WDW’s Holiday Inn to Open in November

The new owners of the Holiday Inn on Hotel Plaza Boulevard say they are spending $35 million remodeling the property, which is within walking distance of Downtown Disney.

The 14-story hotel is now booking guests for stays starting Nov. 15.

“I don’t call this ‘renovation’ because it isn’t,” said Doug Smith, the hotel’s director of sales and marketing. “It’s ‘start from scratch.’”

When built in 1972, the hotel was a Howard Johnson’s. At the time, HoJo’s was an iconic American brand, and the Lake Buena Vista hotel was its flagship, said Michael Terry, a professor at the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management who back then ran a Howard Johnson’s hotel in Miami.

But the Howard Johnson’s brand “just kept going downhill,” Terry said; what was once the pride of middle America slipped to an economy concept. The Lake Buena Vista hotel operated as a Courtyard by Marriott before it was damaged by the multiple hurricanes of August-September 2004. It closed, and for nearly five years has sat empty.

For the rest of Sara K. Clarke’s article…please go to the Orlando Sentinel