazey) bought the motel, renovated and reopened it in 2022. It’s now pinker than ever.
(David Fotus / For The Times)
(David Fotus / For The Times)
The road ahead runs through the middle of nowhere
Because the point of a motel is to help you toward someplace else, there’s no perfect way to end a motel journey. But Amboy works.
It’s a 20th century ghost town along Route 66, about 45 miles northeast of Twentynine Palms. Roy’s Motel & Cafe stands there like a forgotten stage set, topped by an iconic 1959 sign whose promises are all false.
Roy has been gone for decades. With potable water in short supply, neither the cafe nor the motel nor its six roadside cottages have been open since the 1980s. But Roy’s has gas, snacks and souvenirs, which is enough to attract film crews, selfie snappers and legions of drivers (especially desert-smitten Europeans) on their way between Las Vegas and Joshua Tree.
With Route 66 turning 100 in 2026, Roy’s owner Kyle Okura and manager Ken Large are doing their best to somehow get the six roadside cottages up and renting before that year is over. (Who can resist a centennial?)
It’s too soon to tell if that rebirth will happen. Still, the road warriors come, including off-duty trucker Chris Birdsall, 51, of Omaha, who turned up shortly before sunset one recent day.
“I want to see the sign lit up,” he said.
Soon after, Roy’s assistant manager Nicole Rachel called Birdsall into the old motel office, showed him the three switches that control the 50-foot sign and invited him to do the honors.
Birdsall did his bit, then grinned like a kid as the motel sign blinked to life in red, blue and yellow like a neon mirage or a road-tripper’s dream.
Rachel often invites visitors to throw the switches, she told me. But even if you don’t get that privilege, I can’t think of a better place to stand on the blacktop and imagine what might be down the road.
The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to approve a sweeping package of minimum wage increases for workers in the tourism industry, despite objections from business leaders who warned that the region is already facing a slowdown in international travel.
The proposal, billed by labor leaders as the highest minimum wage in the country, would require hotels with more than 60 rooms, as well as companies doing business at Los Angeles International Airport, to pay their workers $30 per hour by 2028.
That translates to a 48% hike in the minimum wage for hotel employees over three years. Airport workers would see a 56% increase.
On top of that, hotels and airport businesses would be required to provide $8.35 per hour for their workers’ health care by July 2026.
The package of increases was approved on a 12-3 vote, with Councilmembers John Lee, Traci Park and Monica Rodriguez opposed. Because the tally was not unanimous, a second vote will be required next week.
Rodriguez, who represents the northeast San Fernando Valley, told her colleagues that the proposal would cause hotels and airport businesses to cut back on staffing, resulting in job losses. The same thing is happening at City Hall, with elected officials considering staff cuts to cover the cost of employee raises, she said.
“We are right now facing 1,600 imminent layoffs because the revenue is just not matching our expenditures,” Rodriguez said. “The same will happen in the private sector.”
Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, standing before a crowded of unionized workers after the vote, celebrated their victory.
“It’s been way too long, but finally, today, this building is working for the people, not the corporations,” said Soto-Martínez, a former organizer with the hotel and restaurant union Unite Here Local 11.
Hotel owners, business groups and airport concession companies predicted the wage increases will deal a fresh blow to an industry that never fully recovered from the COVID pandemic. They pointed to the recent drop-off in tourism from Canada and elsewhere that followed President Trump’s trade war and tightening of the U.S. border.
Adam Burke, president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board, said Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom — nations that send a large number of visitors to Los Angeles — have issued formal advisories about visiting the U.S.
“The 2025 outlook is not encouraging,” Burke said.
Several hotel owners have warned that the higher wage will spur them to scale back their restaurant operations. A few flatly stated that hotel companies would steer clear of future investments in the city, which has long served as a global tourism destination.
Jackie Filla, president and chief executive of the Hotel Association of Los Angeles, said she believes that hotels will close restaurants or other small businesses on their premises — and in some cases, shut down entirely.
In the short term, she said, some will tear up their “room block” agreements, which set aside rooms for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
“I don’t think anybody wants to do this,” Filla said. “Hotels are excited to host guests. They’re excited to be participating in the Olympics. But they can’t go into it losing money.”
Jessica Durrum, a policy director with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, a pro-union advocacy group, said business leaders also issued dire warnings about the economy when previous wage increases were approved — only to be proven wrong. Durrum, who is in charge of her group’s Tourism Workers Rising campaign, told the council that a higher wage would only benefit the region.
“People with more money in their pockets — they spend it,” she said.
