Marriott’s Delta Hotels Pulls The Plug On This Multi-Year Rebranding Project

by joeheg

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.

a sign from a building

a close up of a sign

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.

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary

2 comments

ar December 17, 2020 - 10:02 pm

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.

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joeheg December 18, 2020 - 10:01 pm

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.

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