In almost every city with a major rail or transit terminal, hotels form a dense ring around it. The pattern is old, it is consistent, and it is driven by the physical difficulty of moving luggage.
Luggage sets the walking radius
A traveler with a suitcase has a much shorter tolerance for walking than the same person unencumbered. Curbs, stairs, crowds and weather all magnify the difference.
That tolerance is roughly a few blocks, and it defines a small circle around any arrival point in which a hotel can advertise itself as walkable.
Inside that circle, land is worth more for lodging than for most other uses, which is what pushes hotels to outbid other buyers for the sites.
Stations were built where the land was, and the hotels followed
Nineteenth-century terminals in American cities were placed at the edge of the built-up core, where a rail company could assemble enough parcels for a yard.
Hotels appeared immediately across the street because arriving passengers needed a bed within sight of the platform, and many of the grandest were built by the railroads themselves.
The buildings outlived the traffic patterns that created them, which is why station districts often contain the oldest large hotels in a city.
The same logic rebuilt itself around modern transit
Where a subway or light rail line reaches an airport, the station at the city end becomes a second arrival point with the same luggage constraint.
Development follows, and new limited-service properties concentrate on those blocks even when they are otherwise unremarkable parts of town.
This is why a hotel two stops down a good line can be a better base than one nearer the sights but far from any station.
Station districts carry a predictable character
High turnover and transient demand support a specific mix of businesses: late-opening food, convenience retail, luggage shops and currency services.
The same conditions often mean the immediate blocks are busier and less residential at night than the neighborhoods a short distance beyond them.
Travelers weighing a station hotel are trading convenience on arrival day against the quality of the evening surroundings for the rest of the stay.
How to use the pattern deliberately
The strongest case for a station hotel is a short stay, an early departure, or a trip with multiple cities where arrival and departure days dominate.
For longer stays, the better move is usually to pick a neighborhood first and then check its distance to a station, accepting one transfer on the arrival day.
Either way the useful question is not how central the hotel claims to be but how many stairs, transfers and blocks separate the platform from the door.