I’m currently at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam, waiting for my connecting flight to Vilnius, Lithuania where I’ll be speaking at BuildStuff 2024.
Upon arrival in Vilnius, I’m driving to Kaunus, Lithuania’s second city, to explore before the conference later in the week, and with a 3+ hour layover I decided I should try and get some sleep. The airport site shows Yotel and XpressSpa as options: Yotel provides an actual room and XpressSpa has sleeping pods. Yotel’s rooms are a minimum of 4 hours and more than I wanted to spend, so decided on XpressSpa.
A huge mistake.
Worn, rough pseudo-leather with a covering sheet and uncomfortable pillows, which don’t look recently cleaned or refreshed even though I was their first customer of the day. What is not shown is the “cover” or “shade” that creates the pod, enclosing you in …. black mesh with holes in it – presumably for air circulation – which, unsurprisingly, let’s in the bright store lights. I could not find a position where the lights weren’t directly in my eyes.
The coup de grâce is the location: the pods are no more than fifteen feet from the airport’s public walkways, meaning you hear everything. My noise-canceling headphones were stored underneath, but even so I doubt it could block out everything.
It was apparent within minutes that this was an exercise in futility and I left. What a waste of 30€! Next time it’s Yotel!
