Hotel mail
Under Hotel Post refers to a private mailing one or more hotels that is offered to the guest.
Hotel mail was mainly carried out in the 19th century. In Europe , numerous localities in the Alps and Carpathians could not yet receive regular mail from the state post or not at all. That is why hotels in particular had their own messengers to take their customers' letters to the nearest post office or train station in the valley . This service was mostly carried out in the opposite direction. This means that the messengers also transported mail addressed to a hotel guest from the nearest post office to the hotel. One of the earliest hotel posts can be found in Rigi, Switzerland , from 1864 .
This postal service of the hotel post was usually only carried out for a small fee. In Switzerland , hotel postage stamps were often produced and issued to acknowledge this service. The hotel's postage rates fluctuated between 5 and 15 centimes per letter. These hotel postage stamps had to be stuck onto the mail item in addition to the normal postage stamps . From September 26, 1883, the Swiss Post forbade the use of numerals and denominations such as " postage " so that these could not be confused with postage stamps.
In addition to Switzerland, there are also comparable editions in other countries, such as Austria . In the 1920s and 1930s there were also private courier services with their own postage stamps, which, however, are not counted among the hotel postage stamps.
Hotel post letters and hotel postage stamps have only survived in a few pieces to this day. This makes them a small but also expensive fringe area of philately .
literature
- Marcel Kottelat: Study of the Swiss hotel mail, 1864–1900 , Switzerland 1995
- Frank Arnau : Lexicon of Philately. Lingen, Cologne 1972. p. 349
- M. Burzan: 150 years of Swiss hotel postage stamps. (Continuation article ) In: Deutsche Briefmarken-Zeitung from issue No. 16/2014 of July 25, pp. 28, 30
