Dateline 1974: Richard Nixon resigns from the presidency in disgrace; Mel Brooks releases two comedy classics with ”Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles”; Muhammad Ali and George Forman fight in The Rumble in the Jungle; and Henry Aaron breaks the all-time home run record.
That same year, in Aberdeen, SD, the first location of economy hotel brand Super 8 was opened by Ron Rivett and Dennis Brown. That was the start of a brand that would grow to about 2,800 locations globally in 49 states and nine countries.
Fifty years later, that first hotel—and the Super 8 brand itself—is still thriving, and Hotel Business sat down with Mike Mueller, president, Super 8, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, and Cameron Prescott, the grandson of Rivett and current owner of that first property, to talk about the history and future of the iconic brand.
“I am super proud to have been part of this brand as it came up on its 50th anniversary,” said Mueller, who is the brand’s eighth president. “So few brands make it. I saw a Harvard Business School study that said that 30,000 new products are launched every single year and 95% of them fail. So, for a brand to survive—and thrive for more than 50 years—it has something really special about it.”
Mueller said he knew Rivett, who died last year, very well. “The thing that impressed me most about him is he stayed involved with the brand long after he sold it to HFS, which became Cendant, which then became Wyndham,” Mueller said. “He was so involved with the brand. While this was his last Super 8, he promised me that he would never sell this property. It will always be in the family.”
“As long as there is any family left, it will be ours,” said Prescott, who started at the hotel in a management position and gained an ownership stake in 2022.
Mueller believes that Super 8 is the only brand that has its first-ever built hotel still in the system. That will continue as the family renewed its franchise agreement for 20 years in 2018.
When the Super 8 in Aberdeen, SD, opened in 1974, the room rate was $8.88.
The history
The idea for what would become Super 8 came about two years before the first hotel opened. In 1972, Brown, who owned two hotels, had the idea for a hotel for people who travel to work.
“They had nowhere consistent to stay,” said Mueller. “It was either Holiday Inns, which were too expensive for them, or mom-and-pops where they had no idea what they were going to get. They saw a market for a consistent, economy-minded customer who just needed a clean, friendly and affordable place to stay. There was nothing like that in the upper Midwest.”
Brown tried to form an association of independent motels that would take on quality standards that they established. “Eight hotels joined this association, and he called it the Super 8 Association,” said Mueller. “After a year or so, it was defunct, but the Super 8 name stuck.”
Brown then approached Rivett with the idea to create the brand. When Rivett first entered the hotel business, he had no experience in hospitality, according to his grandson. “He was a construction guy,” he said. “He could build and create anything.”
Prescott said his grandfather had always been a hard worker. “He had a paper route when he was eight, worked as a janitor at a bowling alley and worked in a bank and was eventually the manager of the loan and trust department,” he said. “Once he figured that out, everything fell together, and Dennis came to him with the idea for Super 8.”
There is some folklore about the forming of the brand, but the story goes that the design for the first one was drawn out in a local bar.
“It was drawn on a napkin without construction plans,” said Mueller. “Ron said, ‘I can roughly do it this way. I have a parcel of land. I think this should be the configuration.’”
From the beginning, the brand was an essential part of the community.
“He used all the local vendors and family members,” he said. “The community got to participate in the introduction and evolution of the brand. He knew a stucco guy in the family, so he put stucco on the outside of the building.”
When the first hotel opened in September 1974, the rate was $8.88 a night, which, interestingly enough, didn’t have anything to do with the name of the brand, according to Prescott. “When he calculated the cost and profits and what he needed to charge per room, $8 was the cost and 88 cents was their profit per night.” That’s a profit of about $5.61 in 2024 terms.
Super 8 by Wyndham Chester East, the brand’s first hotel in the U.K.
Consistency is key
Offering consistency across all of the brand’s hotels was key from the beginning.
“Travelers would know they could travel and know exactly what they were going to get,” he said. “The standards were the same. They would feel like it was home.”
Mueller said that was a major innovation at the time, adding, “Doing it that way allowed that traveling guest to say, ‘Where’s the next Super 8?’ They would call down to the next one to see if they had a room. They knew it was going to be $8.88, clean and friendly.”
That consistent, affordable stay was just one of several innovations that Super 8 would introduce over its history.
Another innovation for the brand, according to Mueller, was the first national reservation system, The Super Line.
“It was a national toll-free number, and there was one lady who sat in the office in Aberdeen, and she had a turntable for each of the hotels,” he said. “She would spin it to get to the next hotel, and she would take the customer’s information, write it down, hang up with the customer and call the hotel to see if they had a room. She would then call the customer back to tell them they had a reservation. That was super innovative.”
After the first one opened, three more were built. The first franchised location opened in Gillette, WY, in 1975.
One of the locations built in Aberdeen became a testing ground for new innovations. “Each room was wired on a different electrical meter so they could test things like the new PTAC units that came out,” said Mueller. “They saw how energy efficient the units actually were and not what the manufacturer told them. That was how they were able to keep the owners’ costs down.”
In 1977, the brand created the VIP Club, one of the first hospitality loyalty programs for economy hotels. It grew to several million members.
A new owner
In 1993, Rivett sold the company, which had grown to almost 1,000 hotels, to what eventually would become Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. “He told me last year that when he decided to sell, it was growing like crazy and getting too big to manage,” said Mueller. “For a smalltown boy from Aberdeen, SD, to run a brand that was getting international attention, it was getting too much. He knew he had to partner with a company that would have the scale to make it work.”
