Hotel

HOTEL, a house or separate apartment for temporary residence of visitors. Abroad, the hotel business represents a capitalist economy, being a profitable adjunct of large, mostly joint-stock capital. In the USSR after the revolution, hotels were municipalized. At present they are operated either by executive committee departments (municipal economy) directly or leased for their exploitation, or special bodies are created for their exploitation (for example, in Moscow - the Administration of Moscow Hotels). From the hotels proper one should distinguish: furnished rooms for residence of inhabitants for a longer time; inns - places for lodging with stables for horses; in the USSR a new form of hotels are dormitories attached to 'houses of the peasant' for peasants arriving in the city. According to their equipment and arrangement, hotels are of several, usually three, classes. The most comfortable and expensive hotels are sometimes called unclassified. From the sanitary side, the hotel business has great significance in the following respects. 1. Hotels must be accessible to broad layers of the population (correct development of their network). In the West and in America hotels serve mainly the wealthy classes and are distinguished by the convenience and luxury of equipment; cheap hotels, however, are arranged and equipped much worse. Meanwhile, it is precisely on cheap hotels that the service of broad masses of the moving working population falls, especially - employees, workers, settlers. From the sanitary side, it is especially important to ensure cheap, conveniently and hygienically arranged places for lodging for all arriving in large, densely populated centers or in points of temporary or permanent concentration of population (for example, seaports, railway junction stations, large cities and generally places with developing industry, places being settled). Finally, the increasingly developing tourism, capturing not only the bourgeoisie but also broad circles of workers (England, Germany, USSR), persistently also raises the task of creating inexpensive popular hotels in places most interesting for tourism. The creation of such bases itself will contribute to the development of this healthy undertaking. 2. Hotels must satisfy all sanitary requirements. Hotel premises must be warm, light, dry, clean, and well ventilated. The latter refers not only to the rooms themselves but also to non-residential premises - stairs, corridors, toilets, kitchens, etc. Hotel walls are better not to be papered with wallpaper, but painted with glue paint, and at the bottom covered with oil paint to the height of a human being. To fight dust, furniture in hotels should be as simple as possible and easily cleanable, there should be as few dust-collecting objects as possible - curtains, carpets, pictures, artificial plants, etc. The interior of hotels in general should be simple, hygienic, without luxury. Floors, preferably parquet or painted boards, must be kept clean and polished with wax or fluorspar, etc. In toilets, baths, kitchens, floors are recommended to be made impermeable from Malthus tiles. The laundry room must be light, ventilated, separate for dirty and clean laundry. For the convenience of service, in the best foreign hotel-restaurants, mechanical serving of dishes by elevators and dropping of linen by special channels, etc., is applied. Hotels must be supplied with good water and sewered; the introduction of water into separate rooms is desirable. In the most equipped hotels, separate baths and toilets are arranged at individual rooms. Centralized supply of hot water is easily feasible and has great sanitary significance. The installation of vacuum cleaners and garbage chutes is very desirable. In the rest, the requirements for hotels are the same as those generally demanded of a well-equipped dwelling or special institutions (dining room, kitchen). 3. The fight against the possibility of infection in hotels must be constant. Besides the immediate isolation of patients and disinfection in case of illness, periodic, so-called preventive, disinfection of toilets, baths, beds, mattresses, blankets, etc., as well as systematic fight against insects and rodents is necessary. 4. Sometimes hotels are places of development of prostitution. To fight this, conscious and disciplined service personnel are necessary, as well as control by the administration, in particular correct arrangement of the whole business and work, introduction for night work exclusively of male staff, control over the non-admission of overnight stay in hotels of strangers unregistered persons, etc. Periodic medical examination of hotel staff is also a measure aimed at fighting the spread of venereal diseases, tuberculosis, etc. Such examinations are carried out on the basis of the 'Regulation on medical examinations of workers in the food industry' (decree of NKOZdr and NKTruda).