A family road trip, a film title and a Memphis motel.

Holiday Inn began with a holiday. The Tennessee Encyclopedia, in an entry by Anne Leonard published by the Tennessee Historical Society in 2017, says that in 1951 the Memphis builder Kemmons Wilson drove his wife and five children from Memphis to Washington, D.C., came home unhappy with the cramped motels the family had used on the way, and set out to build his own. A year later he opened the first Holiday Inn in Memphis. The encyclopedia describes carpeted rooms with a television, a telephone and sturdy all-steel furniture, alongside a restaurant and a swimming pool.

English Wikipedia dates the opening to August 1952 and gives the original name as Holiday Inn Hotel Courts, on Summer Avenue, then the main highway out of Memphis towards Nashville. It says the building was demolished in 1994. The name itself came from the building site: Wikipedia says Wilson’s architect, Eddie Bluestein, suggested it as a joke, borrowing the title of the 1942 musical film Holiday Inn, and the joke stuck.

Growth came through partners and franchising. The Tennessee Encyclopedia says that in 1953 Wilson formed a partnership with another Memphis builder, Wallace E. Johnson, and invited other investors to join them, and that a year later the two formed Holiday Inns of America and began franchising motels. Wikipedia says the first additional motels were built that year on the highways leading into Memphis. The encyclopedia dates public trading of the company’s stock to 1967; the International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 1994) says Holiday Inns of America was incorporated in 1954, went public in 1957 and gained a New York Stock Exchange listing in 1963. The encyclopedia also records an innkeeping school and a corps of inspectors who graded each motel against system standards.

The brand travelled by telephone and teleprinter as well as by road. In 1965, the encyclopedia says, Wilson contracted with IBM to build Holidex, a reservation system that let guests or travel agents book a room at any Holiday Inn from any other. Wikipedia adds the slogan “your host from coast to coast” and says a call centre followed toll-free 800 numbers in 1967. The company’s own description of itself grew with its reach: “The Nation’s Innkeeper” became “The World’s Innkeeper”, and Wikipedia says Wilson appeared on the cover of Time in June 1972.

Holiday Corporation, Bass, Six Continents and IHG.

The Tennessee Encyclopedia says Wilson retired from the company in 1979. In 1985, Wikipedia says, Holiday Inns, Inc. was renamed Holiday Corporation to reflect a wider group of businesses that by then included Harrah’s casinos and the newer hotel brands Embassy Suites, Homewood Suites and Hampton Inn.

The British brewer Bass PLC bought Holiday Corporation in 1988 and the remaining domestic Holiday Inn hotels in 1990, when Wilson sold his interest, according to Wikipedia; the hotel business then traded as Holiday Inn Worldwide. The rest of Holiday Corporation, including Embassy Suites, Homewood Suites and Hampton Inn, was spun off to shareholders as the Promus Companies, so the brands that had grown up together in Memphis went separate ways. In 1990 Bass launched Holiday Inn Express, a limited-service line under the same name, and in 1997 it added Staybridge Suites.

Bass sold its brewing business and the Bass name in 2000 and became Six Continents PLC. When Six Continents split in 2003, its hotels went to the newly created InterContinental Hotels Group, now IHG Hotels & Resorts, which has owned the Holiday Inn brand since that year. Wikipedia says IHG licenses the name to franchisees and to third parties who run hotels under management agreements, and that the chain is based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Under IHG the brand was rebuilt in stages. Wikipedia cites The Wall Street Journal in 2002 on a “Next Generation” prototype hotel with a bistro-style restaurant and an indoor pool, the first of which opened in Duluth, Georgia, in 2003. On 24 October 2007 IHG announced a worldwide relaunch of the brand, with a redesigned welcome experience and signature bedding and bathroom products; the first relaunched U.S. hotel opened in spring 2008 and Wikipedia says the process was completed by the end of 2010. Wikipedia says most of the original roadside motels left the system during the relaunch. Later sub-brands include Holiday Inn Club Vacations, announced in 2008, and Holiday Inn Resort, which Wikipedia says carried the Sunspree name from 1991 to 2007.

Design and documentation.

The hotel names in this group work at many different scales at once. A single brand can be read from a motorway sign at night, from a canopy over a front door, from a lobby wall and from a plastic key card that fits in a wallet, and each of those surfaces asks something different of the same mark. A name that sits comfortably in illuminated letters on a roofline has to survive being printed small on a door hanger or a folded room-service card.

A hotel brand’s identity is also carried by spaces as much as by graphics. Lobbies, corridors, room furnishings, uniforms and printed room collateral are all places where a name, a colour or a typeface can appear, and a hotel that carries a brand name may be built, owned or run by a company other than the one that owns the name. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and how the name and its mark have changed over time.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and how its signs and marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A tall sign with a marquee, retired in 1982.

For its first decades, Holiday Inn’s identity stood beside the highway. The Tennessee Encyclopedia describes a distinctive bright green and orange “Great Sign” that invited travellers in for the night. English Wikipedia says the sign was made by Balton & Sons Sign Company and originally designed by the sketch artists Gene Barber and Roland Alexander, and that Wilson asked for a sign at least 50 feet high, visible from both directions, with a changeable marquee so each motel could welcome a different group by name. The International Directory of Company Histories describes the early motels as sharing a uniform colour scheme, a trapezoidal neon sign and, in many cases, the same blueprints. The marquee let each motel post its own message on a sign that was otherwise the same from town to town.

The sign did not last. Wikipedia says that in 1982 the Holiday Inn board phased out the Great Sign in favour of a cheaper back-lit sign, a decision Wilson later criticised. Most of the signs were scrapped. Wikipedia lists working examples at the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati and The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and the American Sign Museum’s own collection also lists a scale model of the Great Sign built by Cummings, Inc. for Holiday Inn to use at trade shows and promotional events. The museum also holds Wilson’s 1996 memoir with Robert Kerr, Half Luck and Half Brains.

The name has had its own adventures. Wikipedia says a hotel in Niagara Falls, Ontario, used the Holiday Inn name and a logo similar to the chain’s 1970s mark for two decades, kept the corporation from opening its own hotel there and held the holidayinn.com domain, until a 2006 agreement brought both the hotel and the domain into the IHG system. Holiday Inn Express, meanwhile, has carried the name into a separate limited-service line since 1990.

For a design guide, Holiday Inn shows how much of a brand’s memory can live in one piece of roadside hardware: a tall green and orange sign with a changeable marquee carried the name, the welcome and a local message in one object, and examples survive in museum collections. Compare it with Hilton and Marriott, two hotel names that built their identities around a wordmark rather than a sign. For this guide we use sign green, marquee orange and star yellow with a script, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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