Capsule Hotels

• Compact fitted rooms
• Queens, one stop from Midtown
• Rooftop bar and terrace
• Bunk and single configurations

The Long Island City Pod is the outer-borough member of a small New York group built on a straightforward premise: shrink the room, spend the savings on location and on the shared floors. Rooms are fitted rather than furnished — a platform bed, integrated storage beneath it, a compact private bathroom, and enough wall-mounted joinery that the floor stays clear. Bunk configurations are available alongside singles and doubles.

What the building spends its space on instead is the top of the house. A rooftop bar and terrace look back across the East River at the Manhattan skyline, which from this side of the water is a genuinely good view rather than a marketing line, and the ground floor keeps a café and a sizeable lounge in which guests visibly work.

Long Island City is a former industrial district now thick with towers, and the subway puts Midtown a single stop away. The immediate area is quieter in the evening than the equivalent Manhattan address, which is either the trade-off or the attraction depending on the traveller.

• Women-only capsule floors
• Shibuya
• Kimono dressing service
• Communal bath

Nadeshiko sits a short walk from Shibuya's crossing and runs as a women-only capsule hotel, a segment of the Japanese market that has grown considerably since the format's salaryman origins. The capsules themselves follow the established pattern — an enclosed sleeping berth accessed from a corridor, with a blind rather than a door, a light, a socket and a shelf inside.

The house identity is built around kimono. The hotel keeps a dressing service and a collection of garments that guests can be fitted into properly, with staff who do the tying, and this is treated as a core part of the stay rather than a novelty add-on. A communal bath, a lounge and a shared kitchen occupy the social floors.

Shibuya is dense, loud and extremely well connected, and a compact hotel makes a certain amount of sense there: the room is for sleeping, and the neighbourhood supplies everything a larger room would have tried to.

• Fixed compact room template
• Near Geneva Airport
• Tablet-controlled rooms
• Open ground-floor living room

citizenM built its model on one room, repeated: a wall-to-wall bed, a glass shower and washroom pod, blackout blinds, lighting and temperature all run from a tablet, and no wardrobe worth the name. The Geneva property applies that template near the airport, at the edge of the international district where much of the city's institutional business actually takes place.

The compensation, as in every hotel in the group, is downstairs. The ground floor is an open living room rather than a lobby — long tables, deep chairs, a self-service bar, art and a large bookshelf — and it is used throughout the day by guests who have no intention of sitting in their rooms. Check-in is done at a screen, with staff on the floor rather than behind a desk.

For a city where hotel rates are notoriously high and many stays are short and work-driven, the trade is a legible one: a small, well-made room and a large shared one, a few minutes from the terminal and on the tram line into the centre.