Sleeping in airports

This is a story about a travel hack. A dangerous travel hack. A travel hack I don’t recommend.

Staying one night in an airport saves one night’s worth of housing/hotel/hostel costs. But it comes at a steep price - bad/no sleep.

I tried it on my recent trip to Barcelona. My plane landed at 2am so I ‘slept’ the rest of the night in the terminal before exiting to find my hostel where I slept the next two nights. My flight out of Barcelona boarded at 6:20am, so instead of waking up at like 3:30am that morning I got to the airport around 10:30pm the night before, scanned in to my terminal with my boarding pass (which I think allows passengers into their terminals 24hrs before their flight), and found a cozy cushioned bench to lie down on and used my backpack as a pillow.

My friend inspired me to try this out by showing me sleepinginairports.net which had bad ratings for Barcelona’s airport but I was undeterred. A different friend warned me against doing it, they had a miserable experience in a Portugal airport.

The first night went worse than my second. I didn’t get a good spot - only the hard rubber of a child play area and then a rigid glass bench. I knew where to go and where to avoid on my second night, and found a cushioned bench at a Pret that worked well (which had been full of other passengers on my first night).

Tips

• Bring a good sleeping mask and earplugs
• Explore the area and try to find cushioned benches
• Expect to get very poor sleep
• Bring something that works well as a pillow - try for something better than clothes / a bag with clothes in it

Conclusion

In the end, do I regret sleeping two nights in the airport? Yes, I think I do. One night would have been enough: I knew what it felt like and knew that feeling tired after lying in an uncomfortable position for hours is unpleasant and unhealthy. Actually, I could have come to this conclusion without sleeping in the airport at all - my curiosity got the best of me.