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Tourism Management ] (]]]]) ]]]–]]]

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Hotel Babylon? Exploring hotels as liminal sites of transition

and transgression
Annette Pritchard, Nigel Morgan
Welsh Centre for Tourism Research, Welsh School of Hospitality, Tourism & Leisure Management, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, Colchester
Avenue Campus, Cardiff CF23 9XR, Wales, UK
Received 14 September 2004; accepted 11 May 2005

Abstract

This paper draws on cultural studies and cultural geography in its examination of hotels as remarkable, but under-explored spaces
in postmodern travel and tourism. It is argued that discourses of liminality and the carnivalesque can be read to frame the spatial
construction of contemporary hotels and that these peculiar configurations of open, closed and negotiable abstracted spaces can
offer a range of opportunities for transgressive behaviour and sexual adventure. The paper thus foregrounds the potential liminality
of the hotel in a wider discussion of its spatiality. In other words, it argues for a more critical consideration of how hotel space and
social relations are made through each other and explores the hotel as a complex, culturally contested and ideologically laden liminal
place, where dominant discourses of space and wider hegemonic socio-cultural relations are resisted, contested or affirmed. The
paper also attempts to contribute to the putative critical perspective in hospitality studies through this conceptualisation and
through its call to augment the hospitality research agenda to encompass detailed research into issues of power, identity and
sexuality in hospitality spaces—places which, whilst on one level are operational entities, can also be interpreted as liminal
thresholds of transition and transgression. The paper is firmly positioned as an exploratory one since it is based on secondary
sources and its contribution lies not in any presentation of empirical work, but in its conceptualisation of hotels as hybrid, multi-
dimensional spaces and in its advocacy of further research into the hotel as a sociological construct.
r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Hotels; Liminality; Spatiality; Sexual adventure; Surveillance; Transgression

1. Introduction cised language. Yet, whilst this sexualised marketing of

This paper draws on cultural studies and cultural
geography (e.g. Dear & Flusty, 2002; Hubbard, Kitchin,
& Valentine, 2004; Lefebvre, 2002) in its examination of
hotels as highly significant, but under-explored spaces in
postmodern travel and tourism. Discourses of sexual
encounters and sensuality both frequently frame the
marketing of contemporary hotels and tourist resorts,
often implying the promise of risk, novelty and
excitement, often in exoticised and occasionally eroti-
Corresponding author. Tel.: +029 20416487.
E-mail addresses: apritchard@uwic.ac.uk (A. Pritchard),
nmorgan@uwic.ac.uk (N. Morgan).
tourism has been the focus of some research (e.g.
Franklin, 2003; Pritchard & Morgan, 2000) what has
been neglected is the acknowledgement that tourists may
also subvert social norms, challenge convention and
seek adventures in liminal travel spaces such as hotels
and airports. Such encounters may be deliberately
orchestrated or they may be enjoyed as incidental
engagements, which puncture the otherwise mundane
predictability of everyday life. The sense of flux and
mobility of human traffic in these anonymous yet public
spaces of marginality and transition, create conditions
of freedom and opportunity for those open to such
adventures. Following in the footsteps of Peter Bailey’s
(2001) fascinating examination of Victorian railway

0261-5177/$ - see front matter r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2005.05.015
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carriages as negotiable spaces of risk and erotic
adventure, this paper likewise draws on Simmel’s
(1997) identification of the adventure as a unique
phenomenon of modernity, focusing on those episodes
of heightened experience that are most dramatically
realised in erotic encounters and transgressive beha-
viours. Just like the Victorian railway carriage, today’s
hotels are peculiar configurations of open, closed and
negotiable abstracted spaces, offering a range of
opportunities for adventure to guests, whether men
or women, regular business travellers or occasional
tourists.
In this paper, we draw on secondary sources in an
attempt to problematise the hotel as conceptual space,
arguing for a more critical and sociological approach to
its study and exploring it as a complex, culturally
contested and ideologically laden place. As part and
parcel of the process of contemporary hospitality
management, hotel management is a multifaceted
business activity and much hotel work is hard, repetitive
and can often be poorly paid. Much hospitality research
already focuses on these operational aspects of the
industry (see Lashley & Morrison, 2000) and thus here
we want to explore how hotels as spaces are culturally
produced and consumed places for different people at
different times. Cultural and feminist geographers have
argued for some time that there are no politically neutral
spaces and much work has focused (for example) on the
ways in which places are heterosexualised (e.g. Aitch-
ison, 1999; Ashworth & Dietvorst, 1995; Bell &
Valentine, 1995; Duncan, 1996; Valentine, 1993). Yet
there is little of this cultural or feminist influence in
hospitality studies, indeed, Darke and Guerney (2000,
p. 78) have drawn attention to the ‘curious’ absence of a
broad feminist perspective on hospitality, particularly
given the fact that so many employee–guest interactions
are overlain by social relations of gender. Today, such
understandings of space as a site not only which we
inhabit, but which all of us, differentially empowered
and socially positioned, actively construct and invest
with meaning (Hubbard et al., 2004) open up a range of
new research horizons. This paper thus argues that such
readings of spaces as cultural productions are not only
applicable to broader tourism landscapes (Aitchison,
MacLeod, & Shaw, 2000; Crouch, 1999; Morgan, 2004;
Ringer, 2000; Terkenli, 2004), but also to the more
overlooked micro-spaces of hotels, which it contends
can be conceptualised in one interpretation as liminal
places where dominant discourses and wider hegemonic
socio-cultural relations are resisted, contested or af-
firmed.
