With all the thousands of flights a day, it should probably be surprising that there aren’t more flight delays and cancellations, yet we expect all our planes to arrive where they’re going with a minimum of fuss. The only times we would even consider a delay lasting more than few hours might be in winter and then only in the northern parts of the world. This idea is consistently reinforced, every time in January or February we turn on the TV to find more poor souls who were onboard a flight but now are grounded in an icy strange place, without hope of achieving flight any time in the near future. But as it turns out there’s more than one reason to look for a nearby, convenient airport hotel.
The truth is that business travelers often need to move from one city to another quickly — from Lanzarote to Formentera, from Madrid to Mumbai, or Dubai to Sydney, Australia, to the city-state of Singapore and so on. The time saved from being within a five minute walk (or at least within a mile) from the airport can mean valuable time spent elsewhere — working with business proposals, finalizing presentation plans, and so on. Regular travelers, too might be surprised how some of these airport hotels offer more than you’d expect: for instance, many nearby hotels are sound-proofed; while it would appear that trying to sleep near a runway might pose some obvious problems, in a finer, four or five star hotel, there’s no sound of the roaring jet engines at all. In some executive rooms at hotels, there’s a view of the runway as well, for those who are fascinated with planes.
No matter what trip you’re planning, a big part of it is how fast you can move through the airport and be on to your destination, whether a businessman, vacationeer, or world-wide traveler. The best airport hotels are designed to help with maneuvering through the airport — delivering luggage, obtaining boarding passes, etcetera — specifically so you can concentrate on the important things, whether it’s business or, with any luck, pleasure.