American mid Hampton Inn has become the nation's most powerful hotel chain and a global export by being rigorously Okay by Patrick Clark read aloud by Mark Leedorf. Shortly before six a m. Early risers stalk the cafeteria at the Hampton Inn and Suites in El Segundo, California, waiting for the breakfast buffet to open at the appointed hour. Proteins and starches spin out in combinations that change slightly but perceptibly from day to day. On a Tuesday in March, its egg white fritatas Yukon gold potatoes and maple sausage. Soon after its scrambled eggs, red potatoes and hardwood smoked bacon. There are yogurts and hand fruit scattered about for the truly health conscious, and a drawer of bite sized lemon scones for those who are merely playing at it. The key constant is the tub of Hampton's malted vanilla waffle batter in a noun how familiar ritual guests push a plastic tab to extrude the mix into a paper cup, drizzle it over a waffle iron, then flip the handle and watch the second stick down on a digital timer. As with almost everything at Hampton, the process has been rigorously engineered. Those little paper cups of batter are what peak hotel performance looks like. Last year, Hampton Ends around the world cooked up more than two million gallons of batter, or about thirty million waffles. With all due respect, they're not great. Nor is the coffee or the orange juice, the bananas, or the convection of an egg's. What all these things are, crucially is free to lodgers. It costs a US Hampton franchisee less than five dollars per occupied room to furnish this cornucopia, but to a family of four, the perceived value is closer to fifty dollars, or roughly one third of the average cost of a nightly stay. That math has helped power Hampton D's unlikely rise to become the world's largest lodging brand, with almost three hundred and fifty thousand rooms spread across forty three countries. Hampton sold almost ninety million room nights last year, according to Bloomberg Estimates, a few million more than its closest competitor, Holiday and Express. That helped it generate nearly twelve billion dollars in room revenue, dwarfing that of the industry's luxury leaders. Hampton's story is a triumph of Wall Street deal makers, corporate taste makers, and immigrant entrepreneurs. The chain was the unsung hero in one of the most successful leveraged buyouts in history and helped make the chief executive officer of its parent company, Hilton Worldwide Holdings, a billionaire. The major US hotel companies live and die on their appeal to franchisees. They spend the money to build hotels and usually fly the flag that gets them the best return. Customer loyalty is a big part of what's made Hampton the top US brand for franchisees for sixteen years running, according to Entrepreneur magazine. Even as its fees have outpaced those of competitors, it's quietly become ubiquitous in the US, and in many places it's unambiguously the best hotel available, winning fans such as Jay Leno, who took a well publicized tumble down to Hampton adjacent Hill, and Barack Obama, who appreciates always knowing where the light switches are. Hampton has proven that when you make an investment in your guest and your people. You're able to drive a performance premium, says shrewty Gandhi Buckley, the Hilton executive who oversees the chain. The waffles are key, as is the slightly chaotic process of making them during the breakfast rush hour. There's something more dynamic about making your waffle and pouring the batter and the anticipation of it coming out hot and steamy. But launching is a copycat industry. Best Western has free waffles too, as does Wyndham's Laquina brand. Choice Hotels International, whose comfort In competes with Hampton, decorated a recent press release with the photo of the comedian Keegan Michael Key on an oversize waffled throne. In fact, Hampton and some of its competitors buy waffle mix from the same supplier. The law of diminishing differences applies to virtually every amenity the chain offers. Everyone has free Internet, now everyone has free parking, says Michael Belisario, a senior analyst at investment bank Robert W. Baird. Buckley doesn't disagree. This is a commodity product, she says. What's more, the US is increasingly saturated with meh Hotels, pushing Hilton to focus on foreign markets for future growth. That puts Buckley and her team in an unrelenting race to find better ways to greet guests, purchase bedspreads, or translate the American idea of a free hot breakfast for palettes in places as far flung as Amedabad and Gadansk. The task is even more important now, with recession warning signs making vacationers and corporate travel departments more cost conscious. Hilton cut its outlook for hotel demand in its latest quarterly earnings report on April twenty ninth, joining airlines and lodging rivals in predicting a slowdown in the event of a protracted downturn. Travelers who've been shocked by hotel prices in recent years will feel that much further removed from many lodging options. At the average Hampton Inn, on the other hand, you can get a comfortable bed on a typical night for about one hundred and twenty five dollars, though the domestic number is a bit higher. Sure, it's cookie cutter, just okay, decidedly average, but US travelers see the brand as dependable, and many other people around the world have come to view it as a cultural signifier, representing the luxury of reliability at a price they too can afford, both at home and abroad. Hampton is the reigning purveyor of American mid That title takes a surprising amount of work to defend. Hampton Inn was born