The paper also attempts to contribute to the putative
critical perspective in hospitality studies through this
conceptualisation and through its advocacy of a broader
research agenda which involves detailed research into
issues of power, identity and sexuality in hospitality
spaces, places which, whilst on one level are operational
entities, can also be seen as thresholds of transition and
transgression. Such research would not replace the
established focus of hospitality research but complement
it, enriching and enhancing the hospitality research field
and creating a more holistic critical approach to
research topics which are currently ‘ghettoized’ into
the compartmentalised research fields of tourism, leisure
and hospitality, each of which has their differing
dominant epistemic traditions; arguably, the really
interesting research problems are to be found when we
combine these fields and their alternative research
environments. Thus the paper begins by briefly explor-
ing the concepts of space and liminality, before
examining why the hotel itself can be construed as a
liminal space through a discussion of how it is
constructed in the popular western imagination (here
we briefly explore hotel representation in television
documentaries, advertising, guide books, film, etc.). It
should be emphasised, however that this is clearly an
exploratory paper and its contribution lies not in any
empirical work, but in its conceptualisation of hotels as
hybrid, liminal spaces and in its advocacy of further
research into the hotel as a sociological construct.
2. Space, liminality and travel
Recent discourses in tourism have begun to emphasis
the interplay between tourism, space, representation and
social structures, experiences and identities (e.g. Aitch-
ison et al., 2000; Ashworth & Dietvorst, 1995; Crouch,
1999; Ringer, 2000). Indeed, the ‘cultural turn’ in the
social sciences has been reflected in tourism in the
conceptualisation of tourism places, spaces and sites as
political and contested socio-cultural constructions,
although not yet to the same degree as in cognate fields.
Key scholars who placed concepts of space and place at
the centre of social, economic and political thought in
the 20th century argued some time ago that there are no
neutral or innocent spaces (see Hubbard et al., 2004). In
the early 1970s David Harvey was among the first
geographers to suggest that social practices and process
create spaces, and that these spaces in turn constrain,
enable and restructure those practices and processes
(Castree, 2004) in what Soja (1989, p. 78) termed a
‘socio-spatial dialectic’. As a result of such scholarship,
the more widespread understanding of space today is
that it is both a product and a medium, ‘something that
is brought into being according to how it is used,
surveyed and invested with symbolic significance’
(Cohen, 2002, p. 262), a mutable and culturally
constructed mixture of representation and physical
form. Spaces mean different things to different people
at different times and represent, reinforce, idealise and
naturalise socio-cultural power relations. They can also
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be conceptualised on a number of levels and, thus for a
scholar such as Lefebvre space is ‘‘‘made up’’ through a
three-way dialectic between perceived, conceived and
lived space’ (Hubbard et al., 2004, p. 5). The ‘new’
cultural geography thus demonstrates that spaces and
places—including those of tourism and hospitality—are
not fixed but are in a constant state of transition as a
result of continuous, dialectical struggles of power and
resistance among and between a diversity of stake-
holders (such as planners, designers, architects, users
and operational managers). The ‘meanings’ of any
space—from the intimate places of home to the public
spaces of shopping malls, parks and urban centres—
draw on the cultural codes of the society that
constructed it. These meanings (which have evolved
over time and are not only to be understood in terms of
contemporary societies) are thus embedded in and
permeated by a society’s social and cultural norms and
symbols.
The notion that some of these culturally produced
spaces can also be conceptualised as liminal zones has
become a familiar—although problematic and slip-
pery—notion in cultural geography and more latterly
in tourism studies. Preston–Whyte (2004) notes that
since the concept was first used in 1909 by Van Gennep
(1960) to describe the transition from adolescence to
adulthood, liminal, from the Latin word limen for
boundary or threshold, has been used in a variety of
social and cultural contexts. Most have been employed
to distinguish and define some transition from ‘the
known to the unknown’ (Nisbet, 1969, p. 4), so that the
liminal experience is the metaphorical crossing of some
imagined spatial or temporal threshold. As a result,
liminal places are ‘y intangible, elusive, and obscure.
They lie in a limbo-like space often beyond normal
social and cultural constraints. In these spaces can be
found brief moments of freedom and an escape from the
daily grind of social responsibilities’ (Preston-Whyte,
2004, p. 350). Tourists themselves have also been
described as liminal people, occupying some kind of
threshold state (Burns, 1999; Ryan & Hall, 2001),
between places, times and conventions, but to most
tourism scholars, the concept of liminality is perhaps
most immediately associated with the beach—a place in
between, neither land nor sea, where the normal social
conventions need not apply. Much of the work under-
pinning this conceptualisation of the beach is outside
mainstream tourism studies and can be traced to
sociology (e.g. Shields, 1991), social history (see Walton,
2000) and cultural geography (see Preston-Whyte,
2004), scholarship which in turn builds on the work of
Van Gennep (1960) and Turner (1974). Central to the
notion of liminality is its transitory, betwixt nature,
whether manifested in terms of social life, space or time,
so that ‘In this gap between ordered worlds almost
anything may happen’ (Turner, 1974, p. 13). By
3
extension, this conceptualisation of the beach has
similarly constructed the seaside resort as a ludic and
unconventional site. Shields (1991, p. 75) has explored
the liminal, carnivalesque and illicit pleasures associated
with the British seaside resort of Brighton, which
became ‘the topos of a set of connected discourses on
pleasure and pleasurable activities y without which our
entire conception and sense of a beach would be without
meaning.’
Shaped by the same discourses of anonymity,
romance and adventure, hotels—even more than bea-
ches and seaside resorts—are places ‘out-of-time’ and
‘out-of-place’. Moreover, whilst Shields (1991, p. 73) has
argued that today many Western consumers no longer
need ‘to create marginal zones, such as the seaside was,
for reckless enjoyment’, we would argue that hotels
remain very much at the heart of such discourses. In
fact, we will suggest below that the transgressive
behaviour witnessed in hotels shares much with the
outpourings of excess and the challenging of norms
which was found in the seaside carnival, described by
Shields (1991, p. 94) as ‘a mark of resistant bodies which
at least temporarily escape or exceed moral propriety’.
