Intercontinental bans adult entertainment
by Leon Gettler
The world’s largest hotel chain InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), which owns the Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and InterContinental brands, has banned on-demand adult entertainment movies at all its properties.
It’s the latest hotels group to scrap the service following public pressure.
It follows the Hyatt Hotels announcing last year that it would no longer offer on-demand adult entertainment movies in hotel rooms, and the Hilton announcing it would phase out adult entertainment from July this year. In 2013, Nordic Hotels – a major Scandinavian hotel chain – announced that it was eliminating pay-per-view adult entertainment channels from its 171 hotels. Marriott Hotels scrapped the service in 2011. Omni Hotels and Resorts stopped selling adult entertainment in 1998.
IHG has have over 727,000 rooms in 100 countries.
In an email to Breitbart News, IHG said the company already had a policy in place discouraging franchisees from broadcasting adult content.
Obviously however, it was still continuing because from now on, IHG hotels who continue to sell adult entertainment “will face strict penalties for noncompliance”.
Much of this trend to banning adult entertainment is due to pressure from groups like the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) in the United States which blame increasing prostitution and sexual exploitation on organisations that profit from.
These groups are now playing hardball. On February 25, the NCOSE held a press conference revealing its “Dirty Dozen” list for 2016.
Still, there might be other issues driving the change. Much of it might be about the bottom line.
As Robert Mandelbaum, director of research information services at PKF Hospitality research, explains, there has been a “really dramatic” decline in revenues in past years with profits from on-demand services dropping “by half” since 2007.
Instead of paying for on-demand services, people are using the Internet to download movies, games and video clips on their laptops and portable digital devices.
“Between 2013 and 2014 demand for pay-per-view services fell by 12 per cent, and that’s while the hotel industry is achieving record profitability,” Mandelbaum told Breitbart News.
“It’s not like we’re in the middle of a recession. The hotels themselves are full, people just aren’t paying to use these services anymore.”
29th February 2016