airport hotel

Amelia Earhart slept at the first airport hotel

Where was the very first airport hotel?

Oakland Airport Inn

Oakland Airport Inn – Courtesy Port of Oakland

My “At the Airport” column on USA TODAY this month explores the history of airport hotels, including the three (so far) hotels I found that claim to be the first airport hotel.

SFO Airport Hilton

The sprawling San Francisco Airport Hilton opened in 1959. Photo courtesy San Francisco International Airport.

In its long “History of Firsts,” Hilton Hotels & Resorts claims to have pioneered the airport hotel concept with the opening of the San Francisco Airport Hilton in 1959.

Their claim is off by at least 30 years.

Aviation historians say that, in fact, the first hotel built at a United States airport opened its doors to the traveling public on July 15, 1929, on the grounds of what is now the North Field of Oakland International Airport.

“The Oakland Airport Inn was adjacent to the dirt runway,” said Ian Wright, Director of Operations at the Oakland Aviation Museum, “And the structure still stands today.”

At opening, Oakland Airport Inn boasted 37 rooms, a restaurant, a barbershop and a ticket office, according to Air & Space Magazine,.  But in 1931, in a article concluding that airport hotels would never catch on with travelers,  Aviation described the hotel as being “almost completely devoid of patrons after a year of operations” because two airlines had shifted flights away from the Oakland airport.

Restaurant that once served the Oakland Airport Inn. Courtesy Port of Oakland

To fill the rooms, the hotel management instead courted pilots and students from the Boeing School of Aeronautics, which operated on the airport’s grounds from 1929 until the early 1940s.

Courtesy Port of Oakland

Courtesy Port of Oakland

Today the building that housed the Oakland Airport Inn is home to the Amelia Earhart Senior Squadron 188, a local unit of the Civil Air Patrol.

That Earhart homage is fitting: Amelia Earhart was a regular guest at the Oakland Airport Inn. And in May 1937 she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, set out from the airport’s North Field for their ill-fated second attempt to fly around the world.

Dearborn Inn

Ford Trimotor plane flies over Dearborn Inn at Ford Airport in 1931. Courtesy The Henry Ford

While guests can no longer check-into a room at the Oakland Airport Inn, they are able to book rooms at the Dearborn Inn, in Dearborn, Michigan (near Detroit).

The hotel opened its doors on July 1, 1931 and along with claiming this to be the world’s first airport hotel, the Michigan Historical Marker out front says Henry Ford built the inn to serve Detroit-bound guests arriving at the Ford Airport, which opened in 1924.

Stout Air Services, run by Edsel Ford’s friend William Stout, began offering flights between Dearborn and Grand Rapids, MI in 1926 and in 1929 was flying daily (except Sunday) to both Chicago and Cleveland using Ford Trimotor aircraft.

Courtesy The Henry Ford

Courtesy The Henry Ford

“The Dearborn Inn was actually the brainchild of Henry Ford’s son, Edsel, and was intended to be the ‘front door’ to the city of Dearborn and to The Ford Motor Company,” said Charles Sable, Curator of Decorative Arts at The Henry Ford, “Edsel wanted to provide employees, visitors and airline flight crews with nice, comfortable accommodations.”

Noted Detroit architect Alfred Kahn designed the building for a hotel Edsel wanted modeled after the charming New England inns with Colonial-style décor he’d stay in when traveling back and forth between his homes in Detroit and Bar Harbor, Maine.

Dearborn Inn

Cafeteria at the Dearborn Inn – Courtesy The Henry Ford

“The exterior of the hotel is vaguely a Colonial design,” said Sable, “But one feature that’s really cool is that at the tippy top there’s a ‘widow’s walk,’ or observation platform, where guests could go out and watch the planes land at the airport.”

Today the Dearborn Inn operates as a Marriott Hotel featuring modern rooms that are still decorated with Colonial-style furniture and fabrics. The 231-room hotel complex also still offers guests the option to stay on “Pilots Row” – in rooms once used by airline crews – or in one of the five replica Colonial-style homes of Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe and other famous Americans that Henry Ford had built at the inn.

Other ‘early’ airport hotels

Some of today’s travelers may remember a few other early airport hotels that are now also footnotes in history.

Memphis International housed the Skyport Inn from about 1972 until around 2012. The in-terminal hotel had about 30 rooms split between the A and C Mezzanines and was popular with pilots and flight attendants who had early morning flights. Many, if not all, of the rooms may have lacked windows: in an article about the hotel being razed to make way for office space, the Memphis Business Journal noted that each room at the Skyport Inn had its own skylight.

The Airport Mini Hotel that once operated at Honolulu International Airport closed its doors not long at 9/11. But for many years the hotel offered travelers on layovers a space to nap and freshen up for less than $10 an hour. “Apparently the rooms were small, but the bathrooms were decent,” said airport spokeswoman Claudine Kusano.