The hotel is a similarly betwixt transitory space, outside
the ordinary of most people’s everyday social life,
distinct from our normal place of home, which we leave
behind when we travel for business or for pleasure. Yet
the hotel differs from the liminal space of the beach as it
is constructed as a closed and civilised rather than an
open and natural space and, unlike most beaches, it is a
private property. Yet, whilst the hotel is subject to the
same laws and mores which govern our lives elsewhere,
it is also seemingly a place of anonymity where guests
can ‘disappear’ and where the normal social conventions
can be challenged and flouted. This is no doubt in part
due to the hotel being marked as a special, extraordinary
place, a leisure space which is shaped by the discourse of
holidays, which themselves carry associations of excess
and freedom from restraint and everyday obligations, a
set of discourses which also find reflection in hotel
design and interiors (Curtis, 2003).
The notion of liminality is, however, more proble-
matic and complex than perhaps this discussion might
so far suggest. Liminal spaces are borderlands between
the mundane and the extraordinary, they are places
which, whilst locations of ‘desire’ and ‘dreamtime’ are
‘also places of anxiety replete with darker images of
threat and danger’ (Preston-Whyte, 2004, p. 350). Since
the liminal experience involves traversing some imagined
threshold, boundaries such as the no man’s land
between the First World War trenches, crossroads (seen
as magical places and traditional sites of hangmen’s
gibbets) and even sacred sites of pilgrimage have all been
described as betwixt places, crossing points of an uneasy
journey into the unknown (see Preston-Whyte, 2004).
Thus, the Victorian railway carriage, lacking corridors,
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lights and toilets was the epitome of a liminal place, a
space in motion between points of departure and arrival
which offered the opportunity for risk and sexual
adventure for some and yet was simultaneously clearly
a threatening and dangerous place for others. They were
dark, crowded and intimate spaces, the province of card
sharps and swindlers (hence the origin of the term to be
‘taken for a ride’), as well as sexual predators and
criminals, all of whom rubbed shoulders with the
everyday travelling public (Bailey, 2001). On this basis,
we need to appreciate that the concept of liminality
should be problematised to recognise context and to
acknowledge that no territory or place can offer equal
freedom from restraint to all nor can it be uniformly
experienced since spaces are hybrid, mutable and
protean. Differentially empowered, socially positioned
and embodied people interact to construct and consume
spaces and whilst liminal places are typically associated
with freedom, our gender, race, sexuality and embodi-
ment all combine to constrain or empower our every
experience and perception of such places. Thus, the
intimacy and anonymity of the 19th-century railway
carriage was welcomed by some solo women travellers
as a place of freedom, but for others it was regarded as a
place of danger and menace. In the same way, the
contemporary beach might be characterised as a liminal
space but an individual who lacks ‘the perfect beach
body’ may well feel extremely constrained in a place
where undress is the norm. Thus, a liminal, threshold
place may offer freedom for some, but unease,
constraint or even threat for others.
In this paper, we want to broaden the conceptualisa-
tion of tourism spaces as liminal places by arguing that
these characteristics can be equally attributable to
hotels. The hotel has long been central to the travel
and tourism experience and is also inextricably entwined
with the liminal discourses of the beach and the seaside
resort; yet, it has not been similarly sociologically
conceptualised in tourism or hospitality studies. Whilst
scholars in the fields of cultural studies and cultural
geography have used the hotel as a context in which to
explore issues of spatiality (e.g. Jameson, 2002), such is
the invisibility of hotels in tourism studies that the most
recent (at the time of writing) and one of the most
groundbreaking collections of work reviewing key
themes in contemporary tourism geography (Lew, Hall,
& Williams, 2004) does not have an index entry for
hotels. Instead, the overwhelming focus of the literature
on hotels is concerned with operational and manage-
ment issues and is located within what we know as
hospitality studies—a field in which there is little
tradition of critical theory and where positivism, with
its emphasis on scientism, naturalism, empiricism, value
freedom and instrumental knowledge (Delanty, 1997),
pervades the research agenda so that research problems
are characteristically defined as relationships between
empirically examinable variables (Botterill, 2000). At the
same time as hotels have been subjected to this
dominating epistemology by hospitality research, their
existence as imagined, produced, consumed and con-
tested inter-subjective spaces (as opposed to operational,
managed facilities) has been largely ignored by the
growing critical tourism studies social science agenda—
with some exceptions which we will discuss below. As a
result, the conceptual power of the hotel as a social
construction continues to be treated in cavalier fashion
by theoretical constructs, which fail to tie it to space,
history or identity.
3. The hotel in the western social imagination
Hotels occupy a fascinating place in the social
imagination of the West, in many ways they are
synonymous with sex, romance and adventure—linked
in popular culture with clandestine meetings of spies and
lovers, with wedding nights, honeymoons and illicit or
transitory sexual assignations. We have become used to
notions that journalists might pose undercover at hotels
for weeks (as a maid or a porter) looking for ‘that’ story
or photograph of a celebrity caught in the act. They
remain a part of the ritual of the honeymoon, where two
newly married people traditionally spend time in their
own private space away from friends and family. On
many levels hotels have been constructed as realms of
fantasy, oases of freedom away from the familiar where
taboos and inhibitions can be confronted. From the
California Suite and Carry on Abroad to Pretty Woman,
the cinema has confirmed the hotel as a place for
transgressive behaviours and illicit sex and in the UK,
the concept of ‘the dirty weekend’ is peculiarly
associated with hotels, especially in seaside resorts.
