Where to Stay in Denver: Downtown, LoHi or Near the Airport

The A Line from Denver International is 23 miles and about 37 minutes to Union Station, and the pass that covers it is $10 for the whole service day. That one ride is the hotel decision. Book within walking distance of the station if you want to go out on foot. Book LoHi if you’d rather eat on the other side of the South Platte and walk a bridge home. Book at the airport if the only evening you have is a layover.

This is not a list of “best hotels.” Nightly rates move with conventions, Rockies games and ski weekends, and nobody publishes an official neighborhood average you can trust. What doesn’t move is the geography: the train ends in LoDo, LoHi sits across the river, and DEN is its own town on the plains.

The train is the map

RTD’s A Line is electric commuter rail, eight stations, 15 minutes between trains from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. and 30 minutes in the early morning and late evening. Buy the Airport Day Pass at $10. It covers the airport ride and the rest of the network that day, so the bus or train onward from Union Station is already paid. A regular 3-Hour Pass is $2.75 and a Day Pass $5.50, but those don’t include DEN unless you add an airport upgrade ($7.25 from a 3-Hour, $4.50 from a Day). Youth 19 and under ride free on everything RTD runs, which quietly makes a family transfer cheap.

The airport station sits in the Transit Center on Level 1, under the on-site hotel. flydenver’s own page times the downtown ride at 37 minutes and points you at Union Station, not at a downtown bus loop. That’s why “near the airport” and “near downtown” are not two flavors of the same stay. They’re 23 miles apart, with a train that makes the gap tolerable and a rental car that makes it a chore at rush hour.

Once you’re off at Union Station you’re in Lower Downtown. The rest of the city is a choice about how far you’re willing to walk after dinner.

Downtown: walk out of Union Station

Stay downtown if your days are museums, the Capitol steps, a ballgame and a walkable dinner. LoDo’s brick warehouses and the towers east of them put you on foot to Coors Field, 16th Street and the station you already used. You don’t need a car for a two-night city break. You need shoes and a sense of which block is a hotel canyon after 9 p.m. and which still has people on it.

The trade is noise and price. Convention hotels fill on weekdays. Weekend rates can ease when the badges go home, which is the reverse of LoHi. Parking downtown is its own line item if you brought a car you didn’t need. For a first visit that is actually in Denver, this is still the default, because the A Line already paid to put you here.

What downtown is not: a mountain town. The Front Range is a backdrop from some upper floors, not a trailhead. If the trip is Rocky Mountain National Park the next morning, you’re sleeping in the wrong place unless you like a pre-dawn drive through the city. Our Denver travel guide is the days-out-of-the-hotel version of this; this page is only where the keycard works.

LoHi: restaurants, a bridge and a hill

LoHi is Lower Highland, the eastern edge of Denver’s Highland neighborhood, and Visit Denver treats it as its own district: old buildings next to new ones, a dense run of restaurants and bars, and the view back across the Highland Bridge to downtown. Highland Square, further west on West 32nd Avenue and Lowell Boulevard, is the shop-and-wine-bar version of the same hill. Tennyson Street is further out still, in Berkeley. For a visitor choosing a hotel, LoHi is the one that sits closest to the river and the skyline.

You’re not on the A Line. The airport train still dumps you at Union Station; from there it’s a walk across the South Platte, a short rideshare, or a local bus. That’s the point of the neighborhood, not a bug. You come here to eat and to sleep somewhere that isn’t a conference hotel, and you treat downtown as a crossing rather than a lobby.

The hill is real. So is weekend noise on the restaurant blocks. Ask for a room off the main strip if you care about 11 p.m. If you don’t, that’s the atmosphere you paid for. LoHi is a weak base for a 5 a.m. DEN departure and a strong base for a trip whose evenings matter more than its mornings.

The airport hotel is a clock, not a neighborhood

DEN is not “a bit out.” It’s a 23-mile rail ride, and the plains around the airport are their own map: the on-site hotel, then a ring of properties that run shuttles. flydenver says more than 40 hotels within 10 miles operate shuttles, picking up on Level 5. That’s the move for a delayed inbound and a 6 a.m. outbound, not for seeing Denver.

The hotel that sits on top of the train is the Westin at DEN: 519 rooms, steps from the terminal, up the escalator from the Transit Center. That’s a location fact from the airport, not a review. If you sleep there, the A Line is downstairs when you finally want the city. If you sleep in the shuttle ring, budget the shuttle clock in both directions and don’t pretend you’re in LoDo.

An airport night is the right call when the itinerary is a ski transfer, a dawn national-park drive that starts at the rental counter, or a misconnect. It’s the wrong call when you have two dinners in the city and you thought “near the airport” meant “near Denver.”

What Denver adds on the bill

Denver’s own lodger’s tax is 10.75%. Colorado Legislative Council Staff published that rate in January 2026. State and special-district sales taxes sit on top of it, so the percentage on a hotel folio is higher than the city line alone. Live city tax tables were not reachable on the check date, which is a good reason to read the tax line on your dates rather than trust a blog’s combined figure.

Resort fees and parking are separate, and downtown parking is where a “cheap” suburban rate goes to die if you drove in for no reason. Compare the same nights in two neighborhoods before you compare two hotels in one. The gap between a LoDo tower and a LoHi block is usually larger than the gap between two properties on the same street.

If you already have a car

Then the map changes, and not always in your favor. Downtown and LoHi both punish parking. The airport hotels are built for it. A car makes sense when the next morning is I-70 toward the ski towns or a timed-entry slot at Rocky Mountain, which is a Colorado problem more than a Denver one. For a city weekend, the A Line plus walking beats a downtown garage.

If you land, grab the car, and still want a city night, sleep downtown anyway and accept the garage. Don’t sleep at DEN “because of the car” unless the car is leaving at dawn. You’ll spend the evening on Peña Boulevard looking at warehouses.

Three trip shapes

Price those three on the same dates before you fall in love with a rooftop photo. Then go do the days: the city guide covers Red Rocks and the museums, and the state guide covers the reservations that sell out before you land.