Q&A: Bloomberg’s Patrick Clark asks what the mundane popularity of Hampton Inn says about us

The Sunday Long Read chats with Bloomberg’s Patrick Clark about one of his latest articles: a deep dive into the hotel chain Hampton Inn, and why its reputation as being “rigorously OK” has led, unexpectedly, to a kind of world domination. 

As Americans take some of their last summer vacations this Labor Day weekend, Clark digs into everything from Hampton Inn’s “good-enough” business formula, to the perceived value of a free hotel breakfast, to his reporting process when writing about the country’s largest hotel brand. 

Clark covers housing, hotels, and real estate for Bloomberg.

The following highlights, taken from that conversation, have been edited for brevity and clarity. 

The full version of this podcast episode is out now! You can listen to it on Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Amanda Ulrich: You write about a lot of different topics for Bloomberg: housing, hotels, real estate. But today we’re talking about one recent story that really caught my eye, and was interesting for a lot of Sunday Long Read readers. Could you explain how you found this story?

Patrick Clark: I have an editor at Businessweek, and we were talking about what to do next, and he said: “Why don’t you write a story about a mid-priced hotel brand that lots of our readers will have stayed at?” I kinda scratched my head at that, because one of my assumptions about hotel coverage at Bloomberg, and probably elsewhere too, is that people generally want to read about the hotels they wish they were staying at — the fanciest, over-the-water bungalows over the Indian Ocean, or whatever it is. So I said, “Oh okay, let me see about that.”

It’s interesting that you talk a lot about the free waffles [at Hampton Inn] in this story. You say that the cost for Hampton Inn to roll out these free breakfasts and free waffles is not super high, but the perceived value for someone staying at the hotel increases their loyalty to that chain. At what point did you realise that waffles were a pretty big part of this story?

I always knew waffles were going to be a pretty big part of it. When I first started writing about hotels, this was six or seven years ago, someone put the idea in my head that it’s all about free breakfast at the end of the day.

In terms of design, you talk about some of the hotel locations that say “enter happy zone” and other messages like that. Do you think the customer likes those things and likes that they know what to expect at each location, or do you think, on the opposite end of the traveling world, people are wanting to stay at very unique, personalized hotels and properties? Do you think chains like Hampton Inn are going in that personalized direction, or do they know what works for them and it’s a different type of traveler they’re after?

So one part of it is that these hotels have to be durable — they have to be cost-effective to build. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be cheap to build, but whatever it costs to build they then have to have a return on that investment based on what they can sell the room for, which is attached to what people will pay to stay in a Hampton Inn. I think there’s at least some tension between durability and design appeal.

The other thing that’s attached to that is that the people who are in charge of the brand, who are separate from the people who own the hotels, the franchisees, are not thinking of it as a bland hotel. They’re thinking about trying to make it a little more appealing, [that] would be how they would put it — a little more appealing all the time.

Compiled by Amanda Ulrich. Photo of Hampton Inn from Paul Downey/Creative Commons via Flickr.