Forget school prayer, the hotel room nightstand is turning into the new battleground between conservatives and liberals. Will lonely business travelers find comfort in a Gideon Bible hidden inside, or a package full of condoms and lube? Seems placing them side-by-side is in poor taste, so hotels are forced to choose teams.
Hilton Hotels, Ritz-Carltons, New York's Hudson, San Francisco's Clift, Six Columbus and of course plenty of hotels in Canada have jumped on the pro-sex bandwagon.
And the movement is spreading overseas. In communist China there's less debate on whether to lube or not to lube. Last week, Beijing ordered hotels to provide condoms in all bedrooms, in an attempt to prevent soaring HIV/AIDS rates, which jumped in the city 54 percent this year.
Barry Napier from Hotel Online is enraged by this phenomenon and predicts a quick moral slide into total mainstream hotel depravity:
People have sexual relations wherever they are anyway. They provide their own means. So luxury hotels are going beyond this by opening up possibilities of promiscuous or one-night sex with hookers, as an official `service.' If this isn't grubby, then what is?
Many hotels already offer a similar 'service' in the form of porn TV channels, so giving sex kits is the next step in a very quick moral demise. After that must come provision of prostitutes.
Don't get your panties in a bunch Barry. But if you do, there's probably a fresh, sexy pair hidden in the second drawer.
Armistead Maupin if you don't know him, is the author of the Tales of the City series about life for a group of eclectic individuals in San Francisco. Basically, he was Candace Bushnell (the author of Sex and the City) of the late 1970s except he's a gay man who doesn't seem to have a Manolo Blahnik obsession--that we know of. He even had a character named Connie Bradshaw. Hmmm...draw your own conclusions.
Maupin is also a pioneer for the LGBT community because during a time when these topics were still considered taboo, he wrote about the random sex, gay men, lesbian socialites, transsexuals, and AIDS. Yet he always made love--searching for it, having it, losing it-- the constant theme running throughout his books and in his characters.
Anyways, Maupin recently put out another book in the Tales series called, Michael Tolliver Lives. We were thrilled to get the latest installment but we were even more thrilled to learn that Maupin has been blogging about his world-wide book tour and dishing on all the hotels he's been staying in.
Craig Ferguson, host of CBS's Late Late Show, has been known to lace his opening monologues and stand-up routines with travel bits, like hating to fly and loving to dive (as in scuba).
This past weekend, at a sold-out show at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center in Westhampton, New York, Craig, as his fans call him, let loose on our favorite subject, hotels.
honeybear133, a poster on an IMDB message board (registration required) devoted to the multi-talented comedian, attended the show and reported the following:
Goes off on hotels--says he doesn't like very posh ones, just ones like "Ramadan" which played into several accented jokes. Says he HATES boutique hotels, esp. The Clift in SF, which had "oranges in a birdcage" to show how hip they were; where the staff are too cool to help you, even if you're Sting. Says the girls behind the desk "are too beautiful to talk to you."
According to honeybear133, Craig also mentioned free porn in the room.
Intrigued less by the porn than by the idea of oranges in a birdcage, we contacted The Clift, anonymously, of course.
The issue of Hotel Porn comes and goes throughout the years and now it's definitely back on.
Conservatives are giving Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney a hard time for not doing enough during his decade tenure as a board member of Marriott Hotels.
While we were checking out the Bon Appetit events on the Strip and the Red Rock Resort in Summerlin, an FOHC (friend of HotelChatter) was staying at the Artisan Hotel just off the Strip.
The FOHC kindly sent us multiple room photos of the dimly lit, ugly, non-gaming hotel which you can check out after the jump. But most interesting to note is that the hotel porn here is free and you can find it on Channel 69. Classy.
We will admit we love to walk into a hotel suite and see a high-def flatscreen TV with surround sound and a DVD player. At the luxury end, that's becoming more of a given rather than something special. What about all those pay-per-view shows and movies they want to charge you for though?
According to this article that ran in the Wall Street Journal recently, hotel-room TV is struggling. Two of the biggest providers of pay-per-view entertainment in hotels rooms have merged: LodgeNet Entertainment and Ascent Entertainment. The combined company has operations in a staggering 1.8 million hotel rooms, mostly in the U.S. and Canada.
The problem is, we're now carrying our own entertainment with us on laptops, portable DVD players, and Slingboxes, or we have video iPods we can hook into the TV. So the number of people choosing to pay extra money for to see Scary Movie 4 on their hotel TV is declining. (Though we're guessing the hotel porn offerings are doing just fine. Who wants to have their luggage searched at the airport and have porn DVDs spread out on the counter?)
The combined company hopes their expanded size will give them more leverage with content providers and they'll be able to offer current shows on an on-demand basis. So if you missed last night's episode of 24, you'd be able to pull it up whenever you want for a fee. They also hope to get current movies faster since DVDs are now showing up just a few months after the theater release. Will it all work? Stay tuned.
Per our "operative" in the Mandalay Bay, we just learned that the Screech sex tape, which is now marketed as "Screeched", is available as one of the hotel's adult video options.
Also available are a ton of Vivid videos (we smell a partnership), a couple of one-offs like "Screeched" and "Naked Housewives" and then some weird stuff like Adult Alternative Movies and a 24-hour Platinum Pack.
If you go to Vegas and you order a 24-hour Platinum Pack, then you got some serious issues. Then again, the rooms do have a 42-inch flat screen TVs.
At the recent Internext convention, an annual adult entertainment trade show, an owner of a live-action sex company predicted that hotels may start selling "images of people having sex live over the hotels' entertainment systems."
Which sort of makes sense these days since people are still going to the internet first for porn and have become accustomed to live-action sex like webcams and streaming video. Not to mention YouTube is full of porno stuff.
Of course, while the adult entertainment industry gets pumped about yet another medium to distribute porn, don't expect hotel chains to start signing up right away.
An editor from Lodging magazine, Anne Taulane, said:
"The porn offered now is a little more acceptable to the mainstream" than viewing live action over a hotel's video entertainment system.
In the end though, does it really make a difference when your 5-year-old turns on the hotel TV and a porno from 1987 is playing versus a live sex video? The 80s one might have better music but sex is timeless.
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by ced138
