Holiday Inn Express
Encyclopedia
Hotel
A hotel is an establishment that provides paid lodging on a short-term basis. The provision of basic accommodation, in times past, consisting only of a room with a bed, a cupboard, a small table and a washstand has largely been replaced by rooms with modern facilities, including en-suite bathrooms...
chain within the InterContinental Hotels Group
InterContinental Hotels Group
InterContinental Hotels Group plc is a global hotels company headquartered in Denham, United Kingdom. It is the largest hotels company in the world measured by rooms , and has over 4,500 hotels across over 100 countries...
family of brands. As an "express" hotel, their focus is on offering limited services and a reasonable price. Standard amenities lean toward the convenient and practical which cater to business travelers and short-term stays. The brand was first launched in 1990, and now there are over 1,500 Holiday Inn Express hotels worldwide.
History
The first Holiday Inn Express locations opened in 1990, with three hotels opening in that year; plans at the time called for 250 locations to be open by 1995. The Holiday Inn Express concept was intended to target the "upper economy" market segment, offering limited service, low-price lodging.Properties
Typical Holiday Inn Express hotels are built from corporate architectural prototypes, and tend to consist of 60-80 rooms, with a mix of suiteSuite
In music, a suite is an ordered set of instrumental or orchestral pieces normally performed in a concert setting rather than as accompaniment; they may be extracts from an opera, ballet , or incidental music to a play or film , or they may be entirely original movements .In the...
s. The rooms are generally large and spacious, compared to rooms that are "Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an style" and come with standard toiletries. Because the chain has been undergoing tremendous growth, the majority of Holiday Inn Express hotels are brand new or newly renovated.
Recreation
Most hotels offer a fitness center with various equipments such as treadmillTreadmill
A treadmill is an exercise machine for running or walking while staying in one place. The word treadmill traditionally refers to a type of mill which was operated by a person or animal treading steps of a wheel to grind grain...
s, indoor swimming pool
Swimming pool
A swimming pool, swimming bath, wading pool, or simply a pool, is a container filled with water intended for swimming or water-based recreation. There are many standard sizes; the largest is the Olympic-size swimming pool...
s and a hot tub
Hot tub
A hot tub is a large tub or small pool full of heated water and used for soaking, relaxation, massage, or hydrotherapy. In most cases, they have jets for massage purposes. Hot tubs are usually located outdoors, and are often sheltered for protection from the elements, as well as for privacy....
.
Business Services
Most Holiday Inn Express hotels offer a business center with equipments such as computerComputer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
s, printers, and fax
Fax
Fax , sometimes called telecopying, is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material , normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device...
equipment for use by business travelers. Additionally all Holiday Inn Express hotels in the United States offer free local calls and free wireless internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
for business travelers who bring their laptop computer.
Food and Beverage
Restaurant
A restaurant is an establishment which prepares and serves food and drink to customers in return for money. Meals are generally served and eaten on premises, but many restaurants also offer take-out and food delivery services...
s and lounges are not present in most U.S. properties, while many other inns worldwide offer small venue food and beverage offerings.
Holiday Inn Express properties do offer the company's signature "Express Start" breakfast bar. The buffet
Buffet
A buffet is a system of serving meals in which food is placed in a public area where the diners generally serve themselves. Buffets are offered at various places including hotels and many social events...
generally consists of common breakfast
Breakfast
Breakfast is the first meal taken after rising from a night's sleep, most often eaten in the early morning before undertaking the day's work...
offerings, including cereal, a hot meat product, a hot egg product, pancakes, biscuits and gravy, bagels and muffins, fruit, yogurt, and the brand's exclusive cinnamon roll
Cinnamon roll
A cinnamon roll is a sweet pastry served commonly in Northern Europe and North America. It consists of a rolled sheet of yeast dough onto which a cinnamon and sugar mixture is sprinkled over a thin coat of butter...
. Beverages consist of milk and juice, along with the signature "Smart Roast" coffee
Coffee
Coffee is a brewed beverage with a dark,init brooo acidic flavor prepared from the roasted seeds of the coffee plant, colloquially called coffee beans. The beans are found in coffee cherries, which grow on trees cultivated in over 70 countries, primarily in equatorial Latin America, Southeast Asia,...
.
Marketing
In the mid-2000s, Holiday Inn Express began producing humorous televisionTelevision
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
commercials featuring "average Joes" performing extraordinary activities that only experts would know. The concept attributes these exaggerated abilities to the fact that they "stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night". The campaign reflects the brand's slogan "Stay Smart" which is still in use today.
In the summer of 2007, IHG took the "Stay Smart" theme even further. The hotel chain teamed up with AOL and HBO's new comedy site, "This Just In", to develop a two-month daily web series called "The Smart Show". The premise of the show was a virtual tour with the two hosts on a coast-to-coast road trip exploring what's so smart about America. The idea was to showcase the diverse and non-traditional culture of "smart", such as people, places, businesses and inventions that are clever, witty, and unexpected as opposed to simply "book smart". Beginning in Boston, Massachusetts, the traveling show stopped along major metropolitan cities as well as small, back road towns on the way to Los Angeles, California, where the program ended in December 2007. Website visitors were able to interact with the hosts, submit their own video content about smart ideas in their home towns and respond to other smart postings.
Holiday Inn Express has also reinforced their "Stay Smart" slogan online by opening an Internet "Smart Mart" on their website allowing customers to buy shower heads, towels, toiletries, and cinnamon rolls identical to those featured at the hotels. The online store also features clothing product featuring the hotel logo and breakfast offerings.