One thing that I love about hotels is Branding. The power of a brand can instantly make a hotel that is new to the area the cachet of being reliable and in some cases – hip and exciting, compared to an unknown hotel that may take a year or two before it really becomes well known and word of mouth really spreads.

Last week it was announced that the 5 remaining Adams’s Mark hotels have been sold – the locations in Dallas and Denver are being rebranded as a Sheraton, the location in St. Louis is being converted into a Hyatt and the Indianapolis and Buffalo NY locations are being converted into an unbranded hotel managed by Kokua Hospitality.

The Dallas and Denver locations which are being converted into Sheratons, are Adam’s Mark’s largest locations, with 1,840 and 1,225 rooms respectively, (with the Denver location the largest hotel in Colorado), both locations also have extensive meeting and convention space – this further puts Starwood’s Sheraton brand into the convention hotel category. Lately I’ve been noticing that except for resorts, or overseas locations, the majority of Starwood’s extremely large developments – San Juan Sheraton for example, are being made into Sheratons. This is making Sheraton known as a “convention hotel” which is great, as the differentiation between Westin and Sheraton are sometimes hard to pin down. PS: The Westin & Adam’s Mark/Sheraton in Denver are physically connected to each other due to the convention center. Talk about keeping you’re associated brands close!

Back to the Adam’s Mark brand..

Did you know that in 2003 there were 30 Adam’s Mark hotels throughout America? Its amazing how such a large company (ok – obviously not as large as a major such as Hyatt, or Westin, or Hilton – but you get the idea) goes from almost maturing into a nationwide brand, went downhill so fast.

I don’t know why – but the Adam’s Mark brand always makes me think of the Statler Hotels. I’ve never stayed in either hotel (heck, Statler wasn’t even around anymore by the time I was born), but the fact that such well known brands just disappeared is fascinating to me. One of the cool things about a good brand – is that they just should not die, they should stay around forever. I’m not talking about Hollywood Tans, or Subway – those types of brands are somewhat disposable, someone buys them out – they’ll slap a new company name on there faster than you can count to ten – but other brands; brands that look to build an experience and a relationship with their customer – Ford, Sheraton, Coke etc, should never die.

andrew@alconic-inc.com