The hotel industry in AOI: a case of suffocation of private initiative

Abstract

The article intends to contribute to the debate on the development of the hospitality industry in the contemporary age, identifying the period between the 1930s and 1940s in Italian East Africa as an ideal case study. Among the six key roles played in history by hotel structures that were theorized by Sara Fregonese and Adam Ramadan in 2015,
several correspondences are identified with the situation that occurred in Italian East Africa between the 1930s and 1940s. In this work, therefore, we want to make a preliminary estimate of the hotel and hospitality endowment of the imperial territories, understanding first of all whether it is possible to speak of a tourism industry for the empire or whether it was not possible to overcome the emergency phase following the outbreak of the war against Ethiopia.