The Business of Hotels

Hadyn Ingram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9781138140851
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136359439
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Finance
• Index: Business

The fully revised edition of this well-known text by an experienced author, consultant and educator follows the structure and approach which has proved so successful since its first publication in 1980. The book examines the hotel as a business providing commercial hospitality. It focuses on markets, money and people, and uses examples from hotel operations throughout the world. This new edition is the outcome of a thorough revision of an established text. The new material includes a comprehensive profile of the hotel business in the 1990's and includes data, quotes and extracts from a wide range of authoritative industry sources.

Staying Away from Home

DOI: 10.4324/9780080476322-1

For the greater part of each year most people live at home. Although they may go to work, shopping, visiting friends and relatives, and take part in other social and leisure activities, their homes are where they normally return each day and where they spend the night. But many of them also increasingly stay away from home, on business or on holiday or for other reasons, throughout the year. Many of them stay in hotels.

Walking through a town, there are the shops, offices, workshops, restaurants, and a whole host of other places of work, entertainment and recreation. On a drive through the country can be seen factories, farms, petrol stations. Without going too far in the town or in the country, one building emerges sooner or later from the rest – an hotel.

The people one meets in the town and in the country may be residents or visitors. The places they frequent often serve primarily the needs of the resident population, but in many areas to which visitors go in large numbers, many of the facilities and amenities are provided mainly for visitors. One of them invariably owes its origin to visitors – the hotel. To a greater or lesser extent, hotel restaurants, bars and other hotel facilities may also serve the local population, but the primary function of an hotel is to accommodate those away from home and to supply them with their basic needs.

It is the basic function of the hotel, which makes it quite distinct from other types of business, and to which its other functions are supplementary. Where others provide accommodation, meals and refreshments for those away from home – such as hospitals or boarding schools, or hostels – their primary purpose – whether treatment or education or something else – is different. Also in practice it is not difficult to draw a line between the provision of accommodation by hotels and the letting of accommodation on a tenancy basis, but more difficult between hotels and guest houses and similar establishments, which share the basic function of the hotel. However, it is sufficient for our purposes to describe an hotel as an establishment providing for reward accommodation, food and drink for travellers and temporary residents, and usually also meals and refreshments and sometimes other facilities for other users.

The Importance of Hotels

Hotels play an important role in most countries by providing facilities for the transaction of business, for meetings and conferences, for recreation and entertainment. In that sense hotels are as essential to economies and societies as are adequate transport, communication and retail distribution systems for various goods and services. Through their facilities hotels contribute to the total output of goods and services, which makes up the material well-being of nations and communities.

In many areas hotels are important attractions for visitors who bring to them spending power and who tend to spend at a higher rate than they do when they are at home. Through visitor spending hotels thus often contribute significantly to local economies both directly, and indirectly through the subsequent diffusion of the visitor expenditure to other recipients in the community.

In areas receiving foreign visitors, hotels are often important foreign currency earners and in this way may contribute significantly to their countries' balance of payments. In countries with limited export possibilities, hotels may be one of the few sources of foreign currency earnings.

Hotels are important employers of labour. Thousands of jobs are provided by hotels in the many occupations that make up the hotel industries in most countries; many others in the industry are self-employed and proprietors of smaller hotels. The role of hotels as employers is particularly important in areas with few alternative sources of employment, where they contribute to regional development.

Hotels are also important outlets for the products of other industries. In the building and modernization of hotels business is provided for the construction industry and related trades. Equipment, furniture and furnishings are supplied to hotels by a wide range of manufacturers. Food, drink and other consumables are among the most significant daily hotel purchases from farmers, fishermen, food and drink suppliers, and from gas, electricity and water companies. In addition to those engaged directly in hotels, much indirect employment is, therefore, generated by hotels for those employed in industries supplying them.

Last but not least, hotels are an important source of amenities for local residents. Their restaurants, bars and other facilities often attract much local custom and many hotels have become social centres of their communities.

