Quality Inn splits its system in three.

Comfort Inn was born out of a reorganisation rather than a founding. In 1981, Hotel Business reported in January 2019, the company then called Quality Inn divided its lodging system into three distinct chains: Quality Royale as a luxury brand, Quality Inn in the middle, and Comfort Inn as a budget brand. USA Today described the same split in a July 2018 history of the group, calling the three the luxury Quality Royale, the moderately priced Quality Inn and the budget Comfort Inn. Tim Shuy, a vice-president at Choice Hotels, told Hotel Business that the move was driven partly by consumers wanting different product points, and partly by a wish to grow in markets without placing hotels of the same name on top of each other.

The parent at the time was Quality Inns International, which Hotel Business says had become a wholly owned subsidiary of the healthcare company Manor Care Inc. after the two merged in 1980. The roots of that company ran back to 1939, when a group of independent Florida motel owners began referring guests to one another under shared standards, the arrangement that grew into Quality Inn.

English Wikipedia says the first property to trade under the Comfort name was a refurbished motel in Atlanta that had been known as the Tech Motel because it stood near Georgia Tech, citing The Atlanta Constitution of July 1981. It also places the new brand inside an early experiment in market segmentation in American lodging, citing the 1996 book The Motel in America by John Jakle, Keith Sculle and Jefferson Rogers.

The family widened within a few years. Hotel Business records that in 1986 the company bought the rights to the Clarion Hotels name, folded its Quality Royale properties into Clarion, and launched two new brands, Sleep Inn and Comfort Suites. In 1990, it says, Quality Inns International changed its name to Choice Hotels International to reflect its international intentions and the range of brands it now offered. Comfort has stayed with that company ever since, and English Wikipedia lists Choice Hotels of North Bethesda, Maryland, as its owner today.

Move to Modern, a new logo and a prototype.

By the 2010s the brand had three formats under one name: Comfort Inn, Comfort Suites and Comfort Inn & Suites. Lodging, the magazine of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, reported in May 2018 that a review of every Comfort property in 2012 had led Choice to drop hotels that did not meet raised brand standards, and that the brand then introduced an upgrade programme called Move to Modern. The same report described Comfort as an upper-midscale brand and said the renovations would carry through to new lobbies, upgraded guestrooms and updated signage across the United States.

The visible end-point of that programme was a new mark. At Choice’s annual convention in Las Vegas, held from 1 to 3 May 2018, the brand unveiled a redesigned logo to its franchisees. Lodging reported that it was created by Landor, the brand consultancy then based in New York, and described it as a vivid orange and yellow logo with the Comfort name in blue. Anne Smith, Choice’s vice-president of brand management and design, told the magazine that the logo was “more than a change of symbol, it’s a symbol of change”. Megan Brumagim, then head of Comfort brands, said the design was meant to reflect the brand’s warm and welcoming heritage and its refreshed look.

The logo also had an organisational job. According to Lodging, it gathered Comfort Inn, Comfort Inn & Suites and Comfort Suites into one brand family, which the company said was how guests already saw them, according to its consumer research.

Buildings followed. Hotel Dive reported on 31 October 2023 that the first hotel built to Comfort’s new Rise & Shine prototype had opened in Mountain Grove, Missouri, two years after Choice announced a refresh of the brand in 2021, the brand’s fortieth year. Cathy Hartman, Choice’s vice-president of brand strategy, told the publication that the brand’s target guests include families and business travellers. The prototype, Hotel Dive said, has open public spaces with high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows, a multipurpose flex room, and guest rooms with an “on the go” station by the door, with shelving, clothing hooks and power outlets. Kalika Fortman, Comfort’s brand strategy and management director, explained that the station lets several people get ready at once while one of them is in the bathroom.

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 plain word, warm colours and one family name.

The Comfort identity, as the trade press has described it, rests on a word and a colour pair. Lodging’s May 2018 account of the Landor mark gives its colours as a vivid orange and yellow logo with the Comfort name in blue, and the brand’s spokespeople described the design in terms of warmth, welcome and a refreshed, modern look. Anne Smith’s line about a “symbol of change” tied the new logo to the renovation programme the brand had run since 2012.

The consolidation was the structural change. Lodging reported that the 2018 logo unified Comfort Inn, Comfort Inn & Suites and Comfort Suites as one brand family, and that Choice based the decision on consumer research showing that guests already perceived the three formats that way. The magazine also reported that all Comfort properties in the United States were due to complete their renovations and update their signage by the end of 2020, so the new mark was planned to arrive on buildings together with refurbished lobbies and rooms.

The Rise & Shine prototype that Hotel Dive described in October 2023 extended the same refresh into new construction. Its features, as listed by the publication, are architectural and practical: high ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows to bring in daylight, a flex room that can be set up for different uses, and an “on the go” station inside each guest room.

Ownership has stayed constant. Comfort was created in 1981 by the company that renamed itself Choice Hotels International in 1990, and the brand has remained with Choice since then, alongside Quality Inn, the chain from which it was split, and Comfort Suites, the format the company launched in 1986.

For a design guide, Comfort shows how a franchise brand can use a single word, a warm colour pair and one consolidated logo to bring three hotel formats into one family. Compare it with Quality Inn, the older Choice brand it was split from in 1981, and Hilton, another hotel group with a family of brands under one name. For this guide we use comfort blue, sunrise orange and morning yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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