A hotel is a commercial establishment that offers lodging, food, and other services to the public. The United States lodging industry consists chiefly of four types of hotels: transient, residential, and resort hotels; and motels, or motor hotels. Transient hotels, usually located in downtown city areas, cater largely to business travelers and tourists. Residential hotels are essentially apartment houses that rent rooms or apartments on a monthly or yearly basis and that offer hotel amenities: dining rooms, room service, and maid service. Resort hotels, usually located in vacation areas, provide recreation and often convention facilities for their guests. Rates at resort hotels are offered on the European Plan (room only), the American Plan (including 3 meals daily), or the Modified American Plan (2 meals a day). Motels and motor hotels cater primarily to tourists and other transient guests. Most are located near highways, although in recent years a number of high-rise motor hotels have been built in or near cities and offer free parking to automobile travelers. HISTORY OF INNKEEPING Lodging places for travelers probably first developed along roads and travel routes. Muslim inns in western Asia were known as manzils, literally, "The place where the traveler descends." In Persia, inns were called karavan serai, or "house of the caravans." Many were simply enclosed areas near a spring or well, and were actually no more than protected watering and resting places. The Bible contains numerous references to inns and other lodging places. The inn in Bethlehem that turned away Joseph and Mary was probably a khan, a primitive village inn that provided lodging alone; travelers had to find their own food. In Rome, and in Roman-dominated Europe, lodging places located on the extensive system of Roman highways were called mansiones; in medieval Italy they were called locanda; and in France they were known as cabarets (a word originally referring to a building with many rooms) or hotelleries--from which the modern word hotel is derived. The earliest inn identified by name was Le Grand Saint Bernard Hospice, founded by Augustinian monks in a Swiss Alpine pass for the convenience of pilgrims going to and from Rome. Established in AD 961, it was a massive stone structure that could offer shelter to 300 persons and beds to 70 or 80. Its special service, and one that survived until recently, was the use of Saint Bernard dogs to track down travelers lost in the Alpine snows. English Inns With the advent of better roads and the consequent increase in travel, innkeeping became an important industry. England, especially, developed a system of clean, comfortable roadside inns where meals were offered as a regular service. One of England's most famous early inns was the Bat and Ball Inn, scene of the first cricket game. Other famous English inns include the Tabard at Southwark in south London, from which Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims set out; and the White Hart Inn (also at Southwark), the first meeting place of Charles Dickens's Pickwick and his servant, Sam Weller. American Inns and Hotels The first inn built in the original American colonies was the Jamestown Inn in Virginia, established about 1610. Lodging houses--called inns or taverns in the north, and ordinaries in the south--were soon established near seaports, canals, river landings, and post roads. An 18th-century Massachusetts law provided penalties for any town that did not offer lodging for travelers. The first American structure to be designed and built as a hotel was New York City's City Hotel (1799), which operated until the 1840s. The seven-story Boston Exchange Coffee House, opened in 1804, was in its time the largest and best-equipped hotel in America, with more than 200 apartments and a total of 300 rooms. These included stores, offices, banquet halls, ballrooms, dining rooms, numbered private bedrooms, a billiard room, a hairdresser's room, and a large number of bathing rooms. Its central, domed area, the Exchange, was used as a commercial meeting place. Many other Exchange hotels incorporating this feature were built throughout the country. The Exchange gradually became known as the lobby, the name for an anteroom in the British Parliament where legislative business is transacted. Boston's 170-room Tremont House (1828) established an international standard for hotel amenities. An exceptionally high proportion of the total area was devoted to public rooms. Its main dining room could accommodate 200 at a sitting and offered menu cards and French cuisine. The reading room was stocked with newspapers from around the world. Tremont House innovations included private single and double bedrooms (previously travelers had had to share their quarters with one or more strangers), door locks, room service, water closets, free soap, and gas illumination in public rooms. THE EFFECTS OF THE RAILROAD AND THE AUTOMOBILE