I absolutely LOVE the signage old hotels used way back then. The huuuge neon signs, with stars and arrows and various other starbursts, crazy fonts, overly sized and sometimes garish.
@@SuV33358 The Wildwoods, two towns on the New Jersey shore, have several motels that have been restored to that 1950s - 1960s big neon look. Very popular. In addition we stayed in a restored and upgraded 2-story motel in Savannah, GA several summers ago, called The Thunderbird. It still had the huge neon Thunderbird out front. The inside had been renovated to "boutique 1950s". It was awesome!
@@zazubombay they want to force convert as many people as possible to their religion. Part of their agenda involves their holy books in almost every single hotel and motel in the United States - right there in the nightstand drawer. To do so, they vacated that space the phone books used to occupy. Now, you can absolutely guarantee every single time you check in to any hotel or motel in the US, that their religious books will be in your nightstand. It’s a terrible, terrible push of propaganda.
More in hotels than motels, but wake up calls were a thing. Call the front desk and ask for a call to wake you up. Used to be a live person, later a recorded message.
I worked in a hotel in the 90’s. The wake up calls were automatically sent, but if they were unanswered you got a live call, if that was unanswered we came to the room to wake you up. Apparently someone missed a flight and blamed a missed wake up call. The hotel paid for a new flight and in person wake up became a thing
Hotel stationery is a thing of the past. Hotels used to provide a couple sheets of paper with the hotel’s header and an envelope to send letters. I started traveling as this was mostly phased out but I remember using stationery from the Loftleider in Reykjavik and the Hilton in Quito. Now you’re lucky if you get a small notepad.
Yes when i was very little I liked to save and collect the hotel stationary but that was right as they started just leaving a branded notepad and pens.
@@katv1195 Many U.S. hotels are just so rundown they could still be in the 80s. Others are really nice, it's a toss up. You have to take a lot of care when choosing one. Especially if you're from somewhere a long way away.
It's hard to even imagine the time -- not too long ago (pre-COVID) -- when you got DAILY housekeeping service at even the most budget motels, coming back to your room EACH afternoon or evening with completely new sheets on the bed, towels in the bathroom, garbage in the wastebasket removed, and rooms vacuumed and dusted. EACH DAY. This now seems so alien as to be almost a dream. 😒😞
@@yvonneplant9434 Obviously. Everey generation's era of growing up had positives and negatives. Plus generally speaking, childhood memories are good. I realize some people's childhood memories aren't. but I think most were.
These features are actually not that "long ago" if there are millions of us still around who remember using these features routinely. I started traveling a lot for work only in the 1990s, and these features were still commonplace: smoking rooms, wake up calls, hotel stationery, actual metal keys, PBX phone systems with live operators, etc. Their disappearance has really been only in the last 25 years.
On a related note, about 25 years ago, my daughter left her teddy bear at a hotel while we were traveling. About a week after we got back home, we got a package in the mail. It was her teddy bear. The hotel had sent it back to us at no charge.
Another guest service was babysitting. I remember staying at hotels when traveling when my brothers and I were very young. My parents wanted to go out for the evening and the hotel provided a sitter.
At the time of your "smoking rooms", smoking was actually allowed in all areas of the motel/hotel. It wasn't until the mid to late 80's that you could have a non-smoking room, but common areas still allowed smoking.
I came to the comments to say exactly this. Back then there was no such thing as a "smoking/nonsmoking room" or a "smoking/nonsmoking area" because people smoked absolutely everywhere. Airplanes, elevators, schools, grocery stores, you name it. It was inescapable.
@@hewitcStill can find smoking rooms at certain motels/hotels in Vegas to this day, if you know where to look. And outside of Park MGM(where the Monte Carlo got renovated into this), most Vegas casino gaming floors still permit smoking. Even if there are some small smoke free gaming areas.
Coming from Germany in 1973, my vivid memories as a 7-year-old boy was those vibrating beds that cost 25 cents a "ride", colour TV set and telephone in each room, swimming pool, and lot of delicious American breakfast (pancakes, waffles, omelet, etc. ). Those were offered at the cheap motel in the US but non-existential at guest or boarding houses in Germany. You'd have to pay a lot of money to stay at a hotel with TV set, telephone, and hot breakfast in Germany back then.
Coming from Germany, too in the early 90s, we had guest and hotel directories, a real phone book, a fresh copy of the USA Today and even a video game console Nintendo in some Best Western in the US. Often these hotels did not come with breakfast (buffets), so you needed to order food from Denny’s. Nowadays, the hotel breakfasts are better in Germany much more options than in the US. Stayed in a Fairfields in Maine recently and left very unhappily. In some hotels at Hiltons, they even did away with breakfast and only provide with an 18 $ meal breakfast, if you are gold level or higher at honors.
When I saw the bedding, I got a really sharp hit of nostalgia. We used bedding like that at home waaay past the time it was considered stylish (I'm talking 90s). It reminded me of my childhood visiting my grandparents on Sundays and hanging out with my cousins.
I got to take home a couple of those covers when the motel (Holiday Inn) I worked at some years after 2006 started replacing them with more modern covers. My parents still use the one I gave them, and I just recently rediscovered the other one when my dad started renovating a part of the house. It definitely gave me a big blast of nostalgia seeing it after so many years 😌.
When we traveled we stayed at motels, I don't think we ever could afford an actual hotel. Swimming pool was the best part. The jiggling beds were always a treat maybe twenty-five cents. They were always spotless and clean - no bed bug worries back then.
@@ForsakenWarnah most budget motels and hotels have definitely gone down in quality, some being outright dirty. I won’t stay at a Super 8 or Motel 6 or anything less quality than a Wyndham Gardens hotel. Anything of horrid quality, I’ll just sleep in my truck.
I’m a 1951 boomer child. Oldest of 4. Enjoyed x2 family road trips from Ontario to Nova Scotia in the early 60s to visit family. Loved the road trip every bit as much as time with family upon arrival. Pool’s & restaurant meals just fantastic experiences for us kids. I love the descriptions of what once was.
I remember checkout time as being noon or 1pm back in the day. Now it's always 11 am. Check in is usually at 3pm, so the customer doesn't even get a full 24 hours. And the expense is higher now too.
@@edbrown6985 Same here. Almost every hotel chain we stay in has a noon checkout, and if they do happen to have an 11AM, I will ask if I need Noon or even later and they normally accommodate my request.
I understand the need for a time to clean but I wish there was a night owl version so I can come in late and leave in the afternoon. As a night shifter it is another trait of day privelage. 🙄😋
I miss the old Howard Johnson hotels. Whenever I travel to a beach front town, I look for well maintained hotel/motels from the 1960s. There are many still around because older and younger people are looking for an interesting experience from the past.
Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, hotels used regular keys for the rooms. One time circa 1995, we stayed at a Hilton that had electronic room key cards. My brother and I were amazed. It was one of the coolest things we'd ever seen.
I was in Chicago in 1987 and my cousins were staying at a Radisson hotel and I swear the the motel had digital cards with punch holes that you slid into a slot in the door there was no key.
1:01 I recognized those motels immediately! Wildwood, NJ! My family goes there every summer, and they are known for their dop-wop style motels. I thought of Wildwood as soon as you started talking about Googie architecture. Love that you included a picture of Wildwood!❤
For three years in a row in the mid-60s, we vacationed in Wildwood at a small motel called The Astronaut. It has a coffee shop and an icemaker. I still have a picture postcard.
my Mom used to carry her own pillows to Howard Johnson's in Hyannis, MA. The hotel pillows were too lumpy and I can remember her leaving a review on a comment card. 55 years later when I travel I carry my memory pillow just like Mom.
