A motel owners’ group, a franchise system and a family business.

Choice Hotels did not begin as a hotel company in the usual sense. Its roots lie in a group of independent motel owners in Florida who banded together to defend their trade. The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 1996) dates the group to 1941, when owners and operators formed a nonprofit membership corporation called Quality Courts United; English Wikipedia, citing Lodging magazine, gives 1939 as the founding year of the referral chain. The Directory says the members wanted to answer the poor reputation that roadside motels had gained by the 1930s, and did so by setting and keeping quality standards and by sharing promotion and advertising. As evidence of that reputation, the Directory cites an article by J. Edgar Hoover in American magazine that criticised tourist camps for harbouring criminals.

The group became a business in stages. According to the Directory, Quality Courts United was incorporated in 1963 as Quality Courts Motels, Inc. and moved to a more formal, franchise-based relationship with its members. One of those members was Stewart Bainum, a former plumbing contractor who had moved into construction and nursing homes and who franchised his first motel with Quality Courts in 1963. In 1968, the Directory records, he merged his own motel company, Park Consolidated Motels, with Quality Courts and became its president. The company then reached beyond the eastern United States, opening an international division in Brussels and a hotel in Bonn, and buying a motel furnishings supplier and a firm that specialised in motel interior design.

A name change followed. With plans to grow in Europe, the company became Quality Inns International in 1972, the Directory says, although the oil embargo of 1973 hit roadside travel and put that expansion on hold for several years. Bainum’s two businesses, the motels and the Manor Care nursing homes, were brought together in 1980, when Manor Care bought Quality, and the group was reorganised the following year with the franchise business as its own subsidiary.

Segments, new names and a company called Choice.

The 1980s turned one name into several. The Directory credits Robert C. Hazard and Gerald W. Petitt, who joined from Best Western around 1980, with dividing the chain by price: Quality Royale for the top of the range (later renamed Clarion), Quality for the middle and Comfort for the budget end. Inspections were tightened and room design, amenities and furnishings were standardised. A long-running advertising campaign that began in 1983, the Directory notes, showed celebrities jumping out of suitcases.

New names had to be cleared as well as invented. A purpose-built economy chain announced in 1987 was to be called McSleep Inns; the Directory says the name was dropped after McDonald’s Corporation threatened to sue for trademark infringement, and the hotels opened as Sleep Inn. During the decade the company also acquired the names Rodeway, Econo Lodge and Friendship, and in 1990 it bought the Rodeway Inns International, Econo Lodges of America and Friendship Inn chains.

That widening portfolio produced the company’s present name. In 1990, the Directory says, Quality Inns International became Choice Hotels International “to reflect its new diversity” — a name that describes the range of brands a guest or franchisee could pick from rather than any one hotel. The Directory describes a system in which franchisees paid for access to the central reservation network, national advertising and regular quality inspections, with telephone operators steering callers to one of the brand names.

Independence came later in the decade. English Wikipedia, citing The Baltimore Sun, says Manor Care spun off its hotels business in 1996, and that Choice Hotels became a publicly traded company with an initial public offering in 1997. In 2005 it announced Cambria Suites, an upscale limited-service brand, according to The Washington Post. The headquarters moved too: on 26 October 2010 The Washington Post reported that state and Montgomery County leaders had announced the company would move its headquarters from Silver Spring to Rockville, Maryland, in 2013, and English Wikipedia now gives the location as North Bethesda. Stewart W. Bainum Jr. succeeded his father as chairman in 1987, Wikipedia says.

Design and documentation.

Hotel groups tend to organise their names in layers. At the top sits a master brand, the name of the company itself, which appears on investor reports, loyalty programmes and corporate websites. Beneath it sit the hotel brands that guests actually see on the road: names written on tall roadside signs, above front doors, on key cards and on the towels in the bathroom. A single group may run names aimed at very different trips, from a quick overnight stop off a highway to a long city stay.

The link between the two layers is often carried by an endorsement, a short line such as “by” followed by the group’s name, set in smaller type under the hotel brand on a sign or a website. Some groups add the endorsement to every hotel name, some use it for only part of the portfolio, and some leave the hotel brand to stand alone. Hotels in such a group are often run by franchisees, so the brand standards set by the group — the sign, the colours, the lobby details — are what holds the look together.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A master name above many hotel signs.

The Choice Hotels identity works one level above the signs guests see. A traveller pulls in at a Comfort Inn, a Quality Inn, a Sleep Inn or an Econo Lodge; the Choice name sits on the reservation system, the loyalty programme and the corporate website that link them. English Wikipedia illustrates an earlier corporate logo with the caption “used until 2015”, which places a change of the company mark in that year.

The hotel brands carry their own look, and the company’s history shows design built into the franchise. The Directory records that Quality bought a firm focused on motel interior design around 1970 and, in the 1980s, standardised room design, amenities and furnishings across its hotels while tightening inspections.

For a design guide, Choice Hotels shows how a company built from a motel owners’ group can choose a name that promises range rather than a single place, and let its hotel brands carry the colour and signage on the road. Compare it with Hilton and Marriott, two other American groups that run many hotel names under one master brand. For this guide we use roadside navy, sign amber and linen white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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