‘The dirty weekend’ in the hotels of the post-war British
seaside resort of Brighton, became synonymous with
adultery, divorce and ‘seedy’ private detectives as in that
period adultery (whether actual or not) was the principal
route out of a failing marriage. Adultery was cited in a
third of divorce cases at this time and evidence from
hotel registers were used to prove association, inclina-
tion and opportunity (Shields, 1991). These associations
have exerted such a strong influence over the discourse
of hotels in the UK that hotels have ‘run nostalgic
‘‘Dirty Weekend Specials’’ where couples sign in
anonymously as Mr & Mrs Jones’ (Shields, 1991, p.
109) and echoing such associations, the Hotel Pelirocco
in Brighton recently caused a sensation by designing
each room around a different sexual theme (Channel
Five documentary Hotel Sex, 2004), whilst the ‘Mr and
Mrs Smith Hotel Collection’ guides to the best hotels for
romantic assignations in the UK, Ireland and the major
European cities have become bestsellers (Kinsman,
2003, 2004).
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Sex is exciting and also potentially risky and thus
Simmel (1997) included sexual adventures and affairs
alongside his concept of adventure. Arguably, sex has
always been part of tourism and in many tourist resorts
and hotels the couple is the dominant tourist unit. The
ritual conventions of that pre-eminent tourism site—the
beach—and the bodies on display there also interpellate
a sexualised subjectivity (Desmond, 1999) and tourism is
often about the release and gratification of ‘sensual
pleasures, feelings, and other y bodily desires (for
natural resources, sexual freedom and spontaneity)’
(Wang, 2000, p. 67). Certainly, sex is written into the
aspirations and practices of tourists and, since Western
societies have generally long surrounded sexuality with
stringent taboos, rules and behavioural constraints, the
opportunities for secrecy, adventure, risk and new
sexual encounters which tourist trips offer mean that
for most of the history of tourism, sex has played an
important role (Langhamer, 2000; Walton, 2000). In the
1950s in the UK, Brighton was known as ‘the gay
Mecca’, attracting lesbians and gay men from across the
country (Langhamer, 2000) and Hughes (1997, 1998)
has explored how today, holidays provide opportunities
for gay men to confirm their sexual identities. The
conducting and establishing of new sexual relationships
away from the norms and values of the everyday whilst
on holiday has a long tradition and the atmosphere in
many tourist resorts has always been sexually charged—
from the 18th-century scandals in Bath, ‘the first of
Britain’s large specialised resorts to pull in a national
visiting public’ (Walton, 2000, p. 5) to today’s foreshore
flings on the beaches of the Mediterranean. In con-
temporary tourist resorts undress, nakedness and bodily
exposure extends from topless bathing on the beach to
the revealing club wear of the bars and discos. Sex has
become one of the ways in which the tourist market is
segmented and holiday packages and resorts exclusively
for young and single people make the probability of a
sexual encounter an attractive selling point. Group
packages are ‘marketed with clear erotic subtexts’
(Franklin, 2003, p. 254) and, as if to confirm the
marketing promise, Ryan and Hall (2001) note that
surveys suggest that somewhere between just under a
tenth and just under a quarter of holidaymakers admit
to having sex with a new partner whilst on holiday.
At the same time, the media and cultural forces of
globalisation generate a wealth of material suggesting
that sexual pleasure, fulfilment and fantasy are part of
the tourism experience. In the UK there has recently
been a spate of television documentaries (e.g. Sky One’s
Ibiza Uncovered) chronicling the sexual activities of
young British holidaymakers and recognising the
entwining of sexuality, sensuality and the discourse of
tourism, many hotels are marketed as somewhere
luxurious and exciting to stay (e.g. Siese, 2004). Hotels
remain a key element of modern travel, which Adrian
5
Franklin (2003, p. 255) notes ‘affords anonymity and
respite from surveillance, duty and obligationy, but
also the freedom for fantasy, imagination and adven-
ture.’ Numerous hotels promote themselves in a clearly
sensual and sexual fashion; an advertisement for the
Royal Peacock Hotel in Singapore reads:
The staff of the Royal Peacock Hotel. Trained in the
highest professional standards, but no longer in the
oldest profession. Adept as they are, the employees
who now grace the corridors of the Royal Peacock
Hotel are no longer of the kind that dispenses certain
personal services. Services once so delicately termed
‘‘the mysterious charms of the east.’’ Whether this
comes as good news or bad, depends entirely upon
one’s point of view y this is the world of the Royal
Peacock Hotel. A brothel before, a hotel now. Good
service always (quoted in Morgan & Pritchard, 2000,
p. 50).
Hotel guide books, brochures and websites promise
bathrooms with ‘daring double showers’ and over-sized,
room-dominating beds in bedrooms decorated in
sumptuous and tactile furnishings, whilst champagne,
flowers and chocolates on arrival are easily arranged for
that special occasion (e.g. www.morganshotel.com). As
one hotel employee reported in a recent British
television documentary, ‘if you look at most hotels,
they have gone over to using very soft materials which
imply a sensuality y this is somewhere you can let
yourself go y this is somewhere you can be sensual, it’s
permission really’ (Channel Five documentary Hotel
Sex, 2004). The following advertisement for the Phuket
Banyan Tree Hotel is just one of many which
encapsulate such discourses:
Romance, intimacy and rejuvenation are the secrets
behind the success of Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts,
and they are found in abundance at Banyan Tree
Phuket. Romance can even be sensed in the sea
breeze y intimacy is integral to the resort’s design,
with its secluded, luxurious and very private villasy.
Each villa also has a ‘spa pavilion’, where two people
can be massaged together or learn how to massage
each othery (advertisement in Conde Nast Traveller,
2003, p. 203).
