Hotel Indigo is about to turn 10 years old, and Mary Winslow, brand management director, for Hotel Indigo in the Americas, is excited to discuss the brand s evolution and growth.

　　Hotel Indigo is about to turn 10 years old, and no one is more ready to celebrate than Mary Winslow. Winslow, director, brand management, for Hotel Indigo in the Americas, is excited about how the IHG brand has grown to include 52 upscale or upper-upscale properties worldwide, all with a unique “neighborhood story” to tell. She also has high hopes for the brand’s ongoing expansion as well as new brand initiatives such as Interactive Media Displays currently debuting in all Hotel Indigo properties. Winslow discussed all this and more with us during the 2013 IHG Investors & Leadership Conference in Las Vegas earlier.

　　How would you assess the brand as it nears turning 10? How has the brand’s promise and identity evolved and stayed the same?

　　Mary Winslow: It has been quite a journey. The brand was founded in 2004, and at that time branded boutique hotels were not a known entity. At the time IHG was looking for areas of opportunity to grow, and what it saw was this niche of an opportunity within the midscale segment of non-prototypical, non-cookie-cutter hotels — something very different from Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express, to be honest.

　　So the Hotel Indigo brand was born really as a midscale alternative to Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express. What happened as the brand launched and started to grow is customers really jumped on this. They were looking for something that was different, whether it was a business traveler or a leisure traveler.

　　The great thing for us was it helped pull the brand forward, and it actually pulled it from midscale into upscale. It was really customer-led. So by 2008, when we looked at the brand and how it had positioned itself, really, we saw an opportunity to do a little bit of a pivot. We stayed very true to the core of the brand, the key hallmarks remained the same, but we grew up a little bit.

　　That’s really when the brand started to grow tremendously. When we publicly repositioned the brand in 2009 is when we grew outside of the Americas. That was the stepping stone for growth in this branded, boutique, upscale segment, and it has just been gangbusters ever since.

　　So many hotels are focusing on telling an authentic local story today. Was Hotel Indigo able to foresee how relevant its positioning would become?

　　Winslow: I’m flattered that everyone is copying us, but this is what we have been doing. What we saw when we researched the brand, even before it evolved into upscale, we knew that travelers wanted something different. They needed their stay to be more of an experience. So even though the original Hotel Indigos didn’t have “neighborhood stories,” they had a brand story. It was something different already then. The great thing is when it organically evolved, it allowed each hotel to tell its own story.

　　Now there are simply more competitors seeing the opportunity within this space. The great opportunity for Hotel Indigo is we’ve been doing this for 10 years — this is a core part of our DNA, the essence of the brand. We certainly continue to enhance that — a lot of other people are starting to create it. Can they be as successful? Some absolutely will be, but I love the fact that we’ve grown from within to get there so you really get that genuine component, and it doesn’t feel like a forced thing.

　　Is it a tough balancing act sometimes to marry each hotel’s uniqueness with the brand’s standards?

　　Winslow: It’s a balance, but it really doesn’t conflict. On the one hand, you have the brand. With the brand you get the safety, the reassurance of a powerhouse brand. You feel confident in the reservations system. You feel confident in the world’s largest loyalty program. You feel confident in the technology. You feel safe and secure.

　　Then you have boutique — this is where our hotels come to life. It is actually a brand standard that every hotel has a neighborhood story — that plays into both sides. While everyone has to have it, the neighborhood story for the new hotel in downtown Chicago on Michigan Avenue will be radically different than that for the Hotel Indigo in Naperville. Every hotel has hard-surface flooring; that’s a standard. But for the new hotel in Chicago, we’re going to use the building’s original flooring; the Hotel Indigo in Naperville, which will be new-build, might have porcelain tile. While there are standards and consistency, with our brand you have the flexibility to articulate things differently in each hotel.