Wednesday’s vote delivered a huge victory to Unite Here Local 11, a potent political force at City Hall. The union is known for knocking on doors for favored candidates, spending six figures in some cases to get them elected.
Unite Here Local 11 had billed the proposal as an “Olympic wage,” one that would ensure that its members have enough money to keep up with inflation. The union, working with airport workers represented by Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West, also said that corporations should not be the only ones to benefit from the Olympic Games in 2028.
Workers from both of those unions testified about their struggles to pay for rising household costs, including rent, food and fuel. Some pleaded for better health care, while others spoke about having to work multiple jobs to support their families.
“We need these wages. Please do what’s right,” said Jovan Houston, a customer service agent at LAX. “Do this for workers. Do this for single families. Do this for parents like myself.”
Sonia Ceron, 38, a dishwasher at airline catering company Flying Food Group, said she has a second job cleaning houses in Beverly Hills for about 32 hours a week. Ceron lives in a small studio apartment in Inglewood, which has been difficult for her 12-year-old daughter.
“My daughter, like every kid, wants to have her own room, to be able to call her friends and have her privacy. Right now, that’s impossible,” Ceron said.
L.A.’s political leaders have enacted a number of wage laws over the last few decades. The hotel minimum wage, approved by the council in 2014, currently stands at $20.32 per hour. The minimum wage for private-sector employees at LAX is $25.23 per hour, once the required $5.95 hourly healthcare payment is included.
For nearly everyone else in L.A., the hourly minimum wage is $17.28, 78 cents higher than the state’s.
Perched high above the Cahuenga Pass, the 24-story Hilton Los Angeles Universal City Hotel is positioned to be a prime gathering spot for visitors arriving for the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Sun Hill Properties Inc., which manages the 495-room hotel, has already signed a “room block” agreement with the LA28 organizing committee, reserving hundreds of rooms for Olympics fans. The City Council recently approved a plan to let the Hilton add a second, 18-story tower, which would open just in time for the Olympics.
Now, the future of the $250-million expansion is in doubt. On Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council is set to vote on a requirement that hotels with 60 or more rooms pay their workers at least $30 per hour by 2028, along with a new $8.35 per hour healthcare payment.
If the council approves the proposal without significant changes, Sun Hill “absolutely will be pulling out of the room block for the Olympics,” said Mark Davis, the company’s president and chief executive. The hotel’s investors will also kill the 395-room expansion, he said.
“Our board was very adamant that if [council members] go forward with this nonsense, that it’s dead,” Davis said. “They’re going to move the project somewhere else.”
The council voted 12-3 last year to instruct City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto to draft the package of minimum wage hikes, which would apply not just to hotels but also private companies at Los Angeles International Airport, such as airlines and concessions. The minimum wage would be the highest in the country, according to Unite Here Local 11, the hotel and restaurant workers union, which has championed the proposal.
Mark Davis, president and CEO of Sun Hill Properties, said a proposal to hike L.A.’s minimum wage for hotel workers would kill a plan for a new 18-story hotel tower unless it is reworked.
(Marcus Ubungen / Los Angeles Times)
Backers of the higher wage say L.A.’s tourism workers are struggling to pay for food and rent, and deserve to benefit financially from the Olympics just as much as private corporations. They dismiss the hospitality industry’s dire warnings, including the notion that increased wages will scuttle the development of new hotels.
City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez said the Sheraton Universal Hotel, a nearby competitor of the Hilton, has already been paying a higher wage to its unionized workforce. The real threat to the development of new hotels, he said, is higher interest rates and the economic uncertainty surrounding President Trump’s trade policies.
“So, I just don’t buy it,” said Soto-Martínez, a former hotel union organizer, as he referred to Davis’ warning.
Under the city’s proposal, the hotel and airport minimum wage would reach $22.50 on July 1. It would jump to $25 in July 2026, $27.50 in July 2027 and $30 in July 2028. On top of those increases, the $8.35 per hour healthcare payment would go into effect on Jan. 1.
Business groups point out that two hotels have closed in the past year — Four Points by Sheraton next to LAX and Mama Shelter in Hollywood, for a loss of 270 jobs. They say Trump’s trade wars are driving down tourist activity from other nations, with visitors from Canada especially lagging.
Once the increases are in effect, business leaders say, hotels with on-site dining won’t be able to compete with non-hotel restaurants, which will have a much lower minimum wage.
Jon Bortz, chairman and chief executive of the Pebblebrook Hotel Trust, said his company is already looking at scaling back restaurant operations at two of its Southern California properties — the Kimpton Hotel Palomar and the W Los Angeles West Beverly Hills, both in Westwood near UCLA.
