HOTEL PERSONNEL TRIVIA IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF TRAVEL

by JOAO-MANUEL MIMOSO
In the Golden Age of Palace Hotels, French was the traveler's lingua franca. Many French words of the trade have thus crept into other languages. So, I hope that English-speaking readers will view with indulgence my use of quite a few of them in this otherwise unpretentious essay…

Classically there were two sorts of hotel, the hôtel de passage (short-term hotel) and the hôtel de séjour (long-term hotel). The first type was characteristically a town hotel where people stayed, on business or pleasure, for one or a few nights only; the second type corresponded to hotels, patronized by the same guests year after year, where people stayed for the season (anything from one to six months):  Deauville, say, in summer; Nice in winter. An interesting information is that in many hotels, and certainly in all hôtels de séjour, the only personnel who were actually paid a salary were the hotel manager, the floor matrons, the cook and the kitchen personnel, who did not have direct contact with the guests. All the others depended on the generosity of satisfied guests.

The concierge (hall porter) was, and still is, an instrumental figure in any major hotel. On entering the hotel, you find him commandeering the desk in front of the receptionist's. Behind him are the keys to the rooms, from which derive the crossed keys on his lapels that symbolize his functions.  The head porter, and he alone, is properly called ‘concierge’ and he proudly bears les clés d’or (the golden keys) on his lapels. Some of his personnel (a staff that may number over 50) including the second concierge and the concierge de nuit (night porter) also bear embroidered keys, but not golden ones. The concierge's written and unwritten duties are too many to list, but they have been described as a combination of public relations, aide-de-camp, travel agent, social secretary, best friend and miracle worker. In a grand hotel during the Golden Age, the concierge was not only unpaid but he often had to pay handsomely to the owners of the hotel for the privilege of his post. Even so, a popular concierge was so generously tipped that he was said to be the best paid of all hotel personnel, manager included!

Three successive editions of the well known Schweizerhof label. The crossed keys indicate a hall porter, but not the concierge, whose keys were embroidered in gold thread. This particular label, the earliest edition of which may date from before WW1 while the latest (at right) is post WW2, may well be the most emulated label design ever, as shown next...

All better hotels had personnel whose job was to carry the guests’ luggage to and from the rooms, without ever crossing the entrance hall. These were called bagagistes (baggage porters) and it was their job to glue the hotel labels on to the luggage of guests, just before departure.

Bagagistes in a Swiss hotel label dating from the early 1900s and in an Italian label signed by Nino Za and dated 1931. This last label exists in three different versions, attesting that it must have been used for at least a decade.

When there were no bagagistes, their function was performed by grooms.  Grooms (often called bellboys in the US) were the message carriers and general do-all in the hotel, while the chasseurs were their counterparts for outside errands. The grooms sport a characteristic vest, often red with two lines of buttons, and a round hat which the French call camembert, from the name of one of their best known cheeses of about the same shape and size.

Probably the most beloved of all groom labels is this attractive design for the Hotel Victoria in Cannes, printed in the early 1920s by Imbert & Cie of Grasse. A few years later the design was changed to incorporate the name of the owner of the hotel, P.Walsdorff (label at right, of which exist several editions with slight color variations).
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Egyptian label from around 1900 showing a local groom at work and Portuguese label from around 1930.

Two South American labels of the 1930s, in deco style, probably for hotels with common ownership, showing busy grooms against a simplified depiction of their hotels.

Superb Italian deco label from the mid 1920s. The man preparing to enter the car is a voiturier, whose main job was to manage the parking of vehicles. The voiturier can be told apart from other personnel by the leather belt (not visible in this image). Like the grooms, chasseurs, bagagistes, liftiers (lift operators) and huissiers (who stay in or near the hall to open doors before guests, and always carry a nickel plated chain as a collar symbolizing their functions), the voiturier was part of the concierge's staff.
Once lodged, a would-be collector could depend on a porter or groom to obtain labels of the hotel where he was staying. Furthermore, personnel was always eager to satisfy a generous patron and the prospect of a good tip would certainly  put a couple chasseurs to work with their counterparts of nearby hotels to obtain labels from several of them. At the beginning of the century labels were readily available in every hotel. The reason why some labels are common today, is that, at the time, someone gave a tip to a groom who supplied him with a few dozen labels from the stock of  the hotel. Often, all the existing labels of a particular early type come from one single batch obtained by a forgotten collector of a century ago.  Or, maybe, not entirely forgotten, because we are grateful to him!
February 12, 2001......................................................Go back to the short history of hotel labels
 

The author is a mechanical engineer and a collector who has traveled extensively searching for old luggage labels and gathering  information on these little studied but highly interesting pieces of graphic design. He is not a dealer and is not offering to sell any labels. He hopes the above information may be of use to viewers and stresses the importance of gathering and trading information on the most obscure aspects of the history of hotel labels, their artists, printers and on the dating of the earliest types.

Joao-Manuel Mimoso ...Email: hotelsticker@netscape.net (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, or Italian).