as a cheaper sub chain of Holiday Inn in nineteen eighty four, a moment when US hoteliers learned to succeed by offering less for less, Marriott created Fairfield In Around the same time, Holiday Corps hired branding companies to come up with names for its new concept, but hated the results. They were too hokey, too cheap, sounding sounded like competitors' names, recalls Phil Cordell, who served as the general manager of the second ever Hampton in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and went on to run the chain for thirty years. Then, while leaving through a travel magazine, the wife of Holiday's CEO saw an ad for a new England bed and breakfast called Hampton House, which seemed to evoke the cozy feeling the new brand was going for. The idea was to focus on people's favorite amenities and ditch the rest because Bellhop's room service, sit down meals and other perks cost more than guests wanted to pay. Hilton bought Hampton Inn in nineteen ninety nine and started looking for ways to put some meat back on the bone. Some of the things it came up with feel like gimmey the idiot proof alarm clocks. The company still holds a patent on the design the white bedspreads so guests could see they were clean at a glance. But one addition was game changing. In the early aughts, Hampton and most of its competitors offered uninspiring cold breakfasts that were more afterthought than selling proposition. After surveying guests, executives decided the best way to stand out would be to serve free hot meals. They canvassed dozens of chicken farms in search of a liquefied egg product that could be scrambled in hotel microwaves and produced in sufficient quantity to supply a chain that at the time numbered more than a thousand hotels. When Hampton standardized hot breakfast, customers noticed. By the time its competitors followed suit a few years later, execs had decided to test additional options. One contender included a sausage rolled in scrambled eggs, then rolled again in pancake batter. Test crews called this good morning turducan breakfast on a stick, though they could have just called nine one one. This is where the waffles came in. Nowadays, a typical Hampton has two irons. One has the classic waffle shape divided into four slices, while the other yields four circular mini waffles. To limit food waste and help guests with portion control, the batter has been extensively tested to find the one customers like best. Lightly sweetened with a creamy aromatic hint of vanilla and a touch of buttered toast. They say similar testing is required before they'll introduce limited edition flavors. These have included pumpkin spice, red velvet, and a glitterflecked strawberry batter released in partnership with Paris Hilton, whose great grandfather founded Hampton's parent company. But the most important function of a Hampton waffle seems to be as a scaffold for ample toppings. If you don't like the whipped cream, syrup and strawberry slices, Hampton bets it'll get you with the rainbow sprinkles and caramel sauce. Everybody's like, oh, waffles are just for kids, says Buckley. It's surprise how many men in suits will pretend nobody's looking and grab their little waffle with sprinkles. The self serve aspect of the experience is also a plus. Hilton toyed with the idea of using machines that dispensed waffles with the press of a button before deciding that pour and flip made for a homeier experience. It's a weekday morning, and Buckley is at a Hampton Inn in Suites in Herndon, Virginia to explain how the chain is evolving. From the outside, the hotel presents as a typical Hampton. It's located across the way from another hotel, a spring Hill Suites, and fronted with a brick column porte cochere like an unusually nice CBS. Inside, Buckley's team has been using the property to test out room redesigns that other Hamptons are now starting to adopt, making it a good place for her to explain the brand's evolution. The hotel opened in two thousand and seven, years before it became common for Hampton franchisees to post the motto making you happy makes Us Happy on a vaguely instagrammable way just inside the front door. The Herndon Hotel went with a terser message, Enter Happy Zone. These are the kinds of details Buckley obsesses over another one. The Herndon Hotel is what's known in the business as a front loaded property, meaning it's relatively long and narrow. Partly as a result, the front desk doesn't face the main entrance head on. Going forward, Hampton will angle the desk inward so clerks don't have to turn their head to smile at guests as they walk in. Such features are heavily prescribed and handed down to franchisees with limited wiggle room. Sandy Shapery, a San Diego based developer, learned this the hard way when he began converting a historic hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii into a Hampton. Some of the old rooms had gorgeous lava rock walls, and I thought, boy, these rooms are probably worth an extra fifty dollars a night, he says of the property, which is slated to open later this year. Hilton execs had given him some leeway to depart from brand standards for the design of public spaces. On the rooms, they were unrelenting shapery wound up covering the lava rock with drywall at a cost of more than fifty thousand dollars. Buckley likes to compare Hampton to Ikea or Zara retailers that rose with the rising spending power of the middle class. We said, guests deserve more, and you know what, they want more, and they're willing to pay more. But unlike flashier hotels that spring from the soul of o tour designers to appeal to the vanity of guests