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Holiday Inn “Stays Real” with LEDs

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The Holiday Inn brand and hotel chain is undergoing a $1 billion global relaunch, including a redesign of the iconic brand logo, which, in turn, has required new exterior signage for over 3,200 locations.

The signs incorporate GE Tetra® LED lighting systems from Lumination, GE Consumer & Industrial’s LED business. More than 1 million ft. of GE Tetra LED lighting systems will be installed across 3,200 properties.
 

The new signage will save Holiday Inn an estimated $4.4 million annually over previous lighting systems ($3 million in annual maintenance savings, and $1.4 million in energy savings).

This massive signage project involves more than 20 sign manufacturers, who will create 9,300 channel letter and box signs with high-performance GE Tetra LED lighting inside. More than 270 different lighting configurations will fit across five Holiday Inn brands, where the signs range from 11 in. high to as large as 8 ft.

Holiday Inn expects to halve its energy usage and achieve an estimated 52% reduction in kilowatt hours with signs lit an average of 12 hours a day, all year. That represents an estimated reduction of 8,700 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, or the equivalent of planting more than 2,300 acres of trees per year.

The GE Tetra LED systems overcome performance challenges fluorescent can encounter in cold climates.

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“GE has more than 19 million ft. of Tetra LED lighting installed with less than a 0.05% warranty-return rate,” said Eric Stevenson, GE’s global product manager – signage.
Holiday Inn and its signage consultant/project manager Sign Management Consultants sought an LED systems supplier that could carry out such a large project under tight deadlines.

“A project of this scale requires suppliers that can deliver. We were confident GE had a variety of LED solutions to meet Holiday Inn’s needs,” said Mark Burkett, VP, Sign Management Consultants.

The Tetra LED lighting systems used in this program include Tetra Power White and Tetra MAX for channel letters, and Tetra PowerGrid for box signs. The Tetra Power White high-performance LED system delivers up to 66 lumens of brilliant white light per module. Tetra PowerGrid, a high-brightness, modular system, reportedly lasts up to four times longer than T12HO fluorescents. All three lighting systems last up to 50,000 hours and are RoHS compliant, containing no lead, mercury or glass.

InterContinental Hotels Group, Holiday Inn’s owner, earlier this summer announced the opening of its 1,000th relaunched Holiday Inn hotel, the Holiday Inn Express New York Times Square.

IHG owns, manages, leases or franchises, through various subsidiaries, more than 4,200 hotels and over 620,000 guest rooms in nearly 100 countries and territories. Holiday Inn is IHG s largest in terms of hotels and rooms worldwide, said Chief Marketing Officer Tom Seddon, and the revitalization project started two years ago. Overall, a brand overhaul takes roughly four years, according to Seddon.

In 2003, in a program of hotel redesign, the company brought back a revamped version of the Great Sign that showed up the company’s advertising under the slogan "Relax, it’s Holiday Inn.” The makeover came with a new prototype hotel that included photography of the sign and a retro-style diner named after founder Kemmons Wilson.
The new Holiday Inn motto, “Stay real,” replaces such past slogans as “Where the best is no surprise,” “Stay with someone you know,” and “Stay smart.”

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The Great Sign
The “Great Sign,” the traditional, historic roadside sign used by Holiday Inn during their original era of expansion in the 1950s-1970s, was the brainchild of Kemmons Wilson, who introduced it to the world when he opened his first motel on August 1, 1952. The signs were extremely large and eye-catching, but were expensive to construct and operate.

The sign designers and manufacturers were members of the Balton family, whose ancestor D.F. Balton founded Balton & Sons in Memphis, TN in 1875. Most of Memphis’ billboards, theater marquees and street signs during the early 1900s were the work of Balton & Sons.

Members of the Balton family still run Memphis sign companies (Precision Signs and Frank Balton & Co.). Allegedly, the sign’s colors were selected because they were favorites of Kemmons Wilson’s mother.

In 1982, following Kemmons Wilson’s departure, Holiday Inn phased out the “Great Sign” in favor of a backlit sign that still maintained the classic script logo. The decision signaled the end of the Kemmons Wilson era and removed an internationally recognizable company icon.

 

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