Vim Dagrave: Hotels and their secrets

The Exmo Publishing House represents the book of Vim Dagrave “Hotels and their secrets” (translation by N. S. Popova).

The book usually describes the life of the hotel business hidden from the eyes of the guests, the features of the organization of hotels and the problems that this industry faces in the 21st century.

We offer to read a fragment of the chapter dedicated to the history of hotels.

Belgium and the Netherlands played an important role in the history of the development of the hotel industry. In the Netherlands, as historical sources indicate, since 1397 there has been a DRAAK hotel ("Dragon"). It is located on the grotto of Markt in the city of Bergen-on-Zom. This is not only the very first hotel, but also the very first organization with its own employees and accounting in the Netherlands. In 1567, the Grand Duke of Alba stayed here. In Belgium, the title of the oldest and still existing hotel was borne by Damier in a court, which began to receive guests in 1398. But the bookkeeping of the Stella Artois brewery began its work earlier - in 1366.

In the Dutch city of Porskhoten, in 1939, Martin and Rivan der Valka built a hotel from the local Gouden Leeuw (“Golden Lion”), which laid the foundation for a whole empire, which today with 98 hotels around the world. Such a success story could repeat with Belgian Michel Hoygen, who in 1964 built a Ten Bel recreation park on the island of Tenerife. It was a kind of “mass tourism experiment”, which at the height of the season lured hundreds of thousands of vacationers to the south of the islands, but all kinds of embezzlement ultimately brought Hyogen to prison, and Flemish investors who invested in the project were financial fiasco.

The idea of ​​creating luxury resorts, where tourists could carefully walk from a lobby bar to a sunbed on the beach and back, appeared after the Second World War. The first such Club Méditerranée was created by the Frenchman Gilbert Trigano in 1950. His successful idea led to the emergence of a huge number of resort towns and beach hotels along the entire coast of the Mediterranean Sea - from Spain to the Balkans. Then the first casa-hotels opened, and even the airlines decided to focus on the hotel sector.

Thanks to changes in social policy, for example, vacation payments and a five-day working week have appeared-the ability of an ordinary family to get somewhere on vacation increased in arithmetic progression. In 1960, they really started talking about mass tourism.

In 1968, Pete Derksen created the first cottage complex De Lommemberg in the Dutch Limburg, which gradually turned into a Center Parcs hotel network.

Three hotels who (almost) have preserved the world around the world
The world between the United States and the UK (Schamp Hotel, Gent, 1814)
After four months of negotiations, the United States and Great Britain graduated from their second and last armed conflict at the De Schamp hotel, which was on Veldstraat Street in the Gente. The only reminder of the general agreement is now a bronze plate on the facade of the Esprit clothing store. American President John Kuinsi Adams later admitted that he spent a wonderful time in this hotel.

The end of the occupation of the Netherlands (Hotel De Wereld, Waglingen, 1945)
The release of the Netherlands from the fascist invaders occurred on May 5, 1945 at the De Wereld Hotel in the Dutch city of Wageningen, where the surrender agreement was signed. The German invaders surrendered to the Canadian General Charles Foux. After the Second World War, the famous hotel, which has existed since the 17th century, was difficult to maintain its greatness, but after a thorough repair in 2004, one can again spend the night there.

John Lennon in bed for peace (HILTON Hotel, Amsterdam, 1969)
For a whole week, John Lennon and Yoko, it invited the press to their hotel room in Amsterdam to show them how to do nothing, make their contribution to the struggle for peace around the world. Later, the newlyweds Lennon tried to repeat their feat in New York, but since the legendary musician of the The Beatles group was then convicted of storing marijuana, he fled to Montreal, to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel.

Business as usual

In the 70s of the twentieth century, business hotels began their march. Having debuted in the Middle East due to the rapid development of the oil industry, soon business tourism is blurring like an oil spot around the world. This decade was characterized by the appearance of, at first glance, a banal invention, which, however, had great consequences for one important category of hotel workers. In 1970, Bernard Sadou brought to the market the first suitcase on wheels - this led to the fact that the guests were able to move their heavy luggage themselves. And the porters in the hotels remained out of work. But the invention of the Skutan suitcase by the Chinese Hee Liankai in 1999 had a significantly less influence on the sector.

