Hotels in Dallas you can book at 18

The airport code on your ticket settles which side of Dallas you land on. DFW is the big international airport, about 20 miles northwest of downtown, and it is American Airlines' largest hub. Love Field, ticket code DAL, is the smaller domestic airport about 6 miles northwest of downtown, and it is a Southwest Airlines hub.

They share a city name and a compass direction, and that is where the similarity ends. Land at one while your hotel sits near the other and you are looking at about 18 miles by road, 25 to 45 minutes in a car with your bags. Check the code on your ticket before you book the room.

The train belongs to DFW. DART, the Dallas transit agency, runs four light rail lines, and its Orange Line runs from the Terminal A station at DFW to downtown in about 50 minutes. Land there with a hotel near a rail stop and you can skip the car entirely.

Love Field has no rail station of its own. The workaround is the Love Link, DART bus Route 5, which runs from the airport to Inwood/Love Field station, where you change to the Orange or Green line. The whole trip downtown takes about 25 minutes. It works, but it is a bus plus a train, so a DAL arrival with bags means one more change than a DFW arrival.

The M-Line Trolley runs seven days a week between the downtown Arts District and Uptown along McKinney Avenue, and it is free. It also connects with DART rail at Cityplace/Uptown station, but the free ride ends at the trolley door: stepping onto DART rail means buying a pass.

The Dallas Streetcar only sounds like the same thing. It is a separate DART streetcar running from downtown to the Bishop Arts district, and it charges a fare. The names are easy to mix up, but only the trolley is free, and the two do not go to the same places.

Dallas runs on freeways, and the hotels for 18-year-olds on this page are spread across several of them. The rate only makes sense once you know which road the address sits on. Four roads do most of the work:

• I-30 runs east-west through downtown, then continues west toward Arlington and Fort Worth. Downtown Dallas to the AT&T Stadium area in Arlington is about 20 miles.
• I-35E, the Stemmons Freeway, runs northwest from downtown past the Market Center and the medical district.
• US-75, the Central Expressway, runs north from downtown.
• I-635, the LBJ Freeway, loops the north side.

So work backwards from the reason you are coming. A game or concert at AT&T Stadium is an Arlington trip, and a downtown Dallas base puts you about 20 miles east of it. The event picks the freeway, the freeway picks the part of town, and the rate comes last.

Do I need a different DART pass for each airport?

No. The same DART pass works on the Orange Line train from DFW and on the Love Link bus from Love Field, rail transfer included. One pass covers either airport.

How much is the train from DFW to downtown?

Three dollars. That buys the 3-hour pass on the DART Orange Line from the Terminal A station, and the ride downtown takes about 50 minutes. If the day has more rides in it, the $6 day pass covers them.