Holiday Inn

History

The original Holiday Inn chain of hotels was founded in 1952 in Memphis, Tennessee by homebuilder Kemmons Wilson to provide inexpensive family accommodation for travellers within the USA. The first Holiday Inn was built by Wilson on Sumner Avenue in Memphis on the main road to and from Nashville. In 1954, Wilson incorporated the chain with Wallace E. Johnson.

Wilson initially came up with the idea after a family road trip to Washington, DC, during which he was disappointed by the quality and consistency provided by the roadside motels of that era. The name Holiday Inn was given to the original hotel by his architect Eddie Bluestein as a joke, in reference to the Bing Crosby movie.

Wilson soon franchised the chain and it grew dramatically, following Wilson's original tenet that the properties should be standardized, clean, predictable, family-friendly, and readily accessible to road travelers. By 1958 there were 50 Inns across the country, 100 by 1959, 500 by 1964, and the 1000th Holiday Inn opened in San Antonio, Texas in 1968. The chain dominated the motel market, leveraged its innovative Holidex reservation system, put considerable financial pressure on traditional hotels, and set the standard for its competitors like Ramada Inns, Travelodge, Howard Johnson's, Best Western and Days Inn. By 1972, when Wilson was featured on the cover of Time Magazine, there were over 1,400 Holiday Inn hotels worldwide. Innovations like the company's Holidome indoor pools turned many hotels into roadside resorts.

The company later branched into other related enterprises, including Medi-Center nursing homes, Continental Trailways, Delta Queen, and various related enterprises. Wilson also later developed the Orange Lake Resort and Country Club near Orlando and a chain called Wilson World Hotels. The family of founder Kemmons Wilson still operates hotels as part of the Kemmons Wilson Companies of Memphis.

Holiday Inn was the first hotel chain to co-produce (or sponsor) a syndicated game show, He Said, She Said, in 1969. Wilson retired from Holiday Inn in 1979.

Although still a healthy company, changing business conditions and demographics saw Holiday Inn lose its market dominance in the 1980s. In 1988 Holiday Inns International was purchased by UK-based Bass Brewers (ultimately to become the InterContinental Hotels Group), followed by the remaining domestic Holiday Inn hotels in 1990, when founder Wilson sold his interest. The brand name Holiday Inn is still owned by the original Holiday Inn group and leased as a franchise to InterContinental.

In January of 2002, the Wall Street Journal reported that the company, led by Ravi Saligram, was producing a new 130-room "Next Generation" prototype hotel to rebuild the brand. It would include a bistro-like restaurant and an indoor pool. The first of these prototype hotels, the Holiday Inn Gwinnett Center, was built in Duluth, Georgia in 2003.

For many years, there was a separate, non-affiliated Holiday Inn in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, using its own version of the Holiday Inn script and the domain name holidayinn.com. [1] However, in 2006, that Holiday Inn has now been folded into the main Holiday Inn chain, and the entire chain uses holidayinn.com.

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