The Nation's Innkeeper

A brewery from Burton-on-Trent owns the sign that stood over American highways, the trademark never left the United States, and the people behind the front desk work for neither of them.

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이 글의 한국어판 → 여관 주인은 여관이 없다

The shelf’s six questions, asked of Holiday Inn. The brand was born in Memphis and the trademark is still held in Delaware. Almost none of the hotels, and almost none of the people, belong to the company in Windsor.

The meeting where twelve men bought and three men built

By the end of 1953 Kemmons Wilson had four hotels open around Memphis and nothing left to build a fifth with. He described the position himself, forty-four years later, in a lecture at Hillsdale College: "I had used up my savings and credit. That is when I started dreaming of franchising. I don't believe I knew the word at that time."

What he had instead of the word was a price. Five hundred dollars flat, plus a nickel per room per night. For that, a man got Wilson's plans, his specifications, and his name on the roof.

To find buyers he went to Wallace E. Johnson, a Memphis builder active in the National Association of Homebuilders. "We invited 100 homebuilders to a meeting and 64 showed up. We sold 12 franchises, and with the great sum of $6,000 in additional capital, we thought we were off and running."

Then the sentence that follows it. "We were wrong. Most of the homebuilders were too busy building homes to exercise their franchise option. Only three of them actually built one of our hotels."

Three. That is the founding population of what would become the largest hotel system in the world, and the first thing to notice about it is that none of the three worked for Kemmons Wilson. They bought a drawing and a rule book. They put up their own money, hired their own staff, and signed their own paychecks. Wilson collected five cents a night.

He had a word for them. He called them innkeepers, and the company put the word on the sign: The Nation's Innkeeper. It is stamped across the marquee on a postcard from about 1960 held by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, and IHG's own corporate history still marks 1972 as the year "The Nation's Innkeeper" became "The World's Innkeeper."

Hold on to that noun. An innkeeper is a person who owns an inn and stands in it. Everything that follows is a measurement of how far the word has traveled from the thing.

Six questions

This magazine asks six questions of everything on an American shelf. Where was it born. Where is it incorporated. Where is the head office. Who owns the shares. Where is it made. Who signs the paycheck. When the six answers cluster, there is no article. When they scatter, the gap is the article.

Born: 4941 Summer Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee, on August 1, 1952. The Shelby County Historical Commission's marker gives the date and the size — a single 120-room property on the main road into Memphis from the east — and then gives the ending in the same breath: "The first Holdiay Inn was retired by sale in 1973 and finally demolished in 1994." The typo is theirs. A funeral home stands on the site now.

Incorporated: England and Wales, company number 05134420, registered May 21, 2004 under the name Hackremco (No. 2154) Limited. The corporate line behind it runs back to Bass Charrington Limited, incorporated August 17, 1967, which became Bass Public Limited Company on the last day of 1979 and Six Continents PLC on July 27, 2001. The brewery in Burton-on-Trent goes back to 1777. The company does not.

Head office: 1 Windsor Dials, Arthur Road, Windsor, Berkshire. It was Windsor before 2008, then Broadwater Park in Denham for fifteen years, then Windsor again as of January 4, 2023. The Americas office is at Three Ravinia Drive, Suite 100, Atlanta.

Shareholders: as notified to the company by February 12, 2026, the largest is PineStone Asset Management of Montreal at 8.07 percent, then BlackRock at 6.14, Boron Investments B.V. at 5.01, FMR at 5.01, Capital Group at 4.90. The company's own geographic breakdown puts North America, including the American depositary receipts, at 49.5 percent of the register, and attaches a warning to its own number: the analysis captures 88 percent of the share capital and has been scaled up by 100/88 to fill the rest.

Made: this is the box that breaks. As of June 30, 2026 the group counts 7,109 hotels and 1,048,731 rooms. Of those, 6,001 hotels are franchised and 1,091 are managed under contract for owners. Owned and leased: seventeen. Not seventeen thousand. Seventeen hotels, 4,191 rooms, four-tenths of one percent of the system, and none of them in Greater China.

