PICK YOUR LOS ANGELES BEFORE YOU PICK YOUR HOTEL

Los Angeles will punish you for booking a hotel based on how good it looks in pictures. This city is enormous, traffic is part of the experience whether you like it or not, and two hotels that both say "Los Angeles" can put you an hour apart. In LA, where you stay can decide what kind of vacation you actually have.

Downtown, Hollywood, West Hollywood, Culver City, Long Beach, the airport corridor and communities throughout the metro each give you access to a different version of Southern California. You can build a trip around concerts and sports at LA LIVE, Hollywood nightlife, beaches and waterfronts, restaurants, shopping, theme parks, museums, or simply chasing all those places you've spent years seeing on television.

For Black travelers, there is also an LA that exists beyond Hollywood's version of itself. Black Los Angeles has helped shape American music, film, fashion, food, nightlife and culture for generations. The celebrity stuff is fun, but it is nowhere near the whole story.

That is why our Top 20 Los Angeles Hotels stretches across the metro instead of pretending every traveler needs to stay near Hollywood Boulevard. A waterfront hotel in Long Beach might make perfect sense for one trip. Downtown might be exactly right for another. Sometimes staying near LAX is the smart move, and sometimes saving $60 on a hotel means spending the entire savings sitting on the 405 wondering what went wrong.

LA requires a little strategy. Choose the trip first. Then choose the hotel that puts you close enough to actually enjoy it.