Real blackout shades are great when you’re traveling, especially when you’re arriving somewhere late or changing time zones. You can get much better sleep if light from outside doesn’t enter your room and wake you. Sometimes you want natural light, to help wake you on local time. But these are an option to use, and something that a good hotel provides because sleep is about the most fundamental thing that a property helps to deliver to its guests.

Park Hyatt Abu Dhabi

When a room is equipped in a way that you can’t get the curtains, shades or blinds to fully keep out the light, then the hotel is failing on a pretty fundamental level.

“Blackout shades”
byu/TerribleBumblebee800 inmarriott

Usually the problem with curtains is that they don’t come together all the way – the gap between them in the middle lets light in. The trick to address this is:

• To take a hanger from the closet – the kind with clips on it – and use it to clip the two sides of the curtains together to keep them fully closed.

  

• Or be sure to keep a couple of binder clips in your bag, the way I might also have a UK power adapter in my bag to fix inflight seat power.

  

Here though the issue is more vexing because the light is coming in from above! I guess your best bet here is eye shades from a business class amenity kit.

When former United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz introduced his airline’s new business class product – from better seats, to new lounges with sit down dining so you could board the plane having already eaten, to new bedding and pajamas – he declared, “Sleep is the new black.” Airlines delivering sleep comes at a premium. For hotels it’s pretty basic. Sometimes you need to hack it a bit, but you shouldn’t have to.