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Accommodations and catering service in the world
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1.3 Accommodations and catering service in the world
The word hospitality comes from "hospice", an old French word meaning "to provide care and shelter". The first institutions of this kind, taverns, had existed long before the word was coined. In Ancient Rome they were located on the main roads, to provide food and fresh horses and overnight accommodation for officials and couriers of the government with special documents. The contemporaries proclaimed these inns to be "fit for a king". That is why such documents became a symbol of status and were subject to thefts and forgeries.
Some wealthy landowners built their own taverns on the edges of their j estates. Nearer the cities, inns and taverns were run by freemen or by retired gladiators who would invest their savings in this business in the same way that many of today's retired athletes open restaurants. Innkeepers, as a whole, were hardly the Conrad Hiltons of their day. Inns for common folk were regarded as dens of vice and often served as houses of pleasure. The owners were required to report any customers who planned crimes in their taverns. The penalty for not doing so was death. The death penalty could be imposed merely for watering the beer!
After the fall of the Roman Empire, public hospitality for the ordinary travelers became the province of religious orders. In these days, the main purpose of traveling was pilgrimage to the holy places. The pilgrims preferred to stay in the inns located close to religious sites or even on the premises of the monasteries Monks raised their own provisions on their own grounds, kitchens were cleaner and better organized than in private households. So the food was often of a quality superior to that found elsewhere on the road.
The first big hotels with hundreds of rooms were built in the vicinity of railroad terminals to serve the flood of new passengers. This new hotels were more impersonal than the old-fashioned family-style inn or hotel. Indeed, they were usually organized as corporations in what we now consider a more businesslike manner. The cluster of hotels around Grand Central Station in New York is a good surviving example of the impact of railroads on the hotel business.
A wide variety of accommodations is available to the modern tourist. They vary from the guest house or tourist home with one or two rooms to grand luxury hotels with hundreds of rooms. Many of these hotels, like the famous Raffles in Singapore, are survivors of a more leisurely and splendid age that served the wealthy. A feature of Europe is the pension, a small established with perhaps ten to twenty guest room. Originally, pensions not only lodging but also full board, all of the day’s meals for the guest. Nowadays, however, most of them offer only a bed, usually at an inexpensive rate, and a “continental breakfast" of coffee and rolls.
Many people travel to Europe because of its rich historical and cultural heritage. As a result, many old homes and castles have been converted into small hotels. American travel magazines often carry advertisements for holidays in "genuine European castles”. Many old inns have also been restored to serve people with similar romantic tastes.
The major trend in the hotel industry today, however, is toward the large corporate-operated hotel. Many of these hotels might well be described as “package”. A number of large companies have assumed a dominant place in the hotel industry. The biggest is Holiday Inns, which in 1975 had 274,000 rooms. Others thatoperate on a worldwide basis are Sheraton, Inter-Continental, Trust Houses Forte, Hilton International, and Ramada Inns.
Ownership of these hotel companies is an indication of their importance to travel industry as a whole. Hilton International is owned by Trans World Airlines, and Inter-Continental by Pan American Airways; Sheraton is a subsidiary of the huge multinational corporation, ITT. Many other airlines and travel companies have also entered the hotel business and some of the tour operators, especially in Europe, own or operate hotels.
Some of the hotel corporations operate on a franchise basis; that is, the hotel and its operation are designed by the corporation, but the right to run it is sold or leased. The operator then pays a percentage to the parent corporation. His franchise can be withdrawn, however, if he does not maintain the standards that have been established. Other hotel companies serve primarily as managers. The Caribe Hilton, the first and most successful of the big resort hotels in Puerto Rico, was built by the government of the island, which then gave the Hilton company a management contract.
Large, modern hotels contain not only guest rooms, but many other facilities as well. They usually contain restaurants and cocktail lounges, shops, and recreational facilities such as swimming pools or health clubs. Many hotels also have facilities for social functions, conventions, and conferences- ballrooms, auditoriums, meeting rooms of different sizes, exhibit areas, and so forth. Not so long ago, convention facilities were ordinarily found only in large cities or in intensively developed resort areas like Miami Beach. Nowadays, they are more often included in resort hotels so that the people who attend conventions there can combine business with pleasure.
Another modern development in the hotel business is the motel, a word made up from motor and hotel. The motel might best be described as a place that has accommodations both for automobiles and human beings. The typical motel is a low structure around which is built a parking lot to enable the guests to park their cars as close as possible to their rooms. In urban areas, a large garage takes the place of the parking lot.
Another trend in the hotel industry is the construction of the self-contained resort complex. This consists of a hotel and recreational, facilities, all of which in effect are isolated from the nearby community. Examples include the holiday "villages" that have been built by (Club Mediterranee for its members. Another example is the Dorado Beach Hotel in Puerto Rico, built by the Rockefeller-owned Rockresorts. Among other recreational features, the Dorado Beach Hotel has two eighteen-hole championship golf courses on its grounds. It is located far enough from the hotel strip in San Juan to make a trip into the city rather difficult.
Casinos, wherever they are legal, are another feature of some hotels. In Las Vegas, Nevada, the hotels are really secondary to gain-bling. They feed, house, and entertain the guests, but the real profits come from the casinos. In Puerto Rico and other places, gambling usually acts as an additional, rather than the principal, attraction for the hotels.
