Hotels Information

The rise of the automobile in the early twentieth century reordered the nation's transportation regime and marked the beginning of a new hotel age that lasted for more than two decades. The nineteenth-century American hotel system had been predicated upon long-distance, point-to-point, steam-driven water and rail transportation, and the gradual transition to automobility wrought major changes in the hotel industry. In an effort to secure the patronage of drivers, existing hotels added parking facilities, and new establishments incorporated them into their building plans. Other developers created the motor hotel, or motel, a new hotel variant which, instead of being located in cities and other travel destinations, was typically sited on inexpensive land along the roads in between. The automobile also influenced the hotel industry in construction and management techniques, as Fordist mass production fostered a corresponding drive for standardization and scale in hotels. E. M. Statler was the foremost figure in this cause. In 1908, he opened the first chain of hotels dedicated to his belief that hospitality should be made as similar as possible in every location. Statler's success with a business model based on cost cutting and scientific management made him the leading hotelier of his time and an important influence upon twentieth-century hotel administration. By 1930, as the Great Depression was putting a definitive end to this period of hotel building, the Census Bureau counted more than 17,000 hotels in the United States.

The American hotel industry expanded at a previously unseen pace following World War II. The three-decade economic boom of the postwar years increased the incidence of commercial travel and sent incomes soaring, and the success of organized labor distributed wealth more evenly and made paid vacations a reality for millions of workers. Meanwhile, the creation of the interstate highway system and the emergence of safe and reliable passenger aircraft made travel easier and more broadly subscribed than ever before. Hotels emerged as an important terrain of struggle in the conflictual domestic politics of the era. When civil rights activists demanded an end to racial discrimination in public accommodations, the special legal status of hotel space became a crucial consideration in the litigation strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was no coincidence that the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was definitively established by the Supreme Court's ruling in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States.

Hotels were similarly implicated in international politics. Americans ventured abroad in increasing numbers during the postwar years, and the nation's hotel industry expanded globally in order to accommodate them. In the context of Cold War geopolitics, American-owned hotels in foreign countries also served as exemplars of the benefits and vitality of capitalism. Conrad Hilton in particular spoke of his company's overseas properties, particularly those along the Iron Curtain, as valuable assets in the fight against communism. In a world simultaneously divided by politics and connected by transportation, hotels were important symbolic sites.

The American hotel industry benefited greatly from the uneven prosperity of the 1980s and 1990s and entered the twenty-first century as a large and fast-growing segment of the national economy. The hotels of the United States employed well over 1.4 million people and collected more than $100 billion per year in receipts. They formed a dense network of 53,000 properties comprising some 4 million guest rooms nationwide. Internationally, the industry operated more than 5,000 overseas hotels with over half a million rooms.

From its beginnings as an experimental cultural form, the American hotel became a ubiquitous presence on the national landscape and developed into an immense and vital national industry. The hotel system transformed the nature of travel, turning it from an arduous and uncertain undertaking of the few into a predictable and commonplace activity of the many. On the way, the hotel became instrument, ornament, symptom, and symbol of America's continental and international empire.