About hotels
A hotel is an establishment that provides paid lodging on a short-term basis. The provision of basic accommodation, in times past, consisting only of a room with a bed, a cupboard, a small table and a washstand has largely been replaced by rooms with modern facilities, including en-suite bathrooms and air conditioning or climate control. Additional common features found in hotel rooms are a telephone, an alarm clock, a television, a safe, a mini-bar with snack foods and drinks, and facilities for making tea and coffee. Luxury features include bathrobes and slippers, apillow menu, twin-sink vanities, and jacuzzi bathtubs. Larger hotels may provide additional guest facilities such as a restaurant, swimming pool, fitness center, business center, childcare, conference facilities and social function services.
Hotel rooms are usually numbered (or named in some smaller hotels and B&Bs) to allow guests to identify their room.
Some hotels offer meals as part of a room and board arrangement. In the United Kingdom, a hotel is required by law to serve food and drinks to all guests within certain stated hours. In Japan,capsule hotels provide a minimized amount of room space and shared facilities.
Etymology
The word hotel is derived from the French hôtel (coming from hôte meaning host), which referred to a French version of a townhouse or any other building seeing frequent visitors, rather than a place offering accommodation. In contemporary French usage, hôtel now has the same meaning as theEnglish term, and hôtel particulier is used for the old meaning. The French spelling, with thecircumflex, was also used in English, but is now rare. The circumflex replaces the 's' found in the earlier hostel spelling, which over time took on a new, but closely related meaning. Grammatically, hotels usually take the definite article – hence "The Astoria Hotel" or simply "The Astoria."
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;
Upscale Luxury
Examples include Conrad Hotels, InterContinental Hotels, Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Dorchester Collection,andJW Marriott Hotels
Full Service
Examples include Hilton, Marriott, Hotel Indigo, Doubletree, and Hyatt
Select Service
Examples include Holiday Inn, Courtyard by Marriott and Hilton Garden Inn
Limited Service
Examples include Hampton Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Fairfield Inn, Days Inn, and La Quinta Inns & Suites
Extended Stay
Examples include Staybridge Suites, Homewood Suites by Hilton, Residence Inn by Marriott, and Extended Stay Hotels
Timeshare
Examples include Holiday Inn Club Vacations, Marriott Vacation Club International, Westgate Resorts, and Disney Vacation Club
Destination Club
Management
Main article: Hotel management
Hotel management is a significant career. Larger hotels may operate with an extensive management structure consisting of a General Manager which serves as the head executive, department heads that oversee various departments, middle managers, administrative staff, and line-level supervisors. Degree programs such as hospitality management studies, a business degree, and/or certification programs prepare hotel managers for industry practice.
Historic hotels
Some hotels have gained their renown through tradition, by hosting significant events or persons, such as Schloss Cecilienhof in Potsdam, Germany, which derives its fame from the Potsdam Conference of the World War II allies Winston Churchill, Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin in 1945. The Taj Mahal Palace & Tower in Mumbai is one of India's most famous and historic hotels because of its association with the Indian independence movement. Some establishments have given name to a particular meal or beverage, as is the case with the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, United States where the Waldorf Salad was first created or the Hotel Sacher in Vienna, Austria, home of the Sachertorte. Others have achieved fame by association with dishes or cocktails created on their premises, such as the Hotel de Paris where the crêpe Suzette was invented or the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, where the Singapore Sling cocktail was devised.
A number of hotels have entered the public consciousness through popular culture, such as theRitz Hotel in London, through its association with Irving Berlin's song, 'Puttin' on the Ritz'. TheAlgonquin Hotel in New York City is famed as the meeting place of the literary group, theAlgonquin Round Table, and Hotel Chelsea, also in New York City, has been the subject of a number of songs and the scene of the stabbing of Nancy Spungen (allegedly by her boyfriend Sid Vicious).
Unusual hotels
Many hotels can be considered destinations in themselves, by dint of unusual features of the lodging or its immediate environment:
Boutique hotels
Boutique hotels are typically hotels with a unique environment.
