In an airport hotel, whose names are almost always chosen to be forgotten, one sleeps for two reasons, and neither is fabulous.
- For sheer practicality.
2. Because of flight delays or cancellations.
We will focus on the second scenario because the first one has no remedy.
When life takes us to one of them, we walk through its door grumbling, dragging a suitcase and with the same hope with which we go to the pharmacy to buy Frenadol. If someone, as the author does, believes that every trip is an adventure, soon the very foundations of their prejudices begin to tremble. What if that hotel (oh, I’ve already forgotten the name of the last one, the Munich place I stayed) isn’t that bad after all.
Here are a few reasons that invite us to utter such a reckless claim.
1. Once the initial anger subsides, the feeling you get in an airport hotel is one of gratitude. For not wandering the airport like Tom Hanks in The Terminal, for not having to make decisions, for having a bed and a shower. That’s how its gears operate.
2. Let us not underestimate the rooms of an airport hotel simply because they are practical. Leave your snobbery at the gate: you’ll be quick to forgive it in a few hours. They tend to be fantastic, really. Everything in these hotels works: solid beds, showers with rainfall-like pressure, a coffee maker with its watery coffee, a desk for work. We’ve stayed in places ten times more expensive that didn’t cut it—like the room of that hotel, oh, what was its name…
View photos: the best suitcases of the year for check-in
3. When it comes to nourishment, practically anything goes in them. We’re far too lean to keep up with intermittent fasting. Should we dinner pasta, order a giant pizza with a beer worthy of Oktoberfest? Go ahead. In these hotels there’s usually a supermarket with products in every color. In the last one (oh, what was its name?) there were several very spicy varieties of potato chips. That’s how you win a heart.
4. The carpet. Those corridors with impossible-patterned carpets are disappearing. In the United States, for example, they still exist and they’re quite dignified. It’s always a pleasure to see that not everything has succumbed to the Scandinavianization of interiors or to the pseudo-minimalism.
