greenery

I am constantly reading about travelers being stuck at an airport overnight due to weather or other flight delays. When hotels are full of stuck travelers, they roll out the cots and people spend the night at the airport.

Has this ever happened to you? And did you actually "Sleep" at the airport, when standed?

(I doubt I could relax enough to sleep in a public place)

CApreppie

I've slept at an airport once. I overnight on a bench in a quiet corner of the D Concourse at IAD. I booked two separate UA tickets and missed the final flight of the day back to my origin. UA was kind enough to not charge me for protecting me on the morning flight back. It was so late and the flight was so early that I just crashed at the airport with my eyeshades and earplugs.

bigbrownboy

I did an overnight at LGW (arriving midnight from BCN and leaving early morning to EWR)....hundreds and hundreds of others did the same. It was tough just finding a place to lay down...but I strapped my backpack to my leg and at least got a few hours of very terrible sleep.

DeltaRIC

Yes, and I recommend you don't do it. I did it for the first time in ATL 2 weeks ago. We were travelling as non-rev's. We didn't make our flight to PHF and didn't want to go throught the hassle of a hotel at midnight. So, we find some very nice comfortable sofas at the end of C concourse. Though the sofas were comfortable, and I had my blinds and bose headphones on, it was still very difficult to sleep. I basically dozed on and off with few periods of sleep. With people coming and going and whispering, "Are these people sleeping here?!" and the announcements every 15 minutes about carrying lit cigarettes and leaving baggage unattended it was virtually impossible but I managed. To top it all off, when we awoke at 6am with very little sleep, our 730 flight to RIC was cancelled, now that sure as hell woke us up.

alanwar

In 1986 there was a huge celebration in New York City for the reopening of the Statue of Liberty on July 4. All of the bridges from Manahattan to Queens/Brooklyn were going to be closed that day and the taxi drivers were going on strike anyway. I had a very early morning flight out of LGA and had no idea how I would get to the airport from Manhattan and being a college student didn't have any $ more limo service or hotel. So I trekked out to LGA about 11pm and camped out on a some benches and *tried* to sleep. For some reason they wanted to vaccuum the carpet every couple of hours. Funny how some things seem like a great adventure when you are 19 doesn't seem so much fun when you get older !

Alan

pbjag

Therein lies a tale, but it had nothing to do with the weather. I had to go to Panama about a month after the invasion and for a variety of reasons (primarily Pan Am's incompetence and an extremely overbooked flight), Pan Am gave my seat away. Airline schedules in and out of Panama were very limited at the time, so a group of us who had been bumped (including a gal who announced she was smuggling in stun guns in her luggage that had gone on the Pan Am flight) spent several hours waiting as standby for flights on various airlines before finally getting seats on Lloyd Aero Bolivia.

We arrived at the gate at 11:59 p.m. What they neglected to tell us before we deplaned (or I would have stolen a pillow and blanket from the plane!) was that curfew began at midnight.

So -- we got to "sleep" in a confined area of the bombed out airport under military guard. Bad enough to try to sleep on a hard floor, but the guards did patrol our area and the clinking sound of their weapons and thump of their boots made the land of Nod an impossible destination. I wished I had a camcorder with me to make a mini documentary for my friends who don't travel about the true "glamour" of business travel.

Curfew ended at 6 am, so I headed to the hotel, took a shower...and headed to the meeting room to facilitate a planning session that began at 7:30.

MysteryShopper

I have been stranded at CVG for a night.No room at any of the airport inns so moi was asked to volunteer for comp of $300.
It didn't kill me but was not the best nite's rest I could have had ( The $300 in GC that I was comped took the edge off : )

Delta Hog

Does this count?

PDX-ATL redeye, arriving 5:30 am.

2 hour layover, sleeping on floor of concourse.

ATL-DCA connection.