I am 75 and grew up in a town of about 2,000. We were on Hwy 75. There was a motel, small cabin rooms, right next to the highway. When I was very young, one of the rooms was a photographer’s office. In 1993, my guy stayed in the motel when he came to my mother’s funeral. A few years ago, it was put up for sale. No takers-I suppose there were too many remediations that needed done, removal of asbestos, etc. It’s almost completely torn down now, and it makes me sad. Small towns lose so much without having a decades old fixture removed. 2 years ago, it was my high school!
My husband and I literally live in hotels due to his job (my job is online, so I can work anywhere there's Internet). In the last 4+ years, there's only been maybe three rooms that didn't have a bible!
Related to the disappearance of postcards was the disappearance of ballpoint pens and (gasp!) hotel stationery in the guest rooms. (At the time, people did write letters from their hotel rooms....) Also, local Yellow Pages directories disappeared about the same time as the Gideon Bibles -- though my room at the Fairfield Inn in Philly last winter had a rather old copy of the latter!
Diving Boards were common when I was a kid in the 60's.... These were sadly missed as they were slowly removed. What fun is a pool without a diving board...
they were most likely removed from hotel pools and many hotels chose indoor pools that appeal all year around rather than outdoor ones and an indoor pool needs a really tall ceiling for diving boards, also safety risks of diving boards are expensive, if someone got hurt on it, it’s basically blamed all on the hotel or provider of the board to users (the hotel)
I really like how much hotels have done to try to make everyone compfy. I especially love the addition of coffee makers and refrigerators… also, plenty of hotels still sell postcards. I send my mom one from every town I visit. My mom saves them and puts them in a photo album. The best part is that I’ve been to hundreds of cities across 24 countries on 5 continents. I’m only missing Asia and Antarctica.
Love that you still send one to your mom from the various places you go. It's a running joke in my family that when I was about 10 or 12 years old, my parents went on a trip to Europe and left me with my grandparents. I specifically asked them to send me postcards from the road, and waited impatiently, but for days no such postcards arrived. When they finally did, I was flummoxed by receiving an envelope addressed in Mom's handwriting, which turned out to contain various BLANK souvenir postcards. When they got home, my father felt so vindicated by my expression of disappointment! He had tried in vain to explain to my mother his certainty that I didn't merely want the postcards as in "a picture to look at," but was requesting them to write me messages _on_ the postcards about their travels and send them each separately. She was sure he was wrong, and in the 40+ years since, she has been teased lovingly but mercilessly over it: "Send me postcards... *_with writing on them_* !" 🥰 Garrison Keillor once wrote wrote a lovely essay on the art of writing a good postcard message. You can find it in his collection _We Are Still Married_ .
I worked at a motel in the first few years of the early 2000s. 80-90% of the guests would schedule a wake-up call with the front desk. There was a logbook just for wake-up calls next to the phone console. Now, I’m back in the hospitality industry and we get a wake-up request maybe once a month. There are instructions on how to enter them into the phone system taped on the phone console because nobody remembers how since they’re so rare.
Back in the days of rotary phones, many hotels had locks on the dial that you had to pay to get removed during your stay. Probably one of the earliest forms of parental control, preventing kids or drunk guests from making unwanted calls.
I miss bed spreads. No one needs an 18 inch thick duvet that makes you feel like you’re laying on the surface of the sun even when it’s 23 degrees Fahrenheit outside and you have the window open - if you’re lucky enough to have a hotel window that opens.
@@johnp139 LOL. It usually gets kicked to the floor within about 15 minutes of attempting to sleep. Seems like there ought to be an option between nothing and way too much, though.
As a kid traveling in tne 60s with my family, I would say that Googie designs looked like the Jetsons TV show. Mybparents would be perplexed, and my cool older sisters would finally say, yeah you're right! LOL
I work in a hotel as a laundry attendant, and I still very much see the Bibles in the drawer. I don't think that has ever went out of "style" like the other stuff mentioned.
We used to have room service maids. They would come in every day at 9/10, change out the sheets, make the beds, vacuum the room, take out the used towels leaving clean ones, they dusted the furniture/desk, empty or exchange out ash trays and garbage cans, and left the room clean. Sometimes, they turned down the sheets at the corner, and left a chocolate on the turned down corner. Sometimes, there were terry cloth bathrobes hanging in the closet to use instead of the towels. They would replace these when they did the towels. There were glasses, with complimentary toothbrush, toothpaste and dental floss in the bathrooms. The glasses were also changed out daily. These maids worked in shifts and there were 5-10 maids depending on the size of the hotel/motel. Now, we are lucky to get new clean towels without asking for them. The rooms were cleaner, because hotels/motels hired maids to clean.
They don’t clean the rooms anymore if it’s occupied. They only replace towels and take out the trash. Some hotels offer cleaning upon request. Disgusting and lazy on their part.
A modern NYC hotel I stayed at this week had a Bible. It also had The Book Of Mormon. I haven't read that one, but I've seen the stage show and it's a ripper!
4:05 Back in the day, our policy on visitors on the 400-room property where I worked was to ask the visitor to use the house phone to call themotel operator and the operator would connect the visitor to the guest room where the guest could provide the number or come to the lobby if they didn't want the visitor to know the number, or wished to ditch the encounter altogether. 5:25 Beds aren't as comfortable as they used to be. I always pack a separate duffle with a couple of plush blankets in case the motel "comforters" (usuallt an additional thin sheet) is inadequate. Packs neatly into a recess in the trunk.
Some of these are still around. I don't stay in hotels very often anymore but I don't think I've been in an American hotel room that didn't have a Guidian Bible in the nightstand.
One of the greatest things about motels in the 60s was the Ice Machine! In those days, only wealthy people had ice makers, so the availability of Unlimited Ice was just fabulous!
@@BennyLlama39 You can't get the smoke out of the rooms. Smokers actually destroy the hotel's property. We were on a cruise and the smokers before us ruined the room. The manager said the curtains, carpet etc all had to be thrown out and replaced with new.
@@BennyLlama39yeah, how dare they make hotel rooms healthier and more pleasant for both future guests and hotel staff, all because a cigarette turns out to be a portable item a person could just take outside to enjoy without inflicting it on everyone else. The nerve!
I remember staying in a Holidome outside of Cincinnati. It had an indoor pool, playground and putt-putt all in a central dome with the romes around it. It was AWESOME!!
I worked for a popular hotel brand for almost 5 years and technically all hotels are still supposed to keep the written down logbook in the case of power going out or a fire, and we need a way to identify guest if the computers were to fail
At the President Hotel in Atlantic City, in 1965, Mom grabbed the GLASS pitcher of ice water and struck the drunk over his head when he broke the door down mistaking the room for someone else's.
I love how back then everything was special, like watching tv, going out to eat where as now with the over consummation of everything nothing feels anymore
My family used to stay at motels up and down the Eastern Seaboard, driving between New Britain Ct, and Miami. And also around Florida. You could call the front desk and ask for a wake up call, and an actual person would call you in the morning, Live and In Person. Dining in the motel restaurant was also fun. I think "South of the Border," was the most exciting place we stayed at. What could be more fun than Giant Apes and Characters and Fireworks galore !!! The Crystal City Marriott in Washington DC was fun too, with its modern style AND it's underground tunnels connecting to other areas around the hotel.
