The Bible: Is It Really Disappearing From Hotel Rooms?
Are hotels in the United States ending the longstanding tradition of having Bibles in their rooms? And is this a sign of growing secularism in the nation?
Earlier this week, news sites were abuzz with a survey that appeared to show a sharp decline in the percentage of hotels that offered the Bible and other religious materials in their rooms.
A recently released survey by analytics company STR and the American Hotel & Lodging Association seemed to show that from 2006 to 2016 the percentage of hotels that had religious materials in their rooms had plummeted from 95 percent to 48 percent.
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The data made the rounds, with major news entities like the Los Angeles Times and Fox News reporting on this decline.
"A recent survey by STR, a hospitality analytics company, found that the percentage of hotels that offer religious materials in rooms has dropped significantly over the past decade, from 95 percent of hotels in 2006 to 48 percent this year," noted the LA Times.
"Among the reasons for the change, according to industry experts, is a need to appeal to younger American travelers who are less devout than their parents or grandparents, and to avoid offending international travelers such as Muslims or Buddhists."
However, in an email sent to The Christian Post and other publications by a representative of STR, the 48 percent statistic was incorrect, based off of a mistake with that question in the multi-issue survey.
"A corrected entry has resulted in an updated figure of 79 percent of U.S. hotels with religious material in room in 2016," explained Nick Minerd of STR in the email.
"Integrity and transparency are core values of our company culture. Therefore, we understand our responsibility in this situation and apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused."
In another email sent to CP, Jan Freitag of STR explained that the original statistic was problematic because many respondents did not properly fill out the question.
"We checked the data and the brand that initially reported to us that they do not have Bibles in the room filled out the survey out incorrectly," wrote Freitag.
"They do, indeed, offer Bibles. Our data now reflects a change, and the percentage of respondents with materials in the room stayed somewhat steady at 79 percent."
While a far larger percentage of hotels surveyed do in fact include the Bible and other religious materials in their rooms, the decline is still documented by the STR/AHLA report.
The 79 percent figure is a 16 percentage decline from 2006. However, according to the data given to CP by STR, this is still a slight increase from 2014's 77 percent.
