Finding hotels to spend just the day time

View from the room, Seattle

Hotels are making ridiculous check-in and check-out times, making the check-in as late as 5 pm and check-out as early as 10 am. Many hotels then allow late check-out and early check-in, often for an hour. While this works for a good sleep and leaving for the day, it does not work when you arrive past midnight or want to relax during the daytime, just one day. You are forced to pay for the whole day in those cases. Upon our arrival in Fairbanks at 1:40 am, we had difficulty finding hotels on booking.com. Because apps such as booking.com do not allow same-day check-in and check-out. In this case, we are looking for check-in for yesterday's date and check-out for today. After some clear explanations over the phone, we found a hotel to sleep in from 5 am - 1 pm (same day), paying the whole night fare as expected. But as far as the hotel is concerned, this is like we checked in yesterday (just a very late check-in that it is the following day's morning!) and check-out today.

 

Many hotels abroad allow hourly rates too. That is when we decided to look for day-use hotels when we landed in Seattle in the early morning after a red-eye flight. We just had a day in Seattle before our next flight in the night. Even if we use a regular hotel as we did in Fairbanks, that is not ideal as we have to check out by 1 pm the latest. Luckily, we found the Dayuse app, which let us find hotels, allowing check-in as early as 8 am and check-out at 6 pm. We did not have to pay anything to the app beforehand. No need to provide the credit card details even! The hotel let us check-in immediately when we arrived, even an hour earlier than the expected time, at 7 am. Therefore, we had 11 hours to relax, explore the city, come back, freshen up a bit, and then leave for our next flight. These day-use hotels are going to be very useful in similar situations.