Salem’s Holiday Inn Express will soon have a new name.
Owners Sherman and Marsha Odom say they are excited to name their hotel The Crossroads Inn & Suites.
The Odoms decided not to renew the hotel’s franchise with InterContinental Hotels and Holiday Inn Express to allow for more flexibility in services.
“We have enjoyed our 10-year association with InterContinental Hotels and Holiday Inn Express,” Marsha Odom said. “We feel like we have gotten a good education on being hoteliers by being associated with a franchise.”
New signage will go up soon after March 19, they said.
The Odoms are in agreement that when it was time to renew their franchise, there were too many requirements to fulfill with InterContinental Hotels. Franchises often limit what individual hotels can do. Their focus is consistency. For example, Marsha Odom said, Holiday Inn Express hotels, as a limited service franchise, require them to serve only one fruit on the breakfast bar, bananas.
“In addition to bananas, we would like to also offer apples, oranges and seasonally grapes, strawberries and other fruit,” she said. “That’s just one example that we feel we can better accommodate our guests.”
The process of hotel ownership was conceived by the Odoms about 12 years ago after they closed the Tower Inn in 1999. They believed that a franchise would allow them to run a hotel better, since the beginning years would be a learning process. They contacted several franchises and liked the idea of a limited service hotel. Holiday Inn Express seemed to be a good fit with what they wanted to achieve.
When they first opened the hotel they had a preconceived notion that recreational tourism would be the vast amount of the hotel business in Salem, but they have found that recreational tourism travel is about 15 percent of the current hotel traffic.
“The hotel does not necessarily rely on recreational tourism traffic, but depends heavily on business travelers, weddings, funerals and genealogy researchers and other visitors,” Marsha Odom said.
Since the Holiday Inn Express opened here March 19, 2004, the InterContinental Hotels honored the Salem hotel with seven years of winning awards during their 10-year tenure with the franchise. They won the Newcomer’s Award in 2005, three Torchbearer Awards -- the top 20 Holiday Inn Express hotels during that survey year. They also received three Quality Excellence Awards, which are awarded to the top 100 Holiday Express hotels. All seven times there were about 1,800 Holiday Inn Express hotels worldwide. All awards are based on guest satisfaction surveys.
The Odoms said the hotel will remain a limited service hotel with a complimentary, hot breakfast bar. Most everything will remain the same, including phone service, with a few new improvements.
They look forward to investing back into their building. Physical improvements, such as carpet replacement, are needed as well as other things that show evidence of 10 years of wear, they say.
“We want to continue to offer a quality product at a reasonable price and look forward to the new Crossroads Inn & Suites sign going up soon after March 19,” Marsha says.