Nah, I guess not.

venice4504

I have "slept" at JFK one night about 5 years ago. FLight on AF from CDG was late leaving, rerouted to Montreal for more fuel due to thunderstorms, got stuck in Montreal and finally made it to JFK 12 hours after we were planned to get in. No hotel comps avaliable, no outgoing flights to the west coast at that time of night so we camped in a boarding area. Sucked big time. We got a really clean bathroom in the morning since we waited until the lady finished. No food in the concourse either. Burger King ran out of meat.

CPRich

I drove through a raging blizzard from Santa Fe to ABQ in the winter of '92 to meet my wife, who was flying out to my project site for the weekend. When I arrived at 8pm, I found her flight had been diverted and she wouldn't be in until the morning. Driving anywhere had become impossible and, being a few months out of school, clueless about travel, and relatively poor to afford a hotel for 6-8 hours, I found a bench in the lobby and crashed for the night.

thethailife

No, I've never had to but look here, sleepinginairports.net, for tips.

gregorygrady

The first time I traveled through Singapore (SIN) airport, I slept in the free mini-movie theater in the airport. My flight got in ~10PM and the next connecting flight to Penang, MALAYSIA didn't leave until the next morning and I didn't book the SIN-PEN flight before I left the US. I didn't realize there was an airport hote (actually 2 hotels actually inside the terminals of this airport). It was awfully comfortable in the movie theater sytle chairs, nice and dark for the movie, and they actually had a decent movie playing that I watched before I went to sleep. Later I found out about the airport hotels there and I've booked them for 6 hour blocks everytime since then that I've had a SIN layover.

I also slept in the LAX airport a couple months ago on the way from Hawaii. I needed to be back into work the next morning at 8AM so I had to take the afternoon flight back to LAX which arrived at ~12:30AM and I had a 6AM flight scheduled out the next morning. It was awful there as I was stuck in the Terminal 1 (SWA) and you couldn't go into the terminal (past security) until 4AM. Quite uncomfortable but I was surprised that there were at least 6-8 other people doing the same thing. I didn't actually sleep because I couldn't sleep in a hellhold like that so I walked out the door and luckily found an unsecure Wifi signal and an outlet so I just connected the Internet and surfed FT for the 4-5 hours while I waited for my flight. ^ ^
Oh yeah, and I was able to online check-in to my SWA flight via the Internet from here (since the online checking machines in the lobby weren't operational until 4AM as well). Although it didn't go all bad, I certainly wouldn't do it again at LAX although I wouldn't mind doing it again at SIN if there was no hotel in the terminal there........

meagicano

I was flying from ICN-HKT, but there was an overnight in BKK. Our flight left around 9 in the morning, and we got there around 1am. For a few hours it wasn't worth the hassle of figuring out how to find a hotel. I was travelling with some pretty pathetic people (ill-advised spring break trip, I'm only 21) who chose to ignore my warnings that the airport would be freezing. We made our way to the domestic terminal, found a place to lay down... they started whining about how cold they were, said they wanted to find a different place to go. I ended up going with them before saying "forget it, be at the gate fifteen minutes before boarding starts in the morning, I'll meet you there" and slept on and off in BKK domestic arrivals for a couple of hours before heading upstairs, going through security and laying down on the benches near the Burger King... slept there as well.

I would never, ever recommend staying in BKK overnight, no matter how late your flight gets in! Definitely not a good place to be. Uncomfortable, cold, busy...

As for the twits I was travelling with? They arrived while I was waiting in line with some of the last people at the gate to get on a shuttle to the airport. Set up the rest of the trip.

cj001f

www.sleepinginairports.com

BigLar

We had to overnight at LGW once. By "we" I mean myself, my wife, and our two youngest daughters, both teenagers.

LGW is actually not too bad a place to while away the hours, what with the various restaurants and such that seem to be open pretty much all night. There are also showers where you could freshen up for 50p or so.

We located a couple of couches and staked them out. I dozed but didn't really sleep; neither did my wife. The daughters had better luck, although the youngest one complained that somebody passing by tried to grope her. She responded by kicking the crap out of him and that was the last we heard from him.

When I worked for an airline, I was stuck in PIT for the night (on my birthday, as it turned out) because there was no room for this poor non-rev. Not fun at all.