Motels that sent guests to each other.

Best Western began not as a chain but as an agreement among independent motel owners. It was founded in 1946 by the hotelier M.K. Guertin, the Associated Press reported in June 1996, in a feature published by the Deseret News. Looking for more business for his hotel in Long Beach, California, the agency wrote, Guertin travelled to sign up other hoteliers who would send travellers his way while he did the same for them, sharing the cost of marketing. The University of Houston’s Hospitality Industry Hall of Honor, which inducted Guertin, says that on a road trip from Long Beach to Tacoma, Washington, he noted motels within a tank of fuel of one another and published a guide to them.

That informal system became the company. The AP described it as having grown from a loosely knit group of “mom-and-pop motels in the West” into a membership association of independently owned and operated hotels, based in Phoenix. English Wikipedia records that, in the early years, the referrals were made by telephone from one front desk to another, and that the name “Best Western” came from the fact that most of the original operators were west of the Mississippi River.

The model has stayed in place. English Wikipedia describes Best Western International, Inc. as owning the brand and licensing it to its hotels, and as a nonprofit owned by its franchisee members as of 2018. Around 1985, it records, the company stopped calling itself a cooperative after the North Dakota Supreme Court ruled in Quist v. Best Western International (1984) that it was a franchisor subject to franchise law.

Best Eastern and the crown.

The brand’s early geography shaped its name and its mark. English Wikipedia records that from 1946 to 1964 Best Western had a marketing partnership with Quality Courts, whose motels were mostly east of the Mississippi. When that ended, the encyclopedia says, Best Western began expanding east in 1964 under the name “Best Eastern”, using the same typeface and the same Gold Crown logo as Best Western; by 1967 the eastern name had been dropped, and motels from coast to coast carried the Best Western name and the crown.

In the 1996 AP feature, a couple driving through the desert near Yuma, Arizona, followed a “blue-and-gold Best Western sign” off the freeway, and the company’s then chief executive, Ron Evans, recalled looking for “the Best Western crown logo” on family holidays as a boy in Indiana. The same report named charter members that were still Best Westerns half a century later, among them the Coronado Motor Hotel in Yuma, the Rancho Grande in Wickenburg, Arizona, and the Hitching Post Inn in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

The AP also recorded the brand’s printed guide: the Best Western Travel Guide, which it said families used to plan road trips after the Second World War. English Wikipedia dates the Gold Crown logo to 1964 and says it continued, with minor revisions, until a blue and yellow logo replaced it in 1996.

The brand also spread abroad under the same name. English Wikipedia records that Canadian hotel owners joined in 1964, that the network expanded to Mexico, Australia and New Zealand in 1976, and that in 1978 a British group of independent hoteliers, Interchange Hotels, began trading as Best Western United Kingdom. After an Australian group affiliated in 1981, the encyclopedia says, the word International was added after the name.

Signs, lobbies and rooms.

The brands in this group are motel and economy hotel names: chains of roadside and city lodgings, many of them run by franchisees under a name owned by another company. A brand of this kind lives in a sequence of physical places rather than in a single package, and each place carries the name in a different way.

The pylon sign is one of them: a tall post or panel set beside a highway or an exit ramp, designed to be read from a moving car and often lit after dark, so a wordmark and its colours have to work at a distance. Closer in, a canopy over the entrance, a sign on the building itself and the lobby door repeat the mark at a smaller scale. Inside, the front desk, the key card, the room directory and the linen take the same name into the room. Some chains add a mascot, which can appear on signs and in advertising alike.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding, its owners and franchisors, and changes to its name, sign and identity — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Hand-drawn lettering, 2015.

The brand changed its identity again in 2015. The Drum reported on 6 October 2015 that the group had adopted a new name, Best Western Hotels & Resorts, a suite of new logos for its existing hotel brands and a new boutique brand called Glō. Its new masterbrand logo, the magazine reported, carried the brand’s updated modern blue and used hand-drawn lettering, which the company said was created to be “passionate, friendly and memorable.” The changes were to reach the group’s hotels by the end of 2017, with British hotels starting in spring 2016.

The Drum said 2015 was the first time Best Western had updated its logo since 1993; English Wikipedia dates the arrival of the blue and yellow logo to 1996, and says that in 2015 the company introduced a new family of logos, replacing the core logo and adding signage for Best Western Plus and Best Western Premier.

Those tiers predate the rebrand. English Wikipedia records that Best Western Premier was launched in Europe and Asia in 2002, and that in 2011 the system moved to three tiers: Best Western, Best Western Plus and Best Western Premier. The 2015 logos gave each tier its own version of the hand-drawn mark, The Drum reported, so that the group had distinct brands to market. Rob Payne, then chief executive of Best Western Great Britain, said the new line-ups were designed to work in a digital age, the magazine reported.

The parent company has grown beyond the one name. English Wikipedia records that Best Western bought WorldHotels in February 2019, and that BWH Hotel Group was formed as the parent company of both. Its headquarters remain in Phoenix, Arizona, and English Wikipedia describes Best Western International as owned by its member hotels.

For a design guide, Best Western shows how a network of independent hotels can share one sign without sharing one owner. Compare Hilton and Marriott, two hotel groups whose names come from their founders. For this guide we use a member blue, a parchment and a crown gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Best Western’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.