In order to meet the needs of travelers, the location and size of hotels changed to reflect new modes of transportation. As the stagecoach and horse gave way to the railroad, the roadside tavern was replaced by the large city hotel, which was often located adjacent to railroad stations. As cities grew larger and the volume of train travel increased, larger and more elaborate hotels were built in all the major cities; and almost every city or town with a railroad station soon had hotel facilities for rail travelers. The introduction of the automobile triggered a shift in travel patterns and, eventually, a broad exodus in travel accommodations from city centers back to sites adjacent to roads. In the early 1900s motorists could put up for the night in a tourist camp--a group of frame cottages, built along a highway, offering little more than a bed and often operated as a sideline by a farmer who happened to own highway frontage. The tourist camp evolved into the tourist court as the cottages were grouped around a central courtyard; by the 1950s the motel, a long, low building fringed with automobiles and often facing the highway, had become an American institution. The downtown hotels and palatial resort hotels in remote areas that survived the rise of motels shared a characteristic: they either had or soon added facilities for conventions and other group meetings. Most new high-rise, in-city hotels built since the 1950s were planned with conventions in mind. Luxury and Resort Hotels The hotel de grand luxe--the equivalent of a palace built for the wealthy, traveling public--was a 19th-century phenomenon in all the capitals of Europe and in many of America's major cities. The Swiss hotelier Cesar Ritz (1850-1918) established a number of elegant and palatial hotels in Paris, London, and New York, and gave his name to a particular style of conspicuous consumption. In San Francisco, the Palace Hotel was the most splendid and expensive establishment of its day, rivaling even New York's old Waldorf-Astoria. Wealthy vacationers could relax in palatial establishments along the Riviera or take the waters and play roulette in European resorts built near mineral springs. (The Belgian town of Spa supplied the generic name for this type of resort.) In the United States the first important resorts were also spas; Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Hot Springs, Va., and White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., were fashionable early watering places. Although many urban grand hotels had declined by the mid-20th century, resort hotels have flourished. With the coming of the jet age, areas that had been too distant or inaccessible began to be developed as luxury resorts, and today resort hotels can be found in such previously remote regions as the coast of Sardinia or the Yucatan in Mexico. The enormous growth in tourism has also spurred the increase in vacation hotels, and in many areas of the world--the Caribbean, for example, or the French and Italian Rivieras--the tourist has become the prime source of income. Statler and the Rise of Hotel Chains Until the early 1900s most city hotels in the United States were either luxurious and expensive, or inexpensive and uncomfortable. Ellsworth \TStatler\t's accomplishment was to establish a chain of middle-class hotels that set new standards for comfort and cleanliness at moderate prices. His first important hotel, the Buffalo Statler (1907), offered "a room and a bath at a dollar and a half." Convinced that private rooms with baths would give him a vital competitive edge, Statler designed a plumbing shaft that permitted bathrooms to be built back to back, providing two baths for little more than the price of one and allowing him to offer many private rooms with adjoining private baths. Statler was the first to put telephones and radios in every guest room, as well as full-length mirrors, built-in closets, and a special faucet for ice water. Restaurant recipes were standardized, and identical silver, china, and linens were purchased in quantity for use in all the system's hotels. Eventually, Statler hotels were opened in many major cities in the United States, and Statler's success inspired the formation of other hotel chains. The Statler chain was bought by the late hotel mogul Conrad \THilton\t in 1954. Hilton's chain is now among the world's largest, comprising 271 hotels and inns in the United States. The world's largest lodging systems are the Memphis-based Holiday Inns, Inc., with 262,002 guest rooms; and Best Western, headquartered in Phoenix, Ariz., with 1,796 properties. THE INDUSTRY TODAY By the late 1980s total U.S. lodging industry sales exceeded $50 billion a year. The number of hotels and motels in the United States exceeded 44,000, of which just over 20 percent were traditional hotels. The center city hotel, which represents the greater part of that 20 percent, is reemerging as an important