When the historic Plaza Hotel in NYC opened in 1907, a room cost $2.50 per night, the same as $64.26 today. The Plaza now charges over $1,000/night.
100 Mind-Blowing Hotel Facts
In 1871, Potter Palmer, a Chicago businessman, built Palmer House, a Hilton Hotel, for a wedding gift for his wife, Bertha, who in 1893 asked the hotel’s pastry chef to make a chocolate cake-like treat that would be easy to transport for the World’s Columbian Exposition. The result of this request was the Palmer House Brownie, made of thick chocolate and topped with a walnut and apricot glaze and later published in a Sears Roebuck Catalog in 1898.
You can visit or stay in the “Scandal Room” (originally room 214) at The Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., where E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy communicated with burglars via radio during the 1972 Watergate break-in.
The notorious Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker (a.k.a. “Bonnie and Clyde”) stayed at The Stockyards Hotel in 1933, per Texas Highways. Now, you can stay in the room they occupied, which currently goes by the Bonnie and Clyde Junior Suite and features memorabilia about the duo, including a poem Bonnie wrote Clyde.
The Singapore Sling cocktail was created in 1915 in Singapore by Raffles Hotel bartender Ngiam Tong Boon. It’s typically made with gin, pineapple juice, grenadine, lime juice and cherry brandy, among other ingredients.
A hotel in New Orleans offered a $15,000 stay in a contest. The rules simply stated that the prize would go to whoever could steal the most outrageous item from them. This contest was published to the public on the hotel’s 125th anniversary.
A mash-up of two words to make a new word (such as breakfast and lunch into brunch, or motel from motor and hotel) is called a portmanteau. In case you’re wondering, the word “portmanteau” itself is not a portmanteau; it’s a compound word that refers to a duel-sided suitcase.
You can still stay at the world’s oldest hotel, Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Japan, which was founded in 705 AD.
The 2019 MGM data breach resulted in hackers leaking records of 142 million hotel guests. (CPO Magazine)
The First Universal Credit Card Was Introduced in 1950: Credit cards originated in the U.S. back in the 1920s, but were issued by individual firms, such as oil companies and hotel chains, to their customers, specifically for purchases made at company outlets. It wasn’t until 1950 that Diners Club founders Ralph Schneider and Frank McNamara issued a card that could be used at a variety of establishments. The Diners Club card sparked the modern credit card era. Others soon followed, such as American Express, which debuted their card of this type in 1958.