![]() In 1963, Holiday Inn signed a long-term deal with Gulf Oil where it agreed to accept Gulf credit cards to charge food and lodging at all of its American and Canadian hotels, in return for Gulf building service stations on many Holiday Inn properties, particularly near major U.S. ![]() By June 1972, with over 1,400 Holiday Inns worldwide, Wilson was featured on the cover of Time magazine and the franchise's motto became "The World's Innkeeper". īranded as "The Nation's Innkeeper", the chain put considerable financial pressure on traditional motels and hotels, setting the standard for competitors like Ramada Inn, Quality Inn, Howard Johnson's, and Best Western. Holiday Inn opened their first campground, Trav-L-Park, in Angola, Indiana, in 1970. Promoting itself as "your host from coast to coast", Holiday Inn added a call center after AT&T's introduction of 800 toll-free telephone number service in 1967. In 1965, the chain launched Holidex, a centralized reservation system where a visitor to any Holiday Inn could obtain reservations, by teleprinter, for any other Holiday Inn location. The rule on franchising remained until 1973, when a franchisee was denied the rights to build a location in Newark, New Jersey because of this rule the United States District Court thus declared the rule a violation of a United States anti- monopoly law. This led to the Albert Pick-franchised locations exiting the brand by the end of the 1950s. Because a number of Albert Pick franchisees were recommending customers to other Albert Pick hotels instead of to Holiday Inn, the Holiday Inn corporation enacted a rule that franchisees could not own locations of another hotel as well as a Holiday Inn. ![]() A number of early locations were franchised, some by the Albert Pick corporation of Chicago. 61.īy 1957 there were 30 Holiday Inns, and Wilson began marketing the chain as "Holiday Inn of America". In 1953, three more Holiday Inns were built on U.S. Johnson to build additional motels on the roads entering Memphis. Their first hotel/motel opened in August 1952 as "Holiday Inn Hotel Courts" at 4941 Summer Avenue in Memphis, then the main highway (U.S. During construction, the name "Holiday Inn" was coined by Wilson's architect Eddie Bluestein as a joking reference to the 1942 musical film Holiday Inn. Kemmons Wilson, a resident of Memphis, Tennessee, was inspired to build a motel after being disappointed by the poor quality of roadside accommodations during a family road trip to Washington, D.C. A Holiday Inn in Belfast City Centre, Northern Ireland
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