Conrad Hilton success story statement. Novels of Elizabeth Taylor: confessions, scandals and diamonds. New century, new challenges
23-year-old Conrad Hilton was sent to Menninger Psychiatric Hospital in Houston, Texas for treatment. Paris Hilton's younger brother was arrested on May 7 by Los Angeles police for breaking into the home of his ex-girlfriend Hunter Daly Salomon's mother, whom he had previously been banned from approaching by a court, and for stealing her father Tyson Salomon's Bentley. On Wednesday, May 10, a court hearing took place, at which Conrad shouted and tried to rush at his accusers. The court decided to release Conrad on bail in the amount of 90 thousand dollars, on the condition that he be placed for compulsory treatment in a psychiatric hospital, writes TMZ.
Conrad Hilton and Hunter Daley Salomon were together for some time, but the couple broke up in June 2015. Conrad was having a hard time with the breakup and began to blackmail Daley with suicide. After another quarrel, he tried to enter the house of his ex-lover, then the court forbade Conrad to approach Daly.
Photos from the court hearing
Paris Hilton's younger brother has had problems with the law more than once. In July 2014, he caused a scandal on board a plane flying from London to Los Angeles. Conrad loudly shouted insults at passengers and came into conflict with flight attendants. The crew had to use force to restrict his freedom of movement. Then Conrad was sentenced to 750 hours public works, were ordered to pay a fine and undergo treatment at a clinic for people suffering from drug addiction, Fox News reports.
Barron Hilton II, Nicky Hilton-Rothschild, Paris Hilton, Conrad Hughes Hilton
Note that Conrad is the namesake of his famous great-grandfather, an American tycoon and owner of a worldwide famous network Hilton hotels by Conrad Hilton. Conrad Sr. survived World War I, the Great Depression, and became one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. His contribution to the hotel industry is undeniable. In addition to his hotel empire, he founded the Conrad N. Hilton charitable foundation, which rewards organizations that help people.
Below is a video from the courtroom:
Conrad Nicholson Hilton was born on December 25, 1887 in San Antonio, New Mexico. He graduated from the local St. Michael's College, then the New Mexico Military Institute, and upon returning home, he began helping his father in the family business - August Hilton was the owner of a grocery store. In 1912, Hilton Sr. was elected to the lower house of the state legislature and appointed 24-year-old Conrad as his assistant. However, he did not like the work, so as soon as the United States entered World War I in 1917, he volunteered for the army. While Conrad was serving, his father died in a car accident.
Hilton, convinced that he should become an entrepreneur, while working with his father, studied banking legislation very well, thanks to which he was able to organize his own bank. The bank went bankrupt in less than a year, and with 5 thousand dollars remaining after its liquidation, Hilton went to try his luck in the provinces. That's how he ended up in Cisco.
Hilton brought the hotel business to a completely new level, and his initiatives have now become generally accepted throughout the world.
Ups and downs
To buy the hotel, his own 5 thousand dollars were not enough, and Hilton had to borrow another 15 thousand from friends and take out a bank loan for 20 thousand.
He increased the number of beds, and to make more efficient use of space, he placed display cases around the columns in the lobby that sold useful little things like clothes brushes and toothpaste. Rooms cost 1 and 2.5 dollars per night. Just a year later, he bought another hotel in the town of Fort Worth, and then two more smaller hotels. By 1924, Hilton had accumulated enough funds to build his first hotel. The 325-room Dallas Hilton opened on August 2, 1925, with rooms priced inexpensively at $1.50 and $3.00 per night. A few years later, Hilton got married. His wife Mary Barron bore him three sons: Conrad, Barron and Eric.
The stock market crash of 1929 bankrupted 80% of American hotels. Hilton mothballed three of the eight hotels, but this did not ease the situation. In 1930, he received a loan of 300 thousand dollars secured by all his assets, but the crisis dragged on, and in December 1931, Conrad lost ownership of the Hilton Hotels company. Fortunately, at that time the hotel business was not highly profitable, and the new owners had no idea what to do with eight more unprofitable hotels, so they offered to buy Hilton Hotels to Hilton himself. He was appointed manager of the company, and over time he received back all his hotels.
