Hotel
A hotel is an establishment that provides paid
The precursor to the modern hotel was the
Hotel operations vary in size, function, complexity, and cost. Most hotels and major hospitality companies have set industry standards to classify hotel types. An upscale full-service hotel facility offers
Most hotel establishments are run by a
Etymology
The word hotel is derived from the
History
Facilities offering hospitality to travellers featured in early civilizations. In
The precursor to the modern hotel was the
For a period of about 200 years from the mid-17th century,
and replaced tired teams with fresh teams. Traditionally they were seven miles apart, but this depended very much on the terrain.Some English towns had as many as ten such inns and rivalry between them became intense, not only for the income from the stagecoach operators but for the revenue from the food and drink supplied to the wealthy passengers. By the end of the century, coaching inns were being run more professionally, with a regular timetable being followed and fixed menus for food.[4]
Inns began to cater to richer clients in the mid-18th century, and consequently grew in grandeur and in the level of service provided. Sudhir Andrews traces "the birth of an organised hotel industry" to Europe's chalets and small hotels which catered primarily to aristocrats.[5] One of the first hotels in a modern sense, the Royal Clarence, opened in Exeter in 1768, although the idea only really caught on in the early-19th century. In 1812 Mivart's Hotel opened its doors in London, later changing its name to Claridge's.[6]
Hotels proliferated throughout Western Europe and North America in the 19th century. Luxury hotels, including the 1829 Tremont House in Boston, the 1836 Astor House in New York City,[7] the 1889 Savoy Hotel in London, and the Ritz chain of hotels in London and Paris in the late 1890s, catered to an ever more-wealthy clientele.
International scale
Hotels cater to travelers from many countries and languages, since no one country dominates the travel industry.
Country | Hotel rooms in 2011–12[10][11] | Average rooms per hotel[11] | Overnight tourists traveling from each country, annual[10][11] |
---|---|---|---|
United States | 4,900,000 | 93 | 58,000,000 |
China | 1,500,000 | 132 | 83,000,000 |
Japan | 1,370,000 | 27 | 18,000,000 |
Italy | 1,100,000 | 32 | 29,000,000 |
Germany | 950,000 | 27 | 72,000,000 |
Spain | 900,000 | 47 | 12,000,000 |
Mexico | 660,000 | 37 | 16,000,000 |
United Kingdom | 650,000 | 17 | 57,000,000 |
France | 620,000 | 36 | 26,000,000 |
Thailand | 530,000 | NA | 6,000,000 |
Indonesia | 410,000 | 25 | 7,000,000 |
Greece | 400,000 | 41 | 5,000,000 |
Brazil | 400,000 | 40 | 8,000,000 |
Turkey | 330,000 | 117 | 16,000,000 |
Austria | 290,000 | 22 | 11,000,000 |
Russia | 260,000 | 33 | 44,000,000 |
Global total | 21,000,000 | 41 | 876,000,000 |
Types
Hotel operations vary in size, function, and cost. Most hotels and major hospitality companies that operate hotels have set widely accepted industry standards to classify hotel types. General categories include the following:
International luxury
International luxury hotels offer high-quality amenities, full-service accommodations, on-site full-service restaurants, and the highest level of personalized and professional service in
Lifestyle luxury resorts
Lifestyle luxury
Upscale full-service
Boutique
Boutique hotels are smaller independent non-branded hotels that often contain mid-scale to upscale facilities of varying size in unique or intimate settings with full-service accommodations. These hotels are generally 100 rooms or fewer.[13]
Focused or select service
Small to medium-sized hotel establishments that offer a limited number of on-site amenities that only cater and market to a specific demographic of travelers, such as the single business traveler. Most focused or select service hotels may still offer full-service accommodations but may lack leisure amenities such as an on-site restaurant or a swimming pool. Examples include
.Economy and limited service
Small to medium-sized hotel establishments that offer a very limited number of on-site amenities and often only offer basic accommodations with little to no services, catering to the budget-minded traveler seeking a "no frills" accommodation. Limited service hotels often lack an on-site restaurant but in return may offer a limited complimentary food and beverage amenity such as on-site continental breakfast service. Examples include
Extended stay
Motel
A motel, an abbreviation for "motor hotel", is a small-sized low-rise lodging establishment similar to a limited service, lower-cost hotel, but typically with direct access to individual rooms from the car park. Motels were built to serve road travellers, including travellers on road trip vacations and workers who drive for their job (travelling salespeople, truck drivers, etc.). Common during the 1950s and 1960s, motels were often located adjacent to a major highway, where they were built on inexpensive land at the edge of towns or along stretches of freeway.