We put my little bro on a plane in EWR Newark NJ to meet my aunt & uncle in FL. My dad gave him enough money to take them out to eat & all he wanted to do is spend the money on fireworks. They were driving my uncles moms Caddy back up. He was only 10 & knew about South of the Border 😂
@@samanthab1923 And it is still there, just as kooky as it was 40 years ago. But it was the Wild Wild West back in those days, the 70's and early 80's.
@@jeremy1350 I can’t just imagine. They stopped in Mrytle Beach too. 😆 hitting all the hot spots. While sitting by the hotel pool a guy broke the diving board. My uncle hears hey Bill, that big fat guy just broke the diving board! 😮
On trips from Levittown, PA to Miami, 'South of the Border' was way overrated. Stopped 1x to figure that out. Remember the construction of I-95? Some states were slower than others, but what a game-changer.
@@FreeRadicals305 It was a fun "stop" on the way to fireworks shop, and see the kooky giant apes and others. We stayed once, but never again. We traveled mostly on I-95 between the two points. It was cheaper.
Most of the motels and hotels that my family stayed in on vacations had a majority of smoking rooms with a few nonsmoking rooms. I remember my parents having to pay extra for nonsmoking rooms at a few places. I hated the stale smoke smell and how it permeated my clothes and took a long time to rid them of the smell after we returned home. Also, I’m allergic to cigarette and cigar smoke, so I had health issues when we had to stay in a “smoking” room.
Holiday Inn, Amsterdam NY, 1970’s-80’s. Indoor pool with a nonopus painted on the wall, it was supposed to be an octopus but it had 9 legs! Ooops! Quite funny for kids!
The Space Age Lodge in Gila Bend, AZ had that vintage style signage and was a fun roadside attraction place to stay for a long time. Now, I think Best Western has taken it over and it is a toned down version of what it was.
The lobby is very interesting of the Spage Age lodge… I was in Gila Bend in winter… Best Western used to have a real crown on their hotel logos. We could spot a BW for MILES ahead… Now they only have circular logos.
@ 0:10. Geez I wet myself at that photo. That was the Oakleigh motel in Melbourne Australia. I drive by it going to work. Looks basically the same although it’s been converted into apartments now. It was built in the mid 1950’s for the Melbourne Olympics and was the turn around point for the Marathon. It’s about 20 kms out of the central city.
It's interesting how much Australia embraced the American motel concept in the decades after the war. As you noticed, many Australian motels could be mistaken for American ones complete with Googie architecture. But their fall was almost as fast as their rise and by the 1980s we began switching back to traditional accommodation like hotels and guesthouses, although backpacker hostels took over the bottom end of the market from pubs.
I got my hands on a old motel television that had a barrel key hole on the side. The key is long gone but if you wanted television, you had to pay extra, and the desk clerk would unlock it for you.
For a time, Motel 6 used the coin operated B/W TV sets as part of its marketing model of a clean, but basic, low cost motel room. The coins turned out to be too much of a nuisance for guests when the TV would shut off during a program and the guest would find that he or she was out of quarters. Motel 6 switched to a key operated system, where you could obtain a TV key for extra cost at check-in, and your TV viewing would not be interrupted. You would insert the key and turn it, then the TV could be operated normally. The key stayed in the TV lock but the staff had some way of removing it after your stay ended before the next guest checked in. Motel 6 eventually did away with the extra charge for the TV, which was really never intended to make money, just be part of the marketing model. They also upgraded to color TV sets as color became effectively standard, added a reservation system, and started accepting credit cards. Even though the TV was extra cost, it was considered a basic feature that the room had to have. One time, I managed to rent the last room in a Motel 6 because the TV in that room did not work. The clerk asked me if I needed to have a TV and I said no, so he let me have the room, which he planned to leave vacant. Before TV came of age, some rooms had coin operated radios. A few of these radios have survived and are in the hands of collectors.
@@JeffreyMason-e3k I remember in 2005 when I was in China, my parents put our relatives up in a motel room. That was the first and only time I saw an old fashioned black and white TV with the tuning knobs.
I can remember when there were phone booths in the lobby, some motels had coin operated TV's where a quarter would get you like 4 hours of use, cigarette vending machines, and clean smelling rooms.
My family stayed in a motel in New Mexico in the late 1960s on the way to California. The beds all had Magic Fingwers, and I took my precious coin and dropped it in the slot. It vibrated the bed for the expected length of time - and then the coin dropped into the return slot, so I inserted it again. And again - for hours! In retrospect I suppose it was stealing, but I was a dumb kid.
You had to call the hotel or take a chance and just arrive hoping they had a room available. I remember visiting Florida in the 1980's to vacation with my parents and we just drive down without a reservation. We always found a room. However, we ended up in dump once because all of the other nicer hotels were sold out. After that, we stayed in better hotels with a reservation made over the phone of course.
That was my family when there wasn't a Holiday Inn available. I remember those thick books that Holiday Inn gave out that listed their hotels. We never stayed in a dump, but we did stay in a hotel that was just built and in our opinion still wasn't ready for guest.
At 71, I'm very familiar with all of this. Because of smoking, hotel rooms had a "hotel room smell" that was just expected. I quit smoking in 1988 mostly because of non-smoking edicts everywhere. Smoking became too much of a hassle. If they provided a "smoking area" at work it was in the parking lot away from the building. I remember seeing smokers in the rain with their umbrellas. I wasn't willing to go there!
I once checked in to the Sahara in Vegas, and I noticed a painting on the wall. It was gold paint on black velvet, and showed an impressionist vision of the kaaba 🕋 Islam's holiest site. Astonished, I looked around. On the opposite wall was a painting in the same style, but this one showed the Dome of the Rock. Islam's second holiest site. I immediately searched the room for a Gideon Koran. No such luck.
I stayed in a motel once that had a bottle opener right next to the toilet. You know, just in case you wanted to crack open a cold one while you're taking a crap.
In 1973 (3 months out of high school) I got a job as a porter (do everything no one else will do) at a Holiday Inn that was only 1 year old. I stayed in the industry (even got a degree in hotel management at Michigan State Univ) and noticed the gradual changes over a 20+ year period. The longer I stayed in hotels, the less I liked it due to computers, lack of personal service, etc. I miss the "good old days" when telling someone I worked at Holiday Inn ment something to be proud of. The nightly audit used to take hours on a mechanical NCR register and is now done by a computer in 15 minutes while the "clerk" is sleeping in a back room.
One thing I've noticed is that "color cable tv" has been replaced by "free wifi" as a selling point. I don't remember seeing key cards until probably the mid to late 90's.
Believe it or not, some hotels in Germany in the early 2000s only bought the Wifi service from Deutsche Telekom, which still charge a fortune on Lufthansa flights. It was a thing to install specific certificates… Now you just enter a code or your last name and room number and get free wifi. Sadly highly insecure and often hacked, that I recommend to use a travel router.
It wasn’t just your hotel room where the TV only had a few channels. Most people only had a few channels on their home televisions too. Growing up in a Long Island suburb of NYC in the 1960s and 1970s we had three network channels, three local channels and PBS. And this was a major market. When we traveled upstate (NY) there were fewer channels in the motels but that’s because there were no other OTA channels in the area. Cable and satellite TV were decades away. We had radio and we also had books and puzzles and board games for rainy days. But if it was nice out we would be outside. Playing, swimming in the pool or lake, or hiking and exploring. We didn’t travel to sit in a motel and watch TV. And there were no video games or cell phones then. There were no dedicated smoking areas because people smoked everywhere. We weren’t a smoking family except for one grandfather who was not allowed to smoke around us.
