Hotel

• 1. Introduction

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  In the year 705, a hot-spring inn called Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan opened its doors in Japan, and it has never stopped receiving guests. Guinness World Records recognises it as the oldest hotel in the world. One family has run it for forty-six generations. The hotel is one of the most ordinary things in modern life and one of the strangest. It is a building you pay to sleep in, then leave. From a single mattress in a small room to a suite with a refrigerator and en-suite bathroom, the idea covers a vast range. How did a medieval roadside inn become a place where billionaires and the poor both live for years? Why do people sleep underwater, inside nuclear bunkers, and in stacks of glass igloos? And why does a single word, hotel, share its origin with the word hospital?

• 2. From Inn To Industry

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  The precursor to the modern hotel was the inn of medieval Europe, a layout built around an inner court. Bedrooms lined the two sides, with the kitchen and parlour at the front and the stables at the back. Famous London examples include the George and the Tabard. Before that, religious orders at monasteries and abbeys offered accommodation to travellers on the road during the Middle Ages.

  For about 200 years from the mid-17th century, coaching inns served coach travellers, stabling teams of horses and swapping tired teams for fresh ones. Traditionally they stood seven miles apart, though the terrain often decided the spacing. Some English towns had as many as ten such inns, and the rivalry between them grew intense. They competed for income from stagecoach operators and for the money spent on food and drink by wealthy passengers. By the end of the century, coaching inns ran more professionally, with regular timetables and fixed menus.

  Inns began catering to richer clients in the mid-18th century and grew in grandeur to match. Sudhir Andrews traces the birth of an organised hotel industry to Europe's chalets and small hotels that served aristocrats. One of the first hotels in a modern sense, the Royal Clarence, opened in Exeter in 1768, though the idea only caught on in the early 19th century. In 1812, Mivart's Hotel opened in London and later changed its name to Claridge's.

• 3. The Age Of Palaces

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  The 1829 Tremont House in Boston and the 1836 Astor House in New York City marked a wave of luxury lodging across Western Europe and North America. The 1889 Savoy Hotel in London and the Ritz chain in London and Paris in the late 1890s served an ever wealthier clientele. In the United States these grand places were called palace hotels, while Europe called them grand hotels.

  A palace hotel was always large, but a grand hotel could have as few as 50 guest rooms. Both featured dining, facilities for social activities, and a high standard of personalized service alongside rooms for sleeping. Many sat downtown in cities, and the type spread worldwide to give European and American travelers familiar surroundings. Luxury hotels of this period frequently offered long-term stays in addition to short ones.

  In the United States, most hotels from the 19th through the mid-20th centuries held both short-stay rooms and rooms or suites for more permanent residence. People of all social classes lived in hotels during this time. Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 later named hotels as places of public accommodation, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or national origin.

• 4. A Word From Hospital

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  The word hotel comes from the French hôtel, sharing its origin with the word hospital. It once referred to a building that saw frequent visitors and provided care, rather than a place offering accommodation. In contemporary French, hôtel now carries the same meaning as the English term, while hôtel particulier holds the old sense.

  Hôtel-Dieu in Paris keeps that older lineage alive, having served as a hospital since the Middle Ages. The French spelling with the circumflex was once used in English but is now rare. That circumflex replaces an 's' from the earlier hostel spelling, a word that drifted into a new but closely related meaning over time.

  Hotels usually take the definite article, which is why people say The Astoria Hotel, or simply The Astoria. The grammar marks the hotel as a place with a name and a presence, not just a category of building.

• 5. A World Of Rooms

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  Across price categories, locations, and purposes, the facilities of hotels vary considerably. Every hotel offers a private room and a place to sleep, though the form differs sharply. Western-style hotels put a bed in the room, while the Japanese ryokan and some Korean ondol rooms use futons or mats that move out of the way during the day. Most rooms have locking doors and a physical or electronic key.

  Hotel rooms are usually numbered, or named in some smaller hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, so guests can find them. Hotels typically provide bedding and towels, washed between guests and replaced during a stay. Staff usually clean the room daily, and some hotels add a turndown service before bedtime. Guest rooms often hold television sets, hair dryers, desks, chairs, Wi-fi, and complimentary personal care products.

