Japan’s Keiunkan inn has welcomed guests since 705 CE
Hotels sell short-term lodging, from spare mattresses to suites with kitchens. Medieval inns and later coaching inns paved the way; modern hotels diversified into motels, boutiques, and timeshares. Guinness lists Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, founded in 705, as the world’s oldest hotel.
French hôtel once meant a frequently visited care building, sharing roots with hospital; English kept the lodging sense and usually the definite article—“the Astoria.” Greco-Roman and Persian cultures built places of rest and recovery at thermal baths, and medieval monasteries and abbeys put up travellers. In modern French, hôtel particulier keeps the old sense of a grand townhouse, and the Paris Hôtel-Dieu has been a hospital since the Middle Ages. The circumflex marks a lost s from the older spelling hostel.
Operations run from general managers through food and rooms departments. Upscale full-service houses stack restaurants and concierge care; motels offer parking-door access; destination clubs sell seasonal ownership slices.
The modern industry grew out of the inns of medieval Europe and, for about two centuries from the mid-1600s, the coaching inns that served stagecoach passengers. Inns began courting wealthier guests in the mid-1700s, and one of the first hotels in today's sense opened in Exeter in 1768. Hotels spread across Western Europe and North America in the early nineteenth century, and luxury hotels appeared later in that century, especially in the United States.
Rooms range from a basic mattress in a small space to suites with kitchens, and larger properties add pools, business centres, childcare, conference halls, gyms and spas. Rooms are usually numbered, though small hotels and bed and breakfasts may name them, and Japanese capsule hotels offer a pod just big enough to sleep in, with shared bathrooms. Extended-stay hotels cater to longer visits, while casinos and resorts are built to be destinations in themselves.
Source: Hotel
