Hotel Angeleno
June 19th, 2011 at 5:16 pm ET
Time for a brief plug for the Hotel Angeleno, where I’m staying again this trip. Those of you whose Los Angeles experience goes back more than a few years may remember it as “the round Holiday Inn at Sunset and the 405,” but a decade or so ago it got a boutique hotel makeover, and it’s the kind of small hotel I like. There’s no blue lighting in the hallway like at a W, the staff wear ordinary-looking hotel uniforms, you can eat your bagel in the sunny lobby and no one complains; but it’s still nicer than any chain hotel (at left you see a cactus rock garden in the center of a coffee table in the lobby, a nice touch). And you can’t beat the location.
The rooms are very comfortable without being pretentious (they can’t be too pretentious, since they’re small and wedge-shaped); the staff are accommodating of special requests; and there’s a very good restaurant on the rooftop with excellent breakfast in the morning and fine dining in the evening. There’s even a small poolside area, pictured below. And for all this, I’m paying quite a bit less than I paid for the nice-but-relatively-generic convention Hilton in San Diego that I was at earlier in the week. Highly recommended.
Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
