Trammell Crow, the Anatole and 1981.

Wyndham began in Dallas, Texas, as a hotel venture of the real-estate developer Trammell Crow. The trade paper Hotel Business, in a piece published on 7 February 2009 after Crow died in Tyler, Texas, in January that year, described him as a developer known for Dallas commercial projects such as the Market Center, the Infomart and the Bryan Tower. It singled out, among his contributions to the lodging industry, his role in the founding of Wyndham Hotels in Dallas in 1981. A press release carried by Hotel Online on 19 July 2000 quoted Fred J. Kleisner, then a senior Wyndham executive, saying that Crow founded Wyndham Hotels & Resorts in 1981.

The early Wyndham was closely tied to Crow’s own buildings. Hotel Business said Crow was the force behind the Anatole, a hotel north of downtown Dallas, and that it flew the Wyndham flag until early 2006, when the management contract passed to Hilton. The July 2000 Hotel Online release said Wyndham’s management company had run the Anatole since 1995. For the brand, a large hotel in its home city served as a showcase that local guests and visiting conference delegates came to know by the Wyndham name.

The people around Crow also shaped the name. Hotel Business reported that Eric Danziger, who later led Wyndham Hotel Group, had been hired by Crow in 1990 as president of the original Wyndham company, and it quoted Kirk Kinsell, who had worked directly with Crow from 1981 to 1988, recalling the management contracts and developments of those years and saying, “We founded Wyndham.” The same article noted that Neil Ostergren served as Wyndham’s vice president of marketing services in the mid-1980s and worked closely with Crow.

On the origin of the word itself, English Wikipedia records a claim by the business journalist Wyndham Robertson, who profiled Crow for Fortune in the early 1970s, that the chain was named after her, citing a 1986 interview in the Salisbury Post; Wikipedia presents this as her account.

Patriot American, Cendant and Wyndham Worldwide.

After its Dallas start the Wyndham name changed hands several times. English Wikipedia says the chain was acquired in 1998 by Patriot American Hospitality, which later took the name Wyndham International. It says the Blackstone Group bought Wyndham International in 2005 and later that year sold the Wyndham hotel brand to Cendant, the company that already franchised brands such as Days Inn, Ramada, Howard Johnson and Super 8. Hotel Business noted in 2009 that the Wyndham Hotel Group of that time was in fact the former Cendant Hotel Corp, which explains how a single Dallas hotel name came to sit at the head of a collection of brands with their own separate histories.

Wikipedia says that in 2006 Cendant’s hotel and timeshare businesses were spun off as Wyndham Worldwide, with Wyndham Hotel Group as its hotel division. In that period the name worked at two levels at once: Wyndham was a hotel brand of its own and also the corporate name of the group that franchised many other brands.

The link between those two levels was made visible in April 2018. The design trade magazine Hotel Designs reported on 13 April 2018 that twelve brands in the group were adding the suffix “by Wyndham” to their names and signage. The list it gave included Super 8, Days Inn, Howard Johnson, Travelodge, AmericInn, Baymont, Ramada, Ramada Encore, Dolce, Dazzler, Esplendor and Trademark. Beginning on 16 April, it said, the updated names and logos would appear on brand websites, mobile sites and third-party listings, North American hotel owners could order new signs at once, and the change was expected to be complete around the world by December 2022. The magazine noted that Wingate, Microtel, Hawthorn Suites and Tryp already carried the “by Wyndham” tag, Wingate since 2007, and quoted chief marketing officer Barry Goldstein describing the new designation as a celebration of the company’s work on quality, technology, and sales and marketing.

The corporate separation followed weeks later. A release dated 1 June 2018, carried by Resort Trades on 4 June 2018, said that Wyndham Worldwide had completed the spin-off of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Inc., listed on the New York Stock Exchange as WH, and had renamed itself Wyndham Destinations. Shareholders of record on 18 May 2018 received one share of the new hotel company for each Wyndham Worldwide share. English Wikipedia gives the company’s base as Parsippany, New Jersey.

Design and documentation.

A hotel identity is carried less by a logo than by the many surfaces a guest touches. The first is usually the flagship building: its facade, its name lettering above the entrance and the canopy or porte-cochère where arrivals happen. In many hotel groups the founding property becomes the reference point that later openings quote in their signage, materials and colours.

Smaller objects do much of the daily work. Key cards, room folders, stationery, pens and do-not-disturb hangers repeat the mark at hand scale, and they are often the pieces guests take home. Because they are printed in volume, they also tend to fix a palette and a typeface more firmly than any brand manual.

Uniforms are another surface. Doormen, bell staff and front-desk teams wear colours and cuts that let a guest identify the hotel at a glance, and a uniform can stay unchanged for decades while the logo is redrawn around it.

Then come the less visible signals. A signature lobby scent, a house soundtrack, the livery of the cars that meet guests at the airport and the design of the bathroom amenities all extend the identity beyond print. For designers, the useful lesson is consistency across these touchpoints rather than any single element.

A name that became an endorsement.

The first element of the Wyndham identity is its origin as a developer’s hotel name. It began in Dallas in 1981 under Trammell Crow, was shown off at the Anatole, and was run for years by people Crow had hired. Trade coverage written at the time of Crow’s death in 2009 placed the founding of Wyndham among the lasting results of his work.

The second element is movement between owners. In less than a decade the name passed from Patriot American to Blackstone, to Cendant, to Wyndham Worldwide and, in 2018, to a company of its own. Each move kept the word Wyndham while changing what stood behind it.

The third element is the endorsement. The “by Wyndham” suffix of 2018 put the parent name on the signs and listings of twelve brands with long histories of their own, in the manner of a maker’s line under a product name. For a design system this is a demanding role: the word has to sit beneath many different logos, in many colours, and still be recognised as the same name.

For a design guide, Wyndham shows how a single hotel name can grow into an endorsement that links a family of brands. Compare the Hilton Brand Guidelines, another US hotel name that now heads a family of brands, and the Marriott Brand Guidelines. For this guide we use navy, sky blue and pale blue with a clean sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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