Dictionary:

motel

  (mō-tĕl')

An establishment that provides lodging for motorists in rooms usually having direct access to an open parking area. Also called motor court, motor lodge.

[Blend of MOTOR and HOTEL.]

The announcement came in Hotel Monthly for March 1925: "The Milestone Interstate Corporation...proposes to build and operate a chain of motor hotels between San Diego and Seattle, the hotels to have the name 'Motel.'"

It was only the dawn of the motel age, but Interstate was seeing far into the future. At the time, roads for automobiles were still primitive, and so were most lodgings for travelers by car. The first such places were simply campgrounds with parking spaces nearby, though they were often furnished with tents or cabins. Reflecting their character, they took names like auto camp (1922), tourist camp (1923), motor camp (1925), rest cabins (1934), and tourist park (1936). To suggest a more comfortable kind of accommodation, proprietors sometimes used the word court, as in motor court (1936), cottage court (1936), tourist court (1937), and auto court (1940).

But there were more and more car travelers who preferred the comforts and conveniences of a hotel, so motel--which contains four-fifths of hotel--gradually evicted all other names, including the short-lived autotel and autel (both 1936). Indeed, motel has even rendered its parent phrase motor hotel obsolete.

Meanwhile, on the model of motel, we have the boatel (1957) at dockside, for those who drive on water, and the zootel for pets. There is even a snotel, a site where snow surveys are conducted during the winter at Rocky Mountain National Park.

For more information on motel, visit Britannica.com.

A roadside building or group of buildings which contains hotel and parking accommodations primarily for transient motorists, often with individual exterior entrances to each room.

Motels developed in the second decade of the twentieth century to fill the need for functional, accessible, and economical sleeping accommodations catering to the burgeoning number of automobile travelers. Variously known as "tourist cabins," "motor courts," or "cabin camps," individually operated cabin complexes sprang up along highways, especially in the South and West.

The term "motel," a contraction of "motor" and "hotel," was coined in the mid-1920s. By the mid-1930s motels were more decorative, with quaint exteriors mimicking local architectural motifs. A few entrepreneurs experimented with luxurious or exotic designs, including accommodations adapted from aircraft or modeled on log cabins, historic structures, even wigwams.

The number of motels exploded following World War II (1939–1945), tripling from about 20,000 in 1940 to over 60,000 by 1960. More economical and standardized attached units, individualized by absurdly garish signs, gradually replaced cabins as the preferred motel design.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the individually owned motel gave way to corporate chains such as Best Western and Holiday Inn. Motels are increasingly similar to the hotels that they once challenged, locating in urban areas, adding stories, and, especially, creating elegant spaces and business centers to accommodate private and corporate events.

Bibliography

Jakle, John A., Keith A. Sculle, and Jefferson S. Rogers. The Motel in America. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Margolies, John. Home Away from Home: Motels in America. Boston: Little, Brown, Bulfinch Press, 1995.

Sculle, Keith A. "Frank Redford's Wigwam Village Chain: A Link in the Modernization of the Roadside." In Roadside America: The Automobile in Design and Culture. Edited by Jan Jennings. Ames: Iowa State University Press for the Society for Commercial Archeology, 1990.

Holiday Inn 'Great Sign'

Entering dictionaries after World War II, the word motel (portmanteau of "motor" and "hotel" or "motorists' hotel") referred initially to a single building of connected rooms whose doors face a parking lot and/or common area or a series of small cabins with common parking. Their creation was driven by increased driving distances on the United States highway system that allowed easy cross-country travel.

History

The concept originated with the Motel Inn of San Luis Obispo, constructed in 1925 by Arthur Heineman.

Unlike their predecessors, auto camps and tourist courts, motels quickly adopted a homogenized appearance. Typically one would find an 'I'- or 'L'- or 'U'-shaped structure that included rooms, an attached manager's office, a reception which usually takes up the space of one guest room and perhaps a small diner. Postwar motels sought more visual distinction, often featuring eye-catching neon signs which employed pop culture themes that ranged from Western imagery of cowboys and Indians to contemporary images of spaceships and atomic symbols.

