Women are in excess in the occupations of boarding and lodging house keepers, housekeepers, launderers, nurses and midwives, and servants and waiters.
No person is allowed to keep a common lodging-house unless he is registered, and a house may not be registered until it has been inspected.
There is no definition of the expression " common lodging-house " in the Public Health Acts, and at one time the courts decided that shelters for the destitute kept by charitable persons were not common lodging-houses.
The industries all centre in the pilgrimage; the chief object of every Meccan - from the notables and sheikhs, who use their influence to gain custom for the Jidda speculators in the pilgrim traffic, down to the cicerones, pilgrim brokers, lodging-house keepers, and mendicants at the holy places - being to pillage the visitor in every possible way.
Around that time was established a lodging house or inn.