Anybody else???? When the picture went OUT in there 1959 Magnavox,,, they put their 127p “portable” on top of it because the Magnavox, was a piece of furniture.
I was traveling in US from Texas to Wisconsin by car in 2004. I was sleeping in random Motels on my way. I found almost everything same as in this video. The Holy Bible were in every room on bedside table drawer. Telephones with buttons also. TVs with glass color screen and remote control laying on the bed or by side of the Bible. Only vibrating beds I haven't seem. In some Motels reception even an old slot machines I found for play if you are borry at room. Everything were old but working perfectly, also clean. The most impressive was that at anytime, even in midnight when I came I found always somebody in reception and free room available. Just you are tire by driving, turn to motel and in 10min you will get a room key and can go sleep. Opposite in Europe in Germany: you must to book a room at least 2 weeks before.
Better Privacy now. Better TV's now. I do see Bibles still in the Rooms. So that's not gone away. No one is forcing anyone to look at it. It's just there if you want to.
1) Most hotels and resorts still have Gideon Bibles in an upper drawer. 2) The historic Bed and Breakfasts still use the old metal keys and metal key fobs.
Regarding the Gideon Bibles -- I don't think so. The last 4 hotels I've stayed at had no such Bibles in the room. I'm guessing fewer and fewer places do. Perhaps they are more common in certain parts of the country, like the Deep South. I know that in many hotels in Utah and southern Idaho you can find a Book of Mormon in hotel rooms.
I liked going to the older hotels where you could see the bathtubs were sized for how much shorter people were back then. I also get a kick out of some of the really older hotel rooms that were only wide enough for the bed and a bit of room to walk around them. Those rooms still had a bathroom and tub.
Gideon-bibles are still very common in hotels in Germany. There was even one in the station of the (catholic) home for elderly, I did my social service back in the late 1990ies.
In Wildwood, New Jersey there are many vintage motels, I love this place, I have been there many times with my parents as a child, with my boyfriend, now my husband and kids…still planning to return soon 😂
I've stayed at a hotel with a CRT TV and another with metal room keys well after those things were considered obsolete across the industry at large. Though these were small, low-end independent hotels.
I stayed at a motel with metal keys in the last few weeks. The TV was LCD but it was on a shelf clearly designed for a CRT. Not that I even turned it on! That place was just somewhere to shower and sleep between work and socialising for a weekend
I see PBX exchange phones and some other things on this list at quite a few hotels still. This last trip I was on was the first time I didn’t see an exchange phone, and I wasn’t sure what to do when I needed to call the front desk about another guest running down the hall naked and banging on doors. By the time I figured out how to reach someone, he was gone. I didn’t like that-you have to call the general line and hope you aren’t on hold behind people trying to make reservations, and I ended up doing. The direct line approach is much better, and for this reason alone, I won’t be staying there again.
How do hotels back then compare to staying at a hotel now? 🏨
It's depressing how standards have fallen!
Hi
A lot of needless and unnecessary expenses
@@debannas4567 lol, you don't get it. You must be young
@@SuV33358 yep, I’m 70 years young😂😂🤣
For some reason as kids the pool was the best feature ❤
Still is for me and my daughters (30 & 27)!!!
Something positive after a long day on the road. For the parentsa, a chance to get rid of us kids for a while.
I credit the many hotel swimming pools I inhabited when my family was traveling to visit family to my swimming expertise now that I’m in my sixties
Because you were a child… imagine that
@@sp8118 not me cause i dont know how to swim
Watching TV while in bed was a special treat!
I absolutely LOVE the signage old hotels used way back then. The huuuge neon signs, with stars and arrows and various other starbursts, crazy fonts, overly sized and sometimes garish.
Especially Holiday Inn and Quality Inns.
Especially in Las Vegas!
Route 66 still has its places.
@@SuV33358
The Wildwoods, two towns on the New Jersey shore, have several motels that have been restored to that 1950s - 1960s big neon look. Very popular.
In addition we stayed in a restored and upgraded 2-story motel in Savannah, GA several summers ago, called The Thunderbird.
It still had the huge neon Thunderbird out front. The inside had been renovated to "boutique 1950s". It was awesome!
And the fact it’s called Googy Architecture takes it to the next level!
There was usually a local phone book in the nightstand drawer, too.
Gideons made sure that ended 😔
@@mason96575 Why?
@@zazubombay they want to force convert as many people as possible to their religion. Part of their agenda involves their holy books in almost every single hotel and motel in the United States - right there in the nightstand drawer.
To do so, they vacated that space the phone books used to occupy.
Now, you can absolutely guarantee every single time you check in to any hotel or motel in the US, that their religious books will be in your nightstand.
It’s a terrible, terrible push of propaganda.
@@zazubombayThey had Bible's In The night stand drawer
More in hotels than motels, but wake up calls were a thing. Call the front desk and ask for a call to wake you up. Used to be a live person, later a recorded message.
Yes specially if you had an early flight.
We do wake up calls at my hotel but it's automatic. It just rings and goes beep beep.
People rarely ask for one nowadays.
Most hotels will still do wake up calls now, they're just automated.
when i stayed in hotel in 2022 the wake up was still done by live person
I worked in a hotel in the 90’s. The wake up calls were automatically sent, but if they were unanswered you got a live call, if that was unanswered we came to the room to wake you up. Apparently someone missed a flight and blamed a missed wake up call. The hotel paid for a new flight and in person wake up became a thing
Hotel stationery is a thing of the past. Hotels used to provide a couple sheets of paper with the hotel’s header and an envelope to send letters. I started traveling as this was mostly phased out but I remember using stationery from the Loftleider in Reykjavik and the Hilton in Quito. Now you’re lucky if you get a small notepad.
Yes when i was very little I liked to save and collect the hotel stationary but that was right as they started just leaving a branded notepad and pens.
Now you get WiFi instead.
I miss that stationery.
@@katv1195 That sounds very posh. In the U.S. we're lucky if we can find a hotel that's clean anymore. It makes travelling difficult.
@@katv1195 Many U.S. hotels are just so rundown they could still be in the 80s. Others are really nice, it's a toss up. You have to take a lot of care when choosing one. Especially if you're from somewhere a long way away.
Such fond memories of the vibrating beds and outdoor pools!! Remember the lighted Holiday Inn signs??
I remember the first time we stayed somewhere with a vibrating bed. It turned out to be more fun in theory than in practice.
I remember the motels my parents and I stayed at when we went on vacation
It's hard to even imagine the time -- not too long ago (pre-COVID) -- when you got DAILY housekeeping service at even the most budget motels, coming back to your room EACH afternoon or evening with completely new sheets on the bed, towels in the bathroom, garbage in the wastebasket removed, and rooms vacuumed and dusted. EACH DAY. This now seems so alien as to be almost a dream. 😒😞
As someone born decades after the time this video covers, this channel is interesting to see what American life was like long ago.
Same
These kinds of videos tend to idealize everything from the past.
@@yvonneplant9434 Obviously. Everey generation's era of growing up had positives and negatives. Plus generally speaking, childhood memories are good. I realize some people's childhood memories aren't. but I think most were.
You could “dial 9” to get an outside line.
These features are actually not that "long ago" if there are millions of us still around who remember using these features routinely. I started traveling a lot for work only in the 1990s, and these features were still commonplace: smoking rooms, wake up calls, hotel stationery, actual metal keys, PBX phone systems with live operators, etc. Their disappearance has really been only in the last 25 years.
