A Cleaner Hotel Room: Made Possible by Catholic Investments
If you travel, it’s no secret that many, if not most, hotels used to offer adult films as part of their in-room TV selection. What might surprise you is where the films were coming from and why the hotels invited them into the bedroom.
Many of the films were actually made by organized crime and the TVs were given to the hotels on the condition that they add the films to the pay-per-view line up.
The hotels were only too glad to put free TVs in their rooms at the cost of exposing all their guests to a near occasion of sin. Despite the documented connections to organized crime, the hotels didn’t want to eliminate the revenue stream these films produced. A very long battle was about to begin.
Free TVs and Lots of Revenue vs Purity: The Long War of David and Goliath
Given the amount of money at stake (annual revenue estimates for the adult film industry range from $6B to $15B+) and the free TVs, it’s no surprise hotels were not chomping at the bit to remove these films from their line-up. We needed to figure out a way to get hotels to re-think their decision to put money over morals.
It took ten years to get traction on this issue.
Sometimes, the best way to win a long conflict is to drive a wedge between the opposing forces. That’s exactly what we did here. By relentlessly presenting documented evidence of the direct involvement of organized crime in the production of these movies, we were able to break through to hotel corporate management. Shareholder activism on this point was crucial in getting executives to make the decision to ban these movies from their hotel rooms.
Millions of Clean Rooms!
Once change started to happen, it was like a dam bursting. After ten years with seemingly no results, we had five major hotel groups decide to remove these films in the span of two years. Taken all together, these companies have roughly two million hotel rooms between them.
Two million hotel rooms no longer include on-demand adult films because of our advocacy efforts.
This is a major victory on many fronts. Not only did we eliminate offensive content from two million hotel rooms, we also cut off a source of revenue for organized crime. There are still many more hotel groups to reach out to, but this is an impressive first step.