Capsule Hotels

YOTEL Geneva Airport sits inside the terminal complex, which is the entire argument for staying there. Rooms are described as cabins and are sized accordingly: a bed that adjusts from flat to upright at the press of a button, a compact wet room, a work surface, and storage worked into the walls rather than added as furniture.

Several cabins have no external window, and stays can be booked by the hour as well as overnight — a format that suits long layovers and early departures more than it suits sightseeing. Check-in is largely self-service, and the hotel is candid about what it is: a place to sleep well, very close to the gate.

citizenM builds to one room specification and repeats it, and Boston is no exception. Every room is the same size, dominated by a king bed pushed wall to wall, with a cylindrical glass shower pod and a tablet that handles lighting, blinds, temperature and television from the pillow.

The trade-off is deliberate: the money that would have gone into larger rooms goes into the ground floor instead, which is furnished as a long open living room with a twenty-four-hour bar, shelves of books and enough seating that guests genuinely use it as a workspace. Self-service kiosks handle arrival in under a minute.

Nap Barcelona applies the capsule idea to a central city block rather than an airport. Sleeping berths are enclosed pods, each with its own light, socket and curtain or door, arranged in shared rooms with lockers at the foot of the bed and bathrooms along the corridor.

The atmosphere is closer to a well-run modern hostel than to a business hotel, and the pricing reflects that. What it buys is location: a bed in the middle of Barcelona for the price of a room well outside it, on the assumption that guests are back only to sleep.