Sep

Welcome to the Hotel 747

Posted by admin Published in Air Travel

When a jumbo jet dies (and plenty of them do these days), it typically gets chopped up and sold for scrap, or bakes in the Arizona desert for all of eternity. But when Swedish entrepreneur Oscar Dios got his hands on a 30-year old jumbo jet, he had a better notion: turn it into a hostel. Damn, why didn’t we think of that.

The Jumbo Hostel is a 25-room property that’s being built inside a gutted 747. The hostel/plane will be be located right external the entrance to Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, and is scheduled to open later that year. It offers 85 beds in 25 rooms, with some of the nicest located on the plane’s upper floor. Most rooms have shared bathrooms and showers, and all have heat and air conditioning, wireless World Wide Web access, and — in a nod to the airplane geeks that are certain to be making reservations — flat screen televisions that double as departure/arrival monitors.

If you’re looking for a romantic evening with that special someone (or the someone you picked up at a bar a couple of hours earlier), try the deluxe cockpit suite. It’s bigger, has a private bath and shower, and provides a stunning view of the air traffic coming in and out of Arlanda.

the downside, the rooms at the Jumbo Hostel are anything but. Most are 20 square feet with nine foot ceilings, and considering that there are three beds to a room, that’s fairly a squeeze. But really, whether you’re looking for
a place where you can stretch out and kick back, an airplane wouldn’t
be your first choice besides.

Turning an old plane into a place to spend the night is cool. But
turning it into a place where we can afford to spend the night is even
cooler. It would have been easy for Dios to trick out his plane with ten luxury suites, tow it into downtown Stockholm, and sell it as an overpriced boutique hotel for the beautiful society. But instead, he chose to leave it at the airport, and keep it accessible to the masses.

Nothing in Sweden is cheap, and the Jumbo Hostel isn’t talking room rates at that point, but we have a feeling that that is the kind of place even a wandering backpacker might be able to afford.

Photos and drawings: Jumbo Hostel