A travel lodge teddy bear was given to me as a kid by the lobby staff. I loved having it and kept it most of my childhood.
On a related note, about 25 years ago, my daughter left her teddy bear at a hotel while we were traveling. About a week after we got back home, we got a package in the mail. It was her teddy bear. The hotel had sent it back to us at no charge.
That brings to my mind the Shoney bear named after the restaurant.
Another guest service was babysitting. I remember staying at hotels when traveling when my brothers and I were very young. My parents wanted to go out for the evening and the hotel provided a sitter.
That’s… insane.
@@WhosThere26my exact thought lol
I remember being left with the hotel babysitter once! Didn’t end well (for the babysitter) because my cousin and I snuck out.
They still offer those in some places.
Some high end hotels still do. They typically contract with a nanny service, and they are pricey (like $200 for 4 hours plus tip).
At the time of your "smoking rooms", smoking was actually allowed in all areas of the motel/hotel. It wasn't until the mid to late 80's that you could have a non-smoking room, but common areas still allowed smoking.
Dude I was in Vegas in 2006 and still could smoke in my room.
Insane I did that. Glad I quit
I came to the comments to say exactly this. Back then there was no such thing as a "smoking/nonsmoking room" or a "smoking/nonsmoking area" because people smoked absolutely everywhere. Airplanes, elevators, schools, grocery stores, you name it. It was inescapable.
@@penguin44ca Could you smoke in the casino back then?
@@hewitcStill can find smoking rooms at certain motels/hotels in Vegas to this day, if you know where to look. And outside of Park MGM(where the Monte Carlo got renovated into this), most Vegas casino gaming floors still permit smoking. Even if there are some small smoke free gaming areas.
You can still smoke in vegas casinos today and most bars in maimi
Coming from Germany in 1973, my vivid memories as a 7-year-old boy was those vibrating beds that cost 25 cents a "ride", colour TV set and telephone in each room, swimming pool, and lot of delicious American breakfast (pancakes, waffles, omelet, etc. ). Those were offered at the cheap motel in the US but non-existential at guest or boarding houses in Germany. You'd have to pay a lot of money to stay at a hotel with TV set, telephone, and hot breakfast in Germany back then.
Funnily enough, now adays I love the service at hotels in Europe vs American hotels.
But you could probably get a nice dopplebock.
Coming from Germany, too in the early 90s, we had guest and hotel directories, a real phone book, a fresh copy of the USA Today and even a video game console Nintendo in some Best Western in the US. Often these hotels did not come with breakfast (buffets), so you needed to order food from Denny’s. Nowadays, the hotel breakfasts are better in Germany much more options than in the US. Stayed in a Fairfields in Maine recently and left very unhappily. In some hotels at Hiltons, they even did away with breakfast and only provide with an 18 $ meal breakfast, if you are gold level or higher at honors.
When I saw the bedding, I got a really sharp hit of nostalgia. We used bedding like that at home waaay past the time it was considered stylish (I'm talking 90s). It reminded me of my childhood visiting my grandparents on Sundays and hanging out with my cousins.
I got to take home a couple of those covers when the motel (Holiday Inn) I worked at some years after 2006 started replacing them with more modern covers. My parents still use the one I gave them, and I just recently rediscovered the other one when my dad started renovating a part of the house. It definitely gave me a big blast of nostalgia seeing it after so many years 😌.
When we traveled we stayed at motels, I don't think we ever could afford an actual hotel. Swimming pool was the best part. The jiggling beds were always a treat maybe twenty-five cents. They were always spotless and clean - no bed bug worries back then.
DDT got rid of bedbugs.
It was great when hotels has a restaurant attached. Rhe service was always good back rhen
Cleanliness is something I've noticed missing too
You must be staying in the wrong hotels...
Replaced with bedbugs. All ok
@@ForsakenWarnah most budget motels and hotels have definitely gone down in quality, some being outright dirty. I won’t stay at a Super 8 or Motel 6 or anything less quality than a Wyndham Gardens hotel. Anything of horrid quality, I’ll just sleep in my truck.
Hotels have never been clean
bigly
I can remember the heat lamps in the bathrooms. Always thought it was neat.
I'm Tom Bodet, and we'll leave the light on for you.
I met him at a gas station in Marysville, California. He was there to check on one of his motels. He was very nice.
@@Colorado_Native How cool is that? That would be like meeting Mr. Rogers or Bob Ross!
Nostalgia
I used to love the violin jingle during the commercial and can still remember every note! 🎻 ☺️
I’m a 1951 boomer child. Oldest of 4. Enjoyed x2 family road trips from Ontario to Nova Scotia in the early 60s to visit family. Loved the road trip every bit as much as time with family upon arrival. Pool’s & restaurant meals just fantastic experiences for us kids. I love the descriptions of what once was.
I'm with you on that! ( 3rd of 4 ) Can't tell you how COLD the pool would be, never mattered : )
Ah, I miss postcards! so much fun.
@@reneelibby4885 I miss receiving them too.
I guess the cellphone cameras and texts have taken the place of postcards. 📱
Great video! But you forgot to mention diving boards and “deep end” pools. Hardly any of those around at hotels these days.
@@TheParot161 High insurance policies caused many hotel pools to disappear.
I remember checkout time as being noon or 1pm back in the day. Now it's always 11 am. Check in is usually at 3pm, so the customer doesn't even get a full 24 hours. And the expense is higher now too.
Well, they do need time to clean the room after it is used.
I live in Pennsylvania,most allow eleven am check in.or late check out at 2pm for an extra charge.
@@edbrown6985 Same here. Almost every hotel chain we stay in has a noon checkout, and if they do happen to have an 11AM, I will ask if I need Noon or even later and they normally accommodate my request.
Just like everything else, we're paying more and getting less.
I understand the need for a time to clean but I wish there was a night owl version so I can come in late and leave in the afternoon.
As a night shifter it is another trait of day privelage. 🙄😋
I miss the old Howard Johnson hotels. Whenever I travel to a beach front town, I look for well maintained hotel/motels from the 1960s. There are many still around because older and younger people are looking for an interesting experience from the past.
Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, hotels used regular keys for the rooms. One time circa 1995, we stayed at a Hilton that had electronic room key cards. My brother and I were amazed. It was one of the coolest things we'd ever seen.
Smaller hotels still do. Last time I got a regular key was in Germany a year ago. An intermediate solution is the mechanical key cards with holes.
In '89 for me. I was mesmerized. Now I take them for granted.
I was in Chicago in 1987 and my cousins were staying at a Radisson hotel and I swear the the motel had digital cards with punch holes that you slid into a slot in the door there was no key.
@@baba2024-y2c I remember the same, at a hotel in Evansville in '89.
1:01 I recognized those motels immediately! Wildwood, NJ! My family goes there every summer, and they are known for their dop-wop style motels. I thought of Wildwood as soon as you started talking about Googie architecture. Love that you included a picture of Wildwood!❤
For three years in a row in the mid-60s, we vacationed in Wildwood at a small motel called The Astronaut. It has a coffee shop and an icemaker. I still have a picture postcard.
my Mom used to carry her own pillows to Howard Johnson's in Hyannis, MA. The hotel pillows were too lumpy and I can remember her leaving a review on a comment card. 55 years later when I travel I carry my memory pillow just like Mom.
