HOTELS FOR TOURISTS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 21 May 1927, Page 15

HOTELS FOR TOURISTS.

DEVELOPMENT in ENGLAND. AN OVERDUE REFORM. Jt, will be joyful hearing for touring iNew /.eaianuei* mac cue parlous cat* ol uie nnuiii hotel as receiving -serious attention. At is, ot course, the appeal - ia.noe 01 uie mou>i-car wmcn has -ocus--o©a puonc attention on uie real uauness or noteie outside the bag towns. Vne <toixi aid-aastuoneu hostel which w© nau in pre-nan way nays has been a myell lor several generations. It- is Uign time Wiat tne new; use oi the. hote^ wmcn a mechanicaltsed age hajs toouglit us should quidtiy relorm provincial hotels, unless this is done, we i au scarcely avoid ridicule f ar having such a slogan as “(Lome to jangland, .■stales a aaiikiou writer. ) pad are conditions in. wayside norms, and even -those lii towns of some sue, :chat .middle cuass motorists as a whole avoid meals, and if young and iiarcly even ,stleei>mg, m t-he lunmish hotels because of their diat> anu dingy discomfort. A motor expert declared the other day that many people strain their bank balance to buy cars, and so cannot afford to spend lavishly on their travel's; if they visit an hotel they buy no wine, and they will often prefer a cheap eating house to an hotel, if they catch sight of a oleaii and attractive window as they drive into a town. Altogether, it is doubtful whether Hie motor-oar has yet brought much grist to the hotels. With a sprinkling of notable exceptions, the British hotel has made no attempt to cater for the new' traffic. The motorists tend to boycott the hotels at luncheon and tea times, preferring impromptu picmo meals by the roadside or tea houses or email restaurants. Tens and caravans are too radical a solution of the night problems for most people. But a great many travellers either - put in a very long day in order to reach their distant destination without being overcharged for poor food and poor' accommodation at hotels; or else they dis-d-ainfully tolerate the discomforts of one night in an hotel en route to the cottage or rooms whioh they have rented ; or else they cadge accommodation with some old acquaintance, who lives along the road. To turn from this gloomy picture, we have to record that -a definite campaign has been begun by hotel authorities here to raise the standard of English hotel keeping. One handicap from which ;it suffers is that the right type of man has not for a generation or two been entering into the hotel bxisines©. In the pre-railway era Mine Host was very often of the class of a good butler, who knew exactly how to run a kitchen and to provide the simple luxuries of t-hotse days. The twentieth century, however, does not afford scope for the type of hotel which is simply a. large house, run with all the amenities of life which the wellrun English home still provides, to the envy of other nations. The press has lately been very busy discussing the place of the university man in business, and Sir Francis Towle, who is the accepted 'authority on hotel management—he began this work as manager of the Midland Railway Hotels and is ■now director of .some of the most important hotel companies—declares that he himself, the expert who was responsible for the decoration, and the engineer responsible for London’s newest hotel, were all college men who had taken their degrees with honours at Cambridge. He made this announcement to the -press in giving some particulars of the new May fair Hotel, which i.s to be opened shortly in Piccadilly. This hotel is to lie distinctly English, and :is to owe none of its reclame to foreign staff, either in the management or the chef’s department—eighty-five per cent, of the staff will be British and at least half will be ex-service men. It has not yet been decided whether the chief chef will be English, but whoever is to be in that position will have#to content himself with British assistants. What at least will be entirely British i.s the grill. The decorative scheme, too, is to stress British ideas. The wallpaper will be of designs based on English lowers, and the curtains will, of course, be in harmony with the w'alls. It is but right that such an hotel a,s the Mayfair should be on the site of so historic a building as Devonshire House, and one .looks forward to the opening of the Mayfair as fore-shadow-ing the renaissance of British hotelkeeping. Sir Francis Towle argues that people com© to England because .it is English, for sights and institutions they cannot see in other countries. Why, he asks, could, nob an English

hotel be run with all the best Enghsn characteristics? He looks, too, to the raising of the standard in hotel-keeping by the going .into it of better brains, for it is undoubtedly true that, the foriegner who runs an hotel is better educated: and more cultured than the average English hotel-keeper. If, he thinks, hotel-keepers are to act as hosts for the nation to those strangers who enter their gates, they must be equipped mentally ais well as materially to play the part- of host with some distinction. Should the English hotelkeeper but rise to this ideal, one can look to that very much bigger influx of visitors to this country than it now attracts to its historic scenes in spite of bad hotels, and thus justify our uttering the “Come to England invitation without shame. More and more it is ‘becoming the custom _ for visitors from the overseas dominions and America to stay in hotels rather than with friends.