On the Questionable Copywriting Decisions in the Holiday Inn Express Breakfast Area

By Andrew Berkowitz

In recent years, Holiday Inn Express has jazzed up their Express Start breakfast area, offering a perky selection of continental food items and a jaunty suite of signage designed to provide an upbeat, homey feel to the early-morning business traveler.

Regrettably, it appears that the task of creating signage fell to a copywriter who had been engaged in a drug-fueled, late-night bender during the wee hours before the project was due. The entire result is something that feels like an incoherent first draft created by a hung-over procrastinator.

OK, I’ll admit it — our copywriter just nailed this first one. Eggs are indeed packed with protein power, and as one of the most nutrition-rich breakfast foods this sign perfectly conveys to the hungry business traveler the value proposition of a hearty plate of scrambled eggs. I suppose one could quibble with the photo, as the “scrambled eggs” offered at the Holiday Inn Express Start breakfast taste as though they are made from yellow-food-coloring-infused, reconstituted squirrel phlegm, but ignoring that detail the editorial strategy behind this sign is indeed spot on.

I’m not sure what our copywriter was getting at here, honestly. Is bread such a rare and desirable foodstuff that the average traveler lies awake all night in his Queen Non-Smoking Room ($120/night + tax) dreaming of an elusive slice of mouth-watering, all-American white bread? The messaging here is almost taunting, with a come-hither attitude that strikes this reader as a bit unseemly. I’m not at all certain what emotion is supposed to be evoked here, but I’m left with the disturbing feeling that there’s an unexplored place deep within my psyche where bread holds a dangerous, gnawing power. I question my very sanity.

I appreciate the copywriter’s attempt to create a sense of urgency here, but I just can’t summon the sense that fruit occupies such a key piece of my overall dietary plan. Frankly, my want for fruit is probably more urgent than my actual need for fruit, which dredges up painful questions around the whole bread situation. I find myself confused and questioning my entire relationship with jam on toast. Are they hinting at classic signs of co-dependence? Ultimately I feel unsettled, particularly because the fruits shown in the photo (apples and daintily sectioned oranges) bear no resemblance to the actual fruit served at the Holiday Inn Express Start breakfast (threatening piles of overripe bananas).

I appreciate a good pun as much as the next guy, but after leaving me with unanswered existential questions around fruit I find this flippancy to be frankly unnerving. Let’s move on.

“Soon, very soon” … what? This is clearly a veiled threat, and the hostility hangs in the air of the Holiday Inn Express Start breakfast area like the greasy tang of frying bacon would hang in the air if the bacon they served was actually fried instead of reheated like strips of desiccated Slim Jim in an off-brand microwave.

This sign appears atop a tray of squat, recently-defrosted pastries that have every appearance of being available for the entirety of breakfast (6:30 a.m. — 9:30 a.m.). I can only imagine that the urgency this sentence fragment was originally intended to convey was lost during the drunken last-second editing process. I hypothesize that the full statement was likely:

“Soon, very soon, you will rush to the bathroom with regret after horking down a 1,200-calorie glazed pastry made from white flour, corn oil and high fructose corn syrup.”

At this point our copywriter has clearly given up, no doubt staring at the keyboard with one eye pasted shut, the soft blush of cocaine neatly dusting his upper lip. I don’t even know where to begin. Are there so few positive attributes of cereal that one can only describe its appeal by listing the way it is to be served? Or is there a more dangerous message here, that we are taken to be simpletons who require basic instructions on how to eat our corn flakes? Without this sign, would most business travelers grab the nearest styrofoam plate and ruin their JC Penney suit pants while attempting to pour milk over an oddly-heaped pile of Frosted Flakes? Or would our animal instincts be revealed without proper guidance, and we’d simply stick our mouths under the bubble-shaped Lucky Charms dispenser and turn the crank in a sad and urgent effort to sate our cereal cravings?

In the end we’re left with a tabletop sign that quietly mocks us while we eat. “Look at these foods you are not going to get for breakfast,” it hints. Cereal with juicy strawberries. An orange so fresh that it still has the leaf from its morning plucking. Two newly-boiled brown eggs, still warm in the shell —nothing like the breakfast area’s actual pre-peeled, misshapen, waterlogged eggs that taste like congealed otter eyeballs.

At bottom right, a doll-sized teacup of cinnamon has been almost carelessly spilled, inexplicably served separately from the implied platter of wildly-urgent cinnamon rolls. Next to that sits a scoop of white powder that may be sugar, coconut or perhaps the leftover cocaine from our copywriter’s late-night drug-fueled writing session.

And then the coda. The final twist of the knife: “But you knew that.” A patronizing send-off, as if to say that you are such a feeble-minded business traveler you’ve had to be reminded of the basic value proposition of breakfast. Such passive-aggressiveness leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth that smothers the bad taste of the actual breakfast, resulting in tastebuds that are hopelessly confused and slightly anxious.

My recommendation: the Holiday Inn Express Start breakfast area doesn’t belong on your summer reading list. If you’re looking for something in this genre, I recommend the La Quinta Inn continental breakfast nook. Its copywriting is straightforward, literate and surprisingly enjoyable — it’s everything you could want from your business travel lower-mid-priced hotel breakfast signage reading experience.