New travel pillow designs to help us sleep – but will people ever stop hating them?
- The past few years have seen a number of inventive new travel pillow designs hitting the market
- But the item remains a hated object among many, and reminds us that airlines should really concentrate on making economy class more comfortable
Randall Cohen is a titan of travel pillows – you know, those croissant-shaped neck things that passengers lived without for decades until, early this century, humanity collectively determined that it was impossible to board a plane without one.
Cohen’s family runs SNI, an industry leader in the bustling field of travel comfort products that sells five million pillows a year, many under the Cloudz brand. The bestseller is the Cloudz Dual Comfort Microbead Travel Neck Pillow – “Dual comfort! Use it as lumbar support!” – available in more than 30 fashion iterations, including camouflage and unicorn.
But even Cohen concedes that when it comes to travel pillows, “people really hate them”. Though, he adds, that is because they haven’t tried enough of the pillows out there.
This divisive object, in all its plush, polystyrene-microbead wonder, epitomises the suffering of economy air travel.
In our battle against the stress and spatial constraints that airlines have wrought, we have armed ourselves with a woefully inadequate weapon – cumbersome, absurd and forgettable, with legions abandoned on plane seats and in crammed wardrobes. The pillow is a symptom of what we crave and a reminder of how far we fall short. It’s a reminder that we’re all too tired.
Adults look absurd sleeping in public: flopping head, snapping chin, snoring, drooling, mouth agape. Travel pillows compound the folly by enveloping the neck with a felt boa constrictor.