Going back ot school isn't just kid stuff anymore.

Here is today's lesson about Holiday Inn - what was, what is and what will be.     No exams, no papers to write, just  stuff that  you might find interesting....or not.

1. Holiday Inn was founded in 1952,  by  C. Kemmons Wilson. Rumors  that Bing Crosby  was a major investor and named it Holiday Inn after a movie he was in, are  false, but continue to circulate. The chain grew;   Wilson franchised the hotels, becomng both a franchisor and franchisee on some of the properties.

2. The first  Holiday Inn  was in Memphis; the nightly rate was $4 and the pleasantly furnished rooms had telephone and TV.

3. Descendants of  C Kemmons Wilson have recently built a new  133  room Holiday Inn in Memphis and   prominently  display the furnishing of the  original  Holiday Inn, behind glass, in the lobby.   Room rate for the new hotel, is $164 and have flat screen TVs and Wi-Fi

4. Holiday Inn offers  424,000 rooms in 3,300 hotels globally. with more on the way.

5  At one time Holiday Inn  was   the Number One mid -priced hotel brand. However,  in  the last decades they dropped their prominence.  Size of the chain  became a disadvantage, making them less manageable  and  competitors  were building  new and better properties, , as noted  by Professor Bjorn Hanson, of the NYU Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management.

6. In 1999,  Wilson sold the Holidiay Inn brand to Bass, the British  beer company.  Intercontinental was created out of what was the the hotel dividion of Bass.. Intercontinetal Hotel Group now  had to figure out what to do with the Holiday Inn. They did serious  research  in 2003  to  decide  whether it was worth putting in   big bucks to  rehabilitate the ailing  Holiday Inn brand 

7. In 2007, Intercontinental    announced a "relaunch" to make the Holiday Inns more appealing to vacationers and business travelers. New lighing, new bedding, . new logo, new landscaping,  new furnishing, and pleasant  HI scent to waft throughout the public space were just the beginning to upgrade the chain. A Brands Standards Manual was distributed to all franchisees.

8. Hotels that do not  comply with the new standards, are being dropped from the chain. But more  than 1,000 have already complied.

9. In addition,  1,000 new  Holiday Inns are being developed in 47 countries.   Seven hundred  will be in the US

10. If you studied the above, you now know what was, what is and what will be. and it's all good news.

  Holiday Inns will  get better and better, a win-win situation for us all.

And don't you just love that new logo!

This information has been  summarized from a New York Times  four colum article  in the business section of the New York Times, August 26,2009.

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