Success story: Charles Kemmons Wilson and Holiday Inn

Born on January 5, 1903 in Osceola, Arkansas in a family of an insurance agent and a homemaker, Charles Kemmons Wilson revolutionized the hotel industry in the twentieth century.  As a child, he started selling newspaper subscriptions and when, during the Depression, his mother lost her job, he dropped out of High School to start working whatever he found to help his family. With the arrival of the War, Wilson was mobilized and served in the army.   

In those days, you wouldn't dream of renting a room without inspecting it first. I wanted to create a brand that people could trust.

After returning, he entered the homebuilding business and became partner with Wallace E. Johnson, one of the biggest homebuilders in the South. As he became more and more interested in the Real Estate business, one summer, on a family trip to Washington DC, he was surprised by the inconsistency and overall poor quality and service in the motels and road hotels where he stopped. In the age of the newly-born television, he thought that each room should have a TV set, an air conditioning and a clean bedding and flooring. 

"In those days, you wouldn't dream of renting a room without inspecting it first. I wanted to create a brand that people could trust."

When on the following year he started buying new properties along the new Eisenhower interstate system, his wife was the responsible for choosing the appropriate decorations for the rooms. The colors were warm and a Bible was placed in every drawer, a tradition that remains unchanged in most US hotels today. One of the most significant breakthroughs that Wilson brought to the hotel industry was the uniform introduction of swimming pools in all of his locations. In 1952, one year after his Washington trip, the first Holiday Inn was opened. By 1954, 14 more had followed it, all located on the sides of the new freeways of the Eisenhower system.

 

The innovative value proposal of Wilson kept attracting so many customers that by 1964 the company had begun an international expansion, having more than 500 operating hotels worldwide. In 1965, yet another breakthrough marked the history of Holiday Inn and the hotel industry: the introduction of the Holidex reservation system. It conected every single franchisee's room availability information with the central in Memphis where desk clerks could make reservations anywhere in the chain. By the time of his launch, it became the largest civilian computer network in the world.

Yet, with the arrival of the seventies, the financial and oil crises caused the company to lose some of its assets. In addition, new competitors started copying the Inn's formula so frequently that the market quickly became oversaturated.   By 1972, Wilson's stake in the company had dropped to $56 million. He tried to fix the problems by hiring professional managers who could deal more efficiently with the new problems. Even then, things didn't seem to improve much and when Wilson finally turned in his keys, his share was worth a bit more than $7 million.

In the late eighties, the company experienced  difficulties and internal changes, but eventually re-emerged as one of the leaders, though its image and targeted customer segment had changed. The restructuring after Wilson's departure went ahead not without a controversy: In 1982, the new board of directors decided to get rid of the iconic Great Sign. "It was the worst mistake they ever made" said Wilson, while franchisees across the country substituted their once famous road signs with smaller and cheaper backlights as a part of a new re-branding effort. In 2006, the only surviving Great Sign was accidentaly found in a backlot in Minnesota.

 

Today, Holiday Inn is a chain oriented towards the business and focuses on providing the services business travellers, rather than what family vacationers are usually looking for. But even after leaving Holiday Inn, its founder continued working in the Real Estate development business and left his Kemmons Wilson Co. construction company to his sons. He was also a dedicated donor to the University of Memphis, where in 2002 the Kemmons Wilson School of Hospitality and Resort Management opened.