If you stay at a hotel nowadays, you pretty much know what you’re going to get. Sure, amenities may come and go, or might vary based on how fancy the hotel is. But when it comes down to the basics, a hotel is a hotel is a hotel.
It wasn’t always that way.
Inns and other establishments offering lodging have been around since ancient times, but hotels as we know them began getting a foothold in the 1800s.
And every amenity we now take for granted had to start somewhere.
At some point, one hotel was the first to offer indoor plumbing. Another decided guests shouldn’t have to share a bathroom with everyone else. Somebody eventually thought, Hey, maybe people would like food brought directly to their rooms.
And yes, someone was even the first to decide that guests shouldn’t have to PAY FOR ICE.
Here are seven hotels that helped change the way we stay.
1829: Indoor plumbing
In 1829, Tremont House (a.k.a. The Tremont Hotel) of Boston was the first hotel in the world to have indoor plumbing. The brand-new hotel featured eight bathrooms with running water that was supplied by gravity-fed pipes from rooftop storage tanks.This allowed the building to offer indoor toilets AND baths.
By the 1850s, indoor plumbing, including the ability to offer showers, became more commonplace.
1910: En-suite bathrooms
The shared bathrooms of the Tremont Hotel and other hotels like it were the norm for years (with the accompanying queues to use them). But finally, in 1910, when The Goring Hotel opened in London, it offered something no other hotel in earth did – en-suite bathrooms.
1927: In-room radios
Nowadays hotels offer wide screen TVs, cable channels and ability to hook up your own devices. However before the 1940s/1950s or so, most people got their news,music and entertainment via radio.
When the Boston Park Plaza Hotel opened in 1927, it was the furst hotel in the world to offer a radio in each guest room.
Early 1930s: Room service
The newly re-opened Waldorf Astoria, located at 301 Park Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets in New York City, is known for the invention of the Waldorf Salad. But one other “invention” that the hotel can claim is that it introduced room service, not long after the hotel opened in 1931.
1952: Free ice machines
Ice in hotels wasn’t always free; for years you had to pay by the cube. But you can thank the guy who started Holiday Inn for making free ice happen. Here’s how.
1974: Minibars
Mini refrigerators have been available since the 1960s. However in 1974, an executive from the Hong Kong Hilton came up with a brilliant idea – put a mini fridge in each guest room, stock it with small bottles of liquor and charge way too much for them. Guests could get their drinks without having to go down to the bar.
According to The Atlantic, it was a very profitable experiment. The invention of what would be called the “minibar” was said to have led to a 500% increase in room-service drink sales and a 5% boost to the company’s net income that year.
1981 – Non-smoking hotel
Lyndon Sanders opened the Non-Smokers Inn in 1981, in Downtown Dallas. At the time, it was the first exclusively non-smoking hotel in the United States. Some people say it may have even been the first to offer any rooms exclusively for non-smokers, but that seems to be more anecodotal. However in 1984, Sanders did tell the New York Times that 23 motel chains had added nonsmoking rooms since he built the Non-Smokers Inn.
We take a lot of it for granted now
The funny thing is, some of these things don’t seem particularly revolutionary anymore.
Indoor plumbing? We’d better have it.
A private bathroom? I don’t even want to THINK about the alternative (although a long time ago, a friend and I stayed at a bed & breakfast in Key West that offered shared bathrooms. We purposely paid more and got a private one. Granted, it was across the hall and had no air conditioning [in late summer, mind you], but at least it was all ours).
Room service? Nice.
Free ice? Of course.
A nonsmoking room? That isn’t even considered an amenity anymore. It’s simply what we expect.
Others, meanwhile, had their moment and are slowly becoming part of hotel history themselves. In-room radios disappeared long ago, and minibars aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as they once were.
But at one point, every single one of these things was new.
Somebody had to be the first hotel to try it. And when guests liked the idea, other hotels followed. Sometimes the innovation became an industry standard; other times, technology and changing tastes eventually made it obsolete.
Either way, each one helped shape hotel stays during its time.
Although whoever decided tiny bottles of liquor should cost approximately the same as a mortgage payment probably didn’t need quite so many imitators. 😉
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