who want to feel rich, or edgy or important, Hampton tends to reach decisions by market research. Its designers enlist guests to journal about their stays, then prototype rooms to physically manifest common pet peeves and private habits, with the most important features falling into one of four buckets. Lighting, storage, the bed, and what Buckley calls the bathroom experience. Getting this stuff right means balancing the demands of industrial efficiency and the flabby midsection of the travels zeitgeist. These acts of pragmatism include installing curved shower curtain rods to give guests a little more elbow room, and making those white bedspreads the brand standard. More recently, Buckley's team rounded the edges of Hampton's platform beds to save guests and housekeepers from bumping their shins. Hilton's research also showed that the average guest resembles a slovenly teenager. They leave suitcases unpacked and do most of their laptop work in bed. In Herndon designers removed the desks and took the doors off the wardrobes so guests wouldn't forget their coats. Most of Hampton's franchise contracts require owners to update their room designs periodically. Not every new idea lasts forever. The iPhone made Hampton's patented mid AUT's alarm clock obsolete. New hotels are abandoning the sliding doors Hampton started putting on bathrooms in twenty fifteen to save space, because it turned out they weren't ideally sound proofed. In designing the latest room prototype, executives dwelled on lighting. Specifically, they wanted a warm, diffused light shining in all directions. Finding the switches too has remained an obsession long past the days of the last Obama campaign. So Hampton's have night lights, among other things. A middle aged guy's got to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, says Hilton CEO Chris Nascetta. In a lot of older luxury hotels, he gripes, you don't know where the hell you are na Setta. Now, a billionaire isn't a waffle guy. I'm very gluten light, he says. What he is, though, is a believer in company culture. In Hampton's case, that means something called Hamptonality, a concept he equates with warm and caring service, the way we hire people, train people, the way they interact with a customer. He says. The seeds of the idea were planted decades before Nasceetta took charge. When Holiday Era Hampton was trying to figure out how to entice customers to stay at one for the first time. Early on, Hampton hired a Harvard Business School professor who was a fierce advocate of money back guarantees. Soon enough, Hampton was advertising such a promise on the front desks of every hotel. It created a self policing system, says Mitch Patel. The CEO of Chattanooga based Vision Hospitality Group, which owns ten Hampton's, if you didn't provide friendly service and clean rooms, guests could invoke that refund, and if you have quite a few of those refunds, it impacts the wallet. The policy helped align the interests of franchisees with the needs of guests, setting the brand up for rapid growth. Hilton was another story, founded in nineteen nineteen in Cisco, Texas. It's credited with standardizing amenities like air conditioning and ironing boards. In two thousand and seven, however, Nescetta, a career real estate investor, took over a big honking mess with bloated corporate expenses and an emaciated pipeline of hotels under development. Blackstone had just bought the company for twin tenty six billion dollars on the eve of the global financial crisis, when neither consumers nor corporations felt great about spending money to travel, Hilton still relied heavily on hotels it owned itself, a stark contrast to its larger rival, Marriott, which had pioneered the licensing centric hotel empire a decade earlier. Naceetta swung toward licensing and points, building out a loyalty program that today counts more than two hundred million members. At the same time, he sold off glitzy real estate, including the Waldorf Estoria in Manhattan, and began building up the franchise network. He licensed higher end brands such as Waldorf and Conrad to real estate developers in resort destinations and other tourist magnets, and pitched mid scale ones to franchises in smaller markets. Crucially, he spent money to woo developers during the worst of the financial crisis, even as competitors were retrenching. Hampton turned out to be the perfect vehicle for Nasceetta's strategy. The chain's early years had coincided with the ascension of entrepreneurs of Indian ancestry who'd successfully managed independent motels and were now looking to invest in better properties. Not all hotel brands were interested. They thought we were accidental hoteliers who didn't know the business, says hp Rama, who was the founding chairman of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, a trade group whose members now own an astounding sixty percent of all US hotels. Hampton embraced the cohort Rama says, they took chances on us, and we didn't disappoint them. The brand's success with those investors and others wasn't an accident. The cost of building a Hampton was materially lower than some of the other options emerging at the time, says Paul Novak, a former Marriott executive who helped launch Courtyard and Fairfield in the nineteen eighties. Hampton hit a sweet spot. That is, it offered a nice enough stay to command solid room rates, but was cheap enough to build that developers could open them and smaller markets. As the chain spread, it started gaining the economies of scale that made it easier to acquire customers. Franchisees pay about ten percent of room revenue in monthly