With Olympics in mind, Rio's love hotels clean up

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — One worker strips mirrored paneling off the ceiling, as another pries up the fiberglass shell of a whirlpool bath. A third man takes a sledgehammer to a life-size statue of Venus de Milo posing topless with a swirl of plaster robes hanging from her waist.
The Shalimar love hotel is going family-friendly.
Like about a third of the city's 180 hotels that rent rooms by the hour, mostly for amorous rendezvous, the Shalimar is trading its oversized round beds and bondage-ready chairs for proper couches, functional desks and other businesslike furnishings. The goal is reinvention as a standard pay-by-the-day tourist hotel.
With next year's World Cup soccer tournament and the 2016 Olympic Games arriving in this seaside city, local officials are scrambling to solve a chronic hotel bed shortage so severe that during a UN conference here last year, the mayor had to appeal to residents to open their apartments to visitors.