I stayed in a $40 capsule hotel (London)

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/20/zedwell-capsule-hotel-i-stayed-in-a-40-dollar-capsule-hotel-in-london.html

by fcpguru • 7 months ago

31 61 7 months ago

fcpguru• 7 months ago

https://zedwellhotels.com/locations/london/piccadilly-circus...

andy993• 7 months ago

I love the idea, I don’t expect people are respectful enough for it to work where I am, I’d be worried about being stuck next to somebody watching videos on their phone at full volume all night.

Also

  Choose a cosy London capsule hotel in a shared dorm for a sociable vibe, meet like-minded travellers, and swap stories or book out an entire dorm for a private group adventure.

This is literally the opposite of what I would want. It would be great to see a privacy and rest focused concept for this, which is what I associate the Japanese ones with, a place for exhausted salarymen to get some quick rest, rather than a backpacking hostel. Nothing wrong with the latter if that’s your thing but it’s not going to appeal to anyone over 25.

nroets• 7 months ago

In 2023 I stayed in a capsule hotel in Bilbao. There I was told at check in that no talking or loudspeakers of any kind is allow in the capsules. That can only be done in the lounge area.

I spent 3 nights and got much better sleep than I would have at a hostel.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 7 months ago

In Japan, these are often "Sleep off a drunk" hotels. They aren't really meant as regular accommodations; which seems to be the point of the article.

My biggest worry about these types of places would be safety. A fire could be horrifying.

gregoriol4• 7 months ago

I wouldn't worry about fire: it seems to be quite modern so most likely has quite some fire equipment and concrete. Common parts from the pictures don't seem to have much flammable stuff. Last time I stayed in London was in a hotel assembled from multiple old 3-4 floors buildings and multiple old wooden staircases, like to go to your room you had to go to floor 2 then end of a corridor then to floor 3 and right left and stuff like this in 1-person wide corridors and stairs. There I was scared of a fire because there was definitely a feeling of no way to escape fast.

einpoklum• 7 months ago

There are definitely backpacker/frugal traveller-oriented capsule-ish hotels in Japan. For example, in some rural resorts like Hakone.

integralid2• 7 months ago

Really? I spent a few nights in a capsule hotel in Shinjuku (Tokyo) and the experience was great. It was cheap, quiet, clean, and had everything I wanted (quiet private space, free coffee and "onsen" bath. Would definitely recommend.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 7 months ago

Never stayed in one, but "quiet and clean" are pretty much de facto standard for any Japanese accommodation.

I always enjoyed their hotels, and my preference was usually some of the cheaper ones, like the Prince hotels. I have stayed in ones like the fancy Dai Ichi ones, but I felt that they weren't really all that much better than the cheaper ones (but I'm sure there's even fancier ones, for folks that can afford).

louthy• 7 months ago

I’m not claustrophobic, but looking at those pods makes me anxious. You’re one air con fuckup from asphyxiating on your own CO2 by the looks of it.

Filligree• 7 months ago

Would be unpleasant, but asphyxiating from gradual CO2 increase isn’t really possible unless you’re dead drunk.

Your body measures CO2 (not O2), and will escalate to full-blown panic will before it’s particularly dangerous. You’d leave on your own.

timcobb3• 7 months ago

I would guess there is passive ventilation too, they're not hermetic. You'd get stuffy/uncomfortable, but it's not like you'd... suffocate and die?

hexbin010• 7 months ago

I wouldn't count on that passive ventilation...!

Ventilation for accommodation in the UK is extremely poorly regulated, or not at all, from what I can tell. I've been given rooms with a hermetically sealed window and no A/C unit.

I stayed at a brand new Hyatt the other day and the A/C had no "fan" only option (ie to avoid dry throats), and when off, provided no passive ventilation as far as I could tell. No opening window. And this was an aparthotel with a cooker etc. Absolutely ridiculous.

Premier Inn's budget 'Hub' brand chain have sealed windows and just wall-mounted A/C (not fed fresh air from a central duct). Should be illegal

I think legally they're allowed to use the 1 inch space under the door as ventilation...

You actually need a lot of ventilation in hotels because they often use very harsh chemicals especially in the linen

crazygringo• 7 months ago

You’re one air con fuckup from asphyxiating on your own CO2 by the looks of it.

You might as well say the same thing about any sealed building, like virtually every skyscraper, or honestly most hotels I've stayed in (without exterior windows that you can open).

Buildings have air ducts for forced air flow. This isn't any different. Each capsule has one vent for fresh air, another that removes the air. It's the same way regular rooms work.

