From Co-op to Conglomerate: Quality Courts, World War II, and the Commodification of Travel

Abstract

The motel industry and the hotel industry have long been characterized in popular culture by two contradictory themes. Motels are either dens of secret illicit behavior—or the standardizing of motels has made travel unutterably boring and repetitious. The modern motel industry has lost touch with its origins in the rapid evolution from “autocamping” to the modern “bland big box.” The iconic Quality Inns International—at first Quality Courts—has its roots in a 1939 cooperative of tourist courts along the Florida coast; Quality Courts’ first reifying in its advertising and standards its spontaneous response to the needs of travelers is an illustrative example of the ways this industry fled the first popular culture perception to help create the second. An interview with one of the founders, Quality Courts United Bulletins, guidebooks, and minutes of early convention speeches show that court owners worried about Federal Bureau of Investigation claims that motels were criminal “hideouts” and about impressions of immorality caused by “hourly rentals.” Quality Courts members wanted desperately to make their businesses “suitable for families.” But responses to hardships in the tourist industry during World War II (and then to the rapid increase in post-war travel) quickly evolved into ratings charts, inspections, and eventually uniform construction standards focused on pleasing as many potential customers as possible. Frankfurt School critics see culture as a commodity structured by an industry and shaped by forces of production; should the “culture of travel,” even more obviously a commodity, be an exception? Habermas says that in a society that devalues and flees work, play must be as unlike work as possible, experienced with no effort, no strain—experienced as simply as possible. By fleeing the first mass perception of the industry, a small referral organization navigated the transition of a “mom and pop” cooperative through the difficulties of war-constrained tourism; but their efforts rather quickly created the age of the commodified, franchised, internationalized travel industry—and created the second mass perception of a boring industry ruining the travel experience. This chapter illustrates how one early meme of travel advertising was created and quickly became the later meme, created by the coordinated efforts of an owners’ cooperative meant to serve its customers.