Best Western

Logo used from 1996 to 2015.

Best Western Hotel with new logo.

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 brand founded by M.K. Guertin in 1946.[5]

Best Western Plus in Hong Kong

The name "Best Western" originated from the fact that most of the chain's original operators were west of the Mississippi River in the United States. By 1962, Best Western had the only hospitality reservations service covering the entire United States, and in 1963, was the largest motel brand 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, and thus 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 under the name "Best Eastern" for those properties with the same typeset 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.

Best Western's "Gold Crown" logo was introduced in 1964 and would continue with a few minor revisions over the next 32 years, until it was replaced by a blue and yellow logo in 1996. In 2015, Best Western introduced a new family of logos, replacing the core logo and adding signage for Best Western Plus and Best Western Premier.

Best Western purchased WorldHotels[6] in February 2019 adding approximately 360 additional hotels and 81,248 more rooms to its brand.[7] BWH Hotel Group was formed as the parent company of Best Western and WorldHotels following this acquisition. [8]

As of September 2020, Best Western Hotels and Resorts has 18 brands and logos.[12] Since 1948 the Best Western logo has had approximately 13 modification to the main brand logo, with the last brand logo change made in 2015. In 2010 Best Western divided the brand into 3 descriptors.

The logo stayed the same, but the descriptors of Plus and Premier were added, and all hotels were either a Best Western, Best Western Plus, or Best Western Premier. In 2015, a complete overhaul of the Best Western logo resulted in a very different logo from the previous years, with the most notable change being the removal of the crown which had been a part of the logo since 1962.

Since 2014 the brand has created 11 additional brands, for a total of 14 brands with distinctive logos. The Best Western website has a picture of all of their past logos in their "timeline and story" section.[7] Best Western also owns (acquired in February 2019[6]) the WorldHotels Collection[13] which includes 4 additional brands, whose logos are all the same, except for the addition of the distinguishing descriptors of Luxury, Elite, Distinctive, and Crafted.

The following 18 brands of Best Western are:[14]

As of 2018, it was nonprofit owned by its franchisee members.[15]

• List of hotels
• List of motels

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Best Western Hotels.

• Official website