A Chicago restaurateur heads for Arizona.

Ramada was the work of Marion W. Isbell, a Chicago restaurateur. The New York Times, in an Associated Press report of 22 October 1988, said he ran a string of Chicago luncheonettes called Isbell’s from 1934 to 1946, and that the idea of building comfortable roadside inns came to him on a cross-country trip with his wife in 1929, some 25 years before the plan took shape. In 1954, the report said, he and a group of Phoenix investors began buying motels.

English Wikipedia gives 1953 as the founding year and places the first hotel on U.S. Route 66 at Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1954. It names among the early investors Michael Robinson of McAllen, Texas, and Del Webb of Phoenix, and says the chain set up its headquarters in Phoenix, where it built the Sahara Hotel downtown in 1956 and a large Ramada Inn on East Van Buren Street in 1958 that became its flagship and head office. Wikipedia also says Isbell’s brother-in-law, Bill Helsing, had brought him into the Flagstaff hotel deal in 1952.

The roadside idea became a public company. According to the Times, Isbell decided in 1960 to assemble the motels into a chain owned by a publicly held company, and two years later he became chairman of Ramada Inns Inc. He ran the chain as president and chief executive from 1962 until 1973 and retired as chairman in 1979, when his son, M. William Isbell, succeeded him in both roles. The report said the chain had spread to the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and other countries overseas.

The name came from the landscape the chain started in. English Wikipedia, citing The American Heritage Dictionary and a 1990 article in Sunset magazine, says ramada derives from the Spanish rama, meaning branch, and that ramadas — temporary open-air shelters of brush or branches, a kind of arbor — were common in Arizona at harvest time. It adds that company websites have described the word as meaning a shady resting place.

Casinos, a sale and a run of new owners.

By the late 1980s Ramada Inc. was in more than one business. The New York Times reported that on the day of Isbell’s death in October 1988, the company unveiled a restructuring plan to sell its hotel and restaurant businesses and concentrate on its casinos, a plan it said was devised partly in response to a buyout offer from Chicago’s Pritzker family, then a major shareholder.

English Wikipedia describes how that plan played out. In 1989, it says, the hotels and restaurants were sold to Hong Kong’s New World Development, while the gaming business, including the Tropicana properties in Las Vegas and Atlantic City and the Ramada Express in Laughlin, Nevada, was spun off as a new company, Aztar Corporation. The upscale Ramada Renaissance tier, begun in 1982, was split off by the new owners as Renaissance Hotels, which Wikipedia says was sold to Marriott in 1997.

The brand then changed hands again. Wikipedia says Ramada in the United States and Canada was sold in the late 1990s to Cendant Corporation of New York, while outside North America the name was held by Ramada International, which was owned by Marriott International until Cendant bought it in 2004, reuniting the worldwide rights. In 2006, it says, Cendant spun off its hotel operations, including Ramada, to Wyndham Worldwide. Wyndham has owned the brand since then; today it is part of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, which Wikipedia places in Parsippany, New Jersey.

Food had been part of the early offer. Wikipedia says Ramada developed restaurants inside its hotels under names including Uncle Ben’s Kitchen, Ramada Pancake Cottage and Chez Bon, and that the company-owned Ramada restaurants ended in 1990, though franchised hotels may still have their own. Under Cendant, it says, the brand was franchised in North America in tiers such as Ramada Inn, Ramada Limited, Ramada Plaza and Ramada Suites, with full-service Ramada Hotel and Ramada Resort properties found in other countries.

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.

An innkeeper, a banner and a rounded rectangle.

Ramada’s early mark was a person. English Wikipedia says that from the 1950s until around 1976 the logo featured a friendly, balding innkeeper nicknamed Uncle Ben. He wore an apron, later a suit and tie, and held a top hat in one hand; in the other he held a red trumpeted banner reading “Ramada Inn Roadside Hotels”. A photograph on the same Wikipedia page shows him on a Ramada Inn swizzle stick, and the page says that in the early days Ramada had branded on-site restaurants and lounges.

The figure gave way to lettering. From 1976 to 1982, Wikipedia says, the logo was a simple rounded rectangle reading “Ramada Inn” in the gothic, Western-style lettering of the original design. From 1982 to 2004 the chain used a revised rounded rectangle with more modern lettering.

The name and the mascot both reached the dining room. Wikipedia lists Uncle Ben’s Kitchen among the restaurant names Ramada used in its hotels, alongside Ramada Pancake Cottage and Chez Bon. The word ramada itself, in the dictionary sense Wikipedia cites, names an open shelter of brush or branches of the kind once common in Arizona, the state where the first Ramada hotel opened on Route 66 in Flagstaff.

Ownership has changed several times. Ramada passed from the company Isbell led to New World Development in 1989, to Cendant in the late 1990s and to Wyndham in 2006, with the international rights rejoining the North American brand in 2004.

For a design guide, Ramada shows how a roadside brand can move from an illustrated mascot to a lettered badge while keeping a name drawn from the landscape where it began. Compare it with Wyndham, the hotel group that has owned it since 2006, and Hilton, another American hotel brand built around a founder’s name and an early wordmark. For this guide we use banner red, desert gold and adobe cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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