A brewer’s hotel business.

IHG Hotels & Resorts is the name under which InterContinental Hotels Group PLC markets itself. Wikipedia describes it as a British company headquartered in Windsor, Berkshire, listed in London and New York, with regional offices in Atlanta, Singapore and Shanghai. Its master brand sits above a family of hotel names that includes InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Kimpton and Candlewood Suites.

The group’s roots are in beer. Wikipedia traces them to 1777, when William Bass founded the Bass Brewery in Burton-upon-Trent. The company, later called Bass Charrington, first came to lodging through the tied public houses it owned, and in 1969 it launched the Crest Hotels chain.

The hotel business grew in steps. In 1988, Wikipedia records, after the British government limited the number of pubs a brewer could own directly, Bass bought Holiday Inn International; it sold most of Crest Hotels in 1990 and folded the remaining properties into Holiday Inn. In 1998 Bass bought the Inter-Continental chain from Japan’s Saison Group, and its hotel division, until then called Holiday Hospitality, was renamed Bass Hotels & Resorts to reflect that it was now more than Holiday Inn.

In 2001, having sold its brewing business and the Bass name, the company renamed itself Six Continents, and its hotel arm became Six Continents Hotels, Wikipedia says.

Pan Am’s InterContinental.

The name the group now carries came from an airline. According to Wikipedia, Juan Trippe, the president of Pan Am, discussed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 how hotels in Latin American cities could draw business travellers and tourists. On 4 April 1946 the airline founded a wholly owned subsidiary, the International Hotels Corporation; in early 1947 it was renamed Intercontinental Hotels Corporation, a name chosen to reflect wider ambitions. The hotels were also meant to house Pan Am crews and passengers in cities that lacked upscale rooms.

The company signed a lease in 1947 for the Hotel Victoria Plaza in Montevideo, Uruguay, whose construction ran on for more than five years. Executives had spent 1946 travelling to Latin American cities to scout sites, and in early 1949 agreements followed for properties in Caracas and Maracaibo, Venezuela. On 1 May 1949 it took over the running of the Grande Hotel in Belém, Brazil, and on 1 January 1950 the Hotel Carrera in Santiago, Chile, Wikipedia records. The name thus began as an airline’s hotel arm, tied to the routes its aircraft flew, before it passed to other owners and finally to Bass in 1998.

That link to an airline helps explain why the InterContinental name was chosen when the group needed a new one. Wikipedia says InterContinental Hotels Group was named after the InterContinental brand, written without its hyphen. The group’s own label, IHG, and its consumer name, IHG Hotels & Resorts, both rest on that hotel brand rather than on the Bass or Six Continents names that came before.

The group’s later purchases added more hotel names under the same roof. Wikipedia records that IHG bought the extended-stay brand Candlewood Suites in 2004 and the boutique hotel company Kimpton Hotels in 2015; in 2024 it signed an agreement with the German hotel operator Novum Hospitality to rebrand that company’s hotels to IHG names, including Holiday Inn Express and Garner.

Master brands and hotel brands.

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 split in 2003.

The group became independent through a demerger. On 2 October 2002 Julia Finch of The Guardian reported that Six Continents, “the hotels, pubs and restaurants group formerly known as Bass,” had confirmed plans to split in two: its hotels, including the Inter-Continental and Holiday Inn brands, would become a standalone business, and its pubs and restaurants division, with names such as Harvester, All Bar One and O’Neill’s, would be demerged, with shareholders receiving stock in both companies.

The split took effect in April 2003. On 16 April 2003 Richard Wray of The Guardian reported that the two new companies formed from Six Continents — the pubs and restaurants group Mitchells & Butlers and InterContinental Hotels — had made their stock-market debut the day before. The paper noted that Mitchells & Butlers ran All Bar One among other chains. Wikipedia gives the completion date as 15 April 2003 and says the new hotel company’s portfolio was then mainly Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza and InterContinental hotels.

After the demerger, Wikipedia says, IHG sold most of the hotels it owned and moved towards running and franchising hotels that belong to others. Wikipedia lists the group’s chief executives since 2003 as Richard North, Andy Cosslett, Richard Solomons, Keith Barr and, since July 2023, Elie W. Maalouf.

The group’s names thus run in layers. Above the hotel brands sits InterContinental Hotels Group, the listed company; beside it sits IHG Hotels & Resorts, the name under which the group markets itself, which Wikipedia also uses for the group’s loyalty programme.

For a design guide, IHG shows how a group can borrow its corporate name from one of its own hotel brands and turn it into a short umbrella label for many. Compare Hilton, a hotel group whose master brand shares its name with a hotel brand, and Pan Am, the airline that started InterContinental. For this guide we use a deep green and a brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep IHG Hotels & Resorts’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.