I am 75 and grew up in a town of about 2,000. We were on Hwy 75. There was a motel, small cabin rooms, right next to the highway. When I was very young, one of the rooms was a photographer’s office. In 1993, my guy stayed in the motel when he came to my mother’s funeral. A few years ago, it was put up for sale. No takers-I suppose there were too many remediations that needed done, removal of asbestos, etc. It’s almost completely torn down now, and it makes me sad. Small towns lose so much without having a decades old fixture removed. 2 years ago, it was my high school!
There's a Gideon Bible in the room I'm staying at right now. I was like, "they're still pretty common," so I looked. Yep.
Yeah, I was just at a hotel over the weekend and there was one there too.
My husband and I literally live in hotels due to his job (my job is online, so I can work anywhere there's Internet). In the last 4+ years, there's only been maybe three rooms that didn't have a bible!
Related to the disappearance of postcards was the disappearance of ballpoint pens and (gasp!) hotel stationery in the guest rooms. (At the time, people did write letters from their hotel rooms....)
Also, local Yellow Pages directories disappeared about the same time as the Gideon Bibles -- though my room at the Fairfield Inn in Philly last winter had a rather old copy of the latter!
Diving Boards were common when I was a kid in the 60's.... These were sadly missed as they were slowly removed. What fun is a pool without a diving board...
they were most likely removed from hotel pools and many hotels chose indoor pools that appeal all year around rather than outdoor ones and an indoor pool needs a really tall ceiling for diving boards, also safety risks of diving boards are expensive, if someone got hurt on it, it’s basically blamed all on the hotel or provider of the board to users (the hotel)
I really like how much hotels have done to try to make everyone compfy. I especially love the addition of coffee makers and refrigerators… also, plenty of hotels still sell postcards. I send my mom one from every town I visit. My mom saves them and puts them in a photo album. The best part is that I’ve been to hundreds of cities across 24 countries on 5 continents. I’m only missing Asia and Antarctica.
Love that you still send one to your mom from the various places you go. It's a running joke in my family that when I was about 10 or 12 years old, my parents went on a trip to Europe and left me with my grandparents. I specifically asked them to send me postcards from the road, and waited impatiently, but for days no such postcards arrived. When they finally did, I was flummoxed by receiving an envelope addressed in Mom's handwriting, which turned out to contain various BLANK souvenir postcards.
When they got home, my father felt so vindicated by my expression of disappointment! He had tried in vain to explain to my mother his certainty that I didn't merely want the postcards as in "a picture to look at," but was requesting them to write me messages _on_ the postcards about their travels and send them each separately. She was sure he was wrong, and in the 40+ years since, she has been teased lovingly but mercilessly over it: "Send me postcards... *_with writing on them_* !" 🥰
Garrison Keillor once wrote wrote a lovely essay on the art of writing a good postcard message. You can find it in his collection _We Are Still Married_ .
I worked at a motel in the first few years of the early 2000s. 80-90% of the guests would schedule a wake-up call with the front desk. There was a logbook just for wake-up calls next to the phone console.
Now, I’m back in the hospitality industry and we get a wake-up request maybe once a month. There are instructions on how to enter them into the phone system taped on the phone console because nobody remembers how since they’re so rare.
Because people now have phones as their alarms.
Back in the days of rotary phones, many hotels had locks on the dial that you had to pay to get removed during your stay. Probably one of the earliest forms of parental control, preventing kids or drunk guests from making unwanted calls.
I had forgotten about that!
Those weren't comforters on the beds. They're bed spreads. That was the style then.
And they’re rarely washed, which is horrifying.
I miss bed spreads. No one needs an 18 inch thick duvet that makes you feel like you’re laying on the surface of the sun even when it’s 23 degrees Fahrenheit outside and you have the window open - if you’re lucky enough to have a hotel window that opens.
It is still the style in more expensive hotels. With top sheets of course.
@@rhuffstedtlerHow about TAKING IT OFF?!?!?!?!?!!?
@@johnp139 LOL. It usually gets kicked to the floor within about 15 minutes of attempting to sleep. Seems like there ought to be an option between nothing and way too much, though.
Googie architecture was so cool!
As a kid traveling in tne 60s with my family, I would say that Googie designs looked like the Jetsons TV show. Mybparents would be perplexed, and my cool older sisters would finally say, yeah you're right! LOL
I remember getting the postcards, I saved some to put in my travel diary.
I'm old enough to remember the disgusting smoking rooms. Great video! 👍
EXACTLY!!! I got stuck in a smoking room because they “ran out of” non-smoking rooms.
Plot twist, all yellow surfaces are actually white….with stains
Gideon Bibles are still quite common.
Also the Book of Mormon.
@@zazubombayya Marriott brands have the Book of Mormon as JW Marriott was Mormon.
I work in a hotel as a laundry attendant, and I still very much see the Bibles in the drawer. I don't think that has ever went out of "style" like the other stuff mentioned.
Agree; I stay in a lot of hotels and don’t think I’ve been in one that didn’t have one (at least that I’ve notes)
We used to have room service maids. They would come in every day at 9/10, change out the sheets, make the beds, vacuum the room, take out the used towels leaving clean ones, they dusted the furniture/desk, empty or exchange out ash trays and garbage cans, and left the room clean.
Sometimes, they turned down the sheets at the corner, and left a chocolate on the turned down corner.
Sometimes, there were terry cloth bathrobes hanging in the closet to use instead of the towels. They would replace these when they did the towels.
There were glasses, with complimentary toothbrush, toothpaste and dental floss in the bathrooms. The glasses were also changed out daily.
These maids worked in shifts and there were 5-10 maids depending on the size of the hotel/motel.
Now, we are lucky to get new clean towels without asking for them. The rooms were cleaner, because hotels/motels hired maids to clean.
They don’t clean the rooms anymore if it’s occupied. They only replace towels and take out the trash. Some hotels offer cleaning upon request. Disgusting and lazy on their part.
How about the bottle opener on the wall?
Yes -- often in the bathroom.
I remember the bottle openers too.❤
As a kid travelling with my parents in the early 70s, those "Googie" hotels still were all along the road, and so much fun at which to be guests.
...and hotel keys were a thing, even at some places in the 90s.
A Best Western in Jackson, TN still has Gideon Bibles!
Most hotels older than 2010 will. But it seems to be primarily southern. The Marriott I stayed at in SeaTac WA two years ago didn’t have one
@@yungsagegaming8577 This one was built in 2020.
@@pamelas1002 🤔
And probably the vibrating beds.
A modern NYC hotel I stayed at this week had a Bible. It also had The Book Of Mormon. I haven't read that one, but I've seen the stage show and it's a ripper!
4:05 Back in the day, our policy on visitors on the 400-room property where I worked was to ask the visitor to use the house phone to call themotel operator and the operator would connect the visitor to the guest room where the guest could provide the number or come to the lobby if they didn't want the visitor to know the number, or wished to ditch the encounter altogether.
5:25 Beds aren't as comfortable as they used to be. I always pack a separate duffle with a couple of plush blankets in case the motel "comforters" (usuallt an additional thin sheet) is inadequate. Packs neatly into a recess in the trunk.
Mints on pillows.
Whoa, what Palaces were you staying at?
I like mint.
The 5 star hotels used to leave chocolates on the pillow
We get chocolates
When I was a kid in China, it was usually white chocolate.
I remember every one of these
I guess that makes me old 🫤
Join the club! These were good times regardless.....
Some of these are still around. I don't stay in hotels very often anymore but I don't think I've been in an American hotel room that didn't have a Guidian
Bible in the nightstand.
