Opulence in the Cabin

The traveling salesman on the road these days never had it so good--and neither, for that matter, did the farmer's daughter on vacation with her husband and five children. U.S. motels, once thought of as only a place to lay down one's head overnight, are competing with one another to give Americans the most outlandishly luxurious and wildly gimmicked night's rest in the history of the middle class. Today's motels bear about as much relation to the old tourist cabin as the Baths of Caracalla do to a penny arcade, and the grander names that now adorn them signal the newest look: Motor Inns, High Rise Motor Inns, Horizontal Hotels--almost anything but motels.

Butlers & Bedspreads. Swimming pools, cocktail lounges, restaurants, wall-to-wall carpeting and TV--nowadays, they are just the beginning. Guests at the four su-permotels of the Aristocrat chain in Chicago hardly notice such conveniences when they are ensconced in the "Rogue Room"at the Essex Inn, which is decorated with paintings of nude ladies and boasts a circular bed surrounded by a curtain of beads, or in Room 908 in Ascot House, which is decorated in Japanese style and comes complete with kimonos for its occupants. Ascot House also has a sidewalk cafe and a Cafe French Market where patrons may munch such Continental delicacies as escargots and bouillabaisse Marseillaise ($4.25), served by bus boys and bellhops in jockey silks.

On the way is the Aristocrat chain's $20 million, 75O-room McCormick Inn, which will have three swimming pools, six restaurants, a toboggan slide and a putting green.

Not content with ordinary restaurants, Holiday Inns is planning to build tenstory inns in downtown locations, each with a revolving restaurant on the roof.

Atlanta's Americana Motor Hotel offers tropical gardens, crystal chandeliers, shops, beauty salons and underground parking, and the city's Cabana Motor Hotel's new addition will treat its guests to copies of French provincial furniture, $140 bedspreads, a glass elevator--and split-level rooms. And at the Inn of the Six Flags, halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, there is not only steak-dinner room service and vibrating beds for travel-weary bones, but also a three-bedroom Acapulco Suite with its own private swimming pool, patio, and fulltime butler--all for $100 a night.

Many motels now take children under 14 free, but the William Hilton Inn in Hilton Head, S.C., has a nurse and helpers who mind children and even feed them in the dining room while parents are busy elsewhere. Staid Boston is building the Fenway Commonwealth, a six-story, Continental-flavor motel with reproductions of Italian provincial furniture and atmosphere built into the walls. At the Ocean-House Motel in San Diego, waiters are dressed in 17th century costumes as British naval officers, and macaws shrill from cages as guests swim in one of the largest pools in Southern California. Other motels offer kennels for dogs, fulltime butlers, free sewing kits, cookout facilities, bowling alleys, masseurs, Finnish saunas.

Kansas City's new Hilton Inn provides patrons with portable short-wave radios so that they can listen to jet pilots being "talked down" by the control tower of the Municipal Air Terminal outside the motel window ("Every man a barstool jet pilot"). Probably the farthest-out gimmick of all is the Frustration Room at Chicago's new Imperial Inn. After a nerve-twanging day of trauma and repression on the road, motorists are invited to unwind by hurling plates, light bulbs, lamp bases, etc., at pictures of such prime targets as stop signs, traffic cops and Khrushchev, flashed on a steel-covered wall.

Chain Reaction. Because such luxuries skyrocket the cost of new motels--many cost millions to build--today's motel is more and more a big business. "To succeed today, a man needs a chain reaction," says James Philson, assistant vice president of Hilton Inns (eight motels). The biggest chain reaction in motels is Holiday Inns, founded by Kemmons Wilson, 49, a onetime Memphis contractor who took a motor trip with his wife and five children ten years ago and decided that motels were not catering sufficiently to families.

In 1952 Wilson opened a 120-room motel in Memphis, with air conditioning, its own restaurant and no charge for children--innovations for that day. It caught on immediately. Today, there are more than 265 Holiday Inns in the U.S., some 63 owned by Wilson's company and the rest operated under franchise. New Holiday Inns are opening at the rate of about one a week, and Motelman Wilson expects that eventually there will be some 3,000 in the U.S. and abroad.

Holiday and the other rapidly growing motel chains have changed not only the concept of the motel, but its appearance and location as well. On its way out is the familiar sprawling, one-story spread; most motels being built today are at least two or three stories high, and some are much higher: Chicago's new McCormick Inn will be 25 stories high. And motels are moving out of the great open spaces closer to and into the big cities, where they do not suffer the lean winter fate of their country cousins. Traveling salesmen and supervisors, still the bread and butter of motels, prefer the city's conveniences, and travelers of all sorts prefer its glittering attractions to the sterile night life of most country motels. Even in Manhattan, which has the biggest collection of hotels in the U.S., five motels have been built in the last three years.

Prices at motels are naturally steeper than before--from $10 all the way up to $100. But many motel patrons nowadays seem to think they can recoup at least part of their money. One of the new motel's biggest problems is pilfering. Patrons inclined to walk off with mere towels and ashtrays in hotels--things they can pack into a suitcase--are not so inhibited in motels, which have no lobby gauntlet that must be run. Pictures, lamps, bed linen, even chairs, desks, and an occasional TV set disappear directly into cars. There is nothing motel operators can do about it but write theft off as an operating expense --and include it in the rates.

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