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LA28 looks to host events outside of city
The Los Angeles Olympic Committee announced venue plans for the 2028 Olympic games, including moving some events out of the city and into the San Fernando Valley.
LOS ANGELES - Los Angeles is officially less than four years away from hosting the Summer Olympics for the third time in its history. Los Angeles will join London and Paris (the host of this year's Games) as the only cities to host three Olympics. The Games have been held in some of the most iconic cities in the world — each of them are major hubs for tourism, and are all cities on plenty of travelers' bucket lists.
But if you had to pick, which city offers travelers the best experience? To help narrow it down, Kühl, an outdoor clothing brand, ranked the best and worst Olympic host cities to visit, and let's just say LA left them a little underwhelmed. Los Angeles ranked as Kühl's sixth-worst Olympic host city for travelers.
The study focused on four factors — the cost of a trip, the number of activities in the area, the local traffic and safety. After taking all of those factors into account, the cities were then given a composite score.
First, let's see who topped the list.
Rome, Tokyo, Athens, Beijing and Sydney round out the top five. Rome's biggest separator was the number of activities in the area, with more than triple that of the next city, Tokyo. But, the top cities all shared a few things in common, mainly a lot to do at a low price tag.
Then there were the cities at the bottom of the list:
Mexico City, Montreal, Seoul, Turin, Los Angeles, Milan, London, Atlanta, St. Louis, and Vancouver rounded out the bottom 10.
You may notice there's a lot of American representation at the bottom of Kühl's rankings. In fact, the only U.S. city on this list that wasn't near the bottom was Salt Lake City, Utah.
"North America has five host cities at the bottom of the list," Kühl wrote. "Their main issues are high holiday costs and moderate to low safety indices."
Overall, the company said North America has the worst-rated cities.
But taking a closer look at the data, Angelenos may raise their eyebrows at a few metrics. First, according to Kühl's data, the cost of a vacation in St. Louis is more expensive than one in LA (not by much, but still). According to NerdWallet though, the cost of living is 40% higher in LA than St. Louis. Kühl said it used data like grocery and hotel prices to estimate the cost of a 7-day trip for two.
Then there's LA's traffic rating. Kühl said it used TomTom data to find "how long it took, on average, to drive 10 km (just over 6 miles) in 2023." For Los Angeles in 2023, that was about 15 minutes. That may surprise anyone who's been stuck on the 405 in rush hour, but in fact, LA ranks ninth in the US in average commute, according to that TomTom study.
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Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada has the honor of being the worst-ranked city on the list, which Kühl said is because it costs a lot to do not very much there.
Here's a map and the full list showing the full results of the study:
Olympic fans may notice that there are a few cities missing from this list — cities like Moscow, Sapporo and Pyeongchang to name a few. That's because Kühl excluded any city that didn't have data available for their four criteria.
Do you think Los Angeles deserves to be so low on the list?
You can check out the full report, including how Kühl got their numbers, by tapping or clicking here.