Next time you’re in Atlanta and you feel the need to rent a room by the hour, you’ll be able to do it without leaving the airport and heading to a sleezy part of town. Behold, I bring you the Minute Suites.

For world travelers, this is nothing new. You can find dayrooms in airports all over the place, but the US has been way behind the curve on this trend. Atlanta is, I believe, the only place you can currently do it in the US. Please correct me in the comments section if I’m wrong.

I think the airport may be the one place where you would even consider lying on the sheets they provide in a rent-by-the-hour hotel. I mean, it’s a pretty sketchy business in almost any context. But in the airport it makes perfect sense, and it’s a welcome addition.

Here’s how it works. Go to minutesuites.com and you can reserve a room. The mini hotel is located on concourse B outside gate 15. The cost is $30 for the first hour and $7.50 for each 15 minutes after. Anything over 8 hours will get you a 25% discount. That’s still a very hefty $450 for 20 hours (which is basically what you get at a regular hotel). So this is clearly not for that purpose.

The main purpose is for those people who want some sleep. A few years back, I took a redeye from San Francisco to Atlanta and then had a 5 hour layover before my flight to South Africa. I would have loved to have had a bed for a couple hours to break up the two overnight flights.

It’s about time that this trend came to the US. I know there have been efforts in the past (I recall a hotel in the Bradley terminal at LAX long ago), but hopefully this time it’s a trend with staying power. If you want to take advantage, I’d highly recommend making a reservation. There are only a few rooms in this place.

My posts have definitely been traveling around the world this week, so let’s bring it back home. Let’s talk Delta. The airline is having a spat with its largest airport, Atlanta, over new construction that will inevitably raise the cost of operating at the airport. Delta is so unhappy that they’re threatening to move traffic to other airports that are more cost effective. So should you Atlantans worry that you’re going to lose a ton of flights to other airports? No. Might you lose some flights? Sure. That’s why I consider this a “half-empty” threat.

A Delta spokesperson was quoted as saying, “Over time, if the cost per passenger doubles at [Atlanta], it’s Delta’s responsibility to consider the advantage of routing some of the two-thirds of passengers connecting here to hubs where the costs are lower.” Yeah, sure. Too bad that economics don’t agree.

It’s a basic rule of hub operations that you need to have a local traffic base. You can’t just create a hub in the middle of nowhere and send all your passengers there to connect. That idea has been floated before (Mid America Airport WAY outside St Louis), but it’s never drawn any serious attention. Instead, we’ve seen smaller local population bases receive hubs that were overbuilt and they’ve now been scaled back. (Pittsburgh? St Louis?) Connecting traffic isn’t profitable enough to base your entire operation on it. So when Delta says it’s going to move a bunch of its connecting traffic to places like Memphis, that seems to be a threat that has no teeth.

Memphis may have local traffic, but its hub is already more than serving that local traffic. Atlanta is the best market in all of the southeastern US, and Delta would be insane to move flights away from that population base solely to connect people over Memphis. But don’t think that means this threat is completely empty. While I can’t imagine a massive shift of flights to Memphis (neither can Memphis, apparently), I think it’s highly likely that some flights in Atlanta will disappear as costs rise.

This one is basic math. If your costs rise, then you need to make more money for each flight to be profitable. If a flight is relatively marginal now, it will be a money loser under the new structure and that flight will disappear. That doesn’t mean that the flight will move to Memphis. It just means it will go away.

So, the Atlanta airport has some serious thinking to do here. Do they really need that massive new international terminal for $1.6 billion? If so, then they have to be willing to face the consequences of raising their costs to airlines. That will most likely mean fewer flights, but it probably won’t be nearly as dire as Delta is making it sound. So, don’t get excited if you live in Memphis. You’re not going to see any huge growth simply because your airport is cheaper.