The Hotel Doctor

  A foreign student at the University of California had bronchitis. I live three miles from UCLA but this was the University of California a...

A blast of hot air greeted me when the guest opened the door. As I complain regularly, foreigners believe air conditioning spreads dis...

A Biltmore guest with a sore foot had a meeting after breakfast. Could I come now? I rise early, so the 5:50 a.m. call found me wr...

As a hotel doctor, I’m on duty 24 hours a day. This sounds oppressive until you realize that even a busy week – say twenty visits – requ...

The Airport Hilton has a long entrance drive that accommodates perhaps twenty parked cars without blocking traffic. Le Mondrian has a ti...

Park La-Brea Towers is a huge apartment complex in West Hollywood. I’ve been there a dozen times. Inside, the buildings have numbers wh...

Finding a hotel is easy, but some travelers live elsewhere. I received a call to Marina Del Rey, an upscale beach community. Google map...

Walking toward the entrance of the Viceroy, a luxury Santa Monica hotel, I noticed half a dozen parking valets gathered around their sup...

A travel insurer sent me to Koreatown, an older area of Los Angeles, home to a mixture of Koreans and Hispanics. It’s a colorful neighbor...

In parts of Los Angeles, especially downtown and the Sunset Strip, street parking is impossible. I dislike turning my car over to an att...

That is not my favorite greeting, because it means the valet doesn’t recognize me. My response is always: “I’m the hotel doctor. I’ll be her...