New motel construction is rare in the 2000s as hotel chains have been building economy-priced, limited-service franchised properties at freeway exits which compete for largely the same clientele, largely saturating the market by the 1990s. Motels are still useful in less populated areas for driving travelers, but the more populated an area becomes, the more hotels move in to meet the demand for accommodation. While many motels are unbranded and independent, many of the other motels which remain in operation joined national franchise chains, often rebranding themselves as hotels, inns or lodges. Some examples of chains with motels include
Motels in some parts of the world are more often regarded as places for romantic assignations where rooms are often rented by the hour. This is fairly common in parts of Latin America.
Microstay
Hotels may offer rooms for microstays,[14] a type of booking for less than 24 hours where the customer chooses the check in time and the length of the stay. This allows the hotel increased revenue by reselling the same room several times a day.[15] They first gained popularity in Europe but are now common in major global tourist centers.[16]
Management
Hotel management is a globally accepted professional career field and academic field of study. Degree programs such as
Most hotel establishments consist of a general manager who serves as the head executive (often referred to as the "hotel manager"), department heads who oversee various departments within a hotel,
Unique and specialty hotels
Historic inns and boutique hotels
Boutique hotels are typically hotels with a unique environment or intimate setting. Some hotels have gained their renown through tradition, by hosting significant events or persons, such as Schloss
A number of hotels have entered the public consciousness through popular culture, such as the
Resort hotels
Some hotels are built specifically as a destination in itself to create a captive trade, example at casinos, amusement parks and holiday resorts. Though hotels have always been built in popular destinations, the defining characteristic of a resort hotel is that it exists purely to serve another attraction, the two having the same owners.
On the Las Vegas Strip there is a tradition of one-upmanship with luxurious and extravagant hotels in a concentrated area. This trend now has extended to other resorts worldwide, but the concentration in Las Vegas is still the world's highest: nineteen of the world's twenty-five largest hotels by room count are on the Strip, with a total of over 67,000 rooms.[19]
Bunker hotels
The
transformed into hotels.Cave hotels
The Cuevas Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (named after the author) in Guadix, Spain, as well as several hotels in Cappadocia, Turkey, are notable for being built into natural cave formations, some with rooms underground. The Desert Cave Hotel in Coober Pedy, South Australia, is built into the remains of an opal mine.
Cliff hotels
Located on the coast but high above sea level, these hotels offer unobstructed panoramic views and a great sense of privacy without the feeling of total isolation. Some examples from around the globe are the Riosol Hotel in Gran Canaria, Caruso Belvedere Hotel in Amalfi Coast (Italy), Aman Resorts Amankila in Bali, Birkenhead House in Hermanus (South Africa), The Caves in Jamaica and Caesar Augustus in Capri.[21]
Capsule hotels
Capsule hotels are a type of economical hotel first introduced in Japan, where people sleep in stacks of rectangular containers. In the sleeping capsules, beside the bed, the customer can watch TV, put the valuable items in the mini safes, and the customers also can use the wireless internet.[22]
Day room hotels
Some hotels fill daytime occupancy with
Garden hotels
Garden hotels, famous for their gardens before they became hotels, include Gravetye Manor, the home of garden designer William Robinson, and Cliveden, designed by Charles Barry with a rose garden by Geoffrey Jellicoe.