Paycheck: 7,459 people worldwide, on the company's own count, whose costs are borne by the group. Add everyone whose contract runs through IHG but whose wages are billed back to a hotel owner and the figure reaches 27,849. The number IHG puts in its press releases is different: "Approximately 400,000 people work across IHG's hotels and corporate offices globally."

Two of those figures sit in the same annual report. Neither is wrong.

What does a hotel company own, if it does not own hotels?

That is the question this piece exists to answer, and the honest first answer is a rule book and a word. But rule books and words turn out to be collateral, and collateral turns out to be the whole story, so it is worth starting with a single sheet of paper filed in Washington.

A security interest, recorded April 15, 1987

The United States Patent and Trademark Office keeps the ownership history of a mark the way a county keeps the ownership history of a field. Registration 592539, HOLIDAY INN, filed December 8, 1952 and registered July 13, 1954, has six entries in its chain of title. The one this piece is about is not a sale.

On April 15, 1987, Holiday Inns, Inc. of Tennessee recorded an instrument whose conveyance text reads: "ASSIGNOR HEREBY GRANTS A SECURITY INTEREST." The assignees are Wilmington Trust Company as corporate trustee and a man named William J. Wade, and the register spells out on whose behalf Wade was holding it: "AS TRUSTEE, FOR THE BENEFIT OF BANKS."

The sign over the American highway had been pledged to a syndicate. It stayed pledged for eighteen months, until a release was executed on October 20, 1988.

What put it there was debt. Analysts at the time traced it to a recapitalization the company had run the year before, and Daniel Lee of Drexel Burnham Lambert told UPI in September 1987 that selling the international hotels would put Holiday "way ahead of schedule paying debts incurred by last year's $2.6 billion recapitalization." The recapitalization survives mostly in analyst quotation; I could not find the company's own filing for it, and the Securities and Exchange Commission's electronic archive does not reach back that far. The security interest is not a quotation. It is a public record with a reel and frame number.

A company that has pledged its brand name to banks is a company that is going to sell something. In September 1987 it agreed to sell the hotels outside North America — five foreign properties it owned outright, interests in 135 more, twenty-five under development — plus thirteen Holiday Inns scattered across Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee, for $475 million. The sale closed in the first quarter of 1988. The buyer was a British brewer.

February 7, 1990

Two years later the rest went. On August 24, 1989 Holiday Corporation agreed to sell the North American Holiday Inn business to Bass PLC for $2.2 billion, and Bass agreed to retire or assume roughly $2.1 billion of debt on top of the price. Ian Prosser, the Bass chairman, said what the arithmetic meant in London that day: "We are undoubtedly now number one in the world with a total of some 1,600 hotels and more than 300,000 rooms."

The mechanics of the closing are set out not in a press release but in a federal opinion, because Bass sued the spun-off American company over the tax consequences two years later. The court's summary is the clearest description of the transaction anyone has written: "each share of Holiday common stock was cancelled, and in return, each shareholder … received approximately a one-quarter share of Bass and one share of the new company, post-merger Holiday, for every share held of Holiday. On February 7, 1990, the effective date of the merger…"

American shareholders handed in their shares in an American hotel company and were handed a quarter of a share in a British brewery. The casinos and the Embassy Suites and the Hampton Inns went into a new company called Promus. The signs went to Burton-on-Trent.

Why a brewery wanted hotels

Bass was not diversifying out of curiosity. It was being pushed.

In March 1989 the Monopolies and Mergers Commission published its report on the supply of beer, and on July 10 the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Lord Young of Graffham, told the House of Lords what the government would do with it. "I have decided that all brewers who own more than 2,000 on-licensed premises will be required to release from ties one half of the premises above that threshold. They must be leased free of ties to the company's products." The measures, he said, would "add an additional 11,030 free houses."

The order arrived in December. The Supply of Beer (Tied Estate) Order 1989 gave brewers holding more than two thousand licensed premises until the last day of October 1992 to do one of three things: stop being a brewer, get under two thousand pubs, or release the ties on half the excess. A brewer that wanted to stay large had to find somewhere else to be large.

