Are Airport Nap Facilities Better Situated In Clubs Than In Public Waiting Rooms ?
There are many circumstances in which a place to lie down and stretch out is much preferred to sitting in a gate lounge: Multi hour flight delays / connection layovers, flight cancellations, or missed connections. Individual nap boxes have been proposed for deployment alongside the public seating at flight gates. From a marketing standpoint such a strategy might have a few difficulties: People are often uncomfortable standing out for being among the small minority using premium services in the midst of a crowded waiting area. Premium airport lounges like Admirals club and Sky club try to be inconspicuous, choosing locations away from public waiting areas. In addition they have attentive staff adding the human touch to further reduce the stress of travelling. VRT proposes adopting this approach with nap facilities. And while its design might be lower tech compared to other solutions, its quadbunk with internal stairs makes for much higher density and provides the essentials of electrical outlets and USB charging ports.
In the drawings shown above, 64 queen size berths are housed in some 3,000 sq ft / 275 sq m, including attendants desk and waiting area. In this configuration, up to 128 people can snooze and peruse in semiprivate berths, in spirit similar to Pullman train berths although considerably more spacious. I don't think the total privacy of the traditional hotel room is at all necessary. After all air passengers have already steeled their nerves to travelling in exceedingly close quarters for the next several hours. To stretch out in semi seclusion will surely seem like the lap of luxury in comparison,
a difference of huge importance btw, in marketing theory: You don't always have to give people the best in order to make them feel like their getting something really great. You just have to give them something much better than what they have.
As well, the savvy marketer might also be thinking ahead: If a layover is transformed into leisurely divertissement the airlines can start incorporating them into long-layover flights. A New York Uber driver told me that he rarely flies home to Sri Lanka not because of the cost but because of its sheer exhaustion. With ground nap facilities made integral features for such flights a whole new world of possibilities opens up. And from yet another marketing perspective, being able to scale quickly may be more feasible with a serviced micro-hotel strategy
For the longer term and if Singapore's Changi Airport is any indication, the trajectory
of airports is toward self contained micro cities with micro nature parks, shops, restaurants, movie theaters, gyms, pools, spas, micro museums / galleries, amusement rides, and game rooms, about which one can learn more here.
In the travel novel of even just a century ago the discursive, serendipitous, rambling nature of travel was an accepted and integral aspect. The going is the goal was understood to be travelling's major subtext. Getting to any one place while ultimately intended was not necessarily the centerpiece of travel. In place of worrisome concern over fixed schedules, and unforeseen delays, passengers sought to make journeys in elegant style and leisurely luxury.
It was railroads which were the disruptors of their day. They imposed standard time and standard time zones on American life. Before railroads every town had its clock tower with its own ideas about the time of day. But well into the 20th century rail travel remained as much adventure as transit. Furthermore the train stopped in the town center. Getting to the station was simple and quick. The fact that trains came through town often meant there was no pressure to catch any particular one. And best of all you don't pay for your trip until youre already on board.
The airlines completely reworked this semi-discursive mode of travel. Now of course business is largely about limiting and containing uncertainty. The airlines from early on got it in their heads that the uncertainty they needed to control was the uncertainty of selling every seat on a flight. Their solution was a 'futures' system structured to give travelers better prices the earlier they booked. The unfortunate effect was that travel was transformed from the low stress rail transportation to high stress air transportation.
In economic science we would say that markets are by nature ergodic processes. People don't go online and reserve their groceries before driving to the grocery store. In fact the grocery store eliminates significant layers of expensive bureaucracy otherwise necessary if they operated on a futures market like the airlines. With widespread adoption of integrated nap facilities, sufficient buffering is introduced into the supply chain to allow the airlines to exit out of their present futures model and return to the ergodic business model of the railroads and most other transportation. [ Uber btw returned limo service from a futures to an ergodic business model. ] Disintermediation quickly follows re-ergodicitization. The booking hubs disappear making travel much cheaper at the same time stress is taken off the travelling public, both of which combine to increase levels of travel synergistically.
