Inns before hotels

In about 37 BCE the poet Horace traveled from Rome to Brundisium, the port for Greece. In A bad night at the inn on the road to Brundisium he finds Forum Appi "crammed with boatmen and crooked innkeepers." Farther on, a host at Beneventum nearly burns down his own kitchen while roasting thrushes.

Romans had several words for an inn, among them caupona, taberna, and deversorium, and the innkeeper was usually called a caupo. Inns stood in towns and along the main roads. Greeks and Romans thought poorly of innkeepers, and travelers counted dishonest ones among the dangers of the road. Travelers with money and connections often stayed with a hospes, a guest-friend. This was a lasting bond between two families. The host took the guest into his home and protected him, and each side kept a part of a token to prove the tie. Horace, too, is rescued one night by a country house. The Roman state had its own road stations for officials. Only travelers with a permit could use them, a rule Hadrian ordered again; lodging was free only on official business. Local people usually bore the cost.

Churches and rulers also lodged travelers. In Receive every guest as Christ, Benedict of Nursia, writing about 530–547, tells his monks to welcome every guest, and the poor most of all, because Christ comes in each one. The monastery keeps a separate kitchen and guest rooms with beds, and the welcome is free. In The Great Khan's post houses, Marco Polo describes palaces with silk sheets for the messengers of Qubilai, the Mongol ruler of China. Chinese records count over 1,400 stations and some 44,000 horses in the lands Qubilai ruled directly, far fewer than Polo's figures. Peasants and herders staffed the stations in turns.

Paying travelers had fewer comforts. In On restaurants, Paris, 1825, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin says that around 1770 visitors to Paris had to rely on innkeepers' cooking, "usually bad," or on a fixed meal at a fixed hour. According to the historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, travelers in American public houses before the 1790s often shared a room, and even a bed, with strangers. Private friendship, religious charity, state service, and paid lodging all stood behind the hotels that came later.