Chronicle No. 37 · Innovations

Holidex, 1965: The Night the Hotel Room Became Instantly Bookable

Before Holiday Inn wired its motels to a computer, booking a room 500 miles away meant a teletype message and a good deal of hope.

Kemmons Wilson built the first Holiday Inn on Summer Avenue in Memphis in August 1952, having been thoroughly disappointed by America's roadside motels on a family drive to Washington. Consistency was his product: the same room, the same standards and the same enormous illuminated Great Sign, at least fifty feet high and legible from both directions.

But consistency creates a problem of its own. If a traveller trusts the brand in Memphis, they will want the brand in Denver, tonight. In the early 1960s that meant teletype messages passed between properties, and the volume was rapidly outrunning the method.

So Holiday Inns went to IBM, and in 1965 switched on Holidex, the first chain-wide computerised reservation system in the hotel industry. A guest standing in one Holiday Inn lobby could have a room confirmed at any other, there and then. It was described at the time as the largest commercial computerised communications network in the world, and by the 1970s more than 1,400 properties were connected to it. The company put the point on its signage: your host from coast to coast.

Everything downstream is Holidex's descendant. Central reservations offices, global distribution systems, channel managers, the booking engine on your own website, the little green calendar on a phone. So is the expectation, now absolute, that availability is a fact a guest can see rather than a question they must ask.

Wilson's real insight was never the motel building. It was that a promise made in one town has to be redeemable in another, instantly, or it is not a brand at all. Anybody who has ever had to telephone a sister property to check a rate knows exactly how expensive the alternative feels.

“your host from coast to coast”

Lesson: A brand promise is only as strong as the system that lets a guest redeem it on the spot.