What Hospitals Can Learn From the Hospitality Industry

By Dr. Suzanne Falla

The origins of hospitals and hotels are bound to the ancient ideals of sanctuary, hospitality, and the profound duty to welcome the other. The earliest traces of the hospital can be found in the bimaristan—a Persian “place of healing”—whose lineage dates back to Mesopotamian temple complexes of the second millennium BCE, where healers and scholars practiced traditional Persian medicine and sought to restore balance to body and spirit.

Across the centuries and continents, the world’s oldest still-living hotel, the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Japan, founded in 705 CE, has carried forward a parallel tradition of structured lodging, its natural springs offering renewal to weary travelers. In their formative expressions, hospitals, hotels, and hospices were less divided by function than united by a common spirit: a welcoming embrace for travelers and voyageurs, sustained by the ethical obligation to provide nourishment, rest, and care.

Though worlds apart, the bimaristan and the Onsen embody the same enduring thread: sanctuaries of hospitality and healing, shaped by the conviction that caring for the vulnerable is as much a social responsibility as a spiritual calling. They were places of passage, guiding one from state to state, from place to place, offering renewal along life’s journey. In this light, they stand not merely as institutions, but as testaments to the human impulse to fashion sanctuaries of hospitality and renewal —an impulse that would take on new and varied forms across civilizations.

That impulse to fashion sanctuaries of hospitality and renewal has taken on new and varied forms across civilizations, carrying us into the present day. If we look at hospitals and hotels now, they seem to stand at opposite ends of the social spectrum: one a place we long to go, the other a place we hope never to need. They share a common ancestry in welcome and care. Yet, their paths have diverged so dramatically that they embody opposing poles of human experience—necessity and desire, duty and indulgence, survival and pleasure. The difference lies deeper, in the basic core of each enterprise.

In one, the human being and their lived experience are placed at the very center, with comfort, delight, and satisfaction as the measure of success, so that one is drawn to return again and again. In the other, the human being arrives not by choice but by need—vulnerable, uncertain, and exposed. And the reward there is not pleasure but survival itself, often shadowed by fear, the unknown, anxiety, and mistrust. Where the hotel thrives on return and repetition, the hospital aspires to release, to cure, to make departure possible. Thus, the divergence may lie not only in the institutions themselves but in the human experience of those who serve within them, their labor shaped by profoundly different emotions and expectations.

And here arises the ethical question: what do we owe another human being in moments of welcome?

Is it enough to offer comfort when joy is expected, or care when suffering is present?

In one space, welcome is celebrated, adorned, and rewarded; in the other, it is burdened, tested, and often thankless. Why is it that when we ring the bell in a hotel, someone comes rushing with joy, as if our request were a gift, while in a hospital, we ring and ring, and the one who arrives does so weary, impatient, as though our need were a burden? Why is it that in a hotel bed we feel served, cherished, and free, but in a hospital bed we feel at the mercy of another’s will—compelled to justify our pain before it is answered?

I do not claim to hold the answer. Perhaps it lies in the value systems that shape these institutions. From those in hospitality, we might learn how service, attentiveness, and joy are woven into a culture of welcome, while in hospitals, such values are often eclipsed by necessity and strain. If some of that ethos could be carried across, even survival might be met with dignity, compassion, and the feeling of being truly seen.