Why is there a Bible in almost every hotel room?

You open the nightstand drawer—not because you’re expecting to find anything, but because that’s just what you do when you arrive at a new hotel room. And there it is: the Bible. Sometimes on its own, sometimes along with a travel magazine, a restaurant guide, or a notepad with the hotel’s logo.

In Asia, you’ll sometimes find a Buddhist Dhammapada alongside it. In some homes in the U.S., you’ll find the Book of Mormon. But the Bible is the constant. All over the world, in small motels as well as five-star hotels.

How did she get in there—and why did she stay?

The Gideons and an Evening in Wisconsin

The story begins in 1898. Two traveling salesmen, John Nicholson and Samuel Hill, share a room at a small hotel in Boscobel, Wisconsin—because there is no other room available. They discover that they are both devout Christians, pray together, and decide to found an organization designed to offer travelers a place of refuge from their loneliness.

A year later, in 1899, they founded Gideons International together with another man—a Christian lay organization whose stated goal is to distribute Bibles. Their first project: hotel rooms.

In 1908, they placed the first Bible in a hotel room in Superior, Montana. What followed was one of the most successful distribution campaigns in history. To date, according to the Gideons themselves, they have placed more than two billion Bibles in hotels, hospitals, prisons, and schools—free of charge, funded by donations from their members.

Why Hotels Participate

Hotels don’t pay for the Bibles—the Gideons provide them free of charge. For a hotel, it’s a simple arrangement: no effort, no cost, and a guest who looks for something in the drawer and finds it feels taken care of.

There is also a psychological dimension. A hotel room is an impersonal space—strange furniture, strange smells, a strange city. For some guests, the Bible in the drawer serves as a small symbol of comfort—something familiar in an unfamiliar setting. That may not sound like much, but for some travelers—especially in the decades when business trips were even lonelier and less connected than they are today—it was by no means unimportant.

What Has Changed

In recent years, the Bible in the hotel drawer has come under pressure. Many international hotel chains have begun quietly removing them—partly at the request of non-Christian guests, and partly as part of a general trend toward religiously neutral spaces. Hilton, Marriott, and other major chains have removed Bibles from guest rooms in some of their properties or made them available upon request, rather than providing them as standard.

In other parts of the world—the U.S., parts of Latin America, and South Korea, where the evangelical movement is strong—they can still be found in almost every room.

An object that tells a story beyond its appearance

The Bible in a hotel room is actually a small cultural-historical document. It tells of a time when travel was more arduous and lonely, when a business traveler could be on the road for weeks at a time with hardly any contact with home. It tells of two men with an idea in a hotel room in Wisconsin. And it tells the story of how a gesture—free of charge, voluntary, and without expectation of anything in return—has endured for more than a century in billions of hotel rooms around the world.

Whether you consider this sensible or anachronistic is a personal decision. Very few people who open the drawer realize that it has a history.

The next time you open the nightstand drawer, you’ll know.