And oxygen and CO2 diffuse through air and ducts anyways, passively, even if blower fans fail. Plus there are additional gaps anyways for safety. You're not going to suffocate. They do actually think about these things in building codes. You're not allowed to build rooms that would suffocate someone if mechanical fans failed.

ramonga• 7 months ago

I checked the website and the cheapest I could find in 2026 is 64 pounds with most of the days going +100

edit: checked wrong location, only 1 of the locations has capsules and it is 27 pounds as advertised

andy993• 7 months ago

I just checked this link and every day in Jan was under £40

https://zedwellhotels.com/locations/london/piccadilly-circus...

Edit, Jan 1 is £48

torben-friis3• 7 months ago

This is dystopian:

Workers who moved out of London for remote work are under pressure to come back to the office in the city, and some are choosing to stay in Japanese-inspired sleeping pods for just £30 ($40).

People that could be living in human friendly spaces are being pushed to live in a tube for no significant reason other than the whims of the wealthy.

Even setting aside stuff like fire hazards or claustrophobia, notably absent from this is the ability to lead a social life inside: no place to bring a partner or a group of friends.

Your time will be spent at work or recharging for the next work day.

amarcheschi• 7 months ago

You will own nothing, and you'll be pretty miserable as well

gregoriol4• 7 months ago

You misread the story: it's not a house, just a cheaper hotel room.

impossiblefork• 7 months ago

Yes, but if something is allowed and provides some advantage (lower cost, etc.) and there's competition it's going to be mandatory for somebody.

exitb• 7 months ago

Still, I don’t think you can have a normal human experience devoting a significant portion of your life to work and a coffin.

It seems like any low paying job that lets them get back home every evening would be better than this.

torben-friis3• 7 months ago

You misread the story

Did I?

Workers who moved out of London for remote work are under pressure to come back to the office in the city, and some are choosing to stay in Japanese-inspired sleeping pods
in 2025, there’s been a sharp recall in remote work offerings with major companies enforcing return to office mandates in London from HSBC to JPMorgan, Amazon, Salesforce and John Lewis. A typically dormitory with roughly a dozen capsules inside Zedwell Capsule Hotel. A typically dormitory with roughly a dozen capsules inside Zedwell Capsule Hotel. Sawdah Bhaimiya
Zedwell’s Aziz said one of the hotel’s core demographics is young professionals and hybrid workers who are using Zedwell as a “base in the city” due to their flexible working patterns which require them to be in the office for a few days a week.

This is not travelling, it's moving workers half the week to the tube.

andy993• 7 months ago

It sounds great to me. I travel regularly for work, and when doing so I work and sleep with no social life. I get as much work done as possible and then I go back to my house and family. I don’t need a big room or anything really, because I’m just there for work. They obviously don’t fit every use case.

I definitely shouldn’t have to pay more for a hotel because other people are claustrophobic. And the fire thing is a red herring, in a modern city there are fire codes and inspections - presumably this is very regulated. You’re almost certainly less safe staying in an unregulated air bnb, people have died in airbnb fires.

See https://montrealgazette.com/news/owner-of-old-montreal-build... for example

torben-friis3• 7 months ago

It sounds great to me. I travel regularly for work, and when doing so I work and sleep with no social life. I get as much work done as possible and then I go back to my house and family. I don’t need a big room or anything really, because I’m just there for work. They obviously don’t fit every use case.

Have you read the article? it doesn't focus on travellers, it focuses on workers returning to the city after work from home is disallowed.

It's ok to have budget accomodations for travellers, and I can see capsules being more private than a hostel, but this article could be easily reframed as 'people working in london can't afford basic living space in the city, yet businesses are forcing them into the city'. This is not something to glorify in a lifestyle column.

jacknews• 7 months ago

If you have to do this 4-5 days a week, sure, but what if you only have a couple of days of meetings? Seems ideal just as a cheap and safe place to crash privately for a night.

ghusto4• 7 months ago

Can't believe this is the only comment with this sentiment. I find the entire thing horrific.

The fact that so many here say "sounds perfect, I just want somewhere to sleep" is even more worrying.

timcobb3• 7 months ago

I looked at this in NY recently and it was like $150/night with a shared bathroom. Not worth it for me, at that point I'd rather not go to NY :/

gregoriol4• 7 months ago

The story clearly mentions people who have no such choice but have to go to the city because their work requires it, and wouldn't spend 250$ per night to meet such requirement.

ghusto4• 7 months ago

There's always a choice.

gregoriol4• 7 months ago

The story is interesting but clearly lacks the most useful parts: - interview and feedback of people actually using it (since the author says they are not the target audience at the end) - experience with the shower: does it feel private enough, was it clean, ... - experience related to other people staying there: could you hear them? were they nice? socializing? - feeling regarding the small space

ljf• 7 months ago

When I was commuting back to London for work I tried a hostel in Central London, I think it was about £25 a night 9 years ago. The room itself was clean and 'only' 6 people in it.

