This is some city!
Everything OK.
See you soon. (1919)
Arrived here about midnight.
Dead tired!
Swell place though. (1929)
I started collecting vintage hotel and motel postcards because I loved the photography — not so much the stately, city-block buildings, but more the low-slung suburban motel shots with angular neon signs proclaiming "Restaurant!" or "Liquor!" or "Free TV!" alongside a perfectly postage stamp-sized swimming pool. My collection runs the gamut though from depicting early 1900s hotel exterior sketches to 1980s wood-paneled Midwestern inns.
But when I went through my postcard stack recently I remembered it's the messages on the back that are the real fun.
Our Hotel News Now team recently welcomed a new reporter to the team, Natalie Harms. Natalie lives in Houston and came to HNN HQ in Cleveland on the snowiest and coldest week of the year to meet the team and learn the ropes. We love to show off our city, rain or shine, so we did a happy hour at the nearby Hotel Cleveland. I had some postcards in my collection of the building so we brought those along and had a blast reading the messages while we compared the architecture of the renovated bar with the originals depicted on the postcards.
In a cute twist of history, this hotel opened as the Hotel Cleveland in 1918. Over the years it went through many brand iterations, most recently flying the Renaissance flag. Now managed by Crescent Hotels & Resorts, the hotel recently went through a renovation and rebranding back to its original name of Hotel Cleveland, now part of Marriott International's Autograph Collection. See? Everything old really is new again.
But back to the messages: We realized as we went through this stack of vintage postcards that honestly, everything we need to know about travel trends is on the back of a postcard.
Truly, whether the message was written in 1929 or 1969, the notes on these cards reflect pretty much every "trend" we think the hotel industry is reinventing today.
A couple examples:
Experience travel: I like it here very much. I haven't been over the bridge shown on reverse, but hope to soon. (1922)
Solo travel: Dear Sally, I'm taking a tour of the West by myself. Leaving Las Vegas today and I love it. Love, Abby (1960)
Bleisure and foodie travel: This is the hotel, quite nice. I'm very busy with the Convention and have little time to write, but great steak, though. See you soon. (1943)
These scrawlings reflect everything travel is all about, right? I'm here. There's something to do that's worth writing on a postcard. I'll be home soon.
This is what hotels do and there's no need to overcomplicate it. They're here for people far from home. They help those people have an interesting experience, and then those people go home and make way for new travelers.
This is some city!
Everything OK.
See you soon.
That's really all we want, right?
Special thanks to Mike Cahill, CEO and founder of HREC Hospitality Real Estate Counselors, a bona fide vintage hotel postcard collector, who gifted me part of his Cleveland collection.
Email me, or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Want to send me a vintage hotel postcard? Email me and I'll tell you how.
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