Ice, snow and igloo hotels
The Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, was the first ice hotel in the world; first built in 1990, it is built each winter and melts every spring. The Hotel de Glace in Duschenay, Canada, opened in 2001 and it is North America's only ice hotel. It is redesigned and rebuilt in its entirety every year. Ice hotels can also be included within larger ice complexes; for example, the Mammut Snow Hotel in Finland is located within the walls of the Kemi snow castle; and the Lainio Snow Hotel is part of a snow village near Ylläs, Finland. There is an arctic snowhotel in Rovaniemi in Lapland, Finland, along with glass igloos.[25] The first glass igloos were built in 1999 in Finland, they became the Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort with 65 buildings, 53 small ones for two people and 12 large ones for four people. Glass igloos, with their roof made of thermal glass, allow guests to admire auroras comfortably from their beds.[26]
Love hotels
A love hotel (also 'love motel', especially in Taiwan) is a type of short-stay hotel found around the world, operated primarily for the purpose of allowing guests privacy for sexual activities, typically for one to three hours, but with overnight as an option. Styles of premises vary from extremely low-end to extravagantly appointed. In Japan, love hotels have a history of over 400 years.[27]
Portable modular hotels
In 2021 a New York-based company introduced new modular and movable hotel rooms which allow landowners and hospitality groups to create and easily scale hotel accommodations. The portable units can be built in three to five months and can be stacked to create multi-floor units.[28]
Referral hotel
A referral hotel is a hotel chain that offers branding to independently operated hotels; the chain itself is founded by or owned by the member hotels as a group. Many former referral chains have been converted to franchises; the largest surviving member-owned chain is Best Western.
Railway hotels
The first recorded purpose-built railway hotel was the
Frequently, expanding railway companies built grand hotels at their termini, such as the
Straw bale hotels
The Maya Guesthouse in Nax Mont-Noble in the Swiss Alps, is the first hotel in Europe built entirely with straw bales. Due to the insulation values of the walls it needs no conventional heating or air conditioning system, although the Maya Guesthouse is built at an altitude of 1,300 metres (4,300 ft) in the Alps.[32]
Transit hotels
Transit hotels are short stay hotels typically used at international airports where passengers can stay while waiting to change airplanes. The hotels are typically on the
Treehouse hotels
Some hotels are built with living trees as structural elements, for example the Treehotel near
Underwater hotels
Some hotels have accommodation underwater, such as
Overwater hotels
A resort island is an island or an archipelago that contains resorts, hotels, overwater bungalows, restaurants, tourist attractions and its amenities. Maldives has the most overwater bungalows resorts.
Yurt hotels
Other specialty hotels
- The Burj al-Arab hotel in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, built on an artificial island, is structured in the shape of a boat's sail.
- The Library Hotel in New York City, is unique in that each of its ten floors is assigned one category from the Dewey Decimal System.
- The Jailhotel Löwengraben in Lucerne, Switzerlandis a converted prison now used as a hotel.
- The Luxor, a hotel and casino on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada, United States is unusual due to its pyramidal structure.
- The Ritz-Carlton opened the highest hotel in the world in 2011, The Ritz-Carlton, Hong Kong on floors 102-118 of the International Commerce Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui on Kowloon Peninsula, Hong Kong.[34] The lobby is 425 m (1,394 ft) above the ground.[35]
- The Liberty Hotel in Boston used to be the Charles Street Jail.
- Hotel Kakslauttanen in Finland, a collection of glass igloos in Lapland that allow you to watch the Northern Lights[36]
- Built in Scotland and completed in 1936, The former ocean liner RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, United States uses its first-class staterooms as a hotel, after retiring in 1967 from Transatlantic service.
- The Wigwam Motels used patented novelty architecture in which each motel room was a free-standing concrete wigwam or teepee.
