Word: hiltonization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Wringing the Dollars. Even so, Hilton is doing better than most hoteliers in the U.S., and better than any abroad. An English author once described American tourists as people who "dare everything and risk nothing"-and nowhere do they risk less than at Hilton hotels. Whether he is in Teheran or Trinidad, the traveler can be sure that Hilton will offer him a clean bed, pleasant surroundings, plentiful ice water, and food that he can safely eat. He can also be sure that, while supplying American comforts, Hilton will wring his dollars out of him as efficiently, as economically...
...Hiltons are assembly-line hostelries with carefully metered luxuries-convenient, automatic, a bit antiseptic. Conrad Hilton's life is rooted in the belief that people are pretty much equal, and that their tastes and desires are, too. His hotels have made the world safe for middle-class travelers, who need not fear the feeling of being barely tolerated in some of the older European hotels; at a Hilton, all they need is a reservation and money...
...Hilton's U.S. hotels are generally good commercial hotels, but the Hiltons abroad are luxury tourist hotels that are more like resorts than hostelries. Hilton has sited on some of the finest hotel locations in the world-looking up at the Parthenon in Athens, near the Diet Building in Tokyo, overlooking the Vatican in Rome and the Queen's private garden in London, on the Nile in Cairo and above the Bosporus in Istanbul, at the foot of the Elburz Mountains in Teheran. All of the hotels glisten and glitter, with an architecture that ranges from international slab...
Susceptible to Flattery. As the force that created this empire, Conrad Hilton might be expected to be as calculating, as antiseptic and as glossily sophisticated as his hotels. The surprise about Hilton is that he is so much like the guests he caters to. Boyish, candid, trusting, he never fails to be amazed and pleased-even astonished-by the world around him. He cannot get over the speed of jet planes or his possession of a $100 Texas-style Stetson, whose price he mentions to anyone who will listen. He is susceptible to even the most transparent flattery. "You know...
...Hilton refuses to comprehend bad news or business reversals ("Don't bother me about that," he says), and his top aides instinctively try to protect him from the harsh realities of the world. Says one: "For all his financial genius, he's the kind of man who can't catch a plane by himself." He is essentially a lonely man, and his closest friend is neither a businessman nor one of his four children, but his personal secretary for 21 years, Olive Wakeman, fiftyish, who acts as his chief buffer against the outside world...