Still another trend in resort accommodations is condominium construction. The condominium is a building or group of buildings in which individuals purchase separate units. At the same time they become joint owners of I he public facilities of the structure and its grounds and recreational areas. The condominium has become popular because of the desire of many people to own a second home for vacations. Indeed, many of the owners maintain their condominiums just for this purpose. Others, however, make arrangements whereby they can rent their space when they are not occupying it. It is an obvious attraction for someone who has only a month's vacation a year to be able to make an income from his property for the remaining eleven months. Many owners make enough money in rentals to pay for the purchase price and the maintenance costs of the condominium.
Caravanning and camping reflect another trend in modern tourism, thanks in large part to the automobile. Cars variously called caravans, vans, or campers come equipped with sleeping quarters and even stoves and refrigerators. They are in effect small mobile homes, or at least hotel rooms. Many people also carry tents and other equipment with which they can set up a temporary home. Facilities are now offered in many resort areas for camping. The operator may rent only space, but he may also provide electricity and telephone set vice.
A similar kind of arrangement exists for boat owners who wish to use their boats for accommodations while they are traveling in them. This involves the marina, a common feature of resort areas on waterways. The coast of Florida, for example, is dotted with marinas.
A few resorts that contain a mixture of several different kinds of accommodations have been built in recent years. Probably the most spectacular example is the Costa Smeralda development, constructed on the Italian island of Sardinia by a syndicate headed by the Aga Khan. It contains hotels of varying price ranges, residential areas, marinas, elaborate recreational facilities, and even some light industry. The syndicate's own airline flies passengers to the island from such points as Nice and Home. The Costa Smeralda is the largest and most expensive example in the world of developing not just a resort but an entire resort area. Careful planning included not only mixture of facilities, but also the architecture and the preservation natural landscape.
Some resort areas do not reflect this careful planning Miami Beach, for example, is a monument to tourism and the accommodations industry that serves it, but the beach now is hardly visible because of the hotels that form a wall along the oceanfront. The Condado Beach section of San Juan in Puerto Rico is very similar There are also intensive hotel and apartment developments on the Mediterranean, at Torremolinos on the Costa del Sol in Spain, for example and along much of the coastline of the French Riviera.
In spite of the growth of these and other examples of resort areas blessed with sun and sea, cities like New York, London, and Paris still contain the greatest concentrations of hotels, in 1975. New York had approximately 1OO.OOO guest rooms to 40,000 in Miami Beach. This once again reinforces the fact that the large established cities are still the most important destinations. They can absorb tourism more easily and less conspicuously than areas in which tourism is the principal business.
The hotel business has its own load factor in the form of tin occupancy rate. This is the percentage of rooms or beds that are occupied at a certain point in time or over a period of time. One of the hazards of the hotel business is a high occupancy rate during one season and a very low one during another. For instance, Miami Beach essentially a winter resort. Hotels there try to increase occupancy in the summer by offering very low rates. On the other hand, many summer resorts—like those in New England — have built winter sports facilities to attract people during then off-season,
Catering, providing food and drink for transients, has always, gone together with accommodations. Food services are a feature of hotels. The typical modern "packaged hotel" includes a restaurant, a coffee shop for quicker and less expensive meals, and a bar cocktail lounge. Many larger hotels have several restaurants, often featuring different kinds of foods, as well as different prices. Hotels also normally provide room service- food and drink that arc brought to the guest's room. In addition, catering service is usually provided in the hotel's recreational areas. The poolside bar and snack bar, for quick food, are normal parts of the service at a resort hotel.
Restaurants, bars, and nightclubs outside the hotels are a standard feature of the resort scene. Indeed, many resorts could not really operate without them. They provide not only catering, but also some kind of entertainment for the tourist who is bored with the limits of hotel life. In some areas, like Miami Beach, they have sprung up without any apparent design, but in others, like the Costa Smeralda, they are carefully coordinated features of the total plan. In cities like New York, London, or Paris, restaurants and other catering establishments that serve the resident population obtain additional business from the tourists who flock to those cities.
Food, in fact, may be one of the reasons why people travel. Many people go out of their way to visit France, for example, because of the gourmet meals that are served there. Similarly, the excellent restaurants of Hong Kong constitute one of its principal tourist attractions.
It should also be pointed out that many grocery stores, delicatessens, and liquor stores make money from tourism. This is true in large tourist cities like New York and in resort areas like Miami Beach. There is usually a food store at or near most marinas and camping areas. The accommodations and catering service industries employ large numbers of people. According to the United States census of 1970, more than 733,000 people were working in hotels, and more than 3.3 million in restaurants. Of course not all of these depend on the tourist trade, but the figures are indicative of the amount of labor involved in these businesses. At a luxury hotel, there may be as many as two or three employees for every guest room. At a large commercial hotel, there are usually about eight employees for every ten guest rooms.
This intensive use of labor is one of the reasons why tourism is so attractive to developing countries. Furthermore, many of the hotel and restaurant jobs are semiskilled work, so only a small amount of training is necessary to fill them.
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