Why Americans Used to Hate Hotel Workers

Once upon a time, American travelers had a grudge against hotel workers—clerks and maids included—but it was a complicated relationship based on centuries of travel practices. Here’s why hotel clerks were once universally despised across the United States.

In the 19th century, travelers legitimately couldn’t stand people who ran hotels. Most of the criticism came from contemporary writers at the time, who complained about nearly every aspect of what a hotel clerk did.

Livia Gershon explains in an article for JSTOR Daily, where she writes, “In 1874, popular writer Henry Hooper called the hotel clerk ‘the supercilious embodiment of Philistinism.’ Mark Twain described a supposedly typical clerk who ‘didn’t know anything about the time tables, or the railroad routes—or—anything—and was proud of it.’ In Harper’s Weekly, another writer found that ‘the hotel clerk devotes his life to trying to look as if he was in the office entirely by accident.’”

It’s not that the critics hated the workers themselves, though. It’s just that people were used to travel in a specific way: the medieval tradition of staying at taverns or private homes where the head of the household was the lawmaker and enforcer. Owners of these small establishments gave visitors every ounce of personal attention they could, and when massive hotels opened, that because an unreasonable requirement of the job. Clerks were openly mocked, and so were the hotel maids, who were seen as unclean thieves—whereas the servants the travelers had at home were often like trusted family members.

Once we moved into the 20th century, though, hotels became standard and attitudes toward the workers finally changed for the better.

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