After the end of World War II, the company's turnover acquired such impressive proportions that in 1949 Hilton was able to buy the most fashionable hotel in New York - the Waldorf-Astoria. That same year, the first Hilton outside the United States opened, the 300-room Caribe Hilton in Puerto Rico. And 5 years later, Conrad acquired the Statler Hotels chain for $111 million. By the end of the 60s, the Hilton chain consisted of at least 40 hotels in the United States itself and about the same number outside it.
Conrad Hilton retired in 1966, turning the business over to his son Barron. The founder of the largest hotel empire died on January 4, 1979 in Dallas. He bequeathed his entire fortune to the Hilton Foundation, and Barron had to spend nine years challenging his father's last will.
From trend to tradition
Hilton brought the hotel business to a completely new level, and his initiatives have now become generally accepted throughout the world. It was he who introduced a system of grading hotels according to the “star” type and a “standard offer” of services, uniform in all hotels of the chain, established a service system in which everything necessary for the client can be purchased in the hotel itself, developed a loyalty program, a system of discounts and much more. In the late 1950s, Hilton pioneered airport hotels with the San Francisco Airport Hilton Hotel. In 1973, Hilton Hotels was the first to introduce an information and referral system, with the help of which the client could remotely obtain information about the availability of rooms and book rooms along with rail and air tickets.
However, the most unexpected and controversial innovation was the integration of the hotel business and the gambling industry. It began in the late 60s, when the Las Vegas Hilton and Flamingo Hilton hotels were built in Las Vegas, which, unlike all those built earlier, were also gambling establishments. Restaurants and bars were located directly in the gambling halls, and each new guest was given free chips for a certain amount.
New century, new challenges
In the early 2000s, things were not going well for the company: hotels began to make losses, and they managed to stay afloat solely due to the gambling business. In 2007, Blackstone Group, one of the largest players in the market for the buyout of public companies by private investment funds, acquired the Hilton Hotels Corp. hotel group. for 26 billion dollars and assumed its debt, and the president and general director Hilton Worldwide has appointed Christopher Nassetta.
Despite the challenges, the company's brands today comprise more than 3,900 hotels and 650,000 rooms in ninety countries and include such chains as Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts, Conrad Hotels & Resorts, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, DoubleTree by Hilton, Embassy Suites Hotels , Hilton Garden Inn, Hampton Hotels, Homewood Suites by Hilton, Home2 Suites by Hilton and Hilton Grand Vacations. Outside the US, Hilton Worldwide is actively developing six brands. They can be divided into four categories: economy sector - Hampton by Hilton; mid-price sector - Hilton Garden Inn; the upper-class sector, where DoubleTree by Hilton and Hilton Hotels and Resorts are represented, and the luxury sector, where Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts and Conrad Hotels & Resorts are represented.
14 March 2010, 16:54Now everyone knows that there are hotel chains with the same name and the same level of service all over the world - be it London, Paris, Moscow or the Cayman Islands. But the first hotel chain was created by the American Conrad Hilton, who gave all the hotels he owned his own name and offered them a standard set of services. It was he who first came up with the idea of assigning “stars” to hotels (by analogy with cognac) and was the first to begin selling in the lobbies of his hotels everything that clients might need. 