fees to Hilton in addition to other charges, and then they keep what's left over minus their expenses. Starting from scratch is no small investment. On the low end. An eighty nine room Hampton inn costs fifteen million dollars to build in the US, not including the price of the land, but the returns are remarkable. The average Hampton location outperformed competitors by twenty one percent in twenty twenty four. There are about fifteen hundred Hampton franchisees in the US, and they're willing to go to great lengths to stay in the family. Bob Hitchman, who's wheeling West Virginia location Hilton has repeatedly ranked among the world's top Hamptons, says he'll need to spend millions of dollars to update his bathrooms at some point in the next five years. Still, he says it's worth it. People don't travel to go to Bob's home hotel. He says, you need a name that's recognized. The property opened in nineteen eighty nine, next door to a Howard Johnson's hotel Hitchman's family had developed in nineteen fifty eight. Hitchman's father died a month after the earlier property opened. Hitchman was eight. Now, he says he runs his Hampton as an homage. I tell people my daddy and I are here to take care of you. Hitchman's other trick is that he pays employees well with strong bonuses if the hotel scores high on customer satisfaction surveys. Hampton opened its first hotel outside the US on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls in nineteen ninety three, but Niscetta's tenure has also shown the brand starting to compete for a slice of the global middle class. He says Hampton can triple its footprint to nine thousand hotels in the next twenty years by focusing on those travelers. But how do you translate a hotel concept whose primary appeals off ramp locations and unlimited waffles seem uniquely American. Nascetta argues that Hampton's appeal is universal. When countries with rising standards of living build highways and airports, that helps catalyze international tourism, but the bigger uptick they see is in domestic travel. Hampton's reliability translates to middle class travelers of all stripes, he says, even if the formula may require local adjustments. In the UK, for instance, travelers expect to order a pint at their hotel, so the country's forty five Hamptons have a bar sception area next to the front desk. Other markets are putting their own spin on American mid In March, Hilton announced a plan to open seventy five Hamptons in India in the coming years, and the team is experimenting with Masala Chai waffles and waffle shaped doses in China, where there are already more than four hundred Hampton locations. The brand has developed the panda as its mascot. Every time I go into a Hampton in China, Nescetta says, there's a big guy dressed up as Zapanda. American hotels have been seeing a scary drop in tourism from other countries this year, as the Trump administration does its best to make visits on appealing. International arrivals to US airports fell during the first three months of the year. Among Americans, the so called Department of Government Efficiency has nibbled away at federal government travel. Long a dependable source of bookings, Travel is pretty resilient, says Baird's Belisario, until it's not. At the end of April, Hilton cut its estimates for twenty twenty five hotel demand, predicting a year of flat growth at the low end of its guidance range. There's some evidence that the travel vibe is brightening as the market's tariff terror gives way to the Tuaco trade. The idea that Trump always chickens out when it comes to imposing levees, but hotels aren't out of the woods. At a big industry conference in Manhattan in June, researcher co Star Group slashed its growth forecast for the year by nearly half. The tenor of the conference was cautious optimism, says Jan Freytag, co Star's national director of Hospitality Analytics. The underlying data is murky. The franchise model insulates Hilton somewhat from the risk of a Cell America trade in China and elsewhere. Most Hamptons are owned by local investors. Still good enough, isn't a lifetime appointment? Howard Johnson and Holiday Inn used to look dominant too. Although Hampton has the edge on total rooms, Holiday in Express still has more locations. Nescetta says the pressure to keep guests in franchises happy remains high. If we don't deliver those things, he says, then the machine stops. Hamptonality may come and go, but waffles are forever. During a four night stay at the El Segundo Hampton, the night crew goes to pains to insure a smooth check in, confirming guests have linked their loyalty account to the reservation so they can access free Wi Fi and searching a three ring binder for applicable corporate discounts. A fifth floor room is going for one hundred and seventy five dollars. Staff respond quickly to reattach a loose toilet seat, but a dead light bulb over the bathroom vanity goes unreplaced, and there's nothing the desk workers can do but apologize when a gas leak leaves the property without hot water. One morning, Bloomberg Business Week opted not to test the money back guarantee. The breakfast, on the other hand, is as close to flawless as a Hampton Inn can get. In addition to the classic malted vanilla, the hotel rotates flavored batters throughout the week, keeping to the mandate that franchisees furnish a second variety each morning. In lieu of Paris Hilton's glitter Flecked formula, it serves older formulations, including a banana bread waffle that's best enjoyed with a healthy dollop of syrup. The waffle doesn't have much flavor to speak of. It is, however, undeniably a bargain

