To End Uncertain Comforts

Nothing is better calculated to keep dollar-laden American tourists away from a foreign land than the prospect of uncertain comforts. Even business men tend to shun outposts where the hot water runs cold, the cold water may be undrinkable, or the food too bacterial for tender Western stomachs. Nearly a score of underdeveloped countries have overcome the problem of sleazy accommodations -- and so bolstered their economies -- by turning to Inter-Continental Hotels Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Pan American World Airways.

Though Inter-Continental also operates sumptuous establishments on such beaten paths as Geneva, Dublin, Frankfurt and Vienna, most of its 36 hotels have altered the skyline of such places as Abidjan, Amman, Bali, Bangkok, Djakarta, Monrovia and Dacca. The formula--an oasis in the ham-and-egg-less desert--has proved so successful that last week workmen were busy with major expansions of six InterContinental hotels. Completely new additions to the chain were rising at Lahore and Rawalpindi in Pakistan, Nicaragua's Managua, and Auckland, N.Z. This month the company will break ground in Manila, and architects are drafting plans for hotels in Victoria Falls and Lusaka in Zambia, and Nairobi, Kenya. Inter-Continental is even represented behind the Iron Curtain with Zagreb's Esplanade, and emissaries are dickering with Hungarian Communists about helping to run a hotel in Budapest.

"We're in the wildest places," says Inter-Continental Chairman John Gates, "because we concentrate on areas where tourism needs to be developed. In the back of the house, we crank in all the American know-how and labor-saving efficiency, while in front we try to achieve the personalized standards of European service."

Out of the White House. That is sometimes a problem, since many of Inter-Continental's 10,000 employees in 27 foreign countries had never worn shoes or used a knife and fork until the hotel began training them. Few early guests of the Beirut Phoenicia will forget the experience. Maids burst into occupied guest rooms to plug in vacuums to clean the halls. Water pipes sprang torrential leaks, turning lobby light fixtures into overhead fountains and drenching clothes stowed in bedrooms. Such difficulties were overcome, and Pan Am flew in 900 travel agents from all over Western Europe and the U.S. for a free look at the Phoenicia. Soon their clients filled it close to capacity, and it is now a gem of the chain. "We are a catalyst for economic growth and trade," says Gates. Case in point: after the Karachi Intercontinental opened in mid-1964 with cold martinis and five-hour laundry service, tourist arrivals in Pakistan nearly doubled.

Inter-Continental is a bit smaller (10,347 rooms to 12,977) than rival Hilton-International (which is about to merge with Pan Am rival TWA). But Inter-Continental generally owns at least a small share of the hotels it runs, which Hilton does not. Inter-Continental grew out of a White House breakfast one day in 1944, at which Franklin Roosevelt asked Pan American's Juan Terry Trippe to help ease Latin America's then-looming dollar shortage by supplying better hotels to lure U.S. travelers. Though this promised to boost Pan Am's business (and has), Trippe admits that he ventured into hotels abroad "very grudgingly" and only after finding no U.S. hotelier willing to run such a risk. No wonder. A bomb in the ladies' room caused $30,000 damage to Caracas' Tamana-co. Fidel Castro expropriated the Havana Nacional. Losses in politically turbulent regions wobbled the chain in and out of the red for years, but last year it netted close to $1,500,000 on revenues of $70 million.

Exorcising Spirits. Partly to counteract the foreign image of American hotels as graceless marvels of splendid plumbing, Inter-Continental puts great store by 'native decor. The Pago Pago hotel, for example, has thatched-roof guesthouses whose windows are curtained with beads of local Samoan shells. Architects topped the Siam Intercontinental with a rhomboid-ziggurat roof styled after the coronation hat of Thai kings. When construction lagged, the royal-court astrologer blamed evil spirits. To expel them, ten Buddhist monks exorcised the soggy site--and the $5,000,000, 224-room building was completed without further mishap.

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