4. Transitions and transgressions
Hotels stimulate the imagination—they are places of
rituals of romance and sexuality. They provide perfor-
mative stages of drama and role-playing, places where
the meanings and the fluidities of our personal
identities—themselves a series of multiple, multi-faceted
reflexive performances (Giddens, 1991)—can be con-
firmed or (re)constituted. As fantasy creations them-
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selves (most notably the themed hotels of Las Vegas—
including a Egyptian pyramid, an Arthurian castle, a
Caribbean Treasure Island and a pastiche of Paris),
hotels allow guests to create their own fantasies and play
with their identities— this might not be who you are,
although it is who you might like to imagine yourself
being for this moment. In such ways, hotels can be sites
where ‘resistant bodies’ (Shields, 1991) challenge con-
vention and norm to traverse social boundaries. It is not
surprising then, that in the popular imagination, when
couples’ sexual excitement dwindles; a stay in a hotel is
seen as the best way to rekindle it (indeed, this is premise
behind the ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’ hotel guides). The very
liminality of hotels—as crossing points into the un-
known, as places of transition and anonymity, hidden
from familiar scrutiny, make them attractive as venues
for sexual adventure.
In reality, however, the hotel is not a private space,
there may be a sense of anonymity, but its public areas
(e.g. the elevators, lobbies and bars) are subject to closed
circuit television (CCTV) surveillance and guests are
always subject to the scrutiny and even voyeurism of the
staff. As one employee commented in a recent television
documentary:
On one particular night there was a request for a pint
of whipped cream from room 200. We had a debate
as to whether we should do it or not and if people are
paying £500 a night for a room y yes. Please have
two. I was standing over him [the chef] while he was
whipping this cream because I was getting quite y
ooh this is fun. I wonder what they’re going to do
with this. We stood together making this whipped
cream—the two of us getting this excitement of it. I
actually followed him up to the room and stood at
the end of the corridor because I wanted to see
exactly and be a part of ity a gentleman opened the
door said thanks very much and gave him a £5 tip.
Next morning the housekeeper said ‘these people—
you’d never guess what I found in room 200—there
was this bowl and splatters of the stuff everywhere
(Channel Five documentary Hotel Sex, 2004).
There is even the love hotel in Japan, where guests
place their £25 for an hour or £150 for a night in a slot
machine so they can remain totally anonymous and, in
case they have forgotten something for the evening, a
vending machine dispenses a range of items, including
sex toys. The hotel has been very definitely constructed
as a place where guests can experience sexual adventure
and to do things they would not normally do; it is a
place where people of different social positions can form
personal and even intimate relationships, again a
characteristic of liminal spaces (Turner, 1982) and the
carnivalesque (Bakhtin, 1984). As Darke and Guerney
(2000, p. 84) argue, ‘The ‘‘deviant’’ search for sexual
frisson has been normalised in mainstream hotels
through pay-to-view television channels offering soft
porn in Britain and hard-core material where laws are
more permissive y [in addition] the chambermaid has
long been the subject of male sexual fantasies.’
Perhaps the office or Christmas party provides an
obvious case when people engage in transgressive
behaviour, which goes beyond their ‘normal’ interac-
tions with colleagues. Such events are typical of Urry’s
(2002, p. 11) liminal times when ‘conventional social ties
are suspended, [and] an intensive bonding ‘‘commu-
nitas’’ is experienced’. On such occasions, people step
outside of their everyday social conventions, which are
inverted or suspended: ‘the night porter called me over
to have a look at the [CCTV monitor] screeny. There’s
this couple on the billiard table basically going at it y
I was flabbergasted y didn’t know what to say’
(Channel Five Hotel Sex Documentary). Such
behaviour has much in common with Bakhtin’s (1984,
p. 10) carnivalesque, which, as he says involves a
‘temporary suspension both ideal and real, of hierarch-
ical ranky permitting no distance between those who
came in contact with each other and liberating
them from norms of etiquette and decency imposed at
other times.’ As a current manager of a five-star London
hotel has commented in a recent account of the hotel
business:
I don’t know why it happens exactly; all I know is
that something strange occurs to guests as soon as
they check into the hotel. For some reason, even if in
real life they are perfectly well mannered, decent
people with proper, balanced relationships, as soon
as they spin through the revolving hotel doors the
normal rules of behaviour no longer seem to apply.
Their boundaries are altered. Their rules of
engagement change. They forget their responsibili-
tiesy they think they’re invisibley they think they
can behave like rock stars y then turn up at
reception the next day like innocent little childreny
what they forget is that we’re sober and we see and
hear everything (Edwards-Jones & Anonymous,
2004, p. 150–151).
In fact, a recent survey of just under 2500 American
hotel travellers shows that hotel guests often transgress
beyond their normal behaviour in hotels, using excessive
amounts of towels and leaving them on the floor, eating
in bed and leaving the television set on when they are
not in the room. Ten per cent of guests order pay-per-
view movies and many more smuggle things into—and
out of—their rooms. Almost two-thirds of guests take
their complimentary toiletries, but almost a fifth of
respondents admitted stealing toiletries off the house-
keeping cart; other ‘souvenirs’ respondents admitted
taking included hotel towels (18%), ashtrays (14%),
bathrobes (2%) and bathmats (2%) (Harris Interactive,
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2004). Again Edwards-Jones’ anonymous co-writer
comments:
I have been working in hotels long enough now not to
judge people on appearancesy. But there’s one thing
they all have in common. There’s one thing that
absolutely everyone does when they come to a hotel:
they steal. TV sets, teaspoons, ashtrays, bathrobes,
drinks from the ludicrously named ‘honour bar’,
KitKats, crisps, carpets, furniture, works of art
(Edwards-Jones & Anonymous, 2004, p. 4).