Travel and Hotels

Staying away from home is a function of travel and three main phases may be distinguished in the development of travel in the northern hemisphere (Figure 1).

Figure 1 Three phases of travel

Until about the middle of the nineteenth century most journeys were undertaken for business and vocational reasons, by road, by people travelling mainly in their own countries. The volume of travel was relatively small, confined to a small fraction of the population in any country, and most of those who did travel, did so by coach. Inns and similar hostelries along the highways and in the principal towns provided the means of accommodation well into the nineteenth century.

Between about 1850 and about 1950 a growing proportion of travellers went away from home for other than business reasons, and holidays came gradually to represent an important reason for a journey. For a hundred years or so, the railway and the steamship dominated passenger transportation, and the new means of transport gave an impetus to travel between countries and between continents. Although the first hotels date from the eighteenth century, their growth on any scale occurred only in the nineteenth century, when first the railway and later the steamship created sufficiently large markets to make the larger hotel possible. Hotels together with guest houses and boarding houses dominated the accommodation market in this period.

By about the middle of the twentieth century in most developed countries of the world (a little earlier in North America and a little later in Europe) a whole cycle was completed and most traffic returned to the road, with the motor car increasingly providing the main means of passenger transportation. Almost concurrently, the aircraft took over unmistakably both from the railways and from shipping as the principal means of long-distance passenger transport. On many routes holiday traffic came to match and often greatly exceed other traffic. A growing volume of travel away from home became international. Hotels entered into competition with new forms of accommodation – holiday centres and holiday villages in Europe, motels in North America, and various self-catering facilities for those on holiday.

Two Centuries of Hotelkeeping

Hotels are some two hundred years old. The word ‘hotel’ itself came into use in England with the introduction in London, after 1760, of the kind of establishment then common in Paris, called an ‘hôtel garni’ or a large house, in which apartments were let by the day, week or month. Its appearance signified a departure from the customary method of accommodating guests in inns and similar hostelries, into something more luxurious and even ostentatious. Hotels with managers, receptionists and uniformed staff arrived generally only at the beginning of the nineteenth century and until the middle of that century their development was relatively slow. The absence of good inns in Scotland to some extent accelerated the arrival of the hotel there; by the end of the eighteenth century, Edinburgh, for example, had several hotels where the traveller could get elegant and comfortable rooms. Hotels are also known to have made much progress in other parts of Europe in the closing years of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century, where at that time originated the idea of a resort hotel.

In North America early accommodation for travellers followed a similar pattern as in England, with most inns originating in converted houses, but by the turn of the eighteenth century several cities on the eastern seaboard had purpose-built hotels and in the first half of the nineteenth century hotel building spread across America to the Pacific Coast. The evolution from innkeep...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• The Concepts of Hotels and Hospitality
• 1 Staying Away from Home
• 2 Hotel Products and Markets
• 3 Hotel Policies, Philosophies and Strategies
• The Structure of the Hotel Industry
• 4 The Small Hotel
• 5 Hotel Groups
• 6 International Hotel Operations
• The Hotel and its Functions: Guest Services
• 7 Rooms and Beds
• 8 Food and Drink
• 9 Miscellaneous Guest Services
• Hotel Support Services
• 10 Marketing
• 11 Property Ownership and Management
• 12 Finance and Accounts
• People and Procedures
• 13 Hotel Organization
• 14 Hotel Staffing
• 15 Performance in Hotels
• appendix1 Travel and Hotels in the United Kingdom in the 1990s
• appendix2 Travel and Hotels in America in the 1990s
• appendix3 Global Capacity of Hotels and Similar Establishments, 199
• appendix4 Hotel Occupancies in Selected Countries 1994, 1995. 1996
• appendix5 Leading Hotel Groups World-wide
• appendix6 Leading Hotel Consortia
• appendix7 Leading Hotel Consortia
• appendix8 Honvath International Reports
• appendix9 Select List of Hotel and Related Organizations
• appendix10 Select List of Hotel Periodicals
• appendix11 Suggested Further Reading
• reference
• Index