The motel began in the 1920s as mom-and-pop motor courts on the outskirts of a town. They attracted the first road warriors as they crossed the United States in their new automobiles. They usually had a grouping of small cabins and their anonymity made them ideal trysting places (or the "hot trade" in industry lingo). Even the famous outlaws Bonnie and Clyde were frequent guests, using motels as hideouts. The motels' potential for breeding perceived lust and larceny alarmed then FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who attacked motels and auto camps in an article he penned called "Camps of Crime", which ran in the February 1940 issue of American Magazine.

Exterior of a Howard Johnson's motor lodge.

Motels differed from hotels in their emphasis on largely anonymous interactions between owners and occupants, their location along highways (as opposed to urban cores), and their orientation to the outside (in contrast to hotels whose doors typically face an interior hallway). Motels almost by definition included a parking lot, while older hotels were not built with automobile parking in mind.

With the 1952 introduction of Kemmons Wilson's Holiday Inn, the 'mom and pop' motels of that era went into decline. Eventually, the emergence of the interstate highway system, along with other factors, led to a blurring of the motel and the hotel. Today, family-owned motels with as few as five rooms may still be found along older highways. The quality and standards of every independent motel differ.

Long-stay accommodation

Motels with low rates sometimes serve as housing for people who are not able to afford an apartment or have recently lost their home and need somewhere to stay until further arrangements are made.

Short-time

See also: Love hotel

In most countries of Latin America and some countries of East Asia, motels are also known as short-time hotels, and offer a short-time or "transit" stay with hourly rates primarily intended for people having sexual liaisons and not requiring a full night's accommodation.

In Mexico love hotel equivalents are known as "Motel de paso" (Passing Motel) (even if they are actually meant mostly for pedestrian access). In Colombia, motels are used by people for sexual intercourse only. Argentina these establishments are called albergue transitorio ("temporary lodging"), though known as telo in vesre-slang. In Panama love hotels are known as Push Bottoms. In Singapore, cheap hotels often offer a slightly more euphemistic "transit" stay for short-time visitors. In Manila, a campaign against the hotels, believed by religious conservatives to contribute to social decay in the predominantly Roman Catholic country, ended with the city banning hotels from offering stays of very short duration. As of December 2006 there are still many short time hotels in operation. In Belgium and France, these establishments are known as hôtels de passe. In Chile, they are known as moteles parejeros (coupling motels), and many of them offer hourly rates. In the United States and Canada, some ordinary motels in low income areas—often called no-tell motels or hot sheet motels—play a similar role to love hotels.

Motels in fiction

• Bates Motel, a fictional motel from the Universal Pictures horror film Psycho.
• Sunshine Motel, a fictional motel outside of Gallup, New Mexico from the Sci Fi miniseries The Lost Room, where a strange event erased an entire room and its contents from history.
• Crossroads Motel (later Crossroads Hotel), a fictional motel near Birmingham, England from the British soap opera Crossroads.
• Pinewood Motel, a fictional motel from the 2007 film Vacancy, starring Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale.

See also

• List of lodging types

External links

• Motel Americana - a page devoted to history, narratives, and design of postwar motels
• "Motel Memories" - from the Oct. 9 - Oct. 15, 1997 issue of Tucson Weekly
• Motel Signs - A collection of motel signs from around the US

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - motel

Nederlands (Dutch)
motel

Français (French)
n. - motel

Deutsch (German)
n. - Motel

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - μοτέλ, ξενοδοχείο αυτοκινητιστών

Italiano (Italian)
motel

Português (Portuguese)
n. - motel (m)

Русский (Russian)
мотель

Español (Spanish)
n. - motel

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - motell

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
汽车旅馆

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 汽車旅館

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 숙박지

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - モーテル

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) فندق, إستراحه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮פונדק דרכים, מלונוע, מוטל‬

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