Treehouse hotels
Some hotels are built with living trees as structural elements, for example the Costa Rica Tree House in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge, Costa Rica; the Treetops Hotel in Aberdare National Park, Kenya; theAriau Towers near Manaus, Brazil, on the Rio Negro in the Amazon; and Bayram's Tree Houses in Olympos, Turkey. Recently, a Swedish company appropriatly named Treehotel has made several hotel rooms in the Harads. They include interesting designs, like the Cabin, The mirrorcube, the blue cone, theUFO, and the Birds Nest.
Straw Bale Hotels
In Nax Mont-Noble, a little ski resort situated on 1300 metres in the Swiss Alps, construction for the Maya Guesthouse started in October 2011. It will be the first hotel in Europe built entirely with straw bales. Due to the insulation values of the walls it will need no heating
Bunker hotels
The Null Stern Hotel in Teufen, Appenzellerland, Switzerland and the Concrete Mushrooms in Albania are former nuclear bunkerstransformed into hotels.
Shoe hotels
Shoe hotels are hotels built into a giant shoe. The idea was inspired by the There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe nursery rhyme. The largest such hotel is currently in Hokkaido, Japan. The most popular shoe hotels are modelled after a woman's platform dancing shoe.
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.
Capsule hotels
Capsule hotels are a type of economical hotel that are found in Japan, where people sleep in stacks of rectangular containers.
Ice and snow hotels
Main article: Ice hotel
The Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, and the Hotel de Glace in Duschenay, Canada, melt every spring and are rebuilt each winter; 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.
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.
Underwater hotels
Some hotels have accommodation underwater, such as Utter Inn in Lake Mälaren, Sweden. Hydropolis, project cancelled 2004 in Dubai, would have had suites on the bottom of the Persian Gulf, and Jules Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida requires scuba diving to access its rooms.
Other unusual hotels
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 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 Jailhotel Löwengraben in Lucerne, Switzerland is 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 Liberty Hotel in Boston, used to be the Charles Street Jail.
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.
There are several hotels throughout the world built into converted airliners.
Resort hotels
Some hotels are built specifically to create a captive trade, example at casinos and holiday resorts. Though of course 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.
In Las Vegas there is a tradition of one-upmanship with luxurious and extravagant hotels in a concentrated area known as the Las Vegas Strip. 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.
In Europe Center Parcs might be considered a chain of resort hotels, since the sites are largely man-made (though set in natural surroundings such as country parks) with captive trade, whereas holiday camps such as Butlins and Pontin's are probably not considered as resort hotels, since they are set at traditional holiday destinations which existed before the camps.
Railway hotels
Frequently, expanding railway companies built grand hotels at their termini, such as the Midland Hotel, Manchester next to the former Manchester Central Station and in London the ones above St Pancras railway station and Charing Cross railway station also in London is theChiltern Court Hotel above Baker Street tube station and Canada's grand railway hotels. They are or were mostly, but not exclusively, used by those travelling by rail.
Hotel Astoria and a statue of TsarNicholas I of Russia in front, in Saint Petersburg, Russia
Principe di Piemonte, Viareggio (Italy)
Hôtel Ritz in Paris, France
Interior of a capsule hotel in Osaka, Japan
RMS Queen Mary, Long Beach, California, United States
Chicago's Magnificent Mile has hosted many skyscraper hotels such as the Allerton Hotel
Motels
A motel (motor hotel) is a hotel which is for a short stay, usually for a night, for motorists on long journeys. It has direct access from the room to the vehicle (for example a central parking lot around which the buildings are set), and is built conveniently close to major roads and intersections.
World record setting hotels
Largest
In 2006, Guinness World Records listed the First World Hotel in Genting Highlands, Malaysia as the world's largest hotel with a total of 6,118 rooms. Similarly, the Venetian Palazzo Complex, in Las Vegas, has the most number of rooms. It has 7,117 rooms followed by MGM Grand Hotel, which contains 6,852 rooms.
see also List of largest hotels in the world
Oldest
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the oldest hotel still in operation is the Hoshi Ryokan, in the Awazu Onsen area of Komatsu, Japan which opened in 718.