"Folti Tauers"
There are not many television series that could crash into public memory as Folti Tauers. The British comedy, in which John Oklis (Basil) and Prunella Skals (Sibil) played only two seasons (in 1975 and 1979), each of which consists of six episodes. All of them became equally cult, starting from The Hotel Inspectors and The Germans and ending with Waldorf Salad.
The idea of ​​the series came to an enquest after the Gleneagles Hotel in the city of Torki, where he stayed with his comedy group Monty Pieton. According to him, this was one of the most disgusting places where he has ever been. The owner of that hotel threw out the Kliz’s suitcase out the window after he mistakenly saw a bomb in it. By the way, the hotel was closed in 2015 and then converted into the nursing home.
There is no more hotel building, which was shot in the series. A nightclub was made from it, and in 1991, due to the fire, the building burned down to the ground. However, you can still at your own peril and risk at the Fawlty Towers hotel. On the Booking.com website you can find hotels in Norfolka (England), Umbria (Italy), in Florida (USA), in Eilat (Israel) and Yangshuo (China), where people cannot even correctly pronounce the name of the hotel. Assessments of visitors to these hotels vary from 7.1 to 9.3 points out of 10.

In the 80s, the third boom takes place, at which “smart marketing” comes to the fore, and hotels are increasingly adapting to the needs of their customers. There is such a thing as customer -orientation. Hotels begin to literally hunt businessmen and pensioners (read, for those who have a lot of money and/or time).

The first administrative functions begin to be introduced slowly, and the work of administrators is partially automated. In 1995, the first software was launched at Hotel Room Management System. It made it possible to accelerate the procedure for registration and customer statements. In 1996, Girt-Yang Breinsma from the Dutch town of Ensheda discusses how it would be great to book hotels online and watch their photos and description on the Internet, instead of calling some cunning hotel in Budapest and in broken English to hear that they no longer have free numbers. So the Booking.com hotel online booking system was born.

5 legendary hoteliers
• Caesar Ritz (1850–1918). Born by the Thirteenth (!) Child in a shepherd’s family in Switzerland. The founder of the Ritz hotel network. He is considered the "godmother of the hotel industry."
• Konrad Hilton (1887–1979). American, founder of a successful Hilton hotel network. As soon as he escaped bankruptcy during the Great Depression of the 30s. For some time he was married to actress Jari Jacabor. Great -grandfather Paris Hilton.
• Bob Potter (born in 1928). The eccentric Briton, the son of a farmer, a former musician, a former garbage sorter, a former slot machine seller and a former landlord of mobile phourgons, who switched to the hotel business. The founder of the Lakeside Leisure Group Hotel and the Lakeside Country Club hotel complex, where the World Cup is held every year.
• John Willard “Bill” Marriot-Jr. (born in 1932). The son of Bill Marriot Sr., who founded the famous American hotel network. Under the leadership of Marriot Jr., the network grew up in a global player with more than 3 thousand hotels in 67 countries.
• Barry Sternlikht (born in 1960). Jewish businessman and founder of hotels and resorts Starwood. He is called the “hotel king”: at the peak of his career, he was at the head of 733 hotels, 231 thousand rooms and 120 thousand employees.

Meanwhile, experiments with extravagant and eccentric projects begin in Dubai-such “palaces” for tourists as Jumeirah Beach and Burj Al Arab hotels, where everyone can find something luxurious to their own taste-businessmen and ordinary tourists. Five stars seem to be insufficient to designate the luxury frames, so the sixth and seventh stars are not around the mountains, in order to certainly distinguish chic from even more chic. In 2004, the ABU-Dabi Hotel Conference Palace was opened, which, according to its creators, corresponded to the "best service that is only possible and deserved at least nine stars."

Nevertheless, the innovations of the 2000s are not at all the number of additional stars or the number of carats with which the taps in luxury rooms are finished. Real trend changes in the third millennium are the development and democratization of the Internet. With such search engines such as Booking.com (1996), Tripadvisor (2000) and Trivago (2005), such social networks as Facebook (2004) and Fouursquare (2009), and guest networks as Couchsurfing (2003) and 2003) Airbnb (2008), the 2016 hotel industry has changed irrevocably.