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Guest house

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Guest houses in Laos

A guest house (or guesthouse, also rest house) is a kind of lodging. In some parts of the world (such as the Caribbean), a guest house is a type of inexpensive hotel-like lodging. In others, it is a private home that has been converted for the exclusive use of visitor accommodation. The owner usually lives in an entirely separate area within the property and the guest house may be as a form of lodging business.

Overview

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Guest House Altmõisa in Estonia. Tuuru village

In some areas of the world, guest houses are the only kind of accommodation available for visitors who have no local relatives with whom to stay. Among the features which distinguish a guest house from a hotel or inn is the lack of a full-time staff.

Under the 1956 Hotel Proprietor Act in the United Kingdom, while hotels have an obligation to accept travelers "in a fit state" if they have empty rooms, guest houses are allowed to be more selective.[1]

Bed and breakfasts and guest houses in England are family-owned and the family lives on the premises, though family members are not normally available during the evening. However, most family members work a 10- to 12-hour day from 6 am as they may employ part-time service staff. Hotels maintain a staff presence 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, whereas a guest house has a more limited staff presence. Because of this, check-in at a guest house is often by appointment. An inn also usually has a restaurant attached.

In India, a tremendous growth can be seen in the guest house business especially in Delhi-NCR (national capital region) where progress in the IT sector and the Commonwealth Games 2010 were the two most influential factors. Nowadays the guest house accommodation sector has improved significantly, with even a home converted guest house also offering 3-star equivalent facilities to its guests.

In the United States, the term guest house may refer to rooms in private homes.[1]

Security

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Generally, there are two variations of paying guest house:

  1. Home converted guest house
  2. Professionally run guest house with all necessary amenities and staff

In the first version of the guest house, the guests get to live with a family where they get shelter and food (bed and breakfast) only, and for the rest of the jobs like washing clothes and utensils, cleaning of room or area around their bed is to be done by the guests. In the second version, the guests receive some amenities necessary to live life comfortably like a fully furnished room, comfortable bed, air-conditioner, television, water supply and security.

A major advantage of a professionally run paying guest accommodation service is that the owner follows the safety norms set by the local government. Some of the important safety points include:

Guest houses under the Islamic State

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In the territory of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which declared a caliphate in war-torn Syria in 2014, guest houses, called madaffas or maqqars, had a special role. Every town and city controlled by ISIL had one or more of these guest houses and they were similar in condition and atmosphere.[2] Upon arrival in the Islamic State, foreign girls and women would stay in a madaffa. If married, they stayed there while their husbands underwent military and sharia training under ISIL, until their husbands could find them a place to live. If unmarried, they stayed until they accepted an ISIL fighter's proposal of marriage.[3][4] Unmarried women were not allowed to live alone but had to either live with family or in the madaffa until they married. Widows and divorced women under ISIL were expected to remarry quickly, and had to live in the madaffa until they did.[5][2]

Integration officers were responsible for helping childless widows leave their homes and move back into the madaffa; widows with children were exempt from having to live in there. Male ISIL members who wanted to marry consulted with the ISIL Marriage Bureau and described their general preferences for a wife. Integration officers with the Marriage Bureau would arrange for them to meet with women waiting in madaffas, who had also written down their preferences for a husband. If, after the meeting, the man and the woman decided to marry each other, the Marriage Bureau then arranged for the nikah ceremony. If one of the parties did not agree to the marriage, the woman would return to the madaffa to await another meeting with another prospective husband. A woman was in theory free to decline any proposal, but she was not permitted to leave the madaffa until she married someone.[6][7]

The madaffas were intentionally squalid and overcrowded and the wardens authoritarian and unpleasant in order to encourage the women to marry as quickly as possible so they would be allowed to move out.[7] Anna Zizola and Paolo Inghilleri, in their book Women on the Verge of Jihad, compared them to prisons.[3] Journalist Azadeh Moaveni described them as places "of such deliberate torment and uninhabitability that few women could stay long without going mad."[2][8] The madaffas' windows and outside doors were locked, there were guards posted in the yard, and trips outside were supervised by the wardens.[7][3][2] Sophie Kasiki, a woman who was convinced to travel from Paris to ISIL territory in Syria temporarily to volunteer at a hospital, was sent to one of the madaffas when she asked to go home. She said the other women watched ISIL propaganda videos of beheadings and talked constantly of their husbands or the men they hoped to marry.[9][4]

The ISIL integration officers who ran madaffas were initially expected to make sure widows remained there for at least as long as their iddah, their Islamically mandated mourning period, which lasts four months and ten days.[6] However, many ISIL-affiliated women reported that their iddah was violated and that ISIL pressured them to remarry before the mourning period was up, saying their martyred husbands didn't need them anymore but a living fighter did. Sometimes only days passed between the funeral for one husband and the marriage to the next.[10]

See also

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References

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  1. 1 2 "guest house". A Dictionary of Travel and Tourism. Oxford University Press. 2012. doi:10.1093/acref/9780191733987.001.0001. ISBN 9780191733987.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Moaveni, Azadeh (2019). Guest house for young widows: among the women of ISIS. New York: Random House. pp. 250–251. ISBN 978-0-399-17975-4.
  3. 1 2 3 Zizola, Anna; Inghilleri, P. (2018). Women on the verge of Jihad: the hidden pathways towards radicalization. Politics. Milan: Mimesis International. ISBN 978-88-6977-131-6.
  4. 1 2 In the Shadow of Daesh. First Draft Publishing. February 28, 2022. ISBN 978-3944214320.
  5. ↑ "Tareena: Return from ISIS". Exposure. Season 5. Episode 4. ITV.
  6. 1 2 Khelghat-Doost, Hamoon (2021). The strategic logic of women in Jihadi organizations: from operation to state building. Cham: Springer. p. 136. ISBN 978-3-030-59388-9.
  7. 1 2 3 Bloom, Mia (2025). Veiled threats: women and global jihad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. p. 52. ISBN 978-1-5017-7782-0.
  8. ↑ "Tareena: Return from ISIS". Exposure. Season 5. Episode 4. ITV.
  9. ↑ "Removing the myth of ISIL (Editorial)". The National. January 10, 2016. Archived from the original on January 10, 2016. Retrieved January 11, 2016.
  10. ↑ Bloom, Mia (2025). Veiled threats: women and global jihad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. pp. 54–55. ISBN 978-1-5017-7782-0.
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