Capsule Hotels

YOTEL Paris CDG Airport is built inside the terminal complex at Charles de Gaulle, which makes it useful in a very specific way: the cabins are sold by the block of hours as well as by the night, so a long layover can be spent horizontal without leaving the airport.

The cabins take their logic from aircraft galley design — everything folds, slides or stows, and the bed adjusts from flat to seated at the press of a button. There is no attempt at a lobby experience. Check-in is automated, the corridors are short, and the whole arrangement is organised around getting a traveller to sleep quickly.

citizenM Copenhagen applies the brand's compact-room formula near the city's transport links: a standard room, one size only, in which a wall-to-wall bed takes most of the floor and a tablet controls the blinds, the lighting and the temperature.

What the rooms give up is returned downstairs. The ground floor is a large open living room with a long bar, shelves of books and a great deal of seating, used by guests through the day rather than only at check-in. The trade is explicit and the hotel does not pretend otherwise: small berth, generous common ground.

Nadeshiko Hotel Nagoya is a women-only capsule hotel in the Sakae district, and it belongs to a generation of Japanese capsule properties that moved the format away from its salaryman origins without abandoning its efficiency.

Berths are stacked in quiet dormitory corridors, each with its own blind, light and power. The communal facilities carry the character: a bathing area, powder rooms with space to actually get ready, and a lounge for sitting up late. Shoes come off at the entrance, and the house rules about noise are taken seriously by staff and guests alike.