Where the Water Is Safe

The itch to travel, along with the urge to find all the comforts of home, is bringing on the biggest spree of hotel building the world has ever seen. Along the most traveled international tourist and business routes the local scenery these days almost always includes the glass-and-steel presence of an American-type and American-run luxury hotel. The popping of champagne corks in celebration of another gala opening almost drowns out the noise of cranes putting up another hotel on the choice site next door.

Hilton Hotels International, which already operates 13 hotels in 11 foreign countries, will open up a new 30-story, $22 million London Hilton in a fortnight. And it will launch six more hotels abroad this year--in Athens, Hong Kong, Montreal, Rome, Rotterdam, and Tokyo. Intercontinental Hotels, a subsidiary of Pan American, plans to add nine new hotels to its present 14 before year's end. They will be in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Frankfurt, Vienna, Geneva, Singapore, Hong Kong, and at Abidjan on the Ivory Coast.

Sheraton Corp. recently began an overseas push, this week swings open the doors of its 300-room Macuto-Sheraton near Caracas, Venezuela. Rising 258 ft. above Brussels' Renaissance Grand Place is the 250-room Brussels Westbury, which Knott Hotels will open next month. From Dublin to Tokyo, dozens of other de luxe hotels, most of them built under American guidance and often partly financed by U.S. capital, are under construction.

Tourist Flood. After World War II, many small hotels sprang up in Europe, often in new spots favored by the shifting vagaries of tourists. Few grand hotels went up: they were considered a thing of the past. Some of the biggest cities of Europe--London, Paris, Rome--were underbuilt, and though the hotel service is often better than in the U.S., the furnishings are often shabby and the bills padded by extra service charges and taxes. Opening in June, the 400-room Cavalieri Hilton, stretching across Rome's highest hill, Monte Mario, will be the city's first new de luxe hotel in 20 years. Hilton is negotiating for a hotel site at Orly airport outside Paris, and another near the Eiffel Tower.

As the advancing tourist flood spills over into Greece, the Middle East and across Asia, the first postwar hotel boom is being followed by another. Hilton opens in Athens this month with a hotel overlooking (the big word in hotel-promotion nowadays) the Acropolis. Intercontinental is building near Jerusalem's Mount of Olives on the Arab side, overlooking the old city. The Egyptian government last year launched a five-year plan to build 40 hotels. Sprinting toward the 1964 Olympics, Tokyo builders have 14 new hotels in the works. New hotels are under way or planned in such once remote spots as Kuala Lumpur, Karachi, Sardinia, Bangkok, Manila, Alexandria and Aswan.

In most of these ventures. U.S. hotel chains invest little money themselves. Except for recent deals in The Netherlands and Rome, Hilton owns no share at all. Local governments provide funds or loans and tax incentives to investor syndicates that raise capital from such sources as Swiss banks, cautious pension funds, Texas oilmen and international millionaires. Investor appetites are whetted by such success stories as Intercontinental's Phoenicia Hotel in Beirut, which cost $9,500,000 when it went in business last year and is now valued at $20 million.

Going Native. American operators are the first choice of foreigners to run the new hotels. "The only truly international hotel companies operating today are American," says Roger P. Sonnabend, executive vice president of Hotel Corp. of America. A U.S. company usually equips and runs a hotel in return for up to a third of the gross operating profit. U.S. companies thus expand their overseas chains at a minimum of financial risk, and foreign builders gain the managerial experience, the known name, and the benefit of the worldwide referral and reservations networks of the U.S. chains. The fast-rising new hotels also scatter other American touches--a penthouse cocktail lounge (at the Brussels Westbury), swimming pools, cabanas and convention facilities.

The new hotels also strive for local architecture and motifs to give a lobby variation to the common international style; they hire less expensive, local staffs (the manager is often the only American), and on the menu add such local dishes as can be made palatable to U.S. tastes. At the newly opened Al Urdon in Jordan's Amman, run by a Swiss-German holding company in which Americans have an interest, waiters and bellhops dress in Arabic, Turkish and Persian costumes; the Dead Sea Hotel outside Jericho features camel races; the Tokyo Hilton, opening in June, will furnish some guest rooms Japanese-style, tatami mats and all.

All of this is fine for the tourist who likes his foreign charms sanitized and pre-wrapped, though he may miss some of the inefficient human touches of the old hotels. From his room window, the traveler can snap the view; he can buy souvenirs and inspect native art in the lobby, even though the price is marked up. The hotel nightclub will also have a little native entertainment as well as the familiar adagio team. The mutations are generally harmless, but local pride was outraged when Hilton built into its new Hong Kong branch, which will open in June, a bar that is an "authentic reproduction" of an opium den. A competing Hong Kong hotelman could not resist a dig at Hilton's promotion. "Does the elderly, cautious American tourist really want a bar called an opium den and a view overlooking Communist China? It may make him nervous."

Whatever his tastes, the traveler will pay fancy rates for the comfort and convenience offered by the new hotels. Most of them are as expensive as or more expensive than the older grand hotels in foreign capitals. But the hotels clearly know their customers: most of the new ones have a far higher rate of occupancy than those in the U.S., and some not even yet opened are already booked into 1964.

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