American mid Hampton Inn has become the nation's most powerful hotel chain and a global export by being rigorously Okay by Patrick Clark read aloud by Mark Leedorf. Shortly before six a m. Early risers stalk the cafeteria at the Hampton Inn and Suites in El Segundo, California, waiting for the breakfast buffet to open at the appointed hour. Proteins and starches spin out in combinations that change slightly but perceptibly from day to day. On a Tuesday in March, its egg white fritatas Yukon gold potatoes and maple sausage. Soon after its scrambled eggs, red potatoes and hardwood smoked bacon. There are yogurts and hand fruit scattered about for the truly health conscious, and a drawer of bite sized lemon scones for those who are merely playing at it. The key constant is the tub of Hampton's malted vanilla waffle batter in a noun how familiar ritual guests push a plastic tab to extrude the mix into a paper cup, drizzle it over a waffle iron, then flip the handle and watch the second stick down on a digital timer. As with almost everything at Hampton, the process has been rigorously engineered. Those little paper cups of batter are what peak hotel performance looks like. Last year, Hampton Ends around the world cooked up more than two million gallons of batter, or about thirty million waffles. With all due respect, they're not great. Nor is the coffee or the orange juice, the bananas, or the convection of an egg's. What all these things are, crucially is free to lodgers. It costs a US Hampton franchisee less than five dollars per occupied room to furnish this cornucopia, but to a family of four, the perceived value is closer to fifty dollars, or roughly one third of the average cost of a nightly stay. That math has helped power Hampton D's unlikely rise to become the world's largest lodging brand, with almost three hundred and fifty thousand rooms spread across forty three countries. Hampton sold almost ninety million room nights last year, according to Bloomberg Estimates, a few million more than its closest competitor, Holiday and Express. That helped it generate nearly twelve billion dollars in room revenue, dwarfing that of the industry's luxury leaders. Hampton's story is a triumph of Wall Street deal makers, corporate taste makers, and immigrant entrepreneurs. The chain was the unsung hero in one of the most successful leveraged buyouts in history and helped make the chief executive officer of its parent company, Hilton Worldwide Holdings, a billionaire. The major US hotel companies live and die on their appeal to franchisees. They spend the money to build hotels and usually fly the flag that gets them the best return. Customer loyalty is a big part of what's made Hampton the top US brand for franchisees for sixteen years running, according to Entrepreneur magazine. Even as its fees have outpaced those of competitors, it's quietly become ubiquitous in the US, and in many places it's unambiguously the best hotel available, winning fans such as Jay Leno, who took a well publicized tumble down to Hampton adjacent Hill, and Barack Obama, who appreciates always knowing where the light switches are. Hampton has proven that when you make an investment in your guest and your people. You're able to drive a performance premium, says shrewty Gandhi Buckley, the Hilton executive who oversees the chain. The waffles are key, as is the slightly chaotic process of making them during the breakfast rush hour. There's something more dynamic about making your waffle and pouring the batter and the anticipation of it coming out hot and steamy. But launching is a copycat industry. Best Western has free waffles too, as does Wyndham's Laquina brand. Choice Hotels International, whose comfort In competes with Hampton, decorated a recent press release with the photo of the comedian Keegan Michael Key on an oversize waffled throne. In fact, Hampton and some of its competitors buy waffle mix from the same supplier. The law of diminishing differences applies to virtually every amenity the chain offers. Everyone has free Internet, now everyone has free parking, says Michael Belisario, a senior analyst at investment bank Robert W. Baird. Buckley doesn't disagree. This is a commodity product, she says. What's more, the US is increasingly saturated with meh Hotels, pushing Hilton to focus on foreign markets for future growth. That puts Buckley and her team in an unrelenting race to find better ways to greet guests, purchase bedspreads, or translate the American idea of a free hot breakfast for palettes in places as far flung as Amedabad and Gadansk. The task is even more important now, with recession warning signs making vacationers and corporate travel departments more cost conscious. Hilton cut its outlook for hotel demand in its latest quarterly earnings report on April twenty ninth, joining airlines and lodging rivals in predicting a slowdown in the event of a protracted downturn. Travelers who've been shocked by hotel prices in recent years will feel that much further removed from many lodging options. At the average Hampton Inn, on the other hand, you can get a comfortable bed on a typical night for about one hundred and twenty five dollars, though the domestic number is a bit higher. Sure, it's cookie cutter, just okay, decidedly average, but US travelers see the brand as dependable, and many other people around the world have come to view it as a cultural signifier, representing the luxury of reliability at a price they too can afford, both at home and abroad. Hampton is the reigning purveyor of American mid That title takes a surprising amount of work to defend. Hampton Inn was