Still the coolest airport hotel in the world.
The TWA hotel opened in 2019 to significant acclaim, the building had been sitting empty for decades. Recognised as a mid-century masterpiece by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen (who also designed the St Lous Gateway Arch) reclaiming its former glory and retaining all of the 1960’s styling architects Lubrano Ciavarra together with Stonehill Taylor who designed the guest room interiors transformed the former Trans World Airlines (TWA) passenger terminal into the TWA hotel.
The hotel has won numerous awards and accolades for this careful recreation of a sixties design time capsule, there is no doubt that it captures perfectly the heyday of travel in all of its glory and you can stay there for a night or a few hours.
The hotel is connected to terminal 5 by a lift and walkway that takes you down a long tunnel and the beginning of a lot of red carpet!
Hotel Rooms
There are two new wings that connect off each side of the original building, each is seven stories and together they have 512 guest rooms. Rooms range from the Standard Double Queen Suite up to the Howard Hughes Presidential Suite (with a runway view).
Rooms feature white walls and dark wooden floors with walnut panels and a hint of bronze. There are rotary dial phones and floor to ceiling glass windows (with excellent accoustic dampening to control the noise from the planes). There are vintage TWA prints in the rooms and some design classic furtniture.
Beyond the hotel rooms there is a rooftop infinity pool and observation deck, to relax on those longer layovers. Just the place when all you want is to recover a little from the jetlag and defrag from being in a pressurised can for hours, so here you can do a few lazy laps and lie by the pool for an hour or two before your next flight.
Facilities
The hotel gym is enormous (over 10,000 square feet of fitness) with a dedicated peleton spin room. They even have a ‘Twister’ room dedicated to playing the sixties classic board game.
Eat & Drink
Lets face it airport hotels are hardly the place you go for an amazing meal. The TWA has a few options and the pick is the restaurant ‘The Paris Cafe’, where the menu’s are all based on classic in-flight menu’s from Trans World Airlines. The alternative is the grab & go food hall with a fairly simple range of fast food classics including hot dogs and icecream.
The bars at the TWA hotel are possibly one of the biggest drawcards to visiting. There is the pool bar where you can watch the flights as you bask in the sun (perhaps not in January) and the sunken lounge with the original design classic furniture. But the clear favourite is the Connie Cocktail Lounge which is in a converted 1958 Lockheed Constellation “Connie” airplane (one of only four left in the world).
The bar is right in the middle of the restored plane and what could be more perfect than a classic martini in a constellation I ask you?
The TWA Hotel is a JFK Airport Terminal 5
Queens, New York