Pioneer Lodging Chain Aims To Get Its Consistency Back

The New York Times:

In the late 1950s, I had an aunt who was widely regarded as putting on airs, and who displayed in her guest bathroom a pair of those iconic Holiday Inn towels with the big green stripes.

She insisted that the hotels wanted you to take them as advertisements, but everyone knew otherwise. Still, the green and white towels symbolized the early years of Holiday Inn, when it defined the middle-class Eisenhower-era version of the open road — consistent, safe, clean and as reassuring as the new Interstate System itself.

2 decades later, the highways were still dotted with those huge blazing neon-festooned Holiday Inn signs, which always looked to me as if they fell off a truck on their way to Las Vegas. But by the 1980s, the signs were flashing a different message: inconsistent, indifferent, left behind on the wrong side of the interchange.

The so-called Great Sign was abandoned in 1982 in favor of less ostentatious displays. In recent years, Holiday Inn, now owned by InterContinental Hotels Group of London, has recovered from its decline and is expanding aggressively. There are now more than 3,100, including over 500 abroad.

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