The relationship between hotels and sport: the example of Alpine Switzerland (19th century-1954)

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As places that people pass through hotels are conducive to interaction and this can lead to the spreading of new practices. At the same time as the Alps developed as an adventure site, the location also came to represent a broader tourism project. Along with the development of hotels, the variety of sports practiced around them also grew. Initially focused on mountaineering, modern sports such as hiking, biking, motoring, tennis, golf and canoeing were added along with other winter sports such as skiing, skating, bobsleigh, ice hockey and curling. Hotels were not only intermediaries in the dissemination of recreational practices; they also became incubators offering the necessary infrastructure and the potential for their strategic renewal. Beyond simply welcoming customers, hotels were active in developing new sporting activities for both cultural and economic reasons. In doing so, they afforded greater visibility to sport and, in the long run, supported the democratisation of tourism. A hotel’s role as a location for a sport is therefore closely linked to the impact it is able to have on activities that support the sport in question. As hotels constantly search for innovation, they also need to take into consideration the space required for and with the new sporting practices it promotes. Sport thus becomes a way to increase attractiveness used by hotel owners to differentiate themselves and their hotels within a very competitive market.