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Dossier - Histoire de l’entreprise hôtelière en Europe occidentale

History of the Hotel Business in Western Europe: Actors, Strategies and Management. Introduction

Laurent Tissot
Cet article est une traduction de :
Histoire de l’entreprise hôtelière en Europe occidentale : acteurs, stratégies et gestion. Introduction [fr]

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  • 1 1924 for the first German edition and 1986 for the English translation.

“The hotel no longer appealed to me: neither the stifling laundry, nor the gruesomely benevolent lift-boy, nor the three floors of prisoners. This Hotel Savoy was like the world. Brilliant light shone out from it and splendour glittered from its seven storeys, but poverty made its home in its high places, and those who lived on high were in the depths, buried in airy graves, and the graves were in layers above the comfortable rooms of the well-nourished guests sitting down below, untroubled by the flimsy coffins overhead.”
Joseph Roth,
Hotel Savoy, New York, The Overlook Press, 1986[1924], p. 33.1

1With his biting irony, his unvarnished sense of observation and his acute social criticism, Joseph Roth shows the hotel’s capacity to “be” the world. A delimited space, certainly, but one that brings together all the contrasts of humanity, which are as much distinctions as they are divisions: the proximity of heterogeneous populations, the use of more or less efficient technical devices, the assembly of collective and intimate places, in short, a swarming of people who live together as best they can while avoiding meeting each other, and an accumulation of objects and devices that are supposed to make the whole thing work. The smooth world that is initially visible and the intense brilliance that emerges from the outside are therefore only part of what this kind of establishment conceals, the visible hiding the invisible. Joseph Roth’s synthesis invites the historian to enter the building to better understand its mechanisms.

2However, not all hotels operate according to this painful description. Fortunately, they are also places of merriment, laughter, parties and fun. In this respect, the links with tourism are perhaps what characterises them above all. It is the space that is needed to accommodate a clientele travelling for pleasure and looking for accommodation. Historically, the development of tourism has gone hand in hand with that of the hotel industry and vice versa. The relationship is strong and can be seen at several levels: architecture, location, governance, profitability, gastronomy and professional training are all determined by this economic and social profile.

  • 2 To avoid unnecessary redundancy, we invite readers to refer to the references of each article, whic (...)

3The history of the hotel industry seen from the perspective of business history is still a little discussed field of study.2 While its material, cultural and symbolic presence shapes a good number of cities and tourist sites, and sets the tone for a way of life, its economic, financial, technical and managerial significance is linked internationally to a complex dynamic involving multiple actors who aspire to the same objectives in terms of hospitality, sociability and environment. It calls upon common denominators capable of meeting their requirements and expectations, but also capable of conditioning them. This issue is the result of a session organised in Paris on 11-13 September 2019 as part of the International Congress of Business History in France. Its aim is to highlight the interactions that take place in this particular service sector between the various stakeholders (hoteliers, developers, public authorities, financiers, suppliers and customers) in an attempt, given the current situation, to identify models – local, national or international – that are capable of influencing economic policies and anticipating future developments.

4A hotel is a combination of elements, as Roth’s text already shows. The notion of system is perfectly suited to this assembly, that is to say, the whole of the human, economic, political, technical, professional and symbolic relations that allow the establishment to function. In this case, the notion of system facilitates the understanding of how these multiple components fit together and why they can hold together at given times. These considerations apply particularly to periods of crisis, which are the focus of the six articles gathered here. The articles by Mathieu Narindal, Grégoire Schneider, Yves-Marie Evanno/Johan Vincent and Kevin James/Andrew Northey bear witness to the rearrangements brought about by world wars and economic or political crises, while those by Steve Hagimont and Eugénie Galasso examine, from a broader perspective, the long-term changes that characterise a specific territory, the Pyrenees, and the impact of hotel treaties on the industry.

  • 3 See in particular, Cédric Humair, Développement économique et État central (1815-1914). Un siècle d (...)

5The authors show that, while economic disruptions are obviously very hard on the hotel sector, the resilience it has shown in terms of commercial and financial strategies or technical and social innovations is real. Nothing is simple. From an ideological point of view, state intervention, especially in Switzerland, proved difficult to accept for a large proportion of hoteliers and the professional organisations that represent them, particularly during the inter-war and post-war periods. The benefits of Swiss liberalism, which were trumpeted by these same circles, were accompanied by more or less profound and long-lasting intrusions by the public authorities, leading to very lively debates within the corporation. The positions taken are far from unanimous. But the intensity of the crises and their repetition remain the determining criterion in the adoption of what historians have called “organised” or “corporate” capitalism capable of reviving activities in perdition.3 Whether in the form of cartelisation, as Narindal shows, or feasibility studies (Schneider), the idea is to match the interests of an economic branch with their long-term viability through ad hoc “aid” in the form of state guarantees (legal and financial) while claiming to preserve the integrity of liberalism.