born as a cheaper sub chain of Holiday Inn in nineteen eighty four, a moment when US hoteliers learned to succeed by offering less for less, Marriott created Fairfield In Around the same time, Holiday Corps hired branding companies to come up with names for its new concept, but hated the results. They were too hokey, too cheap, sounding sounded like competitors' names, recalls Phil Cordell, who served as the general manager of the second ever Hampton in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and went on to run the chain for thirty years. Then, while leaving through a travel magazine, the wife of Holiday's CEO saw an ad for a new England bed and breakfast called Hampton House, which seemed to evoke the cozy feeling the new brand was going for. The idea was to focus on people's favorite amenities and ditch the rest because Bellhop's room service, sit down meals and other perks cost more than guests wanted to pay. Hilton bought Hampton Inn in nineteen ninety nine and started looking for ways to put some meat back on the bone. Some of the things it came up with feel like gimmey the idiot proof alarm clocks. The company still holds a patent on the design the white bedspreads so guests could see they were clean at a glance. But one addition was game changing. In the early aughts, Hampton and most of its competitors offered uninspiring cold breakfasts that were more afterthought than selling proposition. After surveying guests, executives decided the best way to stand out would be to serve free hot meals. They canvassed dozens of chicken farms in search of a liquefied egg product that could be scrambled in hotel microwaves and produced in sufficient quantity to supply a chain that at the time numbered more than a thousand hotels. When Hampton standardized hot breakfast, customers noticed. By the time its competitors followed suit a few years later, execs had decided to test additional options. One contender included a sausage rolled in scrambled eggs, then rolled again in pancake batter. Test crews called this good morning turducan breakfast on a stick, though they could have just called nine one one. This is where the waffles came in. Nowadays, a typical Hampton has two irons. One has the classic waffle shape divided into four slices, while the other yields four circular mini waffles. To limit food waste and help guests with portion control, the batter has been extensively tested to find the one customers like best. Lightly sweetened with a creamy aromatic hint of vanilla and a touch of buttered toast. They say similar testing is required before they'll introduce limited edition flavors. These have included pumpkin spice, red velvet, and a glitterflecked strawberry batter released in partnership with Paris Hilton, whose great grandfather founded Hampton's parent company. But the most important function of a Hampton waffle seems to be as a scaffold for ample toppings. If you don't like the whipped cream, syrup and strawberry slices, Hampton bets it'll get you with the rainbow sprinkles and caramel sauce. Everybody's like, oh, waffles are just for kids, says Buckley. It's surprise how many men in suits will pretend nobody's looking and grab their little waffle with sprinkles. The self serve aspect of the experience is also a plus. Hilton toyed with the idea of using machines that dispensed waffles with the press of a button before deciding that pour and flip made for a homeier experience. It's a weekday morning, and Buckley is at a Hampton Inn in Suites in Herndon, Virginia to explain how the chain is evolving. From the outside, the hotel presents as a typical Hampton. It's located across the way from another hotel, a spring Hill Suites, and fronted with a brick column porte cochere like an unusually nice CBS. Inside, Buckley's team has been using the property to test out room redesigns that other Hamptons are now starting to adopt, making it a good place for her to explain the brand's evolution. The hotel opened in two thousand and seven, years before it became common for Hampton franchisees to post the motto making you happy makes Us Happy on a vaguely instagrammable way just inside the front door. The Herndon Hotel went with a terser message, Enter Happy Zone. These are the kinds of details Buckley obsesses over another one. The Herndon Hotel is what's known in the business as a front loaded property, meaning it's relatively long and narrow. Partly as a result, the front desk doesn't face the main entrance head on. Going forward, Hampton will angle the desk inward so clerks don't have to turn their head to smile at guests as they walk in. Such features are heavily prescribed and handed down to franchisees with limited wiggle room. Sandy Shapery, a San Diego based developer, learned this the hard way when he began converting a historic hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii into a Hampton. Some of the old rooms had gorgeous lava rock walls, and I thought, boy, these rooms are probably worth an extra fifty dollars a night, he says of the property, which is slated to open later this year. Hilton execs had given him some leeway to depart from brand standards for the design of public spaces. On the rooms, they were unrelenting shapery wound up covering the lava rock with drywall at a cost of more than fifty thousand dollars. Buckley likes to compare Hampton to Ikea or Zara retailers that rose with the rising spending power of the middle class. We said, guests deserve more, and you know what, they want more, and they're willing to pay more. But unlike flashier hotels that spring from the soul of o tour designers to appeal to the vanity of guests