Conrad Nicholson Hilton was born on Christmas Day, December 25, 1887, in the town of San Antonio, located in the US state of New Mexico. His father, August, immigrated from Norway, and his mother, Marie, from Germany. Conrad had no doubt that he had to become an entrepreneur. He was attracted to banking (while working with his father in the state legislature, he had to thoroughly study banking legislation). But the first attempt to organize his own bank was unsuccessful. And during the second attempt, the decision to become a hotelier suddenly came. This happened in 1919 in the small town of Cisco, Texas. The acquisition of the Mobley Hotel was not so cheap for Hilton. In addition to his own $5 thousand, he had to borrow $15 thousand from friends and also take out a bank loan for $20 thousand. Now everything depended on Conrad himself. To the surprise of friends and family, who knew how quickly Conrad's bank had failed, business at Mobley was going just fine. A year later, Hilton bought another hotel in the town of Fort Worth, and then two more smaller hotels. By 1924, Hilton already had 350 rooms and enough money to build the first own hotel"from scratch". Soon, Hilton was buying up hotels that showed no promise and turning them into gold mines. HILTON Hotels provided sparkling clean rooms with motivated staff who provided exceptional guest service. The HILTON organization has created a unique system of minimizing costs and maximizing service - no one has ever seen anything like it. PERSONAL LIFE of Conrad Hilton was not so successful. His first wife, Mary Barron, left Hilton during the crisis, apparently not believing that he would be able to get out of the quagmire of financial failure. Hilton had three sons with his first wife, Mary Barron: Conrad Jr., William Barron, and Eric Michael. He also broke up with his second wife, actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, who spent huge sums on clothes and jewelry. From his second wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Conrad Hilton had a daughter, Francesca. However, failures in marriage did not prevent Hilton from having offspring; during his long life he became the father of eight children. Conrad Hilton retired from running the company in 1966 at the age of 78, handing over his life's work to his son Barron. A year later, Conrad Hilton's autobiography, Be My Guest, was published. The multimillionaire continued to lead an active lifestyle: he spoke to students, worked in his foundation, and got married for the third time. He died on January 4, 1979 in Dallas, where he once built his first Hilton, at the age of 91. Conrad bequeathed his entire fortune to the Hilton Foundation. Son Barron had to spend nine whole years to challenge his father’s last will and retain control of the American part of the Hilton empire for the family. Barron Hilton (grandfather of Paris) 
Barron Hilton himself married Marilyn June Hawley back in 1947, with whom they were together until her death in 2004. From this long marriage they had eight children: William Barron Hilton, Jr., Hawley Anne Hilton, Stephen Michael Hilton, David Alan Hilton, Sharon Constance Hilton, Richard Howard Hilton, Daniel Kevin Hilton, and Ronald Jeffrey Hilton. The 79-year-old patriarch of the Hilton clan, Barron Hilton, was beside himself when the film with Paris's sexual pleasures hit the Internet. And her recent 23-day prison sentence was apparently the last straw. “He was and remains very dissatisfied with the way the Hilton name was sullied because of Paris,” says Jerry Oppenheimer, author of a biography of the Hilton clan. “Now he does not want to leave his relatives what they did not deserve.” Grandpa Hilton sole member family, which retains a significant stake in its vast hotel empire, has signaled that it plans to donate the roughly $2 billion it received from its imminent sale to Blackstone to charity. The money will go to the Conrad Hilton Foundation, the founder of the family business. Conrad Hilton Jr. born July 6, 1926. Brother of Barron Hilton. He and his stepmother Zsa Zsa Gabor had an intimate relationship even before his father's divorce from Gabor, which he later publicly admitted. In 1950 he married Elizabeth Taylor; the marriage was dissolved in 1951. Conrad Hilton Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor In 1958 he married Patricia McClintock, in this marriage they had two children. In 1962, at the age of 43, he died of a heart attack. With actress Betsy von Furstenberg (1951) Richard Hilton (1955) is the most famous of the eight sons of Barron Hilton and the father of the notorious Paris. In 1978 he graduated from the University of Denver with a degree in Hotel and Restaurant Business Management. Rick got his start in the real estate business when he joined Eastdil's New York office. He specialized in securing participation for institutional investors and pension funds in a variety of real estate transactions. In 1984 he formed Hilton Realty Investment. For the past 25 years, Rick has specialized in residential real estate sales in Los Angeles communities. In addition, he is an exemplary family man and the father of 5 children! David Jacques Pierre Cogordan Hilton (born 1973), who did not know the identity of his true father until 2008. Paris Hilton (born 1981) Nicky Hilton (born 1983) Barron Nicholas Hilton (born 1989) Conrad Hughes Hilton (born 1994) Paris's older brother Younger And finally, this is what the hotel built by Conrad Hilton looked like in 1939 And one of the many hotels in our time
When future hotel magnate Conrad Hilton bought his first hotel, he already had several business failures behind him. Having received an engineering degree, he did not work for a day in his specialty, but immediately plunged headlong into financial adventures. They brought only disappointment to Hilton - every new undertaking invariably failed, and everything had to start from scratch. Although he showed business acumen as a child: when he helped his father in the family grocery store, sales skyrocketed. But Conrad himself dreamed of more than just the work of a grocer in the American outback, which was his hometown San Antonio at the end of the century before last. The boy saw himself at the head of a successful bank, a famous financier who handled millions.
