Simple Ways To Make Your Extended Stay Hotel Room Feel More Like Home

Be Prepared With A Favorite Incense Or Candle From Home

Scents are one of the most powerful memory triggers in the natural world, even better than sight. Thanks to brain scans, doctors realized that odors trigger vivid memories because they're processed in the same part of the brain as emotions and memory. That's why people have a big emotional response to smells and they can totally affect your mood, for better or worse. 

Particular scents can do a lot to make you feel at ease or tense depending on your prior experience with it. One study found that nostalgic scents made participants feel happier and more comfortable, while emotions like anxiety diminished. That's why a major hotel hack is arriving extra prepared with your favorite incense or candle. 

Instead of settling for the scent of cleaning products or stale hotel air freshener, light up your rainy meadow candle or jasmine incense. Filling the room with recognizable scents tricks your brain into feeling the same comfort you would normally feel at your real home. If you're not allowed to light a candle or incense in your hotel room, swap those out for your perfume or a laundry scent spray instead to spray on your pillow.

Download Your Top Movies Or TV Shows To Watch

Think about how comforting it is to cozy up in bed at the end of a long day and watch your go-to movie. That's the type of energy you need during an extended hotel stay. Throwing on your favorite movie from childhood or a guilty pleasure TV show can do wonders to comfort you in an unfamiliar hotel room. However, you never know what you're going to get with a hotel's TV. 

To make sure you'll have access to your preferred flicks, just download them off your streaming platform of choice. On Netflix, you can download media to watch offline on the latest version of the app by hitting the download icon next to your fav tv show or movie. On Hulu, users with the 'no ads' plan can download stuff the same way as long as they're connected to WiFi or using cellular data as they're downloading it. Just keep in mind that only certain titles on streaming platforms are available to download and watch offline.

Take Your Own Pillow And Pillow Case Along For The Extended Stay

Having little pieces of home can really make you feel like you're in your own element, even if you're on an extended hotel stay. For example, laying your head down on your own pillow with your own pillow case helps you drift off peacefully and feel cozy. It might seem like a small thing, but it makes a huge difference to sleep on your own pillow every night. 

In addition to being more comfortable, it's also a lot more hygienic to use your own pillow while you're staying at a hotel. The standard hotel pillow is used for around two to three whole years. With over a billion people staying in hotels every year in America alone, that's a lot of different heads all sharing one pillow.  

Even if the staff does an exceptional job of cleaning the room between guests, there is no way to get around the fact that potentially hundreds of other people have slept on the same pillow as you at a hotel. So, you're better off just taking a fresh one along with you when you're spending a long time at a hotel. Don't forget the pillow case either, that's equally as important!

Pack A Pair Of Super Snuggly, Cozy Slippers

Half the battle of feeling comfortable at a hotel on an extended stay is packing the comfort essentials, like a pair of reliable slippers. It just adds a bit of the coziness factor to the equation when you have a pair of fluffy slippers to wear around your hotel room. Who wants to walk barefoot on an itchy hotel carpet anyway? 

Wearing slippers may have more benefits than just being exceptionally comfy, too. If you're staying in a hotel long term during the winter or in a cold destination, wearing slippers will help maintain your body temperature since having cold extremities can make you sick. Slippers also help you be more hygienic around your room and prevent you from tracking debris into your bed at night.

All these things are even more important when you're staying in a shared space like a hotel. If you're on the hunt for the perfect pair of slippers for your extended hotel stay, consider looking into the L.L. Bean Wicked Good Moccasin-Style slippers because they were ranked as the best overall pair for 2023. Alternatively, you can go for the Jessica Simpson Women's House Slipper for under $20 if you're on a budget. 

Get A Wi-Fi Booster To Combat Unreliable Hotel Internet

Hotel Wi-Fi is notoriously unreliable, which is absolutely not something you want to deal with on a long-term stay. This is even more crucial for people traveling for business. If you want to ensure you have the trustable internet connection you get at home, invest in a WiFi booster for your extended hotel stay. 

A WiFi booster is a compact device that you can plug into an outlet in your hotel room to help improve the wireless signal. It's perfect for when the WiFi router is far away from your room and supplying an entire hotel's worth of people with the internet. Most of them are small enough to bring wherever you're going, too. 

If you'll need to use the hotel Wi-Fi a lot to work, go for the more expensive NETGEAR AC1900. Alternatively, if you want a more budget-friendly booster, get the TP-Link Archer T3U for $20. There are options out there for any budget and it makes a long hotel stay a lot less of a headache, so it's definitely worth the extra splurge.