Same. The good old days
One of the greatest things about motels in the 60s was the Ice Machine! In those days, only wealthy people had ice makers, so the availability of Unlimited Ice was just fabulous!
And GLASS drinking glasses
As kids traveling with the family through the South in the 70's we always referred to the heavily chlorinated water as Holiday Inn water.
Sometimes the postcards were in the top drawers of dressers also stationery with hotel logi.
Oh, Nd Hideons Bible in the nightstand.
"non-smoking" rooms used to be the special amenity....
Until some putz said, "Let's make *everything* non-smoking."
@@BennyLlama39God bless that guy. Cigarette smoke is nasty. You never get the smell out of the carpet.
@@BennyLlama39 You can't get the smoke out of the rooms. Smokers actually destroy the hotel's property. We were on a cruise and the smokers before us ruined the room. The manager said the curtains, carpet etc all had to be thrown out and replaced with new.
@@BennyLlama39 REALLY?
@@BennyLlama39yeah, how dare they make hotel rooms healthier and more pleasant for both future guests and hotel staff, all because a cigarette turns out to be a portable item a person could just take outside to enjoy without inflicting it on everyone else. The nerve!
I remember staying in a Holidome outside of Cincinnati. It had an indoor pool, playground and putt-putt all in a central dome with the romes around it. It was AWESOME!!
I worked for a popular hotel brand for almost 5 years and technically all hotels are still supposed to keep the written down logbook in the case of power going out or a fire, and we need a way to identify guest if the computers were to fail
At the President Hotel in Atlantic City, in 1965, Mom grabbed the GLASS pitcher of ice water and struck the drunk over his head when he broke the door down mistaking the room for someone else's.
I love how back then everything was special, like watching tv, going out to eat where as now with the over consummation of everything nothing feels anymore
So true, Susan.
My family used to stay at motels up and down the Eastern Seaboard, driving between New Britain Ct, and Miami. And also around Florida. You could call the front desk and ask for a wake up call, and an actual person would call you in the morning, Live and In Person. Dining in the motel restaurant was also fun. I think "South of the Border," was the most exciting place we stayed at. What could be more fun than Giant Apes and Characters and Fireworks galore !!!
The Crystal City Marriott in Washington DC was fun too, with its modern style AND it's underground tunnels connecting to other areas around the hotel.
We put my little bro on a plane in EWR Newark NJ to meet my aunt & uncle in FL. My dad gave him enough money to take them out to eat & all he wanted to do is spend the money on fireworks. They were driving my uncles moms Caddy back up. He was only 10 & knew about South of the Border 😂
@@samanthab1923 And it is still there, just as kooky as it was 40 years ago. But it was the Wild Wild West back in those days, the 70's and early 80's.
@@jeremy1350 I can’t just imagine. They stopped in Mrytle Beach too. 😆 hitting all the hot spots. While sitting by the hotel pool a guy broke the diving board. My uncle hears hey Bill, that big fat guy just broke the diving board! 😮
On trips from Levittown, PA to Miami, 'South of the Border' was way overrated. Stopped 1x to figure that out. Remember the construction of I-95? Some states were slower than others, but what a game-changer.
@@FreeRadicals305 It was a fun "stop" on the way to fireworks shop, and see the kooky giant apes and others. We stayed once, but never again. We traveled mostly on I-95 between the two points. It was cheaper.
I miss having clean sheets and towels every day.
Most of the motels and hotels that my family stayed in on vacations had a majority of smoking rooms with a few nonsmoking rooms. I remember my parents having to pay extra for nonsmoking rooms at a few places. I hated the stale smoke smell and how it permeated my clothes and took a long time to rid them of the smell after we returned home. Also, I’m allergic to cigarette and cigar smoke, so I had health issues when we had to stay in a “smoking” room.
Holiday Inn, Amsterdam NY, 1970’s-80’s. Indoor pool with a nonopus painted on the wall, it was supposed to be an octopus but it had 9 legs! Ooops! Quite funny for kids!
The Space Age Lodge in Gila Bend, AZ had that vintage style signage and was a fun roadside attraction place to stay for a long time. Now, I think Best Western has taken it over and it is a toned down version of what it was.
The lobby is very interesting of the Spage Age lodge… I was in Gila Bend in winter… Best Western used to have a real crown on their hotel logos. We could spot a BW for MILES ahead… Now they only have circular logos.
I've stayed at the Space Age. 👍
@ 0:10. Geez I wet myself at that photo. That was the Oakleigh motel in Melbourne Australia. I drive by it going to work. Looks basically the same although it’s been converted into apartments now. It was built in the mid 1950’s for the Melbourne Olympics and was the turn around point for the Marathon. It’s about 20 kms out of the central city.
It's interesting how much Australia embraced the American motel concept in the decades after the war. As you noticed, many Australian motels could be mistaken for American ones complete with Googie architecture. But their fall was almost as fast as their rise and by the 1980s we began switching back to traditional accommodation like hotels and guesthouses, although backpacker hostels took over the bottom end of the market from pubs.
Was that on the Princes Highway, left hand side as you drove into the city?
I remember the little mints left on my pillow by housekeeping staff.
I got my hands on a old motel television that had a barrel key hole on the side. The key is long gone but if you wanted television, you had to pay extra, and the desk clerk would unlock it for you.
I stayed in a hotel back in the 70's that had quarter operated TVs.
Me too, and most were black and white. But now when WiFi service is provided, I can watch TV through my Directv wireless subscription on my iPhone.
That’s a new one
For a time, Motel 6 used the coin operated B/W TV sets as part of its marketing model of a clean, but basic, low cost motel room. The coins turned out to be too much of a nuisance for guests when the TV would shut off during a program and the guest would find that he or she was out of quarters. Motel 6 switched to a key operated system, where you could obtain a TV key for extra cost at check-in, and your TV viewing would not be interrupted. You would insert the key and turn it, then the TV could be operated normally. The key stayed in the TV lock but the staff had some way of removing it after your stay ended before the next guest checked in. Motel 6 eventually did away with the extra charge for the TV, which was really never intended to make money, just be part of the marketing model. They also upgraded to color TV sets as color became effectively standard, added a reservation system, and started accepting credit cards.
Even though the TV was extra cost, it was considered a basic feature that the room had to have. One time, I managed to rent the last room in a Motel 6 because the TV in that room did not work. The clerk asked me if I needed to have a TV and I said no, so he let me have the room, which he planned to leave vacant.
Before TV came of age, some rooms had coin operated radios. A few of these radios have survived and are in the hands of collectors.
@@JeffreyMason-e3k I remember in 2005 when I was in China, my parents put our relatives up in a motel room. That was the first and only time I saw an old fashioned black and white TV with the tuning knobs.
I remember quarter operated TVS at the bus stations
I can remember when there were phone booths in the lobby, some motels had coin operated TV's where a quarter would get you like 4 hours of use, cigarette vending machines, and clean smelling rooms.
The pool in front!
My family stayed in a motel in New Mexico in the late 1960s on the way to California. The beds all had Magic Fingwers, and I took my precious coin and dropped it in the slot. It vibrated the bed for the expected length of time - and then the coin dropped into the return slot, so I inserted it again. And again - for hours! In retrospect I suppose it was stealing, but I was a dumb kid.
You had to call the hotel or take a chance and just arrive hoping they had a room available. I remember visiting Florida in the 1980's to vacation with my parents and we just drive down without a reservation. We always found a room. However, we ended up in dump once because all of the other nicer hotels were sold out. After that, we stayed in better hotels with a reservation made over the phone of course.