IHG's own corporate history does not hide the causation. Its 1989 entry reads: "New British legislation limits the number of tied pubs major brewers can own, heralding a new direction for Bass as it reduces its pub estate and increases investment in hotels."

The rest followed the same logic. When Bass tried to grow the other way, buying half of Carlsberg-Tetley in 1997, the British government blocked it. Three years later Bass sold the brewing business to Interbrew of Belgium for £2.3 billion, and the sale included the name. The company that remained had to invent one; it chose Six Continents from names submitted by more than ten thousand of its own staff. Six Continents PLC then split itself in two on April 15, 2003, and the hotel half was listed in London that day with 734,461,900 shares.

The order of events matters here, and it is easy to get backwards. Bass took the international half of Holiday Inn in 1987, before the commission reported. What the 1989 rules changed was everything after that. A British government told a brewer it could not own so many pubs, so the brewer bought the American half too, then sold its beer, then sold its own name, then renamed itself twice more, and the surviving company now runs more than a million rooms in over a hundred countries. Every step after 1989 is a British regulatory decision. None of them is about hotels.

The other American name

There is a second brand in the company's title, and it did not start in England either.

IHG says so on its own history page, without prompting: "Pan American Airways founder, Juan Trippe, founds the InterContinental® brand" in 1946, and the first hotel opened in Belém, Brazil in 1949. An American airline built a chain of hotels so that its passengers would have somewhere to sleep at the end of the route.

It sold them in 1981, and the reason is the most human sentence in this entire history. Pan Am's spokesman Merle Richman explained the $500 million sale to Grand Metropolitan of London to UPI like this: "It won't put our airline in the black. It will help us buy gasoline, pay salaries and do all those kinds of things that need to be done to keep operations going."

The hotels bought the airline gasoline for ten more years. Pan Am failed in 1991. The chain went from Grand Metropolitan to Seibu Saison of Japan, and then, on March 23, 1998, the European Commission cleared Bass plc's acquisition of Saison Holdings B.V. — "188 hotels in 70 countries world wide, of which 40 are located in the EU."

So the company is named for two American brands. One was founded by a Memphis homebuilder and one by an airline, and a British brewer bought them both within a decade of each other.

The date the register changed

Now the part that almost everyone gets wrong, including people who are otherwise careful.

The Holiday Inn trademark did not go to England in 1990. Bass bought a corporation, not a mark, and the corporation kept holding the registration. The chain of title on Registration 592539 shows Holiday Inns, Inc. of Tennessee assigning the entire interest to Holiday Hospitality Corporation of Delaware on April 25, 1997 — seven years after the merger — and then a change of name on April 20, 1998, when Holiday Hospitality Corporation became Bass Hotels & Resorts, Inc.

That is the day a British name first appears on the register, forty-four years after the mark was granted. It lasted three years. On July 27, 2001, the same day the parent in London stopped being Bass PLC, the American subsidiary stopped being Bass Hotels & Resorts and became Six Continents Hotels, Inc.

And there it has stayed. The current owner of the HOLIDAY INN trademark, renewed as recently as September 20, 2024, is Six Continents Hotels, Inc., a corporation organized under the laws of Delaware, at Three Ravinia Drive, Suite 100, Atlanta, Georgia 30346.

The brand never emigrated. The holding company above it did. When an American checks into a Holiday Inn in Ohio, the mark on the door is owned by a Delaware corporation headquartered in Georgia, which is owned by a company registered in England, whose largest disclosed shareholder is in Montreal.

Seventy years on one register. The 1990 merger that put Holiday Inn under a British brewer never appears in it. The first British name arrives in 1998, on an American corporation.

Thirty-five billion, five point two billion, and two hotels

The financial statements make the same point in a different currency.

In 2025, guests spent $35.2 billion at hotels operating under IHG brands. The revenue IHG reported under international accounting standards was $5,189 million. The part that is pure fee business — franchise fees, base and incentive management fees, central revenue — was $1,897 million.

