December 13, 2023 | Bianca Barragán

The Ace Hotel DTLA will cease operations at the end of January.  

“It’s been an honor to inhabit these hallowed halls and The Theatre for ten golden years, which feels as good a run as any,” an Instagram post on the Ace Hotel’s account says. “We hope to be back before long and leave remembering something Mary Pickford, metaphorical matriarch of Ace DTLA, said: The future is yet in your power.”

The hotel opened in 2014, when Downtown was making a powerhouse recovery from the Global Financial Crisis. 

“The owners of the building that houses Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, as well as The Theatre at Ace DTLA, have recently elected to convert the property to a limited-service, rooms-only operation, managed via a tech platform,” representatives for Ace DTLA told the Los Angeles Times, adding the theater would be managed separately and the last day of Ace service would be Jan. 31. 

The Ace Hotel building and its adjacent former United Artists theater are owned by Aju Continuum, formerly Aju Hotels & Resorts, a subsidiary of South Korea-based Aju Group, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal and public records. The entity bought the properties for $117M in 2019. 

At the time, the deal for the 182-room hotel amounted to one of the highest prices per room in Downtown, Atlas Hospitality Group President Alan Reay told the LA Business Journal in 2019. 

“That says a lot about what people think of the future of downtown L.A. and how they expect the hotel market to perform in the next five to 10 years,” Reay added. “It’s interesting to see that kind of price in light of all the new rooms that are planned or under construction.”

It is a very different market now. A third-quarter report about the Downtown LA hotel market from the Downtown Center Business Improvement District found that the year-to-date occupancy rate averaged 69.6%. In the third quarter of 2019, that figure was 79.7%. The average daily rate in 2023 is $221.76, up from $217.53 in Q3 2019.

The hotel landscape has also changed. New hotels including The Hoxton, Downtown LA Proper, the Delphi and Per La, which took over for the shuttered Standard and Nomad hotels, respectively, have also opened in just the last couple of years. 

The Ace Hotel DTLA’s parent, Portland-based Ace Group International, was acquired by Sortis Holdings for $85M in January.  

Contact Bianca Barragán at bianca.barragan@bisnow.com