That was my family when there wasn't a Holiday Inn available. I remember those thick books that Holiday Inn gave out that listed their hotels. We never stayed in a dump, but we did stay in a hotel that was just built and in our opinion still wasn't ready for guest.
At 71, I'm very familiar with all of this. Because of smoking, hotel rooms had a "hotel room smell" that was just expected. I quit smoking in 1988 mostly because of non-smoking edicts everywhere. Smoking became too much of a hassle. If they provided a "smoking area" at work it was in the parking lot away from the building. I remember seeing smokers in the rain with their umbrellas. I wasn't willing to go there!
@@MikeinVirginia1 Congratulations on kicking the habit. And you're much healthier for it, especially your heart, lungs and kidneys.
great videos, thank you
I once checked in to the Sahara in Vegas, and I noticed a painting on the wall. It was gold paint on black velvet, and showed an impressionist vision of the kaaba 🕋 Islam's holiest site. Astonished, I looked around. On the opposite wall was a painting in the same style, but this one showed the Dome of the Rock. Islam's second holiest site. I immediately searched the room for a Gideon Koran. No such luck.
😁
I stayed in a motel once that had a bottle opener right next to the toilet. You know, just in case you wanted to crack open a cold one while you're taking a crap.
In 1973 (3 months out of high school) I got a job as a porter (do everything no one else will do) at a Holiday Inn that was only 1 year old. I stayed in the industry (even got a degree in hotel management at Michigan State Univ) and noticed the gradual changes over a 20+ year period. The longer I stayed in hotels, the less I liked it due to computers, lack of personal service, etc. I miss the "good old days" when telling someone I worked at Holiday Inn ment something to be proud of. The nightly audit used to take hours on a mechanical NCR register and is now done by a computer in 15 minutes while the "clerk" is sleeping in a back room.
Anyone else prefer the old Holiday inn sign?
Yes. We always drove many hours and arrived after dark. That sign was welcoming.
One thing I've noticed is that "color cable tv" has been replaced by "free wifi" as a selling point. I don't remember seeing key cards until probably the mid to late 90's.
Believe it or not, some hotels in Germany in the early 2000s only bought the Wifi service from Deutsche Telekom, which still charge a fortune on Lufthansa flights. It was a thing to install specific certificates… Now you just enter a code or your last name and room number and get free wifi. Sadly highly insecure and often hacked, that I recommend to use a travel router.
It wasn’t just your hotel room where the TV only had a few channels. Most people only had a few channels on their home televisions too. Growing up in a Long Island suburb of NYC in the 1960s and 1970s we had three network channels, three local channels and PBS. And this was a major market. When we traveled upstate (NY) there were fewer channels in the motels but that’s because there were no other OTA channels in the area. Cable and satellite TV were decades away. We had radio and we also had books and puzzles and board games for rainy days. But if it was nice out we would be outside. Playing, swimming in the pool or lake, or hiking and exploring. We didn’t travel to sit in a motel and watch TV. And there were no video games or cell phones then.
There were no dedicated smoking areas because people smoked everywhere. We weren’t a smoking family except for one grandfather who was not allowed to smoke around us.
Magic fingers in a hotel now a days would mean something totally different and it would cost more than 25 cents 😂😂😂
Smoking room? Every room was a smoking room before 1980.
Yeah. And they smelled like it, too.
Yeh, I thought the smoking room was the bar. But there would be an ashtray in your room anyway.
Who else remembers smoking and non-smoking sections on planes?
Anybody else???? When the picture went OUT in there 1959 Magnavox,,, they put their 127p “portable” on top of it because the Magnavox, was a piece of furniture.
I remember the TVs were bolted down
I was traveling in US from Texas to Wisconsin by car in 2004. I was sleeping in random Motels on my way. I found almost everything same as in this video. The Holy Bible were in every room on bedside table drawer. Telephones with buttons also. TVs with glass color screen and remote control laying on the bed or by side of the Bible. Only vibrating beds I haven't seem. In some Motels reception even an old slot machines I found for play if you are borry at room. Everything were old but working perfectly, also clean. The most impressive was that at anytime, even in midnight when I came I found always somebody in reception and free room available. Just you are tire by driving, turn to motel and in 10min you will get a room key and can go sleep. Opposite in Europe in Germany: you must to book a room at least 2 weeks before.
I miss when sit down restaurants were in hotels and motels
All urban hotels have restaurants. Maybe not in rural areas.
Hotel guest books were called registers.
Better Privacy now. Better TV's now. I do see Bibles still in the Rooms. So that's not gone away. No one is forcing anyone to look at it. It's just there if you want to.
Thanks for sharing.
Marriott still has the Gideon Bible as well as the Mormon Bible
1) Most hotels and resorts still have Gideon Bibles in an upper drawer.
2) The historic Bed and Breakfasts still use the old metal keys and metal key fobs.
I know we dumped all the ones we had 7-8 years ago. I always figured all hotels did it.
Regarding the Gideon Bibles -- I don't think so. The last 4 hotels I've stayed at had no such Bibles in the room. I'm guessing fewer and fewer places do. Perhaps they are more common in certain parts of the country, like the Deep South. I know that in many hotels in Utah and southern Idaho you can find a Book of Mormon in hotel rooms.
We used to ride the motel bed (in the 80s) like it was a roller coaster.
I still send postcards when I travel and especially when I go abroad
I rember sun lamps in the barhroom ceiling of some motels as a kid
I love the Googie architecture
Me too!
me too!
Same here. It's alive and well in Wildwood, NJ.
I liked going to the older hotels where you could see the bathtubs were sized for how much shorter people were back then. I also get a kick out of some of the really older hotel rooms that were only wide enough for the bed and a bit of room to walk around them. Those rooms still had a bathroom and tub.
Gideon-bibles are still very common in hotels in Germany.
There was even one in the station of the (catholic) home for elderly, I did my social service back in the late 1990ies.
In Wildwood, New Jersey there are many vintage motels, I love this place, I have been there many times with my parents as a child, with my boyfriend, now my husband and kids…still planning to return soon 😂
I remember those hotal postcards.
The images - and maybe the cards themselves - were decades old.
There was a time hotels provided Ethernet jacks. Now WiFi is provided.
I still find Gideon bibles everytime I rent a hotel room
Great!
Me too. I'm in New Zealand.
Me too. I’m in the USA, and I still find Bibles in most hotel rooms.
@@nancyhey1012 Praise the LORD!
7:00 Smok rooms, in Las Vagas almost every single place is an ashtray and stinks like cigarettes.
I've stayed at a hotel with a CRT TV and another with metal room keys well after those things were considered obsolete across the industry at large. Though these were small, low-end independent hotels.
I stayed at a motel with metal keys in the last few weeks. The TV was LCD but it was on a shelf clearly designed for a CRT. Not that I even turned it on! That place was just somewhere to shower and sleep between work and socialising for a weekend
I see PBX exchange phones and some other things on this list at quite a few hotels still. This last trip I was on was the first time I didn’t see an exchange phone, and I wasn’t sure what to do when I needed to call the front desk about another guest running down the hall naked and banging on doors. By the time I figured out how to reach someone, he was gone. I didn’t like that-you have to call the general line and hope you aren’t on hold behind people trying to make reservations, and I ended up doing. The direct line approach is much better, and for this reason alone, I won’t be staying there again.