Hotel, Motel

Luxury Hotels

Within some of the key commercial cities of major nation-states or imperial economies, luxury hotels became important features of central business districts. Through the provision of a full suite of services—restaurants presenting international (and hence familiar) cuisine, laundry services, and telex, telephone, and then fax and Internet systems—the large hotel often boasted that it was a city in miniature. Annabel Wharton, in Building the Cold War, showed how, from the 1950s, the Hilton Corporation fused modern techniques of hotel management with innovation in modernist design (including the use steel, glass, modern plumbing, telephony, and ventilation systems) as part of a strategy of international expansion that mirrored the economic expansionism of American firms. Five-star hotels were, in these cases, designed to insulate the traveler from the unpredictability of a foreign culture (or else, back in the United States, from the mean streets of the inner city, in the context of the perceived dangers of the postwar American downtown).

Of course, it is important to note that alongside the large, full-service hotels, many cities and towns have sustained an ecology of hostels, boarding houses, single-room occupancy hotels, and cheap hotels with basic facilities, all crucial institutions in the provision of affordable options for migrant workers, pilgrims, budget travelers, and the homeless. This can often be an expression of social polarization in developing economies. As David Gladstone has shown, Indian cities such as Delhi display a stark contrast between gated luxury hotels and the multitude of dharamshalas (pilgrims' rest houses), dormitories, guest houses, and small hotels tucked into the densely packed older city quarters, with intermittent water supply and no air conditioning.

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