When travelling in Japan last year, I must admit that the idea of capsule hotels sounded too claustrophobic and non-practical for my taste. Thus, other forms of quintessential accommodation such as a traditional ryokan and standard Japanese hotel rooms got the preferences instead. Mind you, the Japanese standard rooms are much smaller in size than any hotel room I stayed at before and could be described as tiny cabins!

The idea of capsule hotels are however quite clever when it comes to usage of small places and I quite find the new concept of Yotel that has cropped up in Europe interesting. The idea has further developed the Japanese capsules to also have everything you would expect from a luxury hotel in a small space including work desk, flat screen tv, shower, towels, hand basin and toilet. Services include free internet access, 24 hours cabin service menu and check in kiosks. Cabins are available in premium, standard and twin grades. The interior decor and colour could be notched up a bit (not very fond of the strong purple) but the cabins do their job in terms of convenience. Yotel is currently located inside the airport terminal buildings and accessible from the public areas at Amsterdam Schiphol, London’s Gatwick and Heathrow.

I can see how convenient this can be for frequent business travellers or if stuck in long transits. As I reminisce a trip in 2007 with friends picking me up from the Schipol Airport at the crack of dawn, perhaps I give this a try next time I fly in early to Amsterdam… Suddenly a myriad of other travel flashbacks are surfacing of sleeping on uncomfy seats on various international airports from Copenhagen to Singapore and Bangkok…. oh, good times!

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Yen Huynh, Creator of mecho | the style black book

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