A new bus line called Cabin is positioning itself as a "hotel on wheels." For $115 you get a sleeping pod on a bus that goes between LA and San Francisco (the trip takes 8 hours). Each pod has a power outlet and the bus has WiFi. It also has an espresso bar and an attendant to assist you. Lexy Savvides of CNet took a ride on Cabin, and interviewed Gaetano Crupi, co-founder and president of Cabin.
There's no shortage of cheap flights between San Francisco and Los Angeles. So why would you take Cabin that costs $115 one-way?
We didn't design the cheapest way to get to Los Angeles from San Francisco. There's a lot of options that are significantly cheaper. We also didn't design the fastest way. We tried to design the most comfortable way where you don't burn any of your day while being transported.
We are basically an Uber from a downtown location to the airport and we're also a hotel night's stay. So if you add those two endpoints of transportation, the night and the flight, we think $115 is actually a very reasonable price.
Why are you comparing Cabin to a hotel rather than a regular bus?
The reason why we don't use [the term] bus is that people don't want to sleep on a bus. And so everything that we've designed talking about a hotel, from the sheets that we use, the amenities, the pillows, the way our ground crew services the bathroom, the way we steam all of the sheets when we put them on the bed, all of that is really for someone to think of this not as a bus but as another form of transportation.
