When my wife and I travel, we don’t always stay in luxury accommodations. For most trips, our hotel room is simply a place to spend the night. As long as it’s clean and relatively quiet, that’s good enough for us. We might occasionally stay in a fancy hotel, thanks to collecting hotel points, but you’re just as likely to find us at a Holiday Inn Express as at a Hyatt Centric.
Even when redeeming points, I’m not going to pay for more than what we need. This means we’ll accept a hotel with a smaller room it will save us some points. This has led to us staying in some rooms which were, well, pretty small. The smallest room we’ve stayed in since we started writing Your Mileage May Vary (in early 2017) was the Motel One in Munich, Germany.
Motel One Munich
It was a tight fit for 3 nights, but for 94 Euros, we got our money’s worth.
When it comes to hotels in the United States, there’s no city better known for small hotel rooms than New York City, particularly hotels in Manhattan. While we’ve done pretty well over the years sticking to hotels with larger rooms, occasionally, we’ll end up in a tiny room. Until recently, the smallest room we stayed in was at the Fairfield Inn & Suites New York Manhattan/Central Park. This is the hotel where when we opened the door, it just cleared the end of the bed.
Fairfield Inn & Suites Manhattan
But at a whopping 250 square feet, that room was downright luxurious compared to the room we received on a recent stay in Manhattan.
I had booked a room at the Moxy NYC Times Square using the free night certificates I received from the Marriott Bonvoy Business AMEX card. The room size was stated to be 200 square feet but I don’t think our room was nearly that large. I’ve never been so shocked to walk into a room and that’s as far as I could go.
Moxy Times Square
This was the view as you walked through the door.
There was no way to walk around the bed, and it was the easiest room I had ever photographed because I never had to move; I just turned in different directions.
The table in this picture is the only table in the room. There is no desk or chair. There is just a bed and the bathroom, which, compared to the rest of the room, felt downright large.
When I went to the front desk to ask if there might be any rooms that were a bit larger, he said that the rooms had different layouts. That’s when I pointed out to him that the website says that the room we booked would have a desk and a chair, which were not in this room.
We eventually got moved to another room, which had enough space to walk to the opposite side of the bed (barely) and eventually a chair and desk. Our thoughts about our new room, and the hotel in general, are coming soon in another post.
Final Thought
While we didn’t stay in the super-small room, it might have been OK if we had stayed only the night. However, since we were staying for three nights, we wanted somewhere we could set up our laptops to get work done and possibly somewhere to sit that wasn’t the bed or the toilet.
Also, we’ve never stayed in a room where, if there are two people in the bed, the only way to get out of bed is to crawl over the other person.
Is this the smallest hotel room you’ve seen or have you witnessed or even stayed in a smaller room?
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1 comment
I once stayed in a super-small hotel room in Japan where the work desk was hiding behind the bed. Turns out, to use the desk, you needed to push a button to lift the bed up to the ceiling! It was fun playing with the mechanism, and if you think about it, pretty efficient too.