The Harris Interactive survey also reveals that many
travellers have smuggled additional people into hotel
rooms (29%). In fact, this was the case with over a half
of 18–34 year old respondents and a third of men in this
age group also admitted to sneaking into the pool at
another hotel ‘to check out the scene’ (Harris Inter-
active, 2004). For the businessperson away from home,
the hotel room also provides creates the possibility of
the ‘business fling’ (Hearn & Parkin, 1987, p. 80).
Business tourism is a hugely significant market and a
considerable amount of business is conducted in hotels,
whether at conferences, conventions or at shorter
meetings. All these occasions create opportunities for
illicit sexual encounters and the same researchers also
suggest that hotel managers have to be aware implicitly
or explicitly of the sexual possibilities for hotel residents,
whether in the shape of ‘blue’ movies or prostitutes
(Hearn & Parkin, 1987). In this sense, hotels cannot only
be sites of individual transgression, but also of tolerated
or even condoned illicit activity. There is certainly a
darker side to hotel management than most hotel
managers will admit, with businesspeople seeking
prostitutes and male escorts, and some doormen and
concierges arranging everything for guests—from drugs
to escorts and all kinds of illegal things (Edwards-Jones
& Anonymous, 2004).
5. Surveillance, scrutiny and sexuality
The above discussion has demonstrated that hotels
can be interpreted not simply as liminal spaces, but also
contested spaces, where employees and guests are
subject to surveillance and scrutiny, despite the dis-
course of anonymity, which pervades the hotel experi-
ence. This means that the conceptualisation of hotels as
liminal spaces needs to be more complex in order to
reflect the differing power dynamics of the public places
of the hotel, which are differentially negotiated by
differentially empowered groups and individuals. As one
hotel employee comments in the Channel Five television
documentary, Hotel Sex: ‘When you walk into a hotel—
the staff look at you, eye you up and down and if it’s a
single person they’re looking at the staff as well and
everybody is looking at each other thinking, are they
7
married, are they by themselves, is it business, is it
pleasure, what type of pleasurey.’ To scrutinise and in
turn to be the subject of surveillance is to be human. We
are all constantly being scrutinised, we are always being
evaluated; our very being is absorbed into the ways in
which others look at us: at every moment and in every
way we may fail the test of the scrutinizing world.
Whether it is the ‘people-watching’ in the hotel dining
room, CCTV cameras in the lobbies and elevators or the
‘smart’ cards that allow us access to our rooms or the
hotel gym, arguably surveillance saturates the discourse
of activities in these seemingly anonymous places.
Such informal and formal scrutiny in hotels is also
overlain by what Jordan (2003, p. 184) terms the
‘sexualised performative gaze’, a sexualising scrutiny
which is hard to ignore, especially in places such as hotel
bars and dining rooms. A number of authors (e.g. Ryan
& Lutz, 1993; Jordan, 2003) have commented how
hotels can be problematic places to negotiate for solo
female travellers and Aitchison et al. (2000, p. 166) have
identified the hotel ‘as a site of heterosexual display’,
places which are perceived as ‘effectively surrogate
bedrooms having specific (hetero)sexual associations as
a site for adultery and ‘‘dirty weekends’’ ’ (Valentine,
1993, p. 402). Jordan (2003) draws on many examples of
how heterosexual and masculinist discourses impact on
the behaviours of solo women travellers, subjecting
them to a sexualised surveillance and creating a
surveillance of self. She describes how women travelling
alone actively adopt strategies to reclaim such sexualised
spaces and deflect sexualising scrutiny (such as taking a
book or newspaper down to read at dinner), but she
concludes that sexualising discourses serve to exclude
women, ‘ultimately preserving the [hotel] bar as male
space’ (Jordan, 2003, p. 206).
Clearly, the ‘open’ and ‘closed’ hotel spaces are
differentially negotiated by guests and also by the hotel
employees, who similarly confirm or contest the wider
socio-cultural hegemony of these spaces. The hotel
managers themselves tend to employ front line staff with
personality, confidence, charisma and sexual appeal and
staff learns the boundaries of behaviour on the job. But
as workplaces, hotels also traverse many different social
positionings and the boundaries between staff and
guests are often crossed. Gerrier and Adib (2000b, p.
266–7) conclude that ‘hospitality service involves a series
of complex negotiations between guests and service
providers about what is and what is not acceptable y
[about] sexual behaviour or alcohol consumption’,
issues which are rarely articulated in hospitality manage-
ment programmes or research agendas. Certainly ‘the
interaction between host and guest takes place within a
context of social expectations which may be discrepant
y [and] hospitality can be understood as a particularly
fragile experience for the guest whilst the host carries a
heavy burden of risk, ideological conformity and
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impression management’ (Darke & Guerney, 2000, p.
78). Given that many of these experiences and interac-
tions are overlain by social relations of gender, they also
tend to reproduce existing patterns of inequalities and
differences. The dynamics of the interaction between
hotel employees and guests, commonly referred to as the
service encounter, has attracted the attentions of many
service managers and researchers because, as a critical
element of the service delivery process, it has a crucial
impact on service consumption experience (see Sundar-
am & Webster, 2003). Indeed, the dominant manage-
ment philosophy is what the customer wants is sovereign
(Du Gay & Salaman, 1992) and that front line employ-
ees should do whatever it takes y to ensure that every
guest leaves satisfied. Moreover, providing ‘moral
support’ is considered part of the role of a hotel
receptionist (Gerrier & Adib, 2000a).