  Outside the guest room, a reception desk handles check-in, check-out, and requests. Many hotels add restaurants, bars, and room service. Fitness and wellness offerings can include swimming pools, fitness rooms, saunas, and spas. Hotels built to host conferences and meetings keep meeting rooms ranging from small spaces to large banquet halls or exhibit halls.

• 6. How Hotels Are Sorted

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  Hotel rating systems focus on quality, judging amenities and the level of service available. A higher-rated hotel may be expected to offer a spa, while a lower-rated one may simply have a television in every room. There is no global standard for hotel ratings, so amenities at any given rating level shift from one market to another.

  International luxury hotels carry at least a Five Diamond or Five Star rating and cluster in financial centres and capital cities. Example brands include Grand Hyatt, Conrad, InterContinental, Four Seasons, The Peninsula, and The Ritz-Carlton. Lifestyle luxury resorts, such as Waldorf Astoria, St. Regis, Aman, and Raffles, sell a unique guest experience rather than mere lodging. Boutique hotels are smaller independent non-branded places, generally 100 rooms or fewer, set in unique or intimate settings.

  Down the scale, focused or select service hotels limit amenities and target a specific traveler, like the single business traveler, with brands such as Holiday Inn and Courtyard by Marriott. Economy and limited service hotels offer no-frills accommodations, sometimes with a continental breakfast, through brands like Motel 6's peers such as Hampton by Hilton and Holiday Inn Express. Extended stay hotels, including Staybridge Suites and Residence Inn by Marriott, offer longer-term stays and weekly rates for travelers who need a room for a stretch of time.

• 7. The Strangest Lodgings

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  The Null Stern Hotel in Teufen, Switzerland, and the Concrete Mushrooms in Albania are former nuclear bunkers turned into hotels. Other hotels reach for the extreme in different directions. The Desert Cave Hotel in Coober Pedy, South Australia, is built into the remains of an opal mine, while hotels in Cappadocia, Turkey, occupy natural cave formations. The Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, the first ice hotel in the world, was first built in 1990 and is rebuilt each winter, melting every spring.

  The Library Hotel in New York City assigns one Dewey Decimal System category to each of its ten floors. The Jailhotel Löwengraben in Lucerne, the Malmaison in Oxford, and the Liberty Hotel in Boston are converted prisons. The Luxor on the Las Vegas Strip rises in a pyramid, and the Burj al-Arab in Dubai, on an artificial island, is shaped like a boat's sail. Jules' Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida, requires scuba diving to reach its rooms. Capsule hotels, first introduced in Japan, let people sleep in stacks of rectangular containers with shared bathrooms.

  Some hotels won fame through history and culture. Schloss Cecilienhof in Potsdam hosted the 1945 Potsdam Conference, where Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Joseph Stalin met. The Waldorf Astoria in New York gave its name to the Waldorf Salad, and the Raffles Hotel in Singapore birthed the Singapore Sling cocktail. The Algonquin Hotel in New York hosted the literary group known as the Algonquin Round Table. On the Las Vegas Strip, a tradition of one-upmanship has put nineteen of the world's twenty-five largest hotels in one concentrated area, holding over 67,000 rooms between them.

• 8. Living In Hotels

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  Coco Chanel lived in the Hôtel Ritz, Paris, on and off for more than 30 years, one of many public figures who made a hotel a home. Inventor Nikola Tesla spent the last ten years of his life at the New Yorker Hotel and died in his room in 1943. Composer Cole Porter spent his final 25 years in an apartment at the Waldorf Towers, where former President Herbert Hoover lived from the end of his presidency in 1933 until his death in 1964.

  Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera lived in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland from 1961 until his death in 1977. Billionaire Howard Hughes lived in hotels during the last ten years of his life, from 1966 to 1976, primarily in Las Vegas. Actor Richard Harris lived at the Savoy Hotel in London, and a hotel archivist recounts that as he was carried out on a stretcher shortly before his death in 2002, he raised his hand and told the diners it was the food.

  Hotels make appealing housing because they require no application process and no long-term commitment. They include housekeeping and offer ready amenities, and they carry no responsibility for home maintenance. People with no fixed address, including digital nomads and workers on long assignments, may live in them. In the United States today, hotels increasingly serve as housing for the poor, often more readily available for regulatory reasons than the single-room occupancy housing or boarding houses that once met that need.