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Things to Come. There are also a few other clouds ahead. Tourist courts and motels are already giving Hilton and other hotelmen hard competition. "We have to keep making our hotels better," says Connie Hilton. "Rooms will have to be larger and they'll have to be soundproofed . . . They will have books, magazines and newspapers, just like a home. They will have radio and television and recording attachments on the telephones so that the guest will receive his messages in the actual words in which they're given. Bathrooms, besides their present equipment, will have ultraviolet-ray machines, suntan and infrared lamps . . . What do you think of a future like that?"
Conrad Hilton thinks such a future is fine and he plans to start making it come true by building high-priced, small hotels in the smaller cities which were passed over in the hotel-building '20s. He is now eyeing land in Atlanta, Beverly Hills and Havana. But he does not think that anyone will ever again build huge hotels like those he gobbled up in the last few years. Nor does he expect to buy any more big ones, at least not right away. With the air of a tired conqueror he asks: "After all, where can you go from the Waldorf?"
*To lure U.S. capital and industrialists to the island, the Puerto Rican government grants tax exemption to many new industries until 1959.