The Palomar will likely offset the cost of the higher minimum wage by converting its restaurant into a self-service breakfast operation, while the W will probably close at least one of its two restaurants, Bortz said. “We have to change the business model of these properties to have any hope of surviving,” he added.
Bortz said the proposed wage hikes, along with other hotel regulations approved by the City Council in recent years, have spurred Pebblebrook to look to other markets for new hotel projects.
“Frankly, the [L.A.] market, from a broad-based buyer perspective, has been crossed off the map by investors,” he said.
Hotels in other parts of L.A. are considering similar reductions. An executive with Lightstone Group, which owns the 727-room Moxy + AC Hotels near the Convention Center, told City Council members last year that the minimum wage proposal would likely result in the closure of Level 8, a collection of restaurants on the hotel’s eighth floor.
Mark Beccaria, a partner with the Hotel Angeleno near the 405 Freeway, said in a separate letter to city leaders that he would have to shutter not just the hotel’s restaurant but also its valet parking, eliminating 39 jobs.
“Common sense says you cannot raise wages over 50% in a year when revenues are down,” he said.
Kurt Petersen, co-president of Unite Here Local 11, accused the hotels of fear-mongering, saying they are misrepresenting the potential impact of the planned wage hikes. Hotel owners, he said, “act like the sky is falling every time they have to share profits with their workers.”
“This ‘Chicken Little’ stuff has got to end. Every single time, hotels cry poverty, and then a day later, they’re doing fine. It’s always the same routine,” Petersen said. “What’s not falling is rent and healthcare. What’s not sustainable is workers not earning enough to live in Los Angeles.”
The hospitality industry issued similar warnings a decade ago — when the council approved the current hotel minimum wage — only to see tourism flourish in the years that immediately followed, said Víctor Sánchez, executive director of the L.A. Alliance for a New Economy, a pro-labor advocacy group that produced a report on that phenomenon.
In Long Beach, where residents voted to raise the hotel minimum wage last year, revenue per available room was up 15.7% in March compared with the same month the prior year, said Sánchez, citing data from the real estate group CoStar.
L.A.’s political leaders have enacted a number of wage laws over the last few decades. The hotel minimum wage, approved by the council in 2014, is currently $20.32 per hour. The minimum wage for private-sector employees at LAX is $25.23 per hour, once the required $5.95 hourly healthcare payment is included. Then there’s the minimum wage for nearly everyone else in L.A., which is $17.28 per hour — 78 cents higher than the state’s.
The hourly minimum wage for hotel and airport workers was already slated to go up this year, as part of regularly scheduled increases in the city’s wage laws. Once the council showed interest in the much larger increases, business leaders began warning that hotel developers would take their business elsewhere.
Few were as dramatic as Davis, who told council members that their proposal, as drafted, would “likely kill” the Universal City Hilton’s 395-room expansion.
Davis, whose company has hotels in Simi Valley, Colorado Springs, Colo., and the greater Denver area, said his board instructed him last year to look at acquiring property outside of California, in markets that “make more sense financially for an investment of $250 million.”
“The owners investing this money, they have to look at the numbers,” he said in an interview. “Any project survives only by its numbers.”
The Universal City Hilton already pays most of its workers more than $25 per hour, while also offering healthcare coverage, Davis said. If those health plans have a financial value lower than the $8.35 per hour, the company will need to make up the difference, he said.
Davis said he, too, is looking at scaling back restaurant operations, which would likely require layoffs.
At one point, Davis’ project drew support from the city’s political leaders.
The Universal City Hilton reached an agreement early on with construction trade unions, promising to pay a higher prevailing wage to the estimated 1,000 construction workers who would work on the new tower.
In August, the council voted unanimously to seek an economic analysis that would determine whether the city should provide taxpayer assistance to the project. The analysis, requested by Councilmembers Nithya Raman and Soto-Martínez, would have explored whether to allow the hotel to keep a share of the tax revenues generated by the new tower.
Raman, whose district includes a portion of Universal City, did not respond to questions from The Times about the project — or the potential impact of the higher tourism wage.
In recent days, the Hotel Assn. of Los Angeles has been appealing directly to Mayor Karen Bass, purchasing digital ads that ask her to intervene on the minimum wage issue.
Bass, in an interview earlier this year, said she wants hotel workers to “make a decent living” while also ensuring that their employers “are able to survive.”
“We have to make sure that we can address both — that we can address the needs of the workers without crippling the industry,” she said.
