Los Angeles 6 Day Itinerary

The LAX/Metro Transit Center opened in June 2026, and it changes the math on this whole trip: a $1.75 train ride with a free terminal shuttle now beats a $25 to $40 rideshare for anyone traveling light, though anyone with checked bags or a red-eye landing should still book a car. Plan your six days around that trade-off rather than defaulting to a rental car the moment you land.

Day 1: Downtown LA and Griffith Observatory

Start at Grand Central Market, which has been feeding downtown since 1917 and still does it better than most of the newer food halls that have copied its format since. From there, choose between the Broad Museum, free but requiring a timed reservation booked in advance, or LACMA, which charges admission but covers a far broader collection if you only have time for one. Walk past Pershing Square and City Hall before heading up to Griffith Observatory in the late afternoon; arrive an hour before sunset if you want both the daylight view over the basin and the transition into the city’s lights, and note that the free telescopes on the lawn only open after dark and only when skies are clear. For dinner, Saddle Ranch Chop House delivers exactly the tourist-friendly steakhouse-with-a-mechanical-bull experience its reputation promises, fun once but not a destination on its own merits. Stay centrally at the JW Marriott L.A. Live or the Ritz-Carlton if budget allows, both put you walking distance from downtown’s cluster of sights.

Day 2: Santa Monica and Venice Beach

Santa Monica Beach and the Pacific Park ferris wheel on the pier are the obvious photo stop, but the actual draw of the morning is the Third Street Promenade, still one of the better outdoor pedestrian shopping strips in the country despite some post-pandemic vacancy churn among its retail tenants. Walk or bike south along the boardwalk into Venice, where the Muscle Beach outdoor gym, street performers, and skate park have kept their scrappy character even as the surrounding blocks have gentrified hard over the past decade. Tony’s Darts Away is a reliable lunch stop with a genuinely deep craft beer list and solid vegan options. For dinner, Gjelina remains one of Venice’s defining restaurants, its wood-fired pizzas and produce-forward small plates set the template plenty of LA restaurants have since copied; book ahead, it doesn’t take walk-ins easily on weekend nights.

Day 3: Hollywood

The Walk of Fame and the TCL Chinese Theatre are worth an hour, no more, since the surrounding blocks lean hard into costumed street performers angling for tips and souvenir shops selling the same handful of items. Skip any studio tour built around a talk show that stopped filming years ago, checking current listings before booking anything Hollywood-adjacent saves you from wasting a slot on something that no longer exists. Instead, hike up to the Hollywood Sign viewpoint from Griffith Park’s Innsbruck Trail or the Brush Canyon Trail, both free and considerably more rewarding than the roadside photo spots most visitors settle for. The Dolby Theatre, permanent home of the Academy Awards ceremony, runs guided tours on non-event days if you want a look inside without an Oscar ticket. Mel’s Drive-In closes out the evening with diner classics and enough vintage car styling to feel like a movie set in its own right.

Day 4: Universal Studios Hollywood

Give this its own full day rather than trying to bolt on anything else. Buy tickets online in advance, since prices jump noticeably at the gate and the park increasingly pushes timed entry for its most popular rides during peak season. The Studio Tour tram ride is still the thing that sets Universal apart from Disneyland or Six Flags, an actual working backlot rather than a themed set built purely for guests. Budget extra for a park-hopper or express pass if you’re visiting in summer, wait times on the newer rides regularly exceed an hour without one.

Day 5: The Getty Center and Museum Row

Do not try to combine the Getty Center and the Getty Villa in a single day, despite what some itineraries suggest. They’re two separate campuses roughly 15 miles apart, the Villa sits on the coast in Malibu while the Center is inland in Brentwood, and both require their own timed-entry reservations plus separately booked parking, so cramming them together turns into a day of driving rather than looking at art. Pick the Getty Center for its architecture, gardens, and Impressionist holdings if this is your first visit; save the Villa’s Roman-villa recreation and antiquities collection for a return trip focused on the coast. Admission to both is free, but the parking reservation is not, and it locks you into an arrival window, so book it the moment you know your date. Round out the afternoon at LACMA’s Urban Light installation, 202 vintage cast-iron street lamps arranged in a grid that has become one of the most photographed spots in the city, then have lunch at Lucques or Tavern in West Hollywood for a proper farm-to-table meal that doesn’t require a reservation booked a month out.

Day 6: Pasadena

Old Town Pasadena’s boutiques, cafes, and restored architecture make for an easy, walkable last morning, and the Rose Bowl Stadium is worth a look from the outside even without a game or the January parade happening. Pie ’n Burger has been serving the same no-frills burger-and-pie combination since 1949 and remains a genuine Pasadena institution rather than a manufactured tourist stop, order the pie first since good flavors sell out by mid-afternoon on busy weekends. Spend the rest of the day back in Griffith Park if you didn’t get enough of it earlier in the week, it’s the largest municipal park with an urban wilderness area in the country and its trail network alone could fill several more days.

Things to know

LA traffic is genuinely as bad as its reputation, and it doesn’t meaningfully improve outside classic rush hour anymore, so pad transit time between neighborhoods rather than trusting a map app’s optimistic estimate. The Metro rail system now reaches LAX directly through the new Transit Center, and fares cap at five dollars a day, which makes it a legitimately strong option for anyone not hauling multiple suitcases or landing on a red-eye after trains stop running. Weather swings more than visitors expect, mornings along the coast run noticeably cooler and often overcast, so a light layer is worth packing even in summer. Check timed-entry requirements before you go for the Broad, the Getty properties, and increasingly for Universal’s headline rides, since more of LA’s major attractions have shifted to reservation systems in the past few years than most guidebooks account for.