NYC Trip Part 1 - Pod 51 Hotel

Hi all,

Today I will be sharing with you Part 1 of my awesome belated birthday weekend adventure in NYC with one my best friend in the whole entire world (who unfortunately you will not see in this post). We went and stayed at Pod 51 Hotel in Manhattan and went to see Cinderella on Broadway. In this post, you will see photos and my full review of Pod 51 Hotel and on Part 2, I will talk more about the show and the places we visited for food.

On the train

Simon Theater from inside the Cab

The Hotel- POD 51 Hotel - E 51st St New York NY
We went in to the city on cold Saturday this past January. We arrived around 2:15pm at Port Authority and we made our way down to Pod 51 Hotel. We actually found this hotel when they were having a Cyber Monday sale on Expedia. Pod hotel is based on this Japanese Pod hotel which is the size of an MRI machine if you ever want to check it out on YouTube. The one here in the United States and Europe are obviously not going to be that small but the idea of it is to basically just have a room big enough to accommodate your needs for one or two nights while staying within an affordable price range.

Now it is part hostel/hotel. It's very modern, and you do have a lot of options in terms of what kind of room you want. We wanted the least expensive option because we were only going to stay for one night so we went with the Double Bunk room. It has a sink inside the room but we would have to use the shared bathrooms that are available outside in the hallway (the hostel part). There are deluxe rooms that have bathrooms inside the room if you so choose. There's also free Wi-Fi which is convenient.

We arrived at the hotel by cab from Port Authority and was greeted by the front desk staff. Based on the reviews on Expedia I did request a room further away from the elevator and bathrooms. There's an elevator that takes us to our floor and our hotel key card works for our hotel room and the bathrooms. Our room is at the end of one hall and it was more spacious than the pictures we've seen on the travel sites (we saw some of the other rooms when the doors were open for cleaning and it looks like there are rooms that are bigger and smaller than ours).

So this is our room the 'Double Bunk'. From the entrance you can see the two beds on the left plus a small desk and chair at the end by the two windows and on the right there are coat hooks, the sink and not seen in this picture- an open closet with a safe deposit box.

Our Home away from Home

Desk & Chair

Sink with Toileteries, Tissues and Towels

Open Closet, Safe Deposit Box and Door. Sandals for going out of the room!

The hotel is actually only fourteen stories high so we didn't have the best view of the city, but it was still nice to have a view.

 

There are several bathrooms on the hallway and they also varied in size. This one was the closest to our room and the most spacious. You can see from the pictures below that it has everything that you need except for a tub. There's a sink, a toilet, a shower with shampoo and soap if you forgot to bring some and a place to put your dry clothes far away enough from the shower. There's a sign on the door that will let you know if the bathroom/WC is vacant or occupied.

I took the top bunk and it has an adjustable ladder that you would need to climb. It's not the most friendly ladder so I had to use extra care. It's nice that it also come with an adjustable side railing to prevent accidents. Each bed comes with a personal mini TV and wall lamp. There was a little space near the TV and I used that at night to hold my blog note book and a bottle of water. The unfortunate thing about taking top bunk is that there's no outlet so I had to leave my phone charging on the ground.

As you can see from the last picture of the bedding, it is very minimal. It's nothing luxurious. The room was pretty warm so I had no problem with it being too cold but you are not going to get 'luxury' staying at the Pod Hotel. One thing that we did noticed though was that we had very weak Wi Fi signals. We didn't know if it was because of our room being at the end of the hallway but that was definitely a disappointment.

The hotel also has a roof top deck but unfortunately it was closed the following morning because of icy condition. I totally understand that they did not want their guests to hurt themselves on the roof deck so here are some pictures that I was able to take from inside the building. You can check out a better picture of the deck on their website or on Expedia.

Outdoor Deck

Sorry about the reflection of my bright pink camera!

Final Thoughts
It's a nice place to stay if you are looking for something simple and basic. Some of the things we didn't like:

• The walls are super thin, we were lucky we didn't have loud neighbors.
• Weak Wi-Fi
• No fridge/No coffee machine
• Concierge was not helpful, we asked if we could book a cab and she said to ask the bell hop (which there wasn't anyone available) or hail one.

We thought that since it has a semi-hostel environment that we would see a lot of young people but what we saw was a mix of age groups. Everything was clean- the room, the bathrooms, the lobby, and public spaces. I would recommend if you are interested in staying at Pod 51 Hotel to ask for a room further away from the elevators and bathrooms because around 1:00am, I was able to hear a lot of people moving about checking in to their rooms.

I'm still undecided on whether I would stay at this hotel again. I think it was definitely and experience. Again we booked it when it was on sale but I don't know if I would book it at a regular price.

Pod 51 on 51st street is their 'Original' location, there's also another one - Pod 39 on 39th street. 

If you have any questions about the hotel please let me know on the comments below. 

Until next time,

Jessica