The History of Hotels

This blog was originally posted on Solly Assa's Houzz profile here.

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There is a lack of quality hotel capacities in Mexico. In the Pacific Coast the situation is somewhat better, due to the existing privatization which successfully brought new hotels and apartments from construction to realization. Experienced real estate developer Solly Assa, the founder of Assa Properties and Cassa NY says that this country has somehow been keeping pace with growing demand, which increases every tourist season.

There is a visible trend that smaller, cheap business hotels are being built in larger cities, further away from the narrow city centers. These hotels are primarily intended for business people who aren’t interested in staying longer than a day or two, or whose requirements are mostly reduced at basic accommodation services.

Thus, Solly Assa predicts that a lot of new hotel capacities in the Mexican market will be built or renovated in the next 5 years. Depending on the level of development in the country itself, the market will grow accordingly and so will the development of hotel businesses.

This is almost guaranteed to happen if based on history… 

The first new types of hotels emerged in London in the mid-eighteenth century, back in 1760. Paris followed shortly after, opening accommodations under the name “Hotel Garni”. At the end of the same century, the hotel expanded throughout all cities in Europe. In North America, the hotel came in the early nineteenth century, spreading throughout the whole continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The evolutionary step from the tavern (“inn”) commodities to hotel commodities was instant, happening simultaneously on the old and the new continent. In the nineteenth century hotels become the social centers in the community.. In the period from 1850 to 1950 there was a considerable growth in the number of passengers, who did not stay in hotels because of business reasons, but because of personal reasons like leisure and tourism. With the development of traffic and accompanying infrastructure, the need for hotels only grew.

Today, according to the statistical data of the World Tourism Organization (WTO), total global hotel capacity exceeds 14.5 million rooms. Solly Assa points out that economic development is directly related with the development of the hotel industry. Based on the total hotel capacity in Europe, more than a half is concentrated in five countries - Italy, Germany, France, Spain and England. Italy is the leading European country by hotel capacity, with somewhere around 17.5% of the total European capacity (which amounts to a million rooms). The United States has over four million hotel rooms at disposal, or roughly more than a third of the total hotel capacity in the world. With the opening in Eastern European countries and China, there is a considerable increase in the global hotel capacity. Recently, big hotel chains have been positioning themselves in these new markets.

Mexico follows the same pattern as any other country mentioned in the “history tour” above. And because Mexico is considered a developed country, but needs a little something, Solly believes that increasing their hotel capacities and investing in tourism is the thing that Mexico needs to do in order to aid their development and reach maximum potential.

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Solly Assa is a seasoned investor and developer with over two decades of experience in luxury real estate. As founder and CEO of Assa Properties, Solly spearheaded its rapid, successful expansion across North America, acquiring some 3 million square feet of real estate across the United States and Mexico. Solly Assa is most proud of his work on the Cassa Hotels and Residences, which consist of two magnificent buildings in Manhattan — with a third in the works in Mexico. Each hotel and residence offers an unprecedented degree of customization, allowing buyers to alter floor plans and combine units as they wish.