- The Bus Collective in Singapore was built from 20 retired public buses, and opened in 2023.
- Various Caboose Motel or Red Caboose Inn properties are built from decommissioned rail cars.
- Throughout the world there are several hotels built from converted airliners.
Records
Largest
In 2006,
Oldest
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the oldest hotel in operation is the
Highest
The
Most expensive purchase
In October 2014, the
Long term residence
A number of public figures have notably chosen to take up semi-permanent or permanent residence in hotels.
- Fashion designer Hôtel Ritz, Paris, on and off for more than 30 years.
- Inventor New Yorker Hoteluntil he died in his room in 1943.
- Larry Fine (of The Three Stooges) and his family lived in hotels, due to his extravagant spending habits and his wife's dislike for housekeeping. They first lived in the President Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where his daughter Phyllis was raised, then the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. Not until the late 1940s did Fine buy a home in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles.
- The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and its affiliated Waldorf Towers has been the home of many famous persons over the years including former President Herbert Hoover who lived there from the end of his presidency in 1933 until his death in 1964. General Douglas MacArthur lived his last 14 years in the penthouse of the Waldorf Towers. Composer Cole Porterspent the last 25 years of his life in an apartment at the Waldorf Towers.
- Billionaire , and others.
- Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera lived in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, from 1961 until his death in 1977.
- Actor Richard Harris lived at the Savoy Hotel while in London. Hotel archivist Susan Scott recounts an anecdote that, when he was being taken out of the building on a stretcher shortly before his death in 2002, he raised his hand and told the diners "it was the food."[43]
- Egyptian actor Ahmed Zaki lived his last 15 years in Ramses Hilton Hotel – Cairo.[citation needed]
- British entrepreneur Jack Lyons lived in the Hotel Mirador Kempinski in Switzerland for several years until his death in 2008.[citation needed]
- American actress
- American actress Elaine Stritch lived in the Savoy Hotel in London for over a decade.[46]
- Uruguayan-Argentinian tango composer Horacio Ferrer lived almost 40 years, from 1976 until his death in 2014, in an apartment inside the Alvear Palace Hotel, in Buenos Aires, one of the most exclusive hotels in the city.[47]
See also
- Lists of hotels
- List of chained-brand hotels
- List of defunct hotel chains
- Casino hotel
- List of casino hotels
- Niche tourism markets
- Resort
Industry and careers
- Bellhop
- Concierge
- clerk
- General manager
- GOPPAR, RevPAR, TRevPAR – hotel profitability equations.
- Hospitality industry
- Hotel rating
- Innkeeper
- Night auditor
- Property caretaker
- Tourism
Human habitation types
- Apartment hotel
- Boutique hotel
- Caravanserai
- Cruise ship
- Dharamshala
- Dak bungalow
- Eco hotel
- Guest house
- Glamping
- Homestay
- Hostal
- Human habitats
- Inn
- Serviced apartment
- Vacation rental
- Pop-up hotel
References
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During this epoch [early-15th century], more than 600 inns were registered in England. Their architecture often consisted of a paved interior court with access through an arched porch. The bedrooms were situated on the two sides of the courtyard, the kitchen and the public rooms at the front, and the stables and storehouses at the back.
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Andrews, Sudhir (June 2007). "History of Hotels and Motels". Introduction To Tourism And Hospitality Industry (reprint ed.). New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Education (published 2007). p. 46. ISBN 9780070660212. Retrieved 2 January 2021.
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Further reading
- Lundberg, Donald E. (1994). The Hotel and Restaurant Business (6th ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0471285080.
- "A short history of hotels: Be my guest". The Economist. 21 December 2013. Archived from the original on 1 April 2014. Retrieved 26 March 2014.
External links
- Media related to Hotels at Wikimedia Commons
- Hotels travel guide from Wikivoyage
- Grand old hotels travel guide from Wikivoyage