Best Western

Best Western International, Inc. owns the Best Western Hotels & Resorts brand, which it licenses to over 4,700 hotels worldwide. The franchise, with its corporate headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, has more than 2,000 hotels in North America. It was founded by M. K. Guertin in 1946. As of December 2021, Larry Cuculic is the president and CEO of Best Western. As of 2018, it was nonprofit owned by its franchisee members. It began in the years following World War II. At the time, most hotels were either large urban properties or smaller family-owned roadside hotels. In California, a network of independent hotel operators began making referrals of each other to travelers.