What features of restaurants and hotels have almost completely vanished?: originally appeared on Quora: The best answer to any question. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from experts and access insider knowledge. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Answer by Michael Forrest Jones, Beechmont Hotels Corporation
Full service. And even what we know today as full service is select service, by contrast to what full service used to be.
Back in the day, people used a hotel as an enclave. You were in a strange town, but the hotel was your home away from home, and everything you could need or want was there in the hotel or you could have someone on staff bring it to you. Nowadays, people use a hotel as a beachhead, a pied a terre. They'll get anything they want or need in that town from whoever has it to give (or sell) and simply use the hotel as a forward operating base, and ask only the more basic, minimal support functions. They want what they want, and they aren't willing to pay for any of the rest... you can dispense with that.
Case in point: Remember when there was no such thing as even a cheap, decent hotel without a restaurant? Every Holiday Inn had one... there was no such thing as a Holiday Inn Express. Ditto for Days Inn (in its heyday, it even had gas pumps on the premises, and you could fill your tank as you checked out in the morning.). Howard Johnson's - now known as a declining hotel chain - started out as a restaurant chain and later got into roadside hotels.
There was valet service.
You could drop off your shirts, suit, etc. at the desk (or at a better one, they'd even run someone up to your room and pick it up), send them to the cleaners, and you'd have it back at the end of the day. There'd be a gift shop. In a bigger hotel, there might be a barber shop or hair salon. Anything else you want, ask a bellman (or the desk clerk). The idea was, you came to town, checked into the hotel, and didn't have to leave the hotel for anything. Back then, chances are, you didn't drive, you took the train, or flew - and rental cars were a relatively new thing with Hertz's only competition being Avis and vice versa, and rental rates were higher. Only wealthier people could afford to rent cars. For most, you wanted as much as possible included in the hotel, or at least handy to it. Nowadays, anyone can afford a rent-a-car.
Nowadays, we know that if you come to town, chances are, you're going to want to try one of the local restaurants (unless you return to your room at the end of the day exhausted - even then, you can order pizza or Chinese food delivered and are more likely to do so than order room service). Because hotel restaurants can perform well at all only if they can draw customers from town (most can't, and the sixty or so people who'd be staying in a 100-room hotel on an average night is a pretty thin, limited market, especially since most of them won't want to eat in the hotel anyway), they're a big overhead, low revenue factor and a drain on the profits from rooms. The same goes even more for hair salons, gift shops, and other retail. Marketing any of these things to people who live in town is tricky. A lot of people have a problem with the idea that something in a hotel is available to them, not just for the guests.
A hotel bar might have a little better luck drawing people from the area if they have an attraction - a band, a disco/dance floor, a singles bar (especially if it has a good ratio of women to men, or a reputation as a relatively easy 'pickup' bar), provocatively-dressed cocktail waitresses - but while a successful one might be a good revenue source, even then they cause security and dram shop problems for the hotel.
Part of it is our own fault. With some things, we got greedy and tried to turn it into not so much a service as a moneymaker, and since it didn't play along, we consider it failed as a service as well.
Long distance telephone is a case in point. Some chains are just now bringing it back and offering it as a free thing, when they have a carrier that offers free nationwide long distance service. Back in the days before and right after deregulation, when LDX was something you took paying for for granted, it was a revenue source for the hotel, and we charged three times as much for the call as the phone company would charge us. A $27.00 charge on your bill for a call under a half hour to the next town wasn't uncommon. Valet might be doable but most people wouldn't know to ask for it - and those who do might not take a chance. I don't blame them. The last time I used it in a hotel, I got zonked with a charge of $45.00 to do six shirts, and these were old shirts. The money would have been better spent to buy three new shirts from a local K-mart and just put the old ones in a plastic bag to take home, but I had no idea it would be that costly to do the shirts I had.
Many people assume, understandably, that anything offered in a hotel is going to have a high markup. If the profit margin were low enough to cover the headaches involved in providing the service, and still have it affordable, many services would be worth having as a guest convenience, and we could still make a small profit on it. But someone got greedy. Guests rebelled. Now we've discovered that if the cost were low enough to just give it to you, we could do that as an added feature of the hotel. Effort on our part is minimal on a lot of things, and the price of your room would cover it. Guests ate that up. It's called limited service (Comfort Inn, Courtyard by Marriott, and the original owners of Hampton Inn). Or select service (started out as a Holiday Inn term, meaning some but not all services associated with a hotel are offered: it's since collapsed with what used to be known as mid-scale limited service). Or focused service (a Hilton/Hampton Inn term).
We try to focus on what people really want. The continental breakfast is a given: everyone uses it, the cost per room rented is low enough to be covered by the room charge. In a Hilton Garden Inn, food service may be a little more elaborate and there might be a small charge, but even then it's more simple. Anything that can't produce enough revenue to cover the cost - and headaches - involved in providing it, we try to find a graceful way to dispense with.
At any but the most upscale properties, bell service is easily dispensed with. Most people don't mind taking their own bags up if you have an elevator, and the bags are on casters or if you leave a few luggage carts around. The constant presence of tipped employees always having their hand out is an annoyance for many, anyway and when the economy is good, not that many people want to work as a tipped employee unless they can make really good money in tips doing it.
A lot of it has to do with the proliferation of cars, and the way we market the hotel to the various sorts of people who drive them. In the 50's and 60's, family automobile travel was a big thing, and that's where most of the marketing was focused. When Mommy and Daddy hit the road with the kiddies and continue on to Florida in the morning as they check out. They didn't want to make an additional stop at McDonalds (which didn't start serving breakfast until the 70's anyway), so you almost had to have a restaurant (this would also explain Days Inn and its gas station on premises). In the 80's, the focus began shifting to business travelers - who usually had a rental car if they didn't drive their own, who would rather go see the town anyway, and who could thus eat anywhere they want. So, the hotel restaurant, and other in-house service at all but the more upscale hotels, began to die off. Even now, food and beverage is really only doable if you have lots of meeting space, with the banquet business to justify it.
Full service properties - especially something upscale, luxury, and unique - will always have their place. But for most hotels, the game is going to be "we take the money you're willing to pay, we use it to provide as much as we can of what really matters to you, we pass on providing things you're not willing to pay for, and we hope to achieve the wisdom to know the difference." We can't be everything to everybody anymore...