HotelChatter

The porn business is notoriously hard to track down in terms of financial statistics. There are estimates from a billion to $10 billion of how much the adult movie industry is worth. In hotels, the financial reporting gets a little trickier because not all hotels keep detailed records on how much they make from porn or most likely, they lump the porn movies in with the regular in-room movies.

A couple years ago, PBS did an investigation into the adult movie industry and interviewed  Dennis McAlpine, an analyst. Regarding hotels, he says the profits from adult movies are very low at family-oriented hotels but go up at a business traveler's hotel--possibly even to 80 percent of the in-room movie profits. The hotels take about a 10 percent cut of the movie and the rest goes to the provider either LodgeNet or OnCommand.

To put that in perspective, LodgeNet has their movies pumped into 6,000 hotels amounting to 1 million guest rooms. OnCommand has their services in 3,300 hotels, amounting to 900,000 guest rooms. Again, its hard to tell which of those rooms are offering adult movies and what types of adult movies. Yet there are estimates that the hotels make over $500 million a year from the adult movies. So you can see why the big chains like Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt don't want you to know that they are up there next to Joe Francis, who runs the Girls Gone Wild franchise, in terms of profiting from porn.

Naturally, people making money (big money) from porn has certain groups like conservatives and Christians, concerned parents and other porn-haters in a tizzy about this scandalous hotel amenity. But for the most part, hotels have stood there ground on this issue, saying porn is a private choice offered for their guests and what the customer wants, the customer gets.

Image above via My.../Flickr

Tomorrow we interview Phil Burress, the man behind CleanHotels.com which allows guests to book hotels that don't offer in-room adult movies.