What was the first hotel chain? It depends how you look at it, but the first hotel chain was either Fred Harvey’s Harvey Houses or Ellsworth M. Statler’s Statler Hotels. Conrad Hilton’s hotels later became the first coast-to-coast hotel chain in the United States and one of the first major international hotel chains.
These days, if you want to travel anywhere and need to stay overnight, you will book into a hotel. If the town you are staying in is a decent size, you will have quite a lot of choice. There are apps that you can use to compare the prices of all the different hotels and find the best deal. You will be spoiled for choice. Things have not always been like this.
The word “hotel” comes from the French “hôtel,” which means a mansion or large house. This in turn came from “hostel,” which meant a place to lodge. The word was used to refer to a place to stay from around 1765 in English. It slowly replaced the word inn, which had been in use since about the 13th century. The word hospital has the same route as hotel and early hospitals were places built for rest and recuperation.
People have needed somewhere to stay for thousands of years. If they were traveling through the countryside, they would sleep wherever they were and find their own food. If they were traveling through a settlement, such as traders usually did, then they would look for somewhere to stay. There were a lot of taverns that also doubled as inns in the ancient civilizations of Sumer and Babylonia. They probably didn’t have separate rooms, but would have put a cot down in the room that people were eating and drinking in. Often grain merchants would stay there and there are even laws to protect the customers from being cheated by the tavern-keepers.
The Greeks didn’t use inns, but relied strongly on hospitality and travelers would make a network of friends they could stay with. People would carry letters of introduction to other people’s friends so they would have somewhere to stay. The Romans had a larger empire and they had taverns and inns in many settlements. These inns continued after the fall of Rome and Medieval Europe had a network of inns all across it. Not a lot of people travelled outside their home villages, but for those that did, there was always somewhere to stay.
In Europe, in the mid 18th century, some inns started to cater to richer clients. The Industrial Revolution was the first time people who were not royalty or nobles had wealth. When royalty and nobles travelled, they would stay at the houses of other royalty or nobles. The new class of wealthy people couldn’t do that, but they didn’t want to stay at regular inns. Lodging places to meet their needs appeared. These were places like Claridge’s in London (which was called the Royal Clarence when it first opened in 1768), and Astor House in New York City.
Towards the end of the 19th century, more people had more money than ever before and people were suddenly able to travel. The railway had opened up huge swathes of Europe and the USA than ever before. The number of luxury hotels began to increase and they had rooms aimed at people staying just for a day or two and suites aimed at people staying longer. Some wealthy people even lived in hotels.
Most hotels were independently owned until 1908, when the very first hotel chain took off. Ellsworth M. Statler opened his first hotel in Buffalo in 1901. It had 2,084 rooms and was only supposed to last the duration of the Pan-American Exposition that was taking place at the time. He learned a lot from that, and in 1908 he built a permanent hotel in Buffalo New York that had 300 rooms. It had a bathroom for each room, which was a new concept. He had decided that he wasn’t going to compete with the luxury hotels, but he was going to offer clean, comfortable, and reasonably priced rooms for regular travelers. It was a hit. He used the profits and built another hotel in Detroit in 1915. This was also successful and he built more hotels in St Louis, Boston, New York, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Dallas, and Cleveland. Mean wealth was increasing, as was the ability to travel, and the model of affordable rooms his hotels used was successful everywhere he built a hotel. He started the idea of hotels that we still have today.
Once his success was obvious, other people started to build hotels too. Then, with the invention of airplanes and international travel, Conrad Hilton took his hotels international. Seeing a hotel name you recognized when you traveled abroad brought a level of security to people and the hotels were popular. Today it is impossible to count how many independent hotel chains there are, but there are the “big six” that own the most hotels. These are Marriott International, Hilton, IHG, Accor, Wyndham, and Hyatt. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statler_Hotels
https://www.britannica.com/topic/hotel#ref267723
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel
https://www.gethistories.com/p/a-history-of-hotels-part-1
https://www.etymonline.com/word/hotel
https://www.etymonline.com/word/inn
Photo by Clément Proust: https://www.pexels.com/photo/hilton-hotel-building-18372870/