6While the Swiss specificity is measured in terms of ideology, the Breton case is discussed from the point of view of its long-term adaptation (1870-1970) to changing circumstances. In this respect, Evanno and Vincent distinguish between the impacts of a geopolitical crisis (wars, for example) whose causes are totally external to the tourist environment and those of a socio-economic crisis whose consequences lead to differentiated behaviours according to the establishments. In the first case, the consequences appear to be less for multi-activity establishments which combine the accommodation function with that of a restaurant and/or bar. As for the economic crises, the causes of which are less brutal, they do not necessarily dry up the source of tourist flows, but they do lead the actors to make investment choices which, very often, result in the specialisation of establishments. The degree of powerlessness in the face of these events seems to be the element which determines entrepreneurial reactivity, which nevertheless remains dependent on hotel capacities.

7For the hotel industry, the First World War represented a clear break in the resizing of establishments and in their mode of governance. It marked the end of a Belle Epoque in which “Palaces” were added one after the other, assured of the arrival of financially well-to-do customers who were convinced of their power. It inaugurated an unprecedented period when these same establishments, whether they wanted to or not, participated in the war effort, a situation that saw them redefine their function and reorganise their operations. Joseph Roth mentions the presence of prisoners on the upper floors, i.e., on the least considered floors. Kevin James and Andrew Northey’s article look at how hotels were involved in the infrastructure of the war and details how the mechanisms of British central government grappled with programmes of requisition, adaptation and compensation for hotels. In exploring the roles of hotels and other accommodation, James highlights their singular impacts, not least by better outlining the exact contours of the conflict within the country and also by revealing them as vehicles and sites of political, economic and social contestation. The author recommends a directory of the establishments and districts in which hotels were requisitioned during the war. To do this, he uses theoretical methods of analysis to systematically compare their functions and operations in wartime and during the transition to peace.

8Steve Hagimont’s questioning of the Pyrenean tourism development is also fuelled by the concern to perpetuate a hotel activity. In contrast to the Swiss example, the interactions between hotel companies and the public authorities have continued to play a determining role in the takeover of the Pyrenees by tourism and, consequently, by hotels.

9These local public policies aimed at integrating the Pyrenees into the European investor networks were implemented in several phases. If in the first half of the 19th century, and in the largest resorts, the spatial organisation was first provided by the public authorities, motivating and securing private hotel investment, in the last third of the 19th century and until around 1930, the municipalities delegated the development to limited companies which integrated the tourist functions: thermal baths, casinos and large hotels. Between 1930 and the 1960s, the municipalities tried to slow down the closure of the large hotels in order to avoid a symbolic downgrading. At the same time, from the 1880s onwards, the popularity of railways and mountain hotels industrialised the exploitation of the countryside and raised fears about the decision-making powers still left to the municipalities and guides. The pressure of national and international competition finally led to the support of projects which enabled the Pyrenees to adopt the winter sports economy without much delay, as early as before 1914.

10To consider the crisis in the hotel sector only from the geopolitical or economic angle would leave a fundamental aspect in hotel management in the dark. If capitalism is defined by its incessant exposure to change, the hotel cannot conceal what affects its daily governance and operating methods through product and process innovation. The notion of "crisis" must also be extended to the technological aspect, which has a direct impact on the viability and sustainability of the establishment. The concern to innovate or anticipate remains a constant preoccupation at the risk of disappearing or, at the very least, of running into serious disfunctions. In this respect, the study of hotel handbooks is of great interest. It offers the advantage of understanding the hotel in its purely material functioning. How to welcome, how to serve, in short, how to satisfy the customer? Eugénie Galasso gets into the routine of the hotel and shows us how it works, or rather how it should work. A question is asked: have hotel handbooks contributed to the diffusion of innovations within the hotel industry in France? The article covers a period from the end of the First World War in 1918, which saw the publication of the first hotel handbooks, Louis Leospo’s Traité d’industrie hôtelière, to the present day, when these works have been replaced by consultancy firms.

11The cathartic effect of crises or ruptures takes on its full meaning in the case of the hotel industry. Its capacity for resilience is commensurate with its vulnerability to the slightest hiccup in the economy. It is perhaps in this aspect that we can detect a specificity which needs to be better studied.

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Notes

1 1924 for the first German edition and 1986 for the English translation.

2 To avoid unnecessary redundancy, we invite readers to refer to the references of each article, which cover all the issues developed. In this introduction, we limit ourselves to referencing only those publications that do not appear there.

3 See in particular, Cédric Humair, Développement économique et État central (1815-1914). Un siècle de politique douanière suisse au service des élites, Bern, Peter Lang, 2004.

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Laurent Tissot, « History of the Hotel Business in Western Europe: Actors, Strategies and Management. Introduction »Mondes du Tourisme [En ligne], 22 | 2022, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2022, consulté le 15 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/tourisme/5370 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/tourisme.5370

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Auteur

Laurent Tissot

Professeur honoraire en histoire contemporaine
Université de Neuchâtel
laurent.tissot[at]unine.ch

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