And only at the age of 31, Conrad Hilton accidentally stumbled upon a business that brought him the long-awaited millions and turned his name into a legend. In 1919, he once again found himself broke and was wondering how to raise start-up capital for new banking scams. And then Hilton bought the Mobley Hotel in the Texas town of Cisco, which was standing idle. This shabby inn with ridiculous columns on the façade could only be called a hotel if you had the imagination. However, Hilton was not deprived of imagination – and a special, entrepreneurial fantasy. He made not only the hotel itself profitable, but even its columns, surrounding them with glass display cases with goods necessary in any hotel: newspapers, magazines, razor blades, toothbrushes and much more. As the hotel owner later calculated, each column brought him an additional $8 thousand.
Famous hotel
Success inspired Hilton, and he, forgetting about the banking business, decided to take a closer look at the previously unknown hotel business. And, apparently, he saw considerable prospects in him. In 1925, he opened the first Hilton hotel in Dallas, which became the cornerstone of the famous hotel empire. It grew stronger, expanded, and with minimal losses went through the difficult years of the Great Crisis, when Hilton, in whose veins flowed the blood of tight-fisted Scandinavians and Germans, had to save on literally everything, including even his own salary.
In 1946, Hilton Hotels Corporation was founded and became public. At this time, Hilton expanded his business far beyond Texas; after purchasing and leasing several luxury hotels, the hotel chain became the largest in the United States.
And in 1949, the first hotel abroad was opened - the Caribe Hilton in Puerto Rico. On this occasion, Conrad Hilton founded new company(operating in parallel with the first) - Hilton International, busy promoting its brand outside the United States.
Today there are Hilton hotels in almost every country in the world. Over the past quarter century, the hotel industry of “Papa Conrad” has been replenished with a number of luxury hotels, headed by the oldest and one of the most famous hotels New York Waldorf Astoria (acquired by Hilton Hotels for $35 million in 1977 controlling interest shares). The corporation also includes three- and four-star hotels from the British chain Stakis and the Scandinavian Scandic Hotels AB.
Of all the titles that the newspapers awarded him, the founder of the hotel empire most loved the French name for his profession - hotelier. The famous hotelier passed away in 1979, but before last day retained the post of Chairman of the Board of Directors. Only in 1966, on the eve of his 80th birthday, Conrad Hilton allowed himself to part with another post - the presidency, leaving it to his son Barron. Journalists noted that, along with the construction of hotels, Conrad Hilton also succeeded in another construction - his family clan: to date, eight children of “Papa Conrad” and almost a hundred grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive and well in the world (and some are engaged in business). .
His autobiography “Be My Guest” has become a reference book for a whole generation of hoteliers in many countries. Because the author, who inherited double pedantry from his Norwegian father and German mother, created an entire methodological manual on the topic “how to extract maximum profit from a minimum area or volume.”
Best of the day
Standard Luxury
The company’s corporate motto: “A guarantee of elite luxury with affordable service of a high standard of quality,” attracts a wide variety of clients to its hotels - from crowned heads, business leaders and stars of culture and show business to ordinary middle-class couples. As American journalists wrote, Conrad Hilton was the first to understand what has become a commonplace in the service industry today: both millionaires and people with average incomes equally need true comfort and unobtrusive but ubiquitous service, and both are willing to stay together for this. in the same hotels.
