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About Hotels

When people started to go on package holidays in the 1960s, they wanted to stay in hotels that were cheap but clean. Today many tourists are looking for something new, and sometimes they go to stay in a hotel just because it is unusual

The Ice Hotel is in Sweden. The walls, the rooms, and all the furniture are made of 100 percent ice and snow! The hotel falls down every May because the weather gets warmer. Every November, when the weather is colder, they build it again. It was built for the first time in 1990 and covered about 50 square meters . The hotel has got bigger each year, and it now covers more than 4,000 square meters. It is built from 30,000 tons of snow and 10,000 tons of ice. More than 30,000 visitors come to the Ice Hotel every year. Some famous people, like supermodels Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss, have had a drink in the hotel bar. The bar is made of ice, of course__ and the glasses are made of ice, too. The hotel also has a cinema, a small church, and 120 beds. But only about 4,000 people each year stay the night. The bedrooms and the beds are made of ice and are always cold! If you like unusual hotels, the ice hotel is not the only one. For example, in Florida, in USA. There is a small hotel under the sea. It is called Jules` Undersea Lodge, and it is near Miami. The hotel has got two bedrooms, a living room and a bathroom. People who stay at the hotel can look at the beautiful fish through the windows. They can also go scuba-diving

The Salt Palace and Spa is a hotel in the middle of the Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia. The hotel, like a lot of the furniture, is made of salt. A room here costs about 50 dollars a night

There are many other unusual hotels around the world. Fore example, you can stay in a lighthouse in La Manga in Spain, in an old castle called Doyden Castle in Cornwall in the UK, or 30 meters above the ground in a tree-house in the Western Ghats in India  

A short history of tourism

Tourism probably started in Roman times. Rich Romans wanted to visit friends and family who were working in another part of the Roman world. The Romans built roads (at first these roads were for the army), and travelers stayed in small hotels next to these roads. But when the Roman empire ended, this kind of tourism stopped

In the early seventeenth century, the idea of the “Grand Tour” started. Rich young English people went across the English Channel to France, and then visited the most beautiful and important European cities of the time. The tour lasted for two to four years, and the tourists stayed a few weeks or months in each city. The usually visited Paris, Rome, Venice and Florence. Sometimes they visited cities in Spain, Portugal and Germany, too. The` Grand Tour` was an important part of education__ but only for the very rich

In eighteenth century, tourism began to change. For example, people started to visit towns like Bath in the UK to `take the waters`. They believed that drinking the water in these towns was good for them. Large, expensive hotels were built in these towns

In the nineteenth century, travel become much easier and faster. When the first railways were built in the 1820s and 1830s , it was easier for people to travel between towns, so they started to go for holidays in towns by the sea. They also started to have holidays in the countryside, because cities became larger, noisier and dirtier! Traveling by sea became faster and safer when the first steamships were built, so people began to travel to more distant countries

During the twentieth century there was more and more tourism. People started to have more money and more time. Until 1908, workers did not usually have holidays from work. But by 1951, 66 percent of British workers had two weeks`holiday a year. And by 2000,94 percent of workers had four week`sholiday a year

Travel continued to become cheaper and easier during the twentieth century. More people had cars. Planes became larger and could carry more people, so plane tickets became cheaper

In 1949, Vladimir Raitz started a company called Horizon Holidays, and the package holiday was born. With a package holiday, the company puts everything together__ plane ticket, hotel room, even food__ and the tourist pays for it all before she or he leaves home.In the1960s, many other companies stared to sell package holidays from the UK to Spain (specially the Balearic Islands), Greece and Italy. The modern tourist industry was beginning