ABSTRACT
As an integral part of its cultural history, this chapter traces how the love hotel has over a period of just over fifty years achieved industry status. I will look first at the operational and presentational issues faced by the love hotel as a trade, and consider the ways in which the love hotel functions within cycles of production and consumption. This includes taking account of how a degree of consolidation has been achieved through the development of trade publishing, trade events, love hotel groups, and management concepts, services and philosophy. Second, I will review the ways in which the love hotel has entered the realm of media, considering changes in the advertising and marketing of products and services, its presence on websites, chatrooms and blogs online, and the ways in which the love hotel has been brought into service itself within cultural economies, prompting cultural commentary through different forms of user and artistic engagement, to emerge as a nascent form of heritage industry. Lastly, under the heading investment, as a response and also as an impetus to its change of cultural image, I will reveal plans by financial organisations to mobilise and securitise the love hotel’s lucrative financial status, speculating on the further development of the love hotel industry.