The main lobby was nice and a pint was a reasonable price - I sat there after having dinner at work, and read a book, which felt pretty nice to be honest.

The bed was comfy, with clean good smelling sheets.

But there were three issues that meant I went back to relying on friends and family until I got a local job.

1. Someone's feet smelt terrible - so bad it was hard to sleep

2. Someone snored loadly - it was even harder to sleep

3. The shower was grimy. I was lucky to have a ThirdSpace membership so showered there instead

It was a bargain and saved me traveling after a long day of work and having to be social after a very early start to get to London on the Monday. But the better option for me was to find a suitable local job and not do the extra long week commute. (I was also missing my family loads too, so it was never a longer term option for me).

ageitgey• 7 months ago

I love that you were living in a hostel while having a £300+/month premium gym membership.

alisonatwork• 7 months ago

I can't speak for this one, but I've stayed in a bunch of these over the years and they're exactly as quoted in the article - better than a hostel, worse than a hotel. Because the rate is higher than a hostel, it prices out the bottom rung crowd, and because the architecture explicitly prioritizes privacy over socialization, the visitors tend to be more respectful of one another. As such, it's quiet and clean enough, although obviously if you are sleeping next to a bunch of other people you may hear some snoring, farts, sleeptalking etc.

Some of these are better sound-proofed than others. Some even have little TVs or radios inside, but I've never found that worse than traffic or construction noise if you're anyway in the city. There's always earplugs.

Shared bathrooms suck, especially if you need to be out during "rush hour" when everyone else also needs to be out, but for a saving of $100+ per night there's plenty of people who would gladly accept holding their pee for a few minutes and/or getting into an already-steamed-up and damp shower cubicle. Most people gotta work 4 hours to make that kind of money back.

LooseEquipment• 7 months ago

I stayed at this exact location earlier this year. The showers are in individual stalls (felt private enough to me) and quite clean. You could hear other people occasionally but there wasn't any socialising and there's no space for it anyway. Spaces felt safe/cozy (unusually good light/sound design helped a lot I felt), although the lack of any storage/work space makes it less practical than a hotel room for longer stays. The audience was probably 80% tourists and 20% working poor.

markus_zhang3• 7 months ago

I don't mind living in such a place if I'm alone. But I'm not a sound sleeper so I figured the noise is going to be very upsetting. I'll probably try to stay in the office if no one cares...

adventured4• 7 months ago

3M X5A + earbuds, you'll never hear a thing.

jzb• 7 months ago

How would you sleep with those things on your head? Might work for people who sleep on their back, but not great for side sleepers.

markus_zhang3• 7 months ago

Does it cancel human voices effectively? I have tried a few such earphones but none of them is good against human voices. I'm particularly sensitive to human voices.

pseudony• 7 months ago

Try telling the boomer generation that they have to work in the city center, for a salary insufficient for suitable housing (read: space for children) close by. Then, while remote-work could work, tell them they can’t, instead, push then toward sleeping in a king-sized coffin while god knows how they can manage having children.

I think it’s time for a societal reality-check.

thrance• 7 months ago

*single-sized coffin, more like. They're only one meter wide

HPsquared• 7 months ago

Cities have always been places where people are consumed and converted into capital.

ghusto4• 7 months ago

Try telling the boomer generation that they have to work in the city center

They would say "no", which is exactly what you young people should be doing.

roschdal• 7 months ago

No.

JodieBenitez• 7 months ago

The only appropriate response to such a proposition.

PopAlongKid• 7 months ago

I stayed in this location as a solo tourist for four nights last year. I was in a "cocoon" not a capsule. My room looked a little different from the photo at the website for 1 person, in that there were no hooks on the wall for hanging clothes, but there was a low, small table that could be used to set a laptop computer on top. No chairs, no TV, no windows, but with a sink/toilet/shower. It was OK, although I probably wouldn't do it again, since I can afford something more traditional if I choose (like the Tower Hotel, which I moved to for another four nights).

The facility was nice, clean and modern (it is in the Trocadero building, I think they have over 700 rooms when I asked), but the cafe didn't open until something like 9 AM so I had to go out several times in the morning for my coffee. I ended up using the bathroom mirror backlight as a night light, otherwise it is pitch black.

One way to describe it is as a very pleasant jail cell, which (of course) you can leave at will.

cardanome• 7 months ago

I think booking a shared room in a cheap hostel might be more pleasant and economical than living in a coffin.