And the main thing that brought success to the Hilton hotel chain was innovation in the field of service and marketing. The corporation was the first to install specialized kiosks for souvenirs and gifts (the Hilton Country Store retail chain). For the first time, all rooms were equipped with such devices as are generally accepted today, such as air conditioning, direct dial telephones, multifunctional programmable alarm clocks, and automatically controlled entrance doors. In 1994, Hilton became the first hotel chain in the world to have all its properties equipped with automatic opening, closing, locking and locking devices. And since 1959, the company began to open specialized hotels at airports, which offered an appropriate package of services for air passengers and airline flight crews. Another innovation was the system of rewarding regular customers - the Hilton Honors program, as well as the system of a nationwide club resort holiday. Then revolutionize the market hotel services produced a joint marine project cruise holiday with Festival Cruise.
In addition, Conrad Hilton's company was the first in its business sector to introduce and widely distribute the franchising system, for which a subsidiary, Hilton Inns, was created in 1965. Over time, this system was adopted by all Hilton's competitors, and Conrad Hilton's company itself today operates under franchise agreements with 1,352 hotels.
Virtual booking
But the main innovations hotel chain Hilton was released after his death - when the world entered the electronic era. Following the behests of the founding father, his followers were the first to occupy all the profitable niches that opened up, mainly due to the fact that work on the “electronization” of Hilton hotels and related infrastructure began long before the appearance of the now well-known concepts - e-business and IT technology . Today, competitors are forced to urgently go through stages of technological restructuring that Hilton has long since passed. Back in 1973, Hilton Hotels was the first in the global hotel business to introduce the Hiltron information and reference system - with its help, the client could remotely obtain information about availability and book rooms along with railway and air tickets. The effectiveness of this system turned out to be higher than all expectations - it worked successfully for 26 years, and only in 1999 it was replaced by a more modern one - the Central Reservations System (CRS or Hilstar), which united more than 500 hotels around the world.
In 1985, the corporation began operating another system, the Answer*Net marketing system, which connected all regional offices and hotel complexes in the United States into a single network. And a decade later, she was the first in the industry to open the Internet portal www.hilton.com and, with the support of American Express, its own system credit cards Hilton Optima.
In 2002, the Hilton empire became one of the initiators of the creation of a unified network reservation system WorldRes, which, in addition to Hilton itself, included the resources of two other leading players in the field of resort and hotel business - Accor and Six Continents.
Finally, the company recently successfully announced another innovative service solution - access to a wireless local network based on Symbol Technologies wireless switches. This communication complex was first tested at the Frankfurt Hilton Hotel and immediately gained popularity among the administration and clients.
Hotel roulette
But perhaps the most unexpected and controversial innovation was the active and systematic integration of Hilton's hotel business into a neighboring area - the gambling industry.
This alliance began back in the late sixties, when two unusual hotel– Las Vegas Hilton and Flamingo Hilton. Unlike all the others built earlier, they were also gambling establishments. Before this, in Las Vegas, hotels were built separately and casinos separately. And only Conrad Hilton, for all his piety, came up with a bold idea: to combine living in the “roulette city” with the main local pastime - gambling. This implied an additional system of service and various bonuses for clients. For example, restaurants and bars were located right in the gambling halls, and each new guest was given free gambling chips for a certain amount.
The innovation turned out to be so successful that in 1987, as a result of a series of transactions, Hilton International merged with the British industrial group Ladbroke Group, whose main activities were casinos, bookmakers, lotteries and sweepstakes. The association later became known as the Hilton Group.
The British gaming empire did not become the dominant division in the Hilton Group, but it certainly saved the hotel business during the severe crisis associated with the main tragedy of the new century - the terrorist attacks in New York in September 2001. After them, for the entire global hotel business (as well as the air passenger, tourism, and many others), the era of relative prosperity of the late 1990s gave way to a period of decline. And for some – complete collapse.
