The travel nightmare started in Oaxaca, where on the last day of my trip I woke up ashen green with food poisoning. I chugged multiple electrolyte drinks in the airport and spent the flight to Dallas with my head down, rising from my stupor only when the captain came on to announce we had been rerouted to San Antonio due to weather.
Then: a missed connection, a canceled departure, an hour on hold begging for a hotel voucher. But once I arrived at the musty, fluorescent airport inn, my illness had started to wane. I ordered a fat sandwich from Jersey Mike’s and burrito-ed myself in the blankets, feeling serene.
My 48-hour slog home from Oaxaca, which included another night stuck in Texas, did little to dilute the joys of the trip that preceded: textile shopping, mezcal tasting, an excess of mole, even the meaty market snack that was the likely cause of part of my misery. In fact, my time in Oaxaca now feels all the sweeter in contrast to the herculean effort it took to get home. Part of me even looks back with some genuine fondness for the nights I spent in those cheap, anonymous, perfectly ordinary airport hotels.
I feel a kind of contentment at an airport hotel that I haven’t found anywhere else. My closest comparison is being on an airplane: a feeling of being outside of time and space, powerless in a good way, briefly freed from my responsibilities on the ground. At an airport hotel, most of us guests are in that same kind of in-between—stranded by weather, airlines, or our own poor planning—that stretches out the time when we’re allowed to not be anywhere. An airport hotel is a non-place, a moment of rest.
Perhaps this is why I can recall, with vivid clarity, not only the stays themselves, but also the moments of booking them: in the Denver airport, in the eerie calm before a blizzard, or at JFK after missing the last connecting flight out. Deciding, at least for the night, to stop trying brings an immediate, stress-erasing relief that’s well worth the impulse spend, rarely more than $90. The very fact of being in an airport hotel means I have opted out of the effort of getting where I need to go.
An airport hotel connotes limited takeout, premium cable, and plausible deniability for logging on late the next day.
Airport hotels also serve a more routine purpose, of course—especially for travelers facing long drives to make an early flight or to get home once they land. But anecdotally, I’m not the only one with a slightly embarrassing soft spot that has little to do with function. I love it all: the dingy shuttles, the listless decor, the kinder-than-they-need-to-be staff, the way the boxy buildings cluster along roads with names like “Skyport Drive” and “Terminal Boulevard.”
An airport hotel connotes limited takeout, premium cable, and plausible deniability for logging on late the next day. For me, part of the appeal is the permission it grants: Your travel day is going poorly, or you have a 4 a.m. wake-up call, or you returned in the wee hours of the night and your back hurts. Who can blame you for taking some time just for you—some time to do whatever you want?
The idea of airport-hotel-as-oasis is hardly new—in fact, at the very first airport hotels, calm and relaxation was the goal. One of the earliest examples, Michigan’s Dearborn Inn, opened near Detroit in 1931 adjacent to what was then the Ford Airport, the company’s purpose-built landing field. The hotel was intended as a soft, well-serviced place to land for people coming to do business at the corporate headquarters.
“If you’re going to have visionaries traveling to work with Ford Motor Company, they should have someplace to stay, at least in Henry Ford’s mind,” explains Ted Ryan, Ford’s heritage brand manager and archivist. The Fords envisioned the hotel as a home where they would welcome guests right after they got off the plane. They brought in prominent Detroit architect Albert Kahn to give the place a luxurious look and hand-selected the management company for its superior service. At this airport hotel, creating an impeccable travel experience was paramount.
Ford Airport officially closed in 1947, and the Dearborn Inn’s time as an airport hotel was just one phase in its long life. Still, traces remain—one corridor is still known as “Pilot’s Row,” a nod to the hotel’s origins in aviation. And its legacy of luxury is still visible in a small but mighty cohort of high-design, service-centric airport hotels around the world, many of which are, like the Dearborn Inn once was, located within the terminal complex or just across the access road.
Still, I am often perfectly content with the budget alternatives that spring up like rainy-season mushrooms on the far outskirts of any U.S. airport, so abundant that there always seems to be room for me. Recently, I’ve even started booking them in advance: no longer thinking of airport hotels as a break-in-case-of-emergency option, but as a convenience I can build into my plans, whether before an early flight or after a late arrival, bedding down before heading home. Taking a load off during a long journey with dinner in bed, taking a pause just because I can—that’s its own kind of luxury.