Tallest
The Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong is claimed to be the world's highest hotel. It is located in the top floors of Hong Kong's tallest building, the 488 meter tall International Commerce Centre.
Hotel rooms as an investment
Some hotels sell individual rooms to investors. Timeshare is an example of this kind of investment. The buyer is allowed to stay in the room without charge or at a reduced rate for a given number of days each year. The investor is paid a share of the takings for the room. Rooms can be sold on a leasehold basis, sometimes on a 999 year lease. Room owners are free to sell at any time.
Living in hotels
A number of public figures have notably chosen to take up semi-permanent or permanent residence in hotels.
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 he raised his hand and told the diners "it was the food."
Inventor Nikola Tesla lived the last 10 years of his life at the New Yorker Hotel until 1943 when he died in the hotel room.
Millionaire Howard Hughes lived his last few years in a Las Vegas hotel.
Egyptian actor Ahmed Zaki lived his last 15 years in Ramses Hilton Hotel – Cairo.
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 Larry buy a home in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, California.
General Douglas McArthur lived his last 14 years in the penthouse of the Waldorf Towers, a part of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
American actress Elaine Stritch lived in the Savoy Hotel in London for over a decade.
Fashion designer Coco Chanel lived in the Hotel Ritz Paris on and off for more than 30 years.
Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera lived in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland from 1961 until his death in 1977.
British entrepreneur Jack Lyons lived in the Hotel Mirador Kempinski in Switzerland for several years until his death in 2008.
Fictitious hotels
Hotels have been used as the settings for television programmes such as the British situation comedies Fawlty Towers and I'm Alan Partridge, the British soap opera Crossroads, and in films such as the Bates Motel in Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho and The Dolphin Hotel in1408, a short story by Stephen King which was adapted into a 2007 film.
Another is Tipton Hotel, a fictitious hotel in Disney's "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody." When the show later became a spinoff into "The Suite Life on Deck," the Tipton evolved into the SS Tipton, run by the same company.
Historical Hotel Savoy in Florence
Main article: Motel
8 Things About Hotels I’d Love to See Changed
I’ve worked in the service industry since I was sixteen years old and realize how hard the work is, and how much the people who work in it are undervalued and generally underpaid. On a recent trip I stayed in quite a few hotels, a different one every day for a week, and realized they could be doing a few things that would make things more pleasant for guests, as well as make life easier for the good people that work there:
1. Put amenities in large refillable bottles.
I’ve stopped taking home those tiny bottles of shampoo and body lotion. It’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that I’m no longer that cheap and don’t mind spending a few dollars every couple of months to buy my own. I suspect most people that take them aren’t merely using them as travel-sized bottles for their carry-ons. I’ve always wondered what happens to those little bottles if I use them once. Do they get refilled, or tossed away? I assume they’re tossed, so I no longer bother to use them and bring my own. But for those who just have carry-ons, let’s all make the switch to using large refillable bottles.
2. Give me a checklist with checkboxes asking me what level of service I want.
I am sure there are people out there that like it when someone knocks on their door in the morning, asking if they’re in there so they can clean the room. And I am certain some people like it when they’re watching television and relaxing in the afternoon and someone stops by to see if they need the minibar filled, then thirty minutes later, another person comes by to lift the top of the sheet from the bed and fold it down, otherwise known as ‘turndown service.’
For those people, and for those of us who don’t use all twelve towels in one day, give guests a checklist when they arrive, asking them which services they’d like and which they don’t need. Then the service staff doesn’t have to worry about bothering guests and guests don’t have to worry about the staff coming into their rooms at all hours to put a chocolate on the pillow. Personally, I’d rather they leave a whole stack in the room upon arrival anyways.
3. Put instructions for connecting to the Internet, clearly stated, in each room.
If there’s anyone out there that doesn’t want or need to connect to the Internet when traveling, that’s great. For the rest of us, it’s our lifeline. I cry if I can’t get connected to the Internet. When I check in to a hotel, I’ve probably spent the morning battling lines at the airports and flying all day or night, and I’m not in the best shape to remember a gazillion details or verbal instructions or passwords.
