• The History of Hospitality

    Monday, September 28th, 2009

    It’s certainly one of the oldest habits the human race has, to help someone else, and hospitality could have originated with this impulse.  But it’s difficult to say exactly what hospitality really means for everyone.  For some, it’s simply taking care of others, for others, it implies service, and for still others, it’s rather like charm, and adding a charming touch to any moment is a sign of hospitality.  For the hotel industry, however, it’s a landmark, and it is one of the ways that guests look at their accommodations.  If a place has a sense for hospitality, or whether it’s simply a building with rooms, can be the beginning of the distinctions that make one hotel better than another.  What, exactly, then, do these buildings  have to do to get the ranking of one to five star hotels?

    It’s a complicated question, actually, and there’s a lot of debate about which system is the most accurate for all the countries in the world.  Generally speaking, however, the rankings are based on excellence in hospitality, and to reach the five-star ranking, there are other amenities that have to be present, such as 24-hour dining and airport pickup.  You can reasonably expect to be treated to absolutely sensational elegance in a five-star hotel, and the hospitality offered can be of a quantifiable type, such as that which is sometimes studied by students at Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research.  This is the top-ranked school in the U.S. for hotel management, and offers a Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD degree.  The program is a combination of in-class as well as hands-on learning, so that both theory and practice can come together.

    The other kind of hospitality offered is the kind one would imagine in the early colonial cities in the U.S., such as Charleston, SC, in the 17th and 18th centuries.  In these early days, before the advent of the hotel, guests passing through town might stay in the dependencies, or carriage homes, and here the care was, of course, very personalized and individual.  It was one of the steps toward a recognizable hospitality as the industry understands it.  However, intuitively hospitality is easy to recognize, and is related to that idea of being a stranger passing through town, and finding themselves in good hands, among people who care.