Still forcing workers to return to office when they have already gotten used to remote work is so messed up. Capitalism sucks.

integralid2• 7 months ago

Depends on a person I guess. I suffer in shared rooms and it's exhausting both physically and mentally for me. At the same time the few times I was in a capsule hotel were between OK and great - I just need a clean private space to rest and that's it.

Fully agree on forced RTO being evil.

4gotunameagain• 7 months ago

If London's real estate market had not been obliterated by allowing the world's mega rich to buy apartments they use twice a year for a week, then this disgraceful human stacking venture would not exist.

3rodents• 7 months ago

The ultra wealthy live in a very small number of buildings that have no meaningful impact on rental prices for normal people. The high end buildings that are mostly empty have rents starting at £3k/month for a studio, which is completely out of reach for normal people. London’s problem is the U.K’s problem: not enough housing is being built.

The middle-wealthy landlords are the people profiteering off of normal-people housing, but they are a symptom of not building enough.

ghusto4• 7 months ago

London’s problem is the U.K’s problem: not enough housing is being built.

The problem is more that a few foreign billionaires are buying up large swaths of housing, and can therefore set their own prices, "don't like it? There are literally millions of other lining up I can exploit instead".

This is not a problem outside of the large cities, so no it's not a UK problem.

A_Duck• 7 months ago

This article is something of a PR-piece for Criterion Capital, who are generally not a good influence in London

"The Prince Charles Cinema near Leicester Square claims Aziz is trying to “bully” it out of its building, while his business has also played a key role in the closure of the world’s first YMCA branch near Tottenham Court Road." https://www.londoncentric.media/p/asif-aziz-delta-point-croy...

"Why does a property company controlled by one of London’s richest men keep leasing expensive shop units to students with no obvious retail experience — only for those students to repeatedly vanish without paying millions of pounds in [property] taxes?" https://www.londoncentric.media/p/asf-aziz-london-candy-shop...

rasz2• 7 months ago

leasing expensive shop units to students

I guess snails were not available at the time https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/04/... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46241159

solatic2• 7 months ago

While I do think capsule hotels are just too small, I do sympathize with wanting a lifestyle where you own an actual house on actual land in an actually quiet, rural environment, and occasionally commute into the city for work, sleeping in a pieds-a-terre, which for working-class folk would look something like a studio or 1-bedroom apartment within walking distance of the office. You would rent the studio on a monthly basis for basically as long as your relationship continues with that employer, stay there mid-week, and take rail 3-5 hours out to the rural countryside for the weekend.

imcritic• 7 months ago

That's hell. So most of the time you are away from your home and probably from your family if you have one. If you don't have one - you are leaving your home unwatched most of the time. You pay for 2 places instead of 1. 3-5 hrs commute away from your job - that's nuts by itself.

What you should dream of instead - most jobs becoming remote or physically proximal to where you live.

solatic2• 7 months ago

most of your time

For hybrid workplaces wanting 3 days in-office, it's a little less than half

away from your family

Yes, this is a trade-off. The choice is between whether your family will be crammed into a too-small-barely-affordable apartment in the city, or a more spacious house, since anything family-sized in the city is priced for executives. A lot of kids don't live at home during college; a lot of sales people and the like are used to living out of a suitcase, this is a similar lifestyle except better because the pieds-a-terre apartment is actually stable, it's not the same as living out of hotel rooms.

pay for 2 places instead of 1

Theoretically 1 pieds-a-terre + train tickets + 1 rural mortgage payment is cheaper than 1 family-sized apartment in the city. If it's not in your case - fair enough.

3-5 hour commute away from your job

Even if it's 5 hours, if you do that twice a week plus 3x 15 minute walks each way, that's 10h45m commute time per week, mostly on a train where you can watch movies, read something, etc. If you drive two hours each way, in congestion, to a (premium-priced) house in the suburbs, that's 10 hours of commute time per week fully concentrated on the road. YMMV.

dream of remote or physically proximal

Well sure. That's a dream. Part of the question is, what's a realistic goal to set for yourself? Pieds-a-terre + train + rural house is achievable on my own agency. Overhauling the industry to become remote-first, or overhauling housing to become more affordable closer to employers, is not.

tiku• 7 months ago

I've used a capsule hotel in Tallinn.

The problem with capsule hotels is that it attracts the wrong crowd. In Japan it works because they are considerate.

I've used a capsule pod for a week. Drunk people having sex above your head is not fun. Those plastic pods are a bit flimsy.

The last day there was a whole polish work crew that invited there girlfriends. They had no problem walking around in their underwear.

I had this Japanese vibe in mind, but that was quickly gone.

rasz2• 7 months ago

My favorite is Warsaw Boutique-capsule Hostel located in the former mental asylum. Guests have no idea.

I stayed in a $40 capsule hotel (London)

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