institution for several reasons: the revitalization of urban centers; the development of new convention facilities and complexes, which has increased the demand for lodging accommodations; and the commitment of leading hotel and motel chains to develop properties in major cities. Over the past several decades the introduction of the concept of franchising (see \Tfranchise\t) has stimulated rapid growth of hotel and motel chains. Individual entrepreneurs cannot design, finance, build, and manage enough properties to accommodate the increasing flood of American travelers. Membership in a major franchise, however, has given hotel operators powerful financial and marketing backing, as well as the assistance of brand-name identification, national advertising programs, and central computerized reservation systems. Some 700 hotel and motel chains and systems account for more than 60 percent of the 2.9 million guest rooms in the United States. A large proportion of that percentage--and of the hotel and motel rooms available in major cities and resorts throughout the world--is owned, operated, or managed by a small number of major U.S. chains. With so many hotels and motels controlled by a relatively small group of operators, it is not surprising that standardization of architecture and accoutrements is common throughout the industry. Most middle-priced hotel and motel rooms resemble each other somewhat. Standardization has become even more widespread because Holiday Inns and other large chains operate subsidiaries that supply motel-standard furniture, furnishings, and fixtures to owners of independent lodgings as well as to their own franchisees. In the late 1970s and 1980s, however, luxury hotels designed by prestigious architects and resplendent with the newest or rarest of materials and furnishings were built in many major cities. New York City has several, one of which, the Helmsley Palace, combines a restoration of the magnificent 1884 Villard Houses with a modern 51-story tower. Another, the Grand Hyatt, is considered a superlative example of the use of palatial open space in its many-layered lobby. HOTEL ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT A large hotel is a complex system involving a wide range of trades and professions. Moreover, hotel management has become increasingly specialized as hotels have grown larger, offered more services, and actively sought to market those services to potential guests--business travelers, conventioneers, tourists, business clubs, and others. A number of hotel schools train students in the various aspects of management. The most prominent U.S. hotel school is the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University; many state universities have also organized schools of hotel training. In recent years two central problems--security and fire prevention--have become concerns of hotel designers and managers. Hotel populations, transient and largely unknown to the staffs that serve them, have traditionally provided a rich field for thieves. Ingenious new key systems have been developed to deal with this problem. Because ordinary keys can be duplicated, many hotels now issue their guests a plastic card that is electronically coded to fit into a slot near the guest-room door and to open it only if the card matches the information stored in a console at the front desk. Each time a new guest registers for the room, the console information and the coding on the card change. A major obstacle in assuring maximum fire safety is the wide variance in local building codes. Few codes were designed to deal with such problems as the flammable plastics used in hotel interiors or the broad, high open spaces that characterize the design of some new structures. A few of the recent fires--some in hotels with advanced fire-protection systems--occurred where local codes did not require sprinklers and smoke detectors throughout the building. Variations in structure, function, and staffing do not permit a system of nationwide coding for the lodging industry. Rather, enhanced fire protection is achieved as lodging owners work with local fire and building authorities on a property-by-property basis. ALBERT E. KUDRLE Bibliography: Brymer, R. A., Introduction to Hotel and Restaurant Management, 5th ed. (1987); Gee, Chuck Y., Resort Development and Management, 2d ed. (1988); Lattin, Gerald W., The Lodging and Food Service Industry, 2d ed. (1989); Lecler, Rene, ed., The Three Hundred Best Hotels in the World (1981; repr. 1985); Limerick, Jeffrey, et al., America's Grand Resort Hotels (1979); Rutes, Walter, and Penner, Richard, Hotel Planning and Design (1985); Walter, M., and Donzel, D., Grand Oriental Hotels, 1800-1939 (1987); Watkin, D., et al., The Golden Age of Palace Hotels (1984); White, A. S., Palaces of the People: A Social History of Commercial Hospitality (1970); Williamson, Jefferson, The American Hotel: An Anecdotal History (1930; repr. 1975).