Rebranding a hotel is a complicated process. The major hotel chains have brand standards that properties must meet to remain compliant. If a hotel doesn’t keep up to the standards, it can have the branding stripped. However, if a hotel wants to move to a better brand, there are going to be some renovations required.
I’ve been following the story of the former Radisson hotel just outside of Walt Disney World. The property, which has 718 rooms and over 10,000 square feet of meeting space, is located on 26 acres just off the main I-4 interstate. It has a prime location but the owners didn’t put any money into the property and it was sold in February 2018. The new owners and management quickly announced the hotel was to be rebranded as a Delta Hotel, a new brand by Marriott.
For the time being, the hotel was given the rather generic name “Grand Orlando Resort at Celebration.”
Eighteen months later, in October 2019, renovations were still in progress. The hotel lobby was closed but the property was still saying it would eventually become a Delta Hotel.
Here we are in December 2020. It’s a year later and it looks like either the hotel, Marriott or both of them realized that the hotel was never going to finish the renovations needed to make the property a Delta Hotel.
When checking both the hotel and the Delta Hotel websites, there’s no longer any mention of the hotel joining the Marriott family of hotels.
In fact, since last year, the hotel has dropped from #97 to #109 in TripAdvisor rankings for hotels in Kissimmee. For the guests who give the property one-star reviews, the hotel’s response is that the rooms will soon undergo a renovation to bring them up to current standards.
Since the hotel has been saying this for the past three years, I’m not expecting those renovations to be finished anytime soon. Three years is forever unless you’re comparing this rebranding to another hotel that is reopening 10 years after it closed.
Want to comment on this post? Great! Read this first to help ensure it gets approved.
Like this post? Please share it! We have plenty more just like it and would love it if you decided to hang around and get emailed notifications of when we post. Or maybe you’d like to join our Facebook group – we have 16,000+ members and we talk and ask questions about travel (including Disney parks), creative ways to earn frequent flyer miles and hotel points, how to save money on or for your trips, get access to travel articles you may not see otherwise, etc. Whether you’ve read our posts before or this is the first time you’re stopping by, we’re really glad you’re here and hope you come back to visit again!
This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
2 comments
I have enjoyed your posts in the past. Unfortunately, your VERY draconian, thin-skinned comments policy, unique among bloggers, has turned me against further engagement.
I assure you that our rules are not draconian. You have no idea the things people write as comments to some posts. The great majority of comments are accepted and the ones we reject are because they fall into the categories we mention in the linked post.