In the wake of the Armistice that put an end to the First World War, individuals as well as nations were trying to find their bearings again. So were hotel owners, who started reopening to an uncertain demand, and graphic artists who were once again called to design promotional paper items. Art Nouveau, a somewhat tiresome and often over-decorated style, had started to subside soon after its triumph in the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition. By 1905 Paris was over with it, and the rest of the world soon followed. But not all trends that fitted under the broad umbrella of Art Nouveau were curvaceous or over-decorated. The so-called "Glasgow Four" in Scotland, the Austrian members of the Wiener Werkstätte, and others took inspiration in such sources as the minimalist classical Japanese interiors and the clean aesthetic of machine-made products to advocate the design based on tall, rectilinear forms and sharply defined angles.

The French luxury hôtellerie was possibly hit the hardest by the recession. The heights of Cimiez, above Nice, held one of the largest concentration of luxury hotels in the Cote d'Azur. Its crown was the peerless Regina, once patronized by Queen Victoria herself and one of the largest and most luxurious hotels in the world. In 1934 the owning society was bankrupt. A few months later the wine cellar and furniture were auctioned. In 1937 the hotel was transformed into a condominium. Its long and graceful building still gazes sadly towards Nice. Its neighbors (the Majestic, the Alhambra, the Riviera and the Winter-Palace) suffered the same fate during the 1930s. Of the fabled French palace-hotels of Menton, Grasse, Aix-les-Bains or Vichy none remains today! During the 1930s the palace-hotel owners that still resisted could no longer spend lavishly in paper items that would mark their difference. Now they had to count their pennies and consequently labels tended to be cheap and were cheaply printed, frequently bad copies of older designs. New labels were often somber, as if prophesying the war that was soon to come.

In 1936 French workers were allowed paid summer vacations for the first time. Other countries soon followed. The tourism business took off again but the demand was now for cheap lodgings, not expensive ones. Yet, the new breed of travelers also fancied to emblazon their luggage… By then, all hotel owners had realized that there was promotion potential in having the name of their hotels on the luggage of customers and after WW2 labels would be produced in a number and variety never seen before. Every hotel and boarding house had its own label, often in sets of different colors. Some of these designs are interesting for their naïveté (see label at right). There were still some good artistic designs, particularly for hotels in faraway places, visited by a more exclusive élite, but these were rare and getting rarer.

Expensive printers serving the hotel industry had, meanwhile, diversified or disappeared. By the early 1950s even Richter was gone, after producing some postwar editions, often based on photographs, that in no way hinted to its former grandeur. The vulgarization of air travel during the 1970s finally brought the production of hotel labels to a halt: the rough handling of luggage that characterizes mass travel by air meant that labels would be all but destroyed after only a few flights. Nowadays, a few hotels still offer self-adhesive stickers to their customers, but the designs cannot compare with their illustrious predecessors. The age of the hotel label is a thing of the past but, with time, these small rectangles and circles of colored paper came to represent an era. They irresistibly summon nostalgic feelings for times most of us never knew but, somehow, would like to have experienced.