I arrived at Narita Airport and I had 5hrs until my flight to Sapporo. I had a small adventure before trying to get on that flight and I missed it by 10min!
Okay, that was my fault. I wanted to know my options and I was told that there was a 5am flight to Sapporo. Later in the evening, that was cancelled due to weather. At that point, I had started to prepare to stay the night.
I asked the staff about accommodations, where to sleep and if there was a shower facility. I was told everything was in terminal 1.
So I made my way there and found the shower facility. Friendly staff. The price is usually 1000 yen for 30 minutes, but since my flight was cancelled, I was give a discount to 500 yen.
After that, I found some lounge seats, wiped it down and started to relax.
I knew that others would follow shortly and sure enough, it was busy even after hours. The lights didn’t dim until 2am. At that point, people were hunkering down. I slept the best I could, but it wasn’t comfortable and the other side of these sofas were charging tables, so I had a guy on his laptop.
I knew that once I get up to go to the bathroom, I’d lose my spot. So I tried to sleep as long as possible until I had to finally go pee. It was around 4am and I had just a bit more before everything started to open up.
Once I got up, I started to move around. I wanted to get something to eat and luckily, there was a Lawson a floor below that was open. Since I had already moved, I decided to get some food into my system.
I started to just wander around terminal 1. Everything was blocked off and there were security guards doing their rounds. But I have never stayed the night at an airport, but to do it in Narita (Japan in general), where it was clean, secure and have a 24 Konbini… I don’t know other places can offer that.
As Narita is a busy airport… to see it so calm and quiet was really interesting.
While I don’t think I will ever do this again (especially finding out that a capsule hotel is nearby), it was an experience and lesson learned.