who want to feel rich, or edgy or important, Hampton tends to reach decisions by market research. Its designers enlist guests to journal about their stays, then prototype rooms to physically manifest common pet peeves and private habits, with the most important features falling into one of four buckets. Lighting, storage, the bed, and what Buckley calls the bathroom experience. Getting this stuff right means balancing the demands of industrial efficiency and the flabby midsection of the travels zeitgeist. These acts of pragmatism include installing curved shower curtain rods to give guests a little more elbow room, and making those white bedspreads the brand standard. More recently, Buckley's team rounded the edges of Hampton's platform beds to save guests and housekeepers from bumping their shins. Hilton's research also showed that the average guest resembles a slovenly teenager. They leave suitcases unpacked and do most of their laptop work in bed. In Herndon designers removed the desks and took the doors off the wardrobes so guests wouldn't forget their coats. Most of Hampton's franchise contracts require owners to update their room designs periodically. Not every new idea lasts forever. The iPhone made Hampton's patented mid AUT's alarm clock obsolete. New hotels are abandoning the sliding doors Hampton started putting on bathrooms in twenty fifteen to save space, because it turned out they weren't ideally sound proofed. In designing the latest room prototype, executives dwelled on lighting. Specifically, they wanted a warm, diffused light shining in all directions. Finding the switches too has remained an obsession long past the days of the last Obama campaign. So Hampton's have night lights, among other things. A middle aged guy's got to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, says Hilton CEO Chris Nascetta. In a lot of older luxury hotels, he gripes, you don't know where the hell you are na Setta. Now, a billionaire isn't a waffle guy. I'm very gluten light, he says. What he is, though, is a believer in company culture. In Hampton's case, that means something called Hamptonality, a concept he equates with warm and caring service, the way we hire people, train people, the way they interact with a customer. He says. The seeds of the idea were planted decades before Nasceetta took charge. When Holiday Era Hampton was trying to figure out how to entice customers to stay at one for the first time. Early on, Hampton hired a Harvard Business School professor who was a fierce advocate of money back guarantees. Soon enough, Hampton was advertising such a promise on the front desks of every hotel. It created a self policing system, says Mitch Patel. The CEO of Chattanooga based Vision Hospitality Group, which owns ten Hampton's, if you didn't provide friendly service and clean rooms, guests could invoke that refund, and if you have quite a few of those refunds, it impacts the wallet. The policy helped align the interests of franchisees with the needs of guests, setting the brand up for rapid growth. Hilton was another story, founded in nineteen nineteen in Cisco, Texas. It's credited with standardizing amenities like air conditioning and ironing boards. In two thousand and seven, however, Nescetta, a career real estate investor, took over a big honking mess with bloated corporate expenses and an emaciated pipeline of hotels under development. Blackstone had just bought the company for twin tenty six billion dollars on the eve of the global financial crisis, when neither consumers nor corporations felt great about spending money to travel, Hilton still relied heavily on hotels it owned itself, a stark contrast to its larger rival, Marriott, which had pioneered the licensing centric hotel empire a decade earlier. Naceetta swung toward licensing and points, building out a loyalty program that today counts more than two hundred million members. At the same time, he sold off glitzy real estate, including the Waldorf Estoria in Manhattan, and began building up the franchise network. He licensed higher end brands such as Waldorf and Conrad to real estate developers in resort destinations and other tourist magnets, and pitched mid scale ones to franchises in smaller markets. Crucially, he spent money to woo developers during the worst of the financial crisis, even as competitors were retrenching. Hampton turned out to be the perfect vehicle for Nasceetta's strategy. The chain's early years had coincided with the ascension of entrepreneurs of Indian ancestry who'd successfully managed independent motels and were now looking to invest in better properties. Not all hotel brands were interested. They thought we were accidental hoteliers who didn't know the business, says hp Rama, who was the founding chairman of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, a trade group whose members now own an astounding sixty percent of all US hotels. Hampton embraced the cohort Rama says, they took chances on us, and we didn't disappoint them. The brand's success with those investors and others wasn't an accident. The cost of building a Hampton was materially lower than some of the other options emerging at the time, says Paul Novak, a former Marriott executive who helped launch Courtyard and Fairfield in the nineteen eighties. Hampton hit a sweet spot. That is, it offered a nice enough stay to command solid room rates, but was cheap enough to build that developers could open them and smaller markets. As the chain spread, it started gaining the economies of scale that made it easier to acquire customers. Franchisees pay about ten percent of room revenue in monthly