To save me a call to the front desk, and to save the person at the front desk from receiving the same call they probably get from 98% of the guests five minutes after they land in the room, put a plastic-laminated sheet near the desk that tells you 1) What the charge is for Internet connectivity, 2) How to get connected, and 3) What the networks and passcodes are.
4. Decide whether you want to charge a gratuity or tip, but not both.
I always thought a tip and a gratuity were the same thing; a gesture of cash in exchange for good service. That’s the way it is in America, at least, and I’m fine with that. (Actually, I think it’s not such a great idea—but that’s for another post.) So how come whenever I order room service, on the bill are lines for ‘delivery charge’, ‘gratuity’ (added automatically) and ‘tip’?
As mentioned, I get the fact that a tip is a tip. And as far as I know, ‘gratuity’ is just another word for ‘tip’. As someone who rarely orders room service unless I have a very early morning flight (and believe me, anyone that has to deal with me first thing in the morning deserves something special), I understand that room service is a pain in the patootie for everyone involved, hence the marked up prices and appropriate charges associated.
Room service menus usually state something along the lines of “A service charge and 18% gratuity will be added to room service checks.” That’s fine and I’m down with that. So why is there a space on the bill to write in an additional tip? Or if not, why is the waiter hovering for a few minutes too long after they bring breakfast? (It can’t be because they want to spend more time with me.)
If they’re not getting that 18%, that’s just wrong. (However I was under the impression that the hotel got the delivery charge and the waiter got the tip. If not, why are they separated out?) If the servers merit their worth, pay them that or include that in the bill.
5. Get rid of the tips for bellhops.
They work hard, but I often found myself scrambling for small bills to hand out to everyone who touches my suitcases. But as much as I tried, I would sometimes find myself single-dollar(s) deficient. Why not raise their pay and up the price of the room a few bucks and reward those gals n’ guys for working so hard? Or for those who think that people won’t work hard unless they’re tipped (although I’d like to give them more credit than that), put a checkbox on our bill* when we leave for us to write in an appropriate gratuity. Or tip. (But both would be kind of a stretch.)
6. Put a coffee machine in every room.
The greatest joy in life is waking up, slipping on a bathrobe, and drinking coffee without anyone bothering you. I live for that moment every day. And when I check into a hotel and see a stocked coffee bar, I want to hug it and take it to bed with me. (And yes, I would buy it room service for breakfast in the morning.)
The coffee is usually just okay, and I know one can order an Aeropress orHandpresso and schlep that along. But as much as I would like to consider myself an annoying coffee snob, at 6:45am, I’m just happy to have something strong and warm in bed with me. (And I’m not talking about a plastic coffee machine…)
Even better is that you could make a deal with one of those capsule-taking espresso machines and sell the capsules as part of the minibar. I’m not a huge fan of some of the coffee that comes out of them, but I am certain that at least one company would love to have their machines featured in rooms for guests to try. What a marketing coup!
7. Get rid of the minibar service charge.
I understand why the prices are so high in the minibar; it’s usually late at night, or you’ve had a long day, and it’s just not feasible to go out into the night to find a 2 ounce bottle of whiskey. But what I don’t understand is the 10% service charge added. Does the housekeeper get that money? If so, that’s fine. But I doubt it. (And I’m happy to be proven otherwise.)
If not, just include whatever “service” goes into the work that’s done filling up that lil’ fridge that the hotel has to cover. Why is it separated out? (And please don’t say that it’s to cover the extra costs associated with stocking the bar. If the $45 for a half-bottle of California Chardonnay isn’t covering the costs of that bottle, I’d switch to another wine.)
8. Keep up the good work with the fantastic bed and comfy sheets.
I love how hotels have dialed up their sheets and bedding. In fact, I stayed at one place and the sheets were so good, if I wasn’t such an honest sort, I would have stripped the beds—at the risk of making the coffee machine jealous—and taken them home with me.
A few times I found it hard to get out of bed, and each night the idea of diving in to those lovely sheets and terrific mattress made all the difference in the world. As someone who spend nearly 95% of his time in his hotel room in bed, thanks for thinking of me.