Of the $5,189 million, $544 million came from hotels the group actually owns or leases. Seventeen buildings produced about one dollar in ten.

Break the estate down by brand and the effect is sharper still. As of June 30, 2026 there were 4,618 hotels flying a Holiday Inn flag of some kind: 3,335 Holiday Inn Express, 1,259 Holiday Inn Hotels & Resorts, 24 Holiday Inn Club Vacations. Of those 4,618, IHG franchises 4,256 and manages 360.

It owns or leases two.

Two Holiday Inns, 903 rooms, both in the Americas. The rest of the flag Americans trust most belongs to somebody else, and the somebody else is usually a local partnership that put up between $12.8 million and $19.5 million to build a 104-room Holiday Inn Express, of which between $138,500 and $174,000 went to IHG.

The two numbers on one page

The employment note in the 2025 annual report is worth reading in full, because the company is not hiding anything. It is explaining.

"Having a predominantly franchised and managed business model means that many of those people who work at hotels operated under our brands are not our employees. The average number of IHG employees, including part-time employees, during 2025 were as follows: 7,459 people worldwide … whose costs were borne by the Group; and 20,390 people who either worked directly on behalf of the System Fund … or as General Managers and (in the US predominantly) other hotel workers, who work in managed hotels, who have contracts or are directly employed by IHG and whose costs are borne by those hotel owners."

Elsewhere in the same document, three separate times, a sentence that does the legal work: "We do not employ colleagues in franchise hotels, nor do we control their day-to-day operations, policies or procedures."

Set that against the press release boilerplate, which is also true: approximately 400,000 people work across IHG's hotels and corporate offices globally.

Four hundred thousand people work under the brands. Seven thousand four hundred and fifty-nine of them are paid for out of the group's money. That is one person in fifty-four.

The company is not being coy about why the distinction matters to it. Under risk factors it says so directly. Changes in laws or regulations "could result in a determination that we are a joint employer with our franchisees or that our franchisees are part of one unified system subject to joint and several liability." The separation is not an accounting artifact. It is the product.

One qualification, because it is the sort of thing that gets flattened. In managed hotels the arrangement inverts: "In a managed property, the Group typically acts as employer of the general manager and, in some cases, other employees at the hotel, and is entitled to reimbursement of these costs." IHG does employ people in hotels. It employs them on someone else's dime.

Two ratios from the company’s own documents. Of 4,618 Holiday Inns, IHG owns or leases two. Of roughly 400,000 people working under its brands, it pays 7,459 from its own money.

The strongest case that none of this matters

It bears saying that the arrangement has a good defense, and it is not the one companies usually make.

The defense is not that franchising is efficient. It is that franchising keeps the money local. When a Delaware corporation owns a hotel outright, the profit from every room leaves the county. When a local partnership owns the building and pays a fee for the name, the fee leaves and the profit stays. The developer is from somewhere. The general manager lives nearby. The payroll is spent at the grocery store down the road. Kemmons Wilson did not invent a way to extract value from small towns; he invented a way for a builder in Clarksdale, Mississippi to own a national-standard hotel for five hundred dollars and a nickel a night, and the thing he sold was access to a reservation system and a reputation that a single builder could never have manufactured alone.

By that reading, the fact that IHG owns two Holiday Inns is not evidence of absence. It is evidence that 4,616 other people own one. The 400,000 workers are employed by several thousand American, Chinese, British and Korean businesses rather than by one company in Windsor, and it is not obvious that the second arrangement would be better for them.

I think that case is largely right, and it is why this piece does not end in indignation. But it does not answer the question the six boxes ask. The question is not whether the arrangement is good. It is where the thing actually is. And the answer is that the building is local, the workforce is local, the profit is largely local, and the one thing that is not local is the word on the roof — which is also the only thing anyone is paying for.

Seoul, July 2024

Which brings us to the clearest demonstration of the principle available anywhere in the world, and it happened in Gangnam.

