Philadelphia Travel Forum

We'll be returning from Italy on Sunday afternoon, April 6th and have a more than 5 hour layover at the PHL airport. Since we both have to work the following morning and won't arrive home in Florida until midnight, we'd like to have a nice quiet place to get a few hours of sleep.

A place within the airport itself would be ideal, although we could take a taxi to a nearby place. I checked the Airport Marriott and they want $269 for a room...ouch!

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Ken

I guess that after this flight, you WILL be a "robotman", huh? ;-)

First, I assume that you are not traveling business class or first class? If you were, I would check with your airline (probably USAir?) to see if you get access to the airline's lounge (for free, at least on American Airlines).

Second, I see that American Airlines (the one I mostly fly) now offers one day admission (on a day that you are flying) to their "Admirals Club" lounge. It's like $50/one person, $75/two persons, etc. Call or search to see if your airline offers a similar deal to this.

While the latter is kind of pricey (but it does keep the riff-raff out ;-) ) the lounge will be cheaper than a hotel. There won't be beds, but they'll be plenty of businesspeople half asleep in overstuffed chairs (or at the bar).

With only 5 hours, I don't see how you have time to go out of the terminal anyway...

Bill

Oh, I forgot to mention...if you are an American Express Platinum Card holder, you now get free access to the airport lounges of most of the major airlines in the US, as if you were a member of the lounge...

Bill

You may just want to nap at the lounges noted above. It would take you an hour to get to any motel and over an hour to get back to your gate for departure, so you'd get at most two hours of "sleep." Hardly worth the price of a cab ride.

HOWEVER, save this for future reference. If you go to Kayak.Com, you can do a search for lodging on a specific date, within a specified distance from a specific point (cf, within two miles of Philadelpia Intl Airport). When I did just that for April 6, Kayak found Microtel Inn (1.1 miles from the airport, with free 24 hour shuttle) had rooms for $80 -- a price confirmed when I went to Microtel.Com

You can also check out
www.sleepinginairports.com/usa/philadelphia.htm

If you do not have lounge access, PHL is not the greatest place to find a quiet spot to sleep--the terminals are pretty cramped and they all have those incredibly irritating TVs blaring CNN 24 hours a day. If you don't want to get a cheap hotel room but want quiet, walk out of the gate area and follow the signs for baggage claim. To get there, you walk across a glass-walled pedestrian bridge that goes over the roadway. On that pedestrian bridge, you will find rocking chairs that you can park yourself in for as long as you want. That's one of the quietest and calmest places in the airport. There's no view, but it's fairly peaceful. You may want to pile all your stuff under the chair or your feet if you fall asleep, because there are a lot of people walking by constantly.

for what it is worth, US Airways no longer has any first class 'lounges' They do however have a club which requires membership dues be paid. you can purchase a day pass for 40$ usd. If you are a frequent flyer of any star alliance airline and have gold status or higher, this will also get you access to the club for usairways.