Hotel industry: General information on the hotel industry

A little history of the hotel industry : During Antiquity, hostels offer food and shelter to the traveler. The Roman Empire uses them in particular as a relay for its armies. After the barbarian invasions, only furnished houses remained, which most often became haunts for highwaymen and brothels.
In the Middle Ages, the hotel (written Ostel) still has the meaning of “place of reception for the hosts, hospital” (like the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris) before losing it to the profit of the inn except in the monastic world and designates almost exclusively a “noble residence ".
During the Renaissance, it designates more particularly the King's House then the residence of a prince or a lord, finally that of a bourgeois (a distinction is sometimes made between the grand hotel, inhabited year-round, and the small hotel, townhouse inhabited during the visiting season called social season): it then refers to the private mansion, a French concept with a vocation other than the accommodation offer. Today, the word "hotel" and its English equivalent " hotels Have the same meaning, and the expression "hôtel particulier" is used to refer to the old French concept. French spelling with the circumflex accent was commonly found in English in the past, but this is rarely the case today (in the past, the French word was spelled "hostel"). At the same time, it may concern public buildings: Currency, sales, foreign affairs, town hall.
The oldest hostellerie in France still in service is the Hostellerie de la Croix d'Or in Provins, the facade of which has not changed since it was built in 1270. At the end of 2004, it was a restaurant. It is located opposite the XNUMXth century hotel de Vaulisant.
From the XNUMXth century, we can see that the hotel differs from the inn which takes on a rural connotation. The expression designates an urban establishment to which an adjective such as "Grand" is added, or a location "of the Station, Terminus, (...), of the South, of the Opera (...)" or even associated with a function "of the Trade, Traders, Travelers (…) ”. We also observe that with the development of the luxury hotel industry, the name of the hotels affirms their distinction by a specific vocabulary, it is "Grand or Palace", uses a memorable location such as "Mont-Blanc or the Shore". The differentiation can also take a "cosmopolitan" orientation by calling itself Nations, Ambassadors, Colonies ... ". Finally, some hotels simply keep the surname of their founder, which thus becomes a brand (Carlton, Ritz).

Some famous hotel guests : American billionaire Howard Hughes has lived most of his life in hotels. With his entourage, he moved from hotel to hotel from Beverly Hills to Boston before deciding to settle in Las Vegas and become a casino mogul. Less than a month after his arrival on November 27, 1966, Hughes made a take-over bid to acquire the Desert Inn. The 8th floor of the hotel became the nerve center of his empire, and the penthouse (of which the equivalent in English is often used, the penthouse) on the 9th floor his personal residence. Subsequently, Hughes moved to the Bahamas, Vancouver, London and several other locations, always taking up residence in the hotel penthouse on the top floor. Between 1966 and 1968 he also bought several other Mafia hotel-casinos: the Castaways, the New Frontier, the Landmark Hotel and Casino, the Sands and the Silver Slipper.
Cole Porter lived for several years at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.
Coco Chanel took up residence at the Ritz Hotel in Paris for over 30 years, until her death at the age of 87 in a suite that now bears her name. Rue Cambon, where the Channel group still has its headquarters, passes behind the Ritz hotel, a door of which adjoins the Hemingway bar. It was through this same door that Princess Diana and her fiancé Dodi Al-Fayed tried to escape journalists and paparazzi on August 31, 1997.
King Peter II of Yugoslavia spent most of World War II at the Claridge Hotel in London. Her son, Aleksandar Karađorđević, was born in this hotel.
Prince Félix Ioussoupov resided at the Hôtel de Vendôme in Paris.
After being dethroned by his son Sultan Qabus ibn Said of Oman in 1970, Sultan Said ibn Taimour resided at the Dorchester Hotel in London, where he died in 1972.
Michel Polnareff lived for a while at the Hôtel Royal Monceau in the 1980s.

Unusual hotels : Some hotels stand out from their competitors by their location, their construction or their layout, with some being included in the Guinness Book of Records.
The Queen Elizabeth 2 and the Rotterdam are former cruise ships converted into luxury dockside hotels.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the oldest hotel still in operation is the Hoshi Ryokan, in Awazu, Japan. Opened in 7171-718, it has a thermal spring.
Since January 1, 2008, the Venetian hotel complex in Las Vegas (USA) is considered the largest hotel in the world, in terms of capacity with just over 7 rooms, thanks to its junction with The Palazzo which has a little more than 000 rooms. In 3, the First World Hotel & Plaza, located in the hill station of Genting Highlands in Malaysia, appears to have taken the number one spot thanks to an expansion bringing its initial capacity of 000 rooms, in 2015, to 6 rooms, thus allowing it to claim entry into the Guinness Book of Records. Six of the world's largest hotels are located in the American city of Las Vegas, including the MGM Grand Las Vegas with 116 rooms, the Wynn Las Vegas with 2013 rooms, the Luxor Las Vegas with 7 rooms, offering a total capacity of 'approximately 351 rooms. The future Abraj Kudai complex in Mecca (Saudi Arabia), scheduled to open in 6852, could well be around 4 rooms.
The Library Hotel in New York, located near the New York Public Library, is a hotel created in 2001, with 60 rooms, spread over ten floors of six rooms each, and has the unique characteristic of having been furnished according to the classification Dewey's decimal. Each floor is dedicated to one of the classes of the decimal classification and each room is decorated according to the discipline to which its numerical code relates. Classes 000, 100 and 200 are not associated with the first three levels - from the ground floor to the second floor - but are "shifted" to correspond to floors 10 (class 000) to 12 (class 200).
Some hotels have the distinction of having been built in less conventional materials. The Maya Boutique Hotel, located in Nax in Switzerland and inaugurated in 2012, is an ecolodge built in bales of straw.
In high latitudes or altitudes, some entrepreneurs have had the idea of ​​using ice and snow to build their exceptional hotel. These are seasonal buildings, due to the melting of the material. Ice hotels have thus developed in Swedish Lapland for the Jukkasjärvi ice hotel (1989, 65 rooms) and in Finland for the Igloo Village Kakslauttanen, in glass igloos open all year round, in Canada, with the Hôtel de Glace, created in 2001, a hotel rebuilt every year and which moved in 2016 to the Valcartier Vacation Village, north of Quebec City, but also in Switzerland in Zermatt where an igloo village has been established at 2 727 meters above sea level. In the Netherlands, in Oss, you can sleep in a hotel made of sand with one bedroom.
Concrete Mushrooms in Albania are old bunkers converted into hotel rooms. The Null Stern Hotel in Teufen in the canton of Appenzell in Switzerland is housed in a converted fallout shelter.
At 355 meters, the JW Marriott Marquis Dubai is considered the tallest hotel in the world with 77 floors. The construction of the two Twin Towers started in 2006 and their opening takes place in 2011. The Twin Towers are located in Business Bay, a business district of Dubai. A Swiss project imagines the construction for 2019 of the hotel de la tour Vals, at the Thermes de Vals, with a height of 381 meters, which would also make it the tallest building in Europe.
A luxury 4-star hotel, the Malmaison Oxford in Oxford was once a medieval prison with intractable executioners. If the rooms no longer look like cells at all, the dungeons in the basement have remained in good condition. It is even said that ghosts of former hanged men, in particular a certain Marie Blandy, roam the corridors ...