The Founder
WWII era motel
In 1951, Kemmons Wilson decided to take his family on vacation. They loaded into the family Oldsmobile and headed from Memphis to Washington, D.C. As they traveled, Wilson became increasingly disturbed by the shoddy and unpredictable lodging they encountered. Their choices were often limited to expensive hotels in the downtown areas of major cities they passed or seedy motor courts on the outskirts of town. By the third day, the germ of the idea that would become Holiday Inn was churning in his mind. He imagined a hotel that was family friendly, clean, inexpensive and easily accessible to road travelers.
The Name
A welcome sight on a stormy night
Wilson, a contractor by trade, went right to work. From Wilson's hand-drawn sketches, draftsman Eddie Bluestone created the drawings for the first hotel. According to an article Time Magazine published in 1972, Bluestone, having recently seen the Bing Crosby movie "Holiday Inn," jokingly added the name to his plans. The name stuck, and almost 60 years later Holiday Inn remains one of the most recognizable brand names in the world.
The "Great Sign"
America's developing highway system in the early '50s gave Wilson's concept incredible potential, but he knew that his prospective guests would be driving past at increasing speeds. He needed his hotels to stand out, so he hired a Memphis sign company with experience building theater marquees to build his "Great Sign." The distinctive green, gold and red sign became an icon of American hospitality. Andrew Wood, a professor of communication studies at San Jose State University, stated the Holiday Inn sign "communicated the playfulness, fantasy and optimism of the American roadside."
Rapid Growth
Wilson's first hotel was such a success that he built three more identical hotels. He had decided that consistency and tightly controlled standards would be his hallmark. One of his slogans was, "The Best Surprise Is No Surprise." Wilson began to build a chain of identical hotels, spread one day's drive apart from one another. As he recalled in the 1972 article for Time Magazine, "I wanted to create a brand that people could trust." By 1958, there were 50 Holiday Inns. The count grew to 100 by 1959, 500 by 1964, and by 1968 there were more than 1,000 Holiday Inns
Big Innovation
Growth was fueled by a stream of new ideas. None was bigger than the Holidex reservation system introduced in 1965. It linked all Holiday Inn locations on a computerized network which allowed travelers to book their next stop without making a long distance phone call. Powered by two IBM mainframes, it was at the time the largest civilian computer network in the world. Another innovation was the 1963 cross-branding deal with Gulf Oil. Wilson agreed to accept Gulf credit cards for food and lodging. In return, Gulf would add gas stations to many Holiday Inn properties.
Small Innovation
Amid Wilson's major innovations were dozens of smaller ideas to improve hotels, such as adding swimming pools, free ice, vending machines, in-room TVs and telephones, and a policy that allowed kids stay free. Today we take such amenities for granted, but in the '50s they were rare at motels and it was Holiday Inn that made them standard operating procedure for other motel and hotel chains.
End of an Era
Kemmons Wilson retired in 1979, and in 1990 he sold his shares of the North American Holiday Inns to British based Bass, PLC. Bass has since been renamed its hotel company to InterContinental Hotel Group, which continues to own Holiday Inn along with several other hotel brands.
The company that Kemmons Wilson founded is still an important player in the world's hotel industry, but it is no longer the top dog it once was. In 1972. Holiday Inn had four times as many units as its closest competitor. Today, ICH operates 3,300 hotels under the Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express banners, well short of Best Western's count of 4,200. There is no doubt, however, that Holiday Inn changed the way we travel.
