A business acquaintance recently confided how much he’d enjoyed being stranded by the effects of the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud. He stayed at a luxury airport hotel in the US, 3,500 miles from the demands of work and home, with only a fully-stocked mini-bar, 50 channels of television and a Jacuzzi for company.
He endured the enforced wait with great patience. “Five days. Just had to sit it out,” he confessed to me.
That was all he confessed, and you know what they say: what happens under a volcanic cloud stays under a volcanic cloud.
When it finally lifted, I can’t help feeling that another, much greyer, cloud descended on my acquaintance. It was time for him to leave the limbo of the airport hotel and rejoin real life.
The best airport hotels make you feel like you have slipped through the demands of time and distance into a little piece of heaven. The worst airport hotels make you feel as if you have taken the fast track line straight to hell.
Let’s compare and contrast.
My favourite airport hotel is in the Far East. It isn’t a budget hotel. The rooms are priced at exactly what it would cost you to book a business hotel downtown and take a return taxi ride from the airport. Clever.
From its triple-glazed window you can stare out at the world’s largest airliners silently gliding in and out as the sun sets. From your door you step out into a fragrant open-air atrium, with fragrant trees and running water. Don’t ask me how they make it so fragrant, when all you should be inhaling is jet fumes, but I attribute this to the hotel’s peculiar magic.
The worst airport hotel I have stayed in was in England. Claiming to be adjacent to London Gatwick airport, it was in fact buried deep in the countryside, many miles away.
It was a shame that the hotel wasn’t buried so deep that it was totally inaccessible. This would have spared me, and a coach load of German tourists, from one of the crumbiest nights of our lives.
When I say crumby, I mean literal crumbs in the bedcovers. Crumbs, but without the small consolation of biscuits to greet the hungry traveller. I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but I deduce that the maid must have tucked into a couple of shortbreads before taking a nap in the bed.
And what a bed.
What it lacked in size it more than made up for in damp lumpiness. The bedspread (for duvets had yet to reach this part of Olde England) matched the room’s décor: a kind of oaky brown which was intended to project rural charm, but instead just reminded me of gravy.
For the only time in my life, I decided to cut my losses and get the hell out of the hotel.
In the brown lobby, lined up on the brown carpet, the faces of the German tourists spoke volumes. Disappointment was mixed with horror. It was a scene I had glimpsed once before, on a Florentine mural. The mural depicted sinners being led down to another circle of Hell. In this case, the underworld was going to be brown. With uncomfortable mattresses.
It was an old establishment, but perhaps not old enough for Dante Alighieri to have once stayed as a guest. If he had, it might have explained much of what he’d gone on to write.
Of course, most airport hotels lie somewhere in the middle between paradise and the infernal brown crumb factory. In my imagination, the perfect airport hotel would be as glamorous as that in the 60s film, The VIPs. Starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, the movie more than lived up to its title.
The plot features the misadventures of a group of upmarket passengers, stranded by a London fog. It’s such a star-studded film, that even David (now Sir David) Frost only merits a walk-on part.
Trapped in luxury, the personal and financial troubles of the characters play out against the backdrop of Heathrow in the 1960s. The characters – and the actors themselves – were the first ‘jet-setters,’ a phrase that now sounds archaic.
Could a modern version of The VIPs ever reach the screen? Perhaps. Though they would be well-advised to check the bedclothes for crumbs first.
Hywel Jones is a television producer who has travelled the world with the BBC and ITV. He now runs the international broadcast and corporate TV production company hi.tv. His favourite destination is San Francisco.
