Hotels probably help you sleep better when you’re on vacation, and you don’t even know it.
From meticulously designing the rooms for an optimal night’s sleep to equipping them with luxurious bedding: it’s big business for many companies.
One hotel in New York City thought of everything when it came to designing its rooms — they called them “bedrooms.”
“We’ve all stayed in a hotel room with an annoying flashing light or scratchy bedding: Chris Norton, CEO of Equinox Hotel, said 50 world’s best.
“We worked with sleep scientists to design rooms that function as ‘bedrooms,’ so sleep is built into the hardware.”
The hotel features a Sleep Spa, natural linen bedding, melatonin-boosting charcoal lattes, blackout curtains and medical-grade air filtration.
Also in New York, one hotel is offering beds worth as much as $70,000.
At RH Guesthouse you can laze on the Dutch company’s FreshBed, which claims to circulate purified air through the mattress for optimal sleeping temperatures.
Experts say that is 16 to 18 degrees Celsius.
According to researchers at Tokohu Fukushi University in Japan, heat – especially humidity – is one of the biggest disruptors to good sleep.
London hotel chain Zedwell says its rooms – called ‘cocoons’ – are soundproofed so they won’t be woken up by chatter in the corridor.
It also does not contain televisions or other electronics that ‘improve your sleep quality’.
If you really want to get serious about sleeping, head to Japan.
Chain Nine Hours has its own laboratory where you can snooze on a soybean-shaped Kitamura pillow and then see how good your sleep was.
The hotel’s regular ‘capsule’ rooms are too small to do much other than sleep.
Meanwhile, the party island of Ibiza may not be known as a place where visitors generally sleep a lot, but Six Senses Ibiza wants to address that.
It has in-house sleep specialists who can offer yoga, sound therapy, cryotherapy, meditation and massage.
In the meantime, try the Sleeping Package at the luxurious Four Seasons Resort Bali in Sayan, near Ubud.
Indulgent nap-inducing offerings include the $34 “air nap,” suspended in a silk cocoon in a bamboo pavilion.
You can drift off amid the sounds of nature swelling over the rice fields as the resort’s wellness guru reads the Buddha’s life story.
A little closer to home, the Pullman Hotel in Western Sydney offers its guests an in-room ‘sleep menu’.
That’s possible order things like different pillowsaromatherapy items, but also sleeping masks and earplugs.