Holiday Inn is cleaning house. Big time.
London-based InterContinental Hotels Group is in the process of shedding roughly half the nearly 1,100 Holiday Inn properties it owns, mainly by ending franchise agreements with operators of substandard properties.
Andy Soule, a broadcast engineering consultant from Bangor, Maine, stopped staying often at Holiday Inns three years ago partly due to what he calls their unpredictable quality. “With Holiday Inns, you never really know what you’re going to get,” Soule says. Today, he usually stays in midprice Hilton brands such as Hampton Inns and Embassy Suites.
Frequent traveler David Zangenberg, a gourmet food salesman from Lake Helen, Fla., says he, too, avoids Holiday Inns. He finds everything from restaurants to bedding to be inconsistent.
“I haven’t been impressed for many years with any of the (Holiday Inns) I’ve stayed at,” he says.
Criticism like that is what InterContinental CEO Andrew Cosslett hopes to silence with the massive campaign to modernize the Holiday Inn chain and to restore consistency and predictability for travelers.
[via USA Today]