Rivett was courted by several different companies. “He settled on Hospitality Franchise Systems (HFS) at the time,” he said. “He told me it was because of the executives there who came out to meet him, treated him like he was going to be a partner in this and guaranteed that they were going to treat the owners like family. They were also going to maintain a presence in Aberdeen as long as it was viable.”
In fact, the company still maintained the call center in the city up until a few years ago. “The only reason we stopped was because it was hard to get labor,” said Mueller. “The economy in the town had changed. Ron said that we had far exceeded his expectations for what we would do to keep the continuity of the community.”
The company now has locations in nine countries throughout the globe, including China [Fun fact: 8 is a lucky number in China].
“We have grown exponentially as a brand in places like China,” he added. “There are almost 1,100 Super 8s there, compared to about 1,500 in North America. Prior to COVID-19, they were opening a new Super 8 in China every three days.”
Markets like China, India and Brazil are “great” markets for the company, according to the brand president. “They have emerging middle classes where people are getting their first automobile and getting out on the road. What they need is a clean, friendly and affordable place to stop while they fulfill their bucket-list travel.”
Mueller said that all Super 8 hotels are basically the same. “If you are going to the Grand Canyon, you want to spend time at the Grand Canyon, not your hotel room,” he said. “We are everywhere you want to be on the road. That’s been the success model of this.”
Part of the culture of the brand that Rivett created is to treat people well. “The way you treat people is what is going to bring them back,” he said. “We have a great new room design—that’s nice. People expect your room to be nice. We give them a little bit more than expected here. But what’s really important is this culture of treating people like you want them there. It is so rare now in hospitality.”
That is exemplified when guests check in and check out. “When someone checks in we say, ‘Have a super stay,’” Mueller added. “When they check out, we tell them, ‘Have a super day.’ It just reminds them where they are. It gives them a sense of place and reminds them that this isn’t just another brand. This is part of a community.”
The guest treatment, Mueller said, is one of many ways the brand is run the same way that Rivett did. That includes an owner-first mentality.
“How do we make sure they are profitable?” said Mueller. “We cannot make money if they don’t make money first. How do we create sensible standards that aren’t wasting money on things that guests don’t care about?”
He continued, “We never make decisions from New Jersey [where Wyndham is headquartered]. We come out and meet our owners and hear their stories. We learn what they care about, what their pain points are and what we can do to help them reduce costs and bring more guests in.”
The brand has a franchise advisory council that is, unsurprisingly, made up of eight members.
Community remains an important part of the Super 8 brand ethos. “Many times, Super 8 is the only business in some small towns,” said Mueller. “It’s the only reliable place to stay for 100 miles. It’s so important to that community.”
He also said it is important to cultural communities. “The Asian-American community has been extremely successful with a brand like Super 8 because it is easy to operate,” said Mueller. “It’s not full-service. We don’t require pools and a lot of other amenities.”
Mueller offered a quote from Bhupen Patel, a Super 8 owner in Des Moines, IA: “I started with a Super 8 and kept it, but I went off and built other hotels—midscale, Marriotts, Hiltons—but I always kept my Super 8 because I knew it was always going to make me money. The other ones were to impress all of my friends, but the Super 8 was to impress my banker. I always intended to keep it because it was my retirement strategy.”
The Innov8te 2.0 guestroom will feature some upgrades to the original Innov8te prototype.
Innov8te 2.0
While the brand is celebrating 50 years and looking back on its history, it is also keeping things fresh and looking toward the future. The company is introducing Innov8te 2.0, the brand’s next phase of its design program.
The original Innov8te program was launched in the early 2000s to ensure that all hotels in the chain had the same design standards. “It was intended to deal with what all economy brands were suffering from, which was incredible growth but inconsistent delivery when you get that big,” said Mueller. “We had to work on the guestroom experience.”
He continued, “With our scale at Wyndham, we felt that we should embark upon a strategy to try to create a consistent guestroom experience.”
The brands that were early adopters of the original innov8te program saw a significant performance increase. “We saw almost five points of RevPAR index improvement for those doing the renovations,” said Mueller. “We also saw a 12-basis-point improvement in overall social reviews.”
While the first phase of the program is 100% complete, the brand started hearing from owners who asked what was next, which led to Innov8te 2.0. “There’s a lot of aesthetic changes, things like triple sheeting, clean and white,” he said. “COVID-19 brought a lot of focus on cleanliness. So, when people see white sheets, they can tell whether it’s clean or not visually.”
Owners also asked for other drape options. “Traditional drape options are expensive, they can be clunky and fall of the wall,” said Mueller.
The new program isn’t a departure from the original, according to Mueller, because “we said we would never waste our owners’ money.” He added, “We wanted to give those going under a renovation or coming into the system a contemporary option.”
The future
One of the focuses for the brand as they look toward the future is attracting the younger traveler. “It is the crown jewel for everyone,” said Mueller. “We’re watching the evolution and what they care about and what it important to them.”
They can’t live without their technology. “Everything that we think about has to be technology-focused,” he said. “We know rock-solid WiFi is a must for today and the foreseeable future. People often say they would forego a hot shower if they had to choose between that and good WiFi.”
He said they are never going to watch the traditional television set. “They bring everything that they are interested in on their phones,” said Mueller. “We have to provide the technology that allows them to treat our hotels almost like they are at their own home. They have to have at least as good an experience with their technology as they do at home. It is critical for the brand to have its owners invest in upgraded WiFi capabilities.”
Mueller also feels the brand is ripe for further global expansion. “We opened our 10th Super 8 in Germany last year,” he said. “We opened our second in the U.K. this year.”
