Thanksgiving is once again upon us and with it the official start of the busy holiday travel season that extends through Christmas.
As Americans continue to cope with the ongoing pandemic, travel has seen a steady increase once again. That means packed airports and bumper-to-bumper traffic on most major highways starting Wednesday. It also means more people will be staying in hotels.
This brings us to an interesting and highly symbolic news story, one that deserves coverage.
I have done my share of travel — both in the United States and internationally — over my two decades working as a journalist. The few things you could always count on for much of that time was a newspaper at the front desk, usually USA Today, and a Bible in your nightstand.
Not anymore. Print is slowly dying, and newspaper readers have migrated to the internet in recent years.
What about those Bibles?
They, too, seem to be slowly disappearing. I noticed this past summer, while on a trip to Washington, D.C., that there was no Bible in my hotel room.
The phasing out of Bibles in hotel rooms is actually part of a steady trend across the country over the past few years. In 2016, Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel chain, typically supplied both a Bible and Book of Mormon in its rooms. But the company decided that forgoing religious materials was the way to go at two of its hipper hotel brands such as Moxy and Edition. Note that both of these chains target younger guests.