fees to Hilton in addition to other charges, and then they keep what's left over minus their expenses. Starting from scratch is no small investment. On the low end. An eighty nine room Hampton inn costs fifteen million dollars to build in the US, not including the price of the land, but the returns are remarkable. The average Hampton location outperformed competitors by twenty one percent in twenty twenty four. There are about fifteen hundred Hampton franchisees in the US, and they're willing to go to great lengths to stay in the family. Bob Hitchman, who's wheeling West Virginia location Hilton has repeatedly ranked among the world's top Hamptons, says he'll need to spend millions of dollars to update his bathrooms at some point in the next five years. Still, he says it's worth it. People don't travel to go to Bob's home hotel. He says, you need a name that's recognized. The property opened in nineteen eighty nine, next door to a Howard Johnson's hotel Hitchman's family had developed in nineteen fifty eight. Hitchman's father died a month after the earlier property opened. Hitchman was eight. Now, he says he runs his Hampton as an homage. I tell people my daddy and I are here to take care of you. Hitchman's other trick is that he pays employees well with strong bonuses if the hotel scores high on customer satisfaction surveys. Hampton opened its first hotel outside the US on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls in nineteen ninety three, but Niscetta's tenure has also shown the brand starting to compete for a slice of the global middle class. He says Hampton can triple its footprint to nine thousand hotels in the next twenty years by focusing on those travelers. But how do you translate a hotel concept whose primary appeals off ramp locations and unlimited waffles seem uniquely American. Nascetta argues that Hampton's appeal is universal. When countries with rising standards of living build highways and airports, that helps catalyze international tourism, but the bigger uptick they see is in domestic travel. Hampton's reliability translates to middle class travelers of all stripes, he says, even if the formula may require local adjustments. In the UK, for instance, travelers expect to order a pint at their hotel, so the country's forty five Hamptons have a bar sception area next to the front desk. Other markets are putting their own spin on American mid In March, Hilton announced a plan to open seventy five Hamptons in India in the coming years, and the team is experimenting with Masala Chai waffles and waffle shaped doses in China, where there are already more than four hundred Hampton locations. The brand has developed the panda as its mascot. Every time I go into a Hampton in China, Nescetta says, there's a big guy dressed up as Zapanda. American hotels have been seeing a scary drop in tourism from other countries this year, as the Trump administration does its best to make visits on appealing. International arrivals to US airports fell during the first three months of the year. Among Americans, the so called Department of Government Efficiency has nibbled away at federal government travel. Long a dependable source of bookings, Travel is pretty resilient, says Baird's Belisario, until it's not. At the end of April, Hilton cut its estimates for twenty twenty five hotel demand, predicting a year of flat growth at the low end of its guidance range. There's some evidence that the travel vibe is brightening as the market's tariff terror gives way to the Tuaco trade. The idea that Trump always chickens out when it comes to imposing levees, but hotels aren't out of the woods. At a big industry conference in Manhattan in June, researcher co Star Group slashed its growth forecast for the year by nearly half. The tenor of the conference was cautious optimism, says Jan Freytag, co Star's national director of Hospitality Analytics. The underlying data is murky. The franchise model insulates Hilton somewhat from the risk of a Cell America trade in China and elsewhere. Most Hamptons are owned by local investors. Still good enough, isn't a lifetime appointment? Howard Johnson and Holiday Inn used to look dominant too. Although Hampton has the edge on total rooms, Holiday in Express still has more locations. Nescetta says the pressure to keep guests in franchises happy remains high. If we don't deliver those things, he says, then the machine stops. Hamptonality may come and go, but waffles are forever. During a four night stay at the El Segundo Hampton, the night crew goes to pains to insure a smooth check in, confirming guests have linked their loyalty account to the reservation so they can access free Wi Fi and searching a three ring binder for applicable corporate discounts. A fifth floor room is going for one hundred and seventy five dollars. Staff respond quickly to reattach a loose toilet seat, but a dead light bulb over the bathroom vanity goes unreplaced, and there's nothing the desk workers can do but apologize when a gas leak leaves the property without hot water. One morning, Bloomberg Business Week opted not to test the money back guarantee. The breakfast, on the other hand, is as close to flawless as a Hampton Inn can get. In addition to the classic malted vanilla, the hotel rotates flavored batters throughout the week, keeping to the mandate that franchisees furnish a second variety each morning. In lieu of Paris Hilton's glitter Flecked formula, it serves older formulations, including a banana bread waffle that's best enjoyed with a healthy dollop of syrup. The waffle doesn't have much flavor to speak of. It is, however, undeniably a bargain