Best Western International
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| Marketing cooperative | |
| Industry | Hotels |
| Founded | 1946 |
| Headquarters | Phoenix, Arizona, U.S. |
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Number of locations
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4,195 (Worldwide) |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
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Key people
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| Revenue | US$6,000,000,000 (2012) |
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Number of employees
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1,254 (2012) |
| Website | bestwestern.com |
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Footnotes / references Data from Hoover's factsheet |
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Best Western International, Inc., operator of the Best Western Hotels & Resorts brand, operates about 4,100 hotels and motels. The chain, with its corporate headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, operates 2,163 hotels in North America. The brand was founded by M.K. Geurtin in 1946. David Kong is the president and CEO of Best Western, and Dorothy Dowling is the chief marketing officer.
In 1964, Canadian hotel owners joined the system. Best Western then expanded to Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand in 1976.
In 2002, Best Western International launched Best Western Premier in Europe and Asia. (The other hotels in the chain were known as Best Western.) In 2011, the chain's branding system-wide changed to a three-tiered system: Best Western, Best Western Plus, and Best Western Premier. Since it no longer operates under a single brand, Best Western concurrently modified its slogan in 2011 from "the world's largest hotel chain" to "the world's largest hotel family."
Best Western began in the years following World War II. At the time, most hotels were either large urban properties or smaller family owned roadside hotels. In California, a network of independent hotel operators began making referrals of each other to travelers. This “referral system” consisted of phone calls between one desk operator and another. This small and informal network eventually grew into the modern Best Western hotel chain founded by M.K. Guertin in 1946.
The name "Best Western" was a result of most of their properties originally being in the United States west of the Mississippi River. By 1962, Best Western had the only hospitality reservations service covering the entire United States, and in 1963, was the largest motel chain in the industry with 699 member properties and 35,201 rooms. From 1946 to 1964, Best Western had a marketing partnership with Quality Courts, the forerunner of the chain known today as Quality Inns, whose properties were located mostly east of the Mississippi River, not in direct competition with Best Western. This partnership made sense geographically, but was not successful in the long run, and was eventually abandoned. In 1964, Best Western launched an expansion effort of its own operations east of the Mississippi using the moniker "Best Eastern" for those properties with the same typestyle and Gold Crown logo as "Best Western." By 1967, the "Best Eastern" name was dropped and all motels from coast-to-coast got the "Best Western" name and Gold Crown, a move that would further enhance an already successful marketing brand into the "World's Largest Hotel Chain" by the 1970s.
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Wikipedia