Less researched is how the nature of hotels as betwixt
liminal places, where the ‘normal’ code of behaviour
seems less certain and fixed, affects the relationships
between guests and employees. If, as we suggest above,
discourses of transgression, risk and sexual adventure
permeate the hotel in the social imagination, then we
need to be aware that this can be translated into the
sexual harassment of employees as a consequence of the
asymmetric power relations between customers and
employees. This harassment can take the form of verbal
abuse, unwanted touching or physical assault. Gerrier
and Adib, (2000a, b, p. 691) argue that ‘hotel staff
members are vulnerable to harassment because of their
status relative to the customers’ and Hearn and Parkin
(1987) suggest that receptionists (who are often female)
can find their jobs sexualised since their role is to
provide bedrooms and service and their friendliness can
be misunderstood as ‘flirting’ (Hall, 1993). Moreover,
Filby (1992) and Adkins (1992, 1995) argue that many
hospitality operations actively encourage employees to
dress and interact with guests in a sexualised manner.
Kinesics or body movements are vital aspects of
nonverbal communication and body orientation (e.g. a
relaxed, open posture), nods, smiles and eye contact are
all powerful communication signs in interpersonal
interactions. However, the kinds of kinesic cues which
management encourage employees to display to show
warmth towards hotel customers—smiling, frequent eye
contact, open body posture, leaning the body forward—
are not only associated with friendliness and courtesy
but also with intimacy and sexual attraction (Burgoon,
Birk, & Pfau, 1990). Sundaram and Webster (2003) have
identified how aspects of nonverbal communication
such as friendliness, responsiveness and enthusiasm
influence customer–guest encounters and note how these
non-verbal aspects of consumption experiences remain
largely unexplored, despite the fact that nonverbal
communication accounts for 70 percent of all commu-
nication (Barnum & Wolniansky, 1989).
Whilst the need for such research is clear from a
managerial perspective in tourism and hospitality
research, it is hugely significant in the context of this
paper. Such communication can be misinterpreted by
hotel guests as flirting and front-of-house hotel employ-
ees are providers of emotional labour, where personal
service is critical. Asymmetrical power relations and the
sexualisation of the hotel space can render such staff
vulnerable to sexually abusive behaviour from custo-
mers, especially in smaller hotels, where service is a key
aspect of the service delivery and staffs are smaller.
Gerrier and Adib (2000a, b, p. 696) also note that in
hotels ‘boundaries are blurred between public and
private space, between work, leisure and home.’ Thus,
whilst reception is a public area of the hotel and the
front desk staff can demarcate their private territory
behind the desk, this only offers relative privacy, which
guests can violate. Bodego (2004) comments how
receptionists report customers leaning over the desk
asking questions such as ‘What are you doing after
work?’ ‘Is there anything extra included in the rate?’ or
‘Do you want to come to my room when you finish?’
Gerrier and Adib (2000b) similarly identify the need for
in-depth research on transgressing boundaries between
staff and guest, friendship and friendliness, serving and
policing the guests and what happens when a guest
makes unwanted advances. Quoting ‘Nick’ (Nick,
2000b, p. 266), they report one employee saying, ‘People
just come down and say ‘‘I’ve had a long day, I’m very
stressed out, so you know where I can get a blow job?’
Another employee reported a guest asking:
Can you send one of your colleagues up to my room?
And I just went ‘‘Hm—no I don’t think she’ll come
up to your room’’ and he goes ‘‘well you’ll do
anyway’’ and I said ‘‘No, we don’t provide that
service y He was really serious. He goes ‘‘well, you’ll
do, just come up’, like we’re obliged to do it y He
just thought it was a service we should provide him
(quoted in Gerrier & Adib, 2000b, p. 266).
6. Conclusions
Liminal spaces are transitional territories and from
the above discussion, it emerges that hotels are most
definitely places of departure and encounter, borderland
spaces between the mundane and the extraordinary.
However grand or humble, whether luxury or budget,
they all share the same cultural construction in the social
imagination as places of desire and opportunity. As we
enter their lobbies we enter a ‘displaced’ space, which is
a place of rest and sanctuary yet which is not home; a
place of anonymity and ambiguity, yet one where we are
constantly under scrutiny and observation. To enter a
hotel is to cross an imagined threshold into a liminal
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place which is strange, yet familiar, which offers
freedom for some, but constraint, risk and unease for
others. As potentially liminal and transgressive spaces
they offer ‘the spatial presence and practice outside of
the norms of the prevailing (enforced) social spatialisa-
tion’ (Shields, 1991, p. 210) and can become sites of
‘resistant bodies’ where normal rules and conventions
are able to be suspended and where personal identities
can be resisted and reshaped— if only temporarily. In
such spaces, which seem ‘out-of-time’ and ‘out-of-place’,
we have also seen how perhaps everyday obligations and
conventions seem ‘out-of-mind’. Some guests may seek
sexual encounters with each other, in extreme cases they
may harass the staff and in many cases they engage in
petty theft and excessive behaviours.
Whilst this paper has tried to begin the discussion, the
analysis of hotels as liminal spaces and the exploration
of liminality itself need to be broadened and deepened.
We have raised a range of issues in relation to
conceptualizing hotels as liminal spaces, but the paper
is largely an exploratory one aimed at theory-building
and there remains a paucity of empirical study of the
extent and nature of the symbolism and meaning of
these threshold spaces. In addition, in the course of our
explorations of hotels as liminal spaces, we have also
begun to ‘unpack’ the very spatiality of hotels and thus
move the discussion beyond notions of liminality.