For some, but not for the Hilton Group, it again demonstrated rare insight, having managed to acquire a saving magic wand in the form of the aforementioned gambling business. Because it quickly became clear: natural and man-made crises and disasters in society lead to people being less willing to travel, fly on planes and stay in hotels, but the craving for gambling in such times, on the contrary, only intensifies! Which, in general, is natural - when everything is unstable in the world, the hope of increasing one’s well-being with the help of fortune grows.
In the early years of the new millennium, the Hilton Group's hotel sector suffered losses, but profits from another division - the gambling and bookmaking division - made it possible not only to cover them, but also to increase profits in 2003 by almost $2 million compared to the previous year. Hilton Group's total sales for 2003 were approximately $16 billion, of which only 19% came from Hilton International's hotel division.
Today, when most contemporaries hear the word “Hilton,” the image of a glamorous girl throwing money away left and right immediately comes to mind.
However, Hilton is primarily a hotel chain. Things are not going well for her right now, to put it mildly. But once upon a time it was its founder, Conrad Hilton, who made hotels the way we are used to seeing them today (Figure 1).
He was one of the first people to introduce star rating into this business, like cognac. The most expensive and best hotels were to be designated 5 stars, and the cheapest and simplest 1. In addition, Conrad combined hotels with restaurants, casinos and much more. Conrad Hilton was born on December 25, 1887. He was the eighth child in the family. His father, August Hilton, had his own small business. He ran a grocery store. It cannot be said that the store brought in a lot of money, but the family did not go hungry, and Conrad quite calmly received what he did not need. higher education at the Mining Institute. He was an engineer by profession, but this did not attract him at all. Since childhood, Conrad Hilton dreamed of becoming a bank manager. He saw himself among people handling millions. But the war came. In 1917, Conrad volunteered for the army. A year and a half later, he returns home to find out that his father died in a car accident.
Figure 1 - Conrad Hilton
However, with the business he dreamed of so much, everything turned out to be not so simple. Hilton began to suffer one fiasco after another. At the age of 31, his first bank went bankrupt, which lasted less than a year. The young man at that moment had only 5 thousand dollars in his wallet, and his head filled with dreams of banking. Arriving in Cisco, Texas, 31-year-old Hilton stayed at the inconspicuous Mobley Hotel. The young entrepreneur immediately noticed the line that had formed in hopes of getting a number. But there were no vacancies, and the owner was already so tired of work that he didn’t even think about expanding (clients simply left to look for a place to stay in other hotels). He just wanted to retire. It was one of those situations where a person finds himself in the right place at the right time (the same thing happened to Ray Kroc when he walked into the McDonald brothers restaurant).
After purchasing Mobley, Hilton began improving the hotel. To begin with, he equipped it with a large number of bedrooms, thereby eliminating the queue. Then the thought struck him that he could make money from the guests by offering them some Additional services and products that would entertain them (at that time, most hotels resembled boring inns). So, in the lobby, around all the columns, small display cases appeared, on which various trinkets (newspapers, magazines, razors, toothbrushes and toothpastes) were located. Conrad later noted that one column brought him 8 thousand dollars a month.
Conrad Hilton's success surprised his family, who already considered him a failure. After all the failures in the banking business. However, a year after purchasing Mobley, Conrad purchased his second hotel in Fort North, and then several more. So, by 1924, Conrad Hilton became the owner of 350 rooms in all his hotels. He has come to the point where finances allow him to build his own hotel.
And on August 2, 1925, the stunning (for that time) Dallas Hilton hotel opened (about 300 rooms, i.e. about the same as all the other hotels owned by Conrad Hilton). A year later, the 38-year-old entrepreneur finally marries Maria Baron (although he will later divorce and remarry two more times). It was good time, given that the Dallas Hilton was the first hotel to bear the name of the founder and the center of the entire Hilton Hotels company. But I couldn’t relax. 3 years after Conrad’s marriage, an economic crisis began in the country. It hit the hotel business hard. People simply began to travel less. And business travel has decreased.
By the beginning of the 30s most of American hotel companies were bankrupt. Conrad Hilton was forced to sell his business, however, since at that time the hotel business was, to put it mildly, not the best option, then the owners of Hilton Hotels, towards the end of the Great Depression, hired Conrad as manager of the hotel chain. And they were even ready to sell him the network back.
