Airport Sleep Pods Are Here for Stranded Passengers

For decades, a thunderstorm or missed connection meant you might have to sleep in the airport, leaving frustrated travelers with a truly tired dilemma: Is the boarding gate chair-curl worth a try, or is it better just to grab some floor?

Some airports are considering a better way to accommodate unlucky passengers while making some money in the process. At least four companies are angling for space inside terminals for a new generation of sleeping spaces dubbed cabins, capsules, and even pods. One of them, Minute Suites LLC, has retail sleep locations at airports in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Philadelphia, with a Charlotte, N.C., location opening in December. Washington Dulles airport is exploring the concept as well, and aims to have a sleep amenity next year.

Meanwhile, a company dubbed izZzleep opened a sleep capsule warren in the Mexico City airport this summer, with rates from $8 per hour to $34 per night. Yotel Ltd., the London-based mini-hotel operator, operates YotelAir in four European airports, with a Singapore Changi project coming in early 2019. Yotel also hopes to expand into U.S. airports at some point, as does NapCity Americas, which has acquired U.S. rights to Napcabs, a German-based sleep pod company that operates at the Munich airport. As airports are growing and expanding, a lot of them are definitely exploring passenger amenities, said Stephen Rosenfeld, a Florida entrepreneur who formed NapCity Americas in 2014 to operate a version of the “napcabs” found sprinkled across Europe.