Parnas Hotel Co., Ltd. runs two five-star hotels in the Samseong-dong block by the COEX convention center. Its annual report to the Korean financial supervisory service lists its major contracts in a plain table. One row reads: counterparty, IHG (Intercontinental Hotels Group); purpose, Franchise Agreement; term, 2021 to 2030. Another row, added later: counterparty, Starwood Asia Pacific Hotels & Resorts Pte. Ltd.; purpose, Westin Franchise Agreement; term, 2024 to 2035.

In July 2024 the InterContinental Seoul COEX closed for renovation. It reopened in September 2025 as the Westin Seoul Parnas. Same owner, same building, same land lease from the Korea International Trade Association, same employer. Parnas Hotel's payroll carried 1,353 people at the end of 2025, and the filing counts another 1,085 separately as workers not belonging to the company. What changed was the sign in the lobby and the name of the foreign corporation receiving a fee.

The company describes the result without embarrassment: it is now "the first in Korea to operate the global hospitality brands of IHG and Marriott International simultaneously."

There is exactly one InterContinental left in South Korea, the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas, and Parnas Hotel owns that one too. Parnas Hotel is 67.56 percent owned by GS P&L Co., Ltd., which was spun off from GS Retail on December 2, 2024, and 31.86 percent by the Korea International Trade Association. A Korean conglomerate and a Korean trade body own the buildings. The brands are rented, and one of them was swapped for a competitor's without anyone having to move a bed.

The other Korean example is better still. The Holiday Inn Express Seoul Hongdae, 294 rooms, opened September 1, 2018. It is owned by Pacific No. 3 Private Real Estate Investment Company, which was established on December 2, 2016 by Jeju Air — a low-cost airline — as its route into the hotel business. In 2025 the hotel produced ₩20.9 billion of revenue and ₩7.2 billion of operating profit, about 1.3 percent of Jeju Air's consolidated turnover.

An American motel brand, owned by an English company, flown by a Korean airline's property fund, in a district of Seoul known for its music clubs. Every box scattered.

The sign came down in 1982

Kemmons Wilson's Great Sign was forty-three feet of green and orange and yellow, according to Time's reporter in 1972, who called it "a Pop symbol of U.S. enterprise abroad." Wilson had taken the idea from the movie-theater marquees he had owned in Memphis in the thirties. The American Sign Museum's restored example needed 836 feet of neon, 31 transformers and 450 bulbs, and weighed about seven tons.

In 1982 the company replaced it with plastic. The contractors installing the new signs were required to destroy the old ones, which is why almost none survive. Wilson, who had left the board in 1979 after a heart attack, said afterward that it was a mistake; the exact wording has come down in two versions and I cannot verify either.

The word on the sign lasted longer than the sign.

Holiday Inn has been named the most trusted travel and hospitality brand in the United States by Morning Consult for six consecutive years, most recently in the release announcing a new lobby prototype outside Denver in August 2026 — a hotel built by a franchisee called NibbleNook Hospitality. In the same period, IHG's Americas room count for the Holiday Inn brand fell three percent in 2025 and another two percent in the first half of 2026. Crowne Plaza fell five and then two. Across the whole Americas region the room count grew by zero percent in 2025. The growth came from Greater China, up nine, and from Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, up eight.

The brand Americans trust most is the brand America is quietly taking down.

What an innkeeper is

Return to the word. An innkeeper, in Wilson's use, was a man who had put his own $500 on the table, built the building with his own crew, and stood behind his own desk while a company in Memphis checked his work four times a year and could revoke his license if he scored below 850 out of 1,000.

That person still exists. There are 4,256 of them under the Holiday Inn flags alone, and several thousand more under the other eighteen brands, and they are the ones who employ the four hundred thousand. What has changed is that the company that sold them the word no longer does any part of what the word describes. It is not a nation's innkeeper. It is a nation's landlord of nouns.

The 2025 annual report puts it more precisely than I can, in a sentence the lawyers presumably wrote and the disclosure rules required: "We do not employ colleagues in franchise hotels, nor do we control their day-to-day operations, policies or procedures."

Three men built the first franchised Holiday Inns. Seventeen buildings are left in the company's own hands.