Yotel Schiphol

Sometimes you make a mistake and don’t realize it until sometime later. If you are lucky, you realize it while it is still potentially funny rather than tragic. This is what happened to me last night…

When I booked my flight for Vienna and the International AIDS Conference, I was really excited to find a flight that didn’t leave Vienna until 8:30PM on my departure date. I thought that would give me a delightful amount of extra time to get back from Budapest and to the airport, and maybe even enough time to do something fun and interesting on that last day. Now, I am usually quite careful when booking flights. I know I checked the departure times, and while I saw that I arrived a day after I left, I considered this par for the course since I wasn’t leaving until 8:30PM. As I was mailing out my itinerary last night, however, I saw that my flight arrives in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport at 10:30PM, and departs for Detroit Metro at 8:30AM. This is not the kind of layover I thought I was booking. I don’t know how I missed it, and can only chalk it up to the overall stress and craziness of this summer. Thankfully, however, I realized this while it was still ridiculously funny followed by a frantic search for lodging rather than a most unpleasant shock followed by a night at the gate. After a thorough search of the Schiphol website, I discovered this: Yotel Schiphol.

Although it is what you might generously call a “budget” hotel, it offers a surprising number of amenities, including free wireless internet. When I clicked looked around to figure out why the pictures looked nice and the pricetag also looked reasonable, I discovered that Yotel Schiphol is a “design hotel,” and that the “rooms” could best be described as “pods on a spaceship” or “weird isolation cabins.”

This did not deter me from booking a room however, as it contains the only amenities I need for my brief stay in Amsterdam: a bed, free wi-fi, a shower, and easy access to the terminal.

If things are going to be crazy enough that I make uncharacteristically ridiculous mistakes, I can only hope that all of them can be fixed by such uncharacteristically ridiculous solutions.