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Services in hotels
Hotels often provide a number of additional guest services such as a
restaurant, a swimming pool or childcare. Some hotels have conference
services and meeting rooms and encourage groups to hold conventions
and meetings at their location.
Cost
The cost and quality of hotels are usually indicative of the range and type
of services available. Due to the enormous increase in tourism worldwide
during the last decades of the 20th century, standards, especially those of
smaller establishments, have improved considerably. For the sake of
greater comparability, rating systems have been introduced, with the one
to five stars classification being most common.
Categories of hotels
he five categories can be described (loosely) as follows:
* (one star) — low budget hotel; inexpensive; may not have maid service
or room service.
** (two stars) — budget hotel; slightly more expensive; usually has maid
service daily.
*** (three stars) — middle class hotel; moderately priced; has daily maid
service, room service, and may have dry-cleaning, Internet
access, and a swimming pool.
**** (four stars) — first class hotel; expensive (by middle-class standards);
has all of the previously mentioned services; has many "luxury"
services (for example: massages or a health spa).
***** (five stars) — luxury hotel; most expensive hotels/resorts in the
world; numerous extras to enhance the quality of the client's
stay (for example: some have private golf courses and even a
small private airport).
The AAA and their affiliated bodies use diamonds instead of stars to
express hotel and restaurant ratings levels.
Traditional systems rest heavily on the facilities provided, which is often
disadvantageous to smaller hotels whose quality of accommodation could
fall into one class but the lack of an item such as an elevator would prevent
it from reaching a higher categorization.
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