Clearly tourism and hospitality researchers need to
advance from the idea that the hotel is merely a built
environment with a physical location. One of the major
contributions of this paper therefore is its call to explore
the spatiality of the hotel in order to analyse how
interior and exterior hotel spaces are made through
social relations and how social relations are in turn
shaped by those self same spaces. We would also suggest
that Lefebvre’s (1991) conceptualisation of space as a
dialectical triad of lived, perceived and conceived space
holds opportunities for hospitality researchers to holi-
stically examine what might otherwise seem to be diverse
research interests under these three conceptual cate-
gories. Moreover, since Lefebvre’s approach is char-
acterised by his gender-blindness and hetero-patriarchal
position (Shields, 2004), there are further opportunities
to combine his conceptualisation of space with feminist
geographical thought which allows for a different kind
of understanding of space through its emphasis on
embodiment and ‘its refusal to separate experience and
emotion from the interpretation of places’ (Rose, 2002,
p. 322).
Taking spatial practices—the first of Lefebvre’s triad
(which concern the production and reproduction of
space)—researchers could utilise this to examine the
spatial practices of the hotel, the routines of its staff and
management and the behaviours and interactions of
guests and employees. However, the framework could
also be used to critically investigate how embodied
9
persons occupy and utilise (de Certeau, 1984) the hotel
as a constructed sensual, emotional and aesthetic space
which is shaped by socio-political and economic
relations. Hotels are experienced inter-subjectively by
individuals who are themselves constrained by a certain
gender, class and race position and for women (because
of their particular awareness of their own embodiment)
they can be ‘something tricky, something to be
negotiated, a hazardous arena’ (Rose, 2002, p. 317).
The interior spaces of the hotel offer opportunities for
both pleasure and discipline and permissive and
transgressive behaviours (Foucault, 1982) and whilst
they promise freedom and anonymity, they are also
places of constraint, of formal surveillance in the shape
of CCTV cameras and of informal scrutiny under the
eyes of fellow guests and staff, often leading to self-
surveillance and bodily censorship (Jordan, 2003). On
this basis, we need a much deeper understanding of the
spatiality of the hotel which recognises social context
and cultural power and which accommodates the hybrid
and mutable nature of space. It has been suggested that
a characteristic of tourism is freedom from surveillance
(Franklin, 2003), yet arguably surveillance issues are
now central to tourism experiences, practices and
performances and security concerns are increasingly
influencing interactions at tourism sites from airports
and train stations to hotel lobbies, casinos and theme
parks. The conceptualisation of liminality in terms of
space and behaviour thus needs to embrace the cultural
consequences of information and communications
technologies (ICT); liminality is bound up with freedom
of expression and action, yet we know that tourists are
increasingly subject to the disciplinary gaze (Foucault,
1982).
Representations of space—the second of Lefebvre’s
(1991) triad—refer specifically to conceptual space and
could be used to frame explorations of how the hotel
space is conceived, conceptualised and signified. Draw-
ing on the work of Lefebvre (2002) and Jameson (2002),
amongst others, such studies could analyse the hotel as a
multi-dimensional space, for instance, analysing the
language of hotel style and architecture and reading the
‘texts’ of their interior design and furnishing and even
their staff uniforms. Jameson’s (2002) interpretation of
the very postmodern Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los
Angeles provides a foundation for such study and is a
cue for further exploration of the architectural language
of the hotel, both as an external and internal space.
Critical hospitality researchers could well apply con-
cepts from architectural theory and narrative analysis to
explore how we move in and are guided through hotel
spaces which provide us with: ‘Virtual narratives or
stories, as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms
which we as visitors are asked to fulfill and to complete
with our own bodies and movements’ (Jameson, 2002,
p. 148). In such ways could we extend our understanding
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of the spatiality (and the liminality) of hotels by
holding conversations with the hotel guests to investi-
gate how, with their cultural discourse and symbols they
conceptualise the hotel spaces. In this, we could also
explore the materiality of the hotel–guest interaction
and examine the complexity of associations, which
constitute the subject–object relations and how a hotel
stay might encompass and engage the full range of
bodily sensations. Moreover, whilst it is often assumed
that the hotel employees, who are engaged in their
everyday duties in these places, do not perceive them in
the same way as hotel guests, there is no empirical
basis for this assumption. Thus, there is also scope
for investigation which explores not only the employee–
guest relationships, but also analyses how the employees
themselves construct the socio-cultural spaces of the
hotel.
The third and final component of Lefebvre’s triad is
representational space which encompasses ‘space as
directly lived through its associated images and symbols’
(Lefebvre, 2002, p. 141). This is the lived space of the
imagination, transcending and reconfiguring the balance
of popular perceived space and official conceived space.
This space offers lived space at its richest and most
symbolic (Gottdiener, 1985) and is particularly evident
in art, literature and fantasy. Significantly, this space
also includes ‘clandestine and underground spatial
practices that suggest and prompt restructurings of
institutionalised discourses of space’ (Shields, 2004, p.
210). In this space we can explore both the lived and
imagined space of the hotel, particularly in the spheres
of popular culture and the media. Here, researchers
could interrogate how hotels are configured in the social
imagination as representational spaces; such investiga-
tions could fruitfully examine the discourses surround-
ing hotels in popular cultural forms such as film,
television, literature and music. These and other such
investigations are vital to further our understanding of
the hotel for, as Dear (2002, p. 166) notes, life
has become a ‘ritualised choreography of signs,
symbols and expectations led by and mirrored in the
media’. Certainly, these and similar explorations of
the cultural meanings of sites which have hitherto
been largely examined from a management and
functionalist perspective would go some considerable
way towards expanding the scope of the existing
hospitality research agenda and (re)claiming analysis
of the hotel as a cultural product for hospitality studies.
Such research would not replace the established focus of
hospitality research but complement it, enriching and
enhancing the hospitality research field and creating a
more holistic approach to understanding ‘the hotel’, a
phenomenon which is much more than simply an
operational entity, but a cultural construction which
exists in lived, perceived and conceived as well as
physical space.
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