And while we now know that th sprawling Hilton that operated at San Francisco Airport from 1959 until the late 1990s was not the world’s first airport hotel (by a longshot), we do know that a night club at the hotel called Tiger A-Go-Go was quite popular with passengers, airline crew and employees.

So popular, it seems, that in 1965, the pop duo Buzz & Bucky released a single about the lounge titled (what else but) Tiger-A-Go-Go (click on the link to give it a listen) which spent four weeks on the Billboard charts.

What are your favorite airport hotels?

Capsule hotel opens at Tokyo’s Narita Airport

NineHoursSleepingPodswithnumbers

Travelers now have a snug option for sleeping and showering between flights at Tokyo’s Narita Airport.

The first airport branch of a capsule hotel called nine hours — the estimated minimum time needed to shower, sleep and groom — offers guests individual pod-like sleeping spaces, luggage-storage lockers, high-speed Wi-Fi and shared shower and lounge facilities in a pre-security area at Terminal 2.

Men and women sleep in separate areas of the hotel, in door-less pods that are 43 inches https://stuckattheairport.com/wp-admin/plugins.phpwide, 86 inches deep and 43 inches tall. Prices start about $39 for one night and about $15 for one hour if you’re just in need of a nap and a shower.

Narita’s nine hours is the newest addition in the airport “capsule” hotel trend.

Yotel rooms – they call them “cabins” – at Amsterdam’s Schiphol and London’s Gatwick and Heathrow airports measure about 75 square feet. And napping rooms by Minute Suites, at the Atlanta, Philadelphia and Dallas-Fort Worth airports have enough space for daybeds, HDTVs/computers, desks and office chairs.

9_hours_hotel_tokyo

(My story about Narita’s capsule hotel first appeared on NBC News Travel)

Women-only floor at Danish airport hotel ruled illegal

Bella Sky Hotel - copenhagen

A ruling by a Danish court has put an end to the women-only floor at the Bella Sky Hotel, located near the Copenhagen Airport.

The rooms will stay, but now men will be allowed to reserve a spot on the hotel’s secure-access Bella Donna floor, where rooms cost about $28 extra and include amenities such as large towels, international women’s magazines, upgraded beauty products and a minibar that the hotel website boasts is stocked “with smoothies and champagne instead of potato chips and beer.”

“We had no idea this product could be remotely illegal,” said Allan Agerholm, CEO of the company that owns Bella Sky Hotel. “It is a business product we created to differentiate our hotel from others. This is a petty case that should have never been brought. It detracts from real discrimination issues happening in our society.”

Last Friday, a court ruled that even though the hotel had two ladies-style rooms elsewhere in the hotel bookable by men, the women’s-only floor was indeed discriminatory.

The hotel has opted to keep the Bella Dona floor intact, but open it to men and women.

“If for some reason a male guest should find it interesting to stay there in the pink environment, they are welcome to do so,” said Agerholm.

When the 812-room, two-tower hotel opened in spring 2011, the 20 upgraded rooms on the secure-access “Bella Donna” floor were set aside for women only, with feminine touches and amenities ranging from large dressing mirrors to a minibar stocked with smoothies, wine and high quality chocolate.

Bella Sky Hotel - Bella Donna Room

But shortly after the hotel opened, two men complained about the women-only floor to the Danish Board of Equal Treatment, which ruled the floor was gender discriminatory and illegal. Because the board had no authority to sanction, Bella Sky kept the Bella Donna floor women-only and appealed to the Eastern High Court in Copenhagen.

While not very common, some hotels in the United States and elsewhere continue to offer women-only floors, including the Hamilton Crowne Plaza in Washington, D.C., and the Crowne Plaza in Bloomington, Minn.

“Our ladies floor, where we charge a $20 premium, is usually 85 percent occupied or sold out Monday through Thursday and is very popular with female corporate travelers,” said Charlie LaMont, general manager of the Crowne Plaza Bloomington. “Some like the amenities, but for most, it’s the security of the secure-access floor,” he said.

The 10 rooms on the 10th floor of the 127-room Ellis Hotel in downtown Atlanta are set aside for women. In addition to private-access entry, the rooms include upgraded amenities, slippers and use of curling iron and a flat iron.

The hotel charges an added fee of $20 for the rooms, “which are most popular with the female corporate traveler,” said Tom LaVaccare, director of sales and marketing. “It’s a privacy issue, not necessarily a security issue,” he said, “but we’re working on adding more amenities.”

LaVacarre said no male customer has ever complained about being excluded but “if they wanted to be on a floor just for men, we could accommodate that.”

For several years, the Georgian Court Hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia, has offered 18 Orchid Rooms on a “women-preferred” floor with amenities such as curling irons, flat irons, high-powered hair driers, upgraded Aveda products, satin-padded hangers, nylons and other items at no extra charge.

The rooms were so popular that the hotel recently added a second floor of rooms with the same amenities, and men aren’t excluded from those floors, they rarely book there, General Manager Lisa Jackson said.

( My story about hotels with women-only floors first appeared on CNBC Road Warrior in a slightly different version.)