jueves, 19 de febrero de 2009

Sleeping at Lima’s Airport

Tourists sleeping in 1st floor of Lima's Airport

Sometimes you arrive to Lima late at night and you have your connecting flight very early at next morning. What to do? Well, lots of people decide to spend the night at the airport. Others, much luckier, take a room in a hotel. In fact, there is a hotel in Lima’s airport: Costa del Sol Ramada Hotel. Ramada is a 4 stars hotel that is located inside Lima’s airport. This fancy hotel would be perfect to rest those few hours between flights. The problem is that is expensive; almost US$ 200.00 per night according to its web site.

If you are not that lucky to rent a room in Costa del Sol Ramada, you have to take your luggage and get ready to sleep at airport. Once I slept at Lima’s airport. I arrived at 11:00 pm and my connecting flight departed next day at 5:00am. As far as I had to check around 3:00 am and the trip my home-airport and vice versa takes 1 hour, I decided to stay at airport and tried to sleep there. So now I am gonna give you some advices if you want to do the same.

Taking a nap at Lima's airport

  • Go to second floor. First floor is more crowded and noisier.
  • Try to sleep inside some coffes / restaurants if you can. Convince waiters to let you sleep in comfortable couches instead doing it on floor or in noisy food court. I slept at food court and it was not bad at all, but the cleaning service woke me up with their vacuums.
  • If you don’t have problems with it, a little Chapel on second floor is highly recommended to get some rest. You can also take advantage that you are in that place and pray a bit for a safe trip (and ask for best wishes for this blogger too).
  • If you can, check in early and enter to boarding area. Seats there are much more comfortable than in normal area, so comfortable that you have to set your alarm cause you could lose the plane.
  • Announcements are very loudly so don’t forget your earphones. Cleaning service starts around 2:00 am too, so you could get wake up.
  • Lights are intense, so you could take some night shades sleep mask with you.
  • You can leave your luggage in “left luggage” area.
  • Airport has very clean toilets but no showers.
  • No water fountain there, but you can buy bottled water all night long.
Food Court area of Lima's airport

If you cant sleep, there is always the nice option of spending some time at internet (about US$ 2.50 per hour). You also have restaurants, coffees, shops, pharmacy, banks, money exchange, post office, internet, call center and other services, most of them 24 / 7.

1 comentario:

  1. Thanks for the piece of advice! I'm traveling in two days from Sydney to Venezuela, having to wait one night in Peru, so I'll be sleeping at the airport if it's possible. All the hotels seems to be F. expensive and I can't afford it.

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