The roots of the Ramada Inn chain began 70 years ago this year with the development of a motel along Route 66 in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Peter Corbett of Flagstaff Business News had the story. The newspaper contacted 88-year-old Bill Isbell, who was still a teen when he made a small investment with his father Marion and other investors to develop roadside motels.
In 1954, the investors built the 60-room Flamingo Motor Hotel just west of today’s Y-intersection at Milton Road and Route 66. It was remodeled and rebranded as a Ramada Inn around 1959, making it one of the first Ramadas, Isbell said.
The Ramada at that location is now a Super 8 Motel. Wyndham Hotels and Resorts is now the parent company of Ramada. Wyndham has 850 hotels under the Ramada brand.
Bill Isbell’s father, Marion, was a rags-to-riches entrepreneur who became a leader in America’s hospitality industry. He transformed himself from a cotton-picking orphan in Tennessee to a top Chicago restaurateur and ultimately a founder and chief executive of Phoenix-based Ramada Inns Inc., one of America’s largest motel chains, by the early 1970s.
Ramada had 500 motels in 45 states. Only Holiday Inn was larger.
“We were bigger than Marriott. Bigger than Hilton,” Bill Isbell said.
After graduating from the University of Notre Dame and a stint in the Navy, Isbell began working full-time at Ramada in 1962.
Not long after that, Ramada Inns Inc. became publicly traded with 19 Ramadas and seven other hotels.
By the late 1960s, he was executive vice president, then became CEO in 1974.
From the mid-1950s to mid-1970s, Ramada Inn’s logo featured a bald innkeeper, “Uncle Ben,” who wore an apron (later a suit and tie) with a top hat in one hand and a red trumpeted banner that read “Ramada Inn Roadside Hotels” in the other.
Ramada Inn is now referred to as Ramada by Wyndham. Ramada still has more than 800 motels in 63 countries under value-tiered names such as Ramada Limited, Ramada Inn, Ramada Inn & Suites, Ramada Suites, Ramada Hotel, Ramada Hotel & Suites, Ramada Hotel & Resort, Ramada Plaza and Ramada Resorts.
(Postcard images of the Flamingo Motor Hotel and the first Ramada Inn in Flagstaff, Arizona, courtesy of 66Postcards.com)
Been there, Stayed at the original Ramada Inn in Flagstaff