So, gradually, step by step, Conrad Hilton regained his business (he bought out hotels one by one). In 1949, he had already acquired one of the most luxurious hotels in New York - the Waldorf-Astoria, and the first Hilton hotel outside the United States was opened in Puerto Rico.
In 1954, Conrad Hilton shocked the financial world by making the biggest deal in American history. Statler Hotels, Hilton's main competitor, was purchased for $111 million. Such acquisitions became possible for Conrad Hilton largely because in 1946 his company went public, thereby receiving additional financial injections from the outside. It is worth noting that by that time, Conrad already owned two companies - Hilton Hotels, which owns a business in the USA, and Hilton International, which promotes the company’s international business. Hilton hotels have begun to attract more and more more people. The company explained its success simply. Rich people, be they businessmen, royalty, or show business stars, need, just like ordinary representatives of the middle class, unobtrusive comfort. This is the main luxury. This is the fact that began to attract both millionaires and movie/music stars, as well as the ordinary middle class, to Hilton hotels. They all liked the same hotels. Hilton Hotels.
But it’s one thing to talk about unobtrusive comfort, and quite another to provide it. To achieve this, they did the following: firstly, it was the Hilton chain that first introduced small kiosks in hotel lobbies. No one before Hilton had equipped their rooms with air conditioning, automatic entry doors, alarm clocks, and phones that included features such as direct dialing (no need to call the hotel and ask to be connected to a certain phone number) . In addition, the Hilton chain built its hotels near airports and seaports, thereby offering tourists special packages (tour hotel). Finally, it was in the Hilton hotel chain that a special guest reward system called Hilton Honors appeared.
In 1966, Conrad Hilton retired, transferring management of the hotel chain to his son, Barron. At this time, the famous hotelier (that’s what he liked to call himself after hearing this French word) writes his autobiography “Be My Guest.” At the same time, he founded his charitable foundation, the Hilton Foundation, to which he bequeathed his entire fortune after his death in 1979 in Dallas (where the first Hilton hotel was built).
Barron Hilton managed to sue his father's charitable foundation for inheritance rights. It took him about 9 years to do this (it’s worth making a reservation here that Conrad had 8 children and about 100 grandchildren in total, so the Hilton family is not alone in living with Paris. Someone is even engaged in business now). It must be said that the son managed the hotel business quite successfully and made several key changes to the Hilton chain. First, the company switched to a franchise model. True, it was Conrad himself who started this, but it was his son who had to finish the work. Secondly, in 1973, the company introduced a remote help system called Hiltron. The client only had to dial the hotline number, and he received all the information he was interested in from the robot, including the availability of hotel rooms. In 1999, the system was replaced by a more powerful one - Hilstar, which took into account all the capabilities of the global Internet.
In general, if we talk about information technologies, the Hilton hotel chain implements them much faster than all competitors. Thus, it has long been available in Hilton hotels wireless Internet for all laptop owners.
Figure 2 - Granddaughter of the founder of Hilton Hotels - Paris Hilton
In addition to all this, it is worth noting one more moment in the history of Hilton hotels. Merger of hotels and casinos. The first casino hotels appeared in the late 60s, under the leadership of Conrad Hilton in Las Vegas. This was one of the most controversial moves in the company's history. But it showed its worth in 1987 when Hilton International merged with the Ladbroke Group, whose main business was gambling houses.
In the 21st century, the circumstances were such that the hotel business of the Hilton family brought them nothing but losses. But the gambling business managed not only to be profitable, but also to cover the losses of the company’s hotel activities.
In 2007, the investment group Blackstone bought their entire hotel business from the Hilton family for $26 billion. At the same time, 7.5 billion went to pay off the company’s debts.
It must be said that Hilton Hotels is not doing well right now. Incomes are constantly declining, and when Google queries Hilton, it produces information not about legendary hotels, but about the show business star, Barron’s granddaughter Paris, who earns quite a lot from her “idleness” (Figure 2).