New Experience: A (Comfortable) Place to Nap at an Airport

This last December I traveled to Brazil and my flight had a really long layover at the Houston airport: seven hours! I hadn't slept well the night before, so I was feeling very tired when I got to Houston and I still had a ten hour flight ahead of me to Brazil. That made it a perfect opportunity to try something new: Minute Suites.

It is an interesting concept: in the boarding area of an airport (so, past the TSA security) you have a tiny little hotel with tiny little rooms that you can use for a few hours, typically two or three. Each room is the size of a little office, with a couch that can become a bed, a blanket, pillows, a small desk, a chair and a flat screen TV. You can control the temperature and the lights of the room, and there are plenty of power outlets, and also Wi-Fi. The rooms are soundproof as well.

The idea is that you can be in a small space that you can lock yourself in, set the light and temperature to exactly what feels more comfortable to you, and take a nap, or just rest, watch TV, read a book, without all the noise of a large airport. I got a room for two and a half hours, and I took a nice long nap on an actual bed with a pillow and a blanket, and that felt amazingly nice. However, there are no bathrooms: in the middle of my sleep I had to leave the room to go to an airport restroom.

It was really great and it was exactly the recharge I needed to face my next flight. Minute Suites are available in a number of large airports in the US, and next time I have a long layover I'll gladly make use of them again.





Location: George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH), 2800 N Terminal Rd, Houston, TX 77032, USA

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