Holiday Inn on its way out

The Holiday Inn Costa Mesa will no longer be a Holiday Inn, starting Dec. 1. The owner of the hotel, Newport Beach-based Hanford Hotels Inc., is breaking with the Holiday Inn franchise and renaming the 225-room hotel “The Hotel Hanford” in an effort to attract a higher class of customers.

To most travelers, the name Holiday Inn is synonymous with standardized, low-cost accommodations, according to Hanford’s regional director of sales and marketing, Dean Yamashita, and that’s not a reputation the Costa Mesa hotel wants to keep.

About 80% of the hotel’s current customers are business travelers, but the hotel hopes to get some of the senior executives and other clients who are willing to pay higher rates in exchange for more amenities and a boutique hotel feel.

Several competitors within a one-block radius of the Holiday Inn already court the high-end business and travel market, including the Westin South Coast Plaza, the Wyndham Orange County and the Hilton Orange County.

“We want to create a very personalized type of hotel. We have some major competitors, but we want to be the unique hotel in the area,” said Hanford President and Chief Executive Donald Sodaro.

Since it was built in 1973, the location, which is next to South Coast Plaza on Bristol Street, has been a Holiday Inn.

Concurrent with leaving the Holiday Inn chain, Hanford plans to spend $7 million to redesign and renovate the hotel. Sodaro said the changes will be so extensive that a past visitor might not even recognize it.

The trendy W Hotel brand will serve as a model for the redesign, Yamashita said.

Along with its Costa Mesa hotel, Hanford owns two other hotels in Orange County and two in Northern California that are all part of larger chains La Quinta and Marriott.