Are hotels losing their religion?

This sounds like start of a joke, but it’s not.

An atheist walks into a hotel room. He spots something next to the bed and freaks out.

Is it a tarantula? A severed head?

No!

It’s a Bible, which brings us to this week’s Ask Orlando question.

“Do hotels still have Gideon Bibles? I don’t think I’m seeing them as much as I used to.”

The reader’s observation is correct. Hotels still have Bibles, but the Scriptures are getting harder to find. That means a lot less reading material in Orlando, which has approximately

2.4 billion hotel rooms on International Drive alone.

Marriott International’s policy is to place Bibles and the Book of Mormon in almost all its rooms. Other major chains leave it up to individual franchises.

That makes it hard to say exactly how many rooms have gone religion-free. But a survey of 2,400 hotels by the hospitality analytics company STR might make Joel Osteen jump off the balcony of his $10.7 million mansion.

About 95% of U.S. hotels offered religious material in 2006. That plummeted to 48% in 2016. Why?

There’s “a need to appeal to younger American travelers who are less devout than their parents or grandparents, and to avoid offending international travelers such as Muslims or Buddhists,” said Michael “Doc” Terry, an associate instructor at UCF’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management.

John Nicholson and Samuel Hill didn’t anticipate those trends when they shared a hotel room in Boscobel, Wisconsin, in 1899. The traveling salesmen were Godfearing types, but they couldn’t locate a Bible.

Long story short, they started an organization, named it after ancient Israeli leader Gideon, and tried to make darned sure every traveler who needed a Biblical pick-me-up could find it.

Gideons International has placed more than 2 billion Bibles since its founding, most of them in hotel rooms. Marriott