As the official publication of the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA) for the last 40 years, LODGING magazine has seen its fair share of industry change. The rise of global hotel companies, major growth in the hospitality sector, and leaps and bounds in technology have made it so that the industry in its current state is nearly unrecognizable to hoteliers of yore. And, throughout four decades, LODGING evolved with its audience, perpetuating its mission to be hoteliers’ go-to source of strategic business and management content.
The People
The founding editors of LODGING were husband-and-wife team James and Frances Pearson. The Pearsons launched the publication in 1975, leveraging their previous experience with Southern Hotel Journal to get LODGING off the ground. According to Mark Young, director of the hospitality industry archives at the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel & Restaurant Management at the University of Houston, the debut of LODGING filled a major gap in the industry because while there had been smaller publications that covered regional hospitality trends, there had never before been a single publication that reported on hospitality happenings nationwide. With this new publication, U.S. hoteliers knew what was happening in the lodging space.
There is no question that hospitality today is much different than it was 40 years ago, and one of the easiest-to-track developments is the increase in industry diversity. Like many other industries, hospitality started as a boys club. However, readers are able to follow the rise of women in the industry through how, and how often, they are featured in the magazine. At first, LODGING only mentioned women in passing in terms of their relationships to their husbands. This began to change in the late ’70s when the magazine ran a feature titled “Women of Distinction in InnKeeping,” profiling several successful women in the hotel and lodging space. Many similar features have run in LODGING since, including this September’s “Leading Women in Lodging” profiles.
Additionally, the industry began to become more racially inclusive, a fact the magazine called attention to in the ’90s with a diversity study exploring the breakdown of the varying positions held by people of different ethnicities. While the industry is still dominated by Caucasian hoteliers, the publication has featured more and more diverse owners of both genders in recent years.
Gender and race aside, 40 years also gave LODGING an ample amount of time to observe a very powerful demographic in our industry—baby boomers. Readers can track the industry perception of this generation, starting with a feature that ran in the early ’90s that described ways to entice the boomer demographic by appealing to their vanity and describing them as the “ageless generation.” This viewpoint, however, did not last. By 1998, a profile of amenities desired by women put magnifying mirrors at the top of the list because it was becoming harder for boomer women to apply makeup using only the vanity.
This focus also speaks to another trend covered extensively throughout LODGING’s tenure—profiling women travelers. This became increasingly prevalent when women began to travel more for business, and many articles in the ’90s were built about women’s concerns when traveling alone and their treatment when traveling alone with children.
The Technology
People aren’t the only aspect of the lodging industry that has transformed, technology has changed immensely as well. LODGING’s tech coverage goes all the way back to the ’70s, when key cards were introduced and early computer systems first began automatically turning on air conditioning, heating, and telephones at check in. As the new technologies developed, the hotel industry always understood that these advancements were here to stay. In the ’80s LODGING ran several features on the importance of making technology work to the hotelier’s advantage, with suggestions on how to get the most out of everything from the Central Reservations System to the latest key cards and lock technology. According to Phil Hayward, LODGING’s editor-in-chief from 1992 to 2009, keeping up with the latest industry technology has always been of the utmost importance to hoteliers and LODGING has been a key source for that type of coverage since its inception. “We always covered technology very heavily,” he says. “In the late ’90s, we were even partnering with giants like Microsoft in special tech-focused sections.”
The ’90s also saw the introduction of the internet, which was a massive disruptive force in all industries, not just hospitality. The internet pushed the lodging industry forward, especially with the launch of sites like Travelocity that allowed guests to make their own reservations based on their individually tailored search criteria.
