Originally Posted by DenverBrian

You have to go back to the 70s to understand all of Courtyard's DNA. There was none of this branding variegation that we see today; Marriott had perhaps 30 hotels in the portfolio nationwide.

The prototype Marriott was huge - lots of F&B, meeting rooms, and so on. Bill Sr. and Jr. were looking for a way to get a compact Marriott footprint into close-in parcels of land in all the major metropolitan areas. By eliminating most of the F&B, conference and catering, they could produce a compact hotel that focused on room revenue (80% house profit) instead of the ancillaries (20% or less house profit). They also thought there was a niche for a business-oriented small hotel chain at the time, since compact hotels of the day were dominated by Holiday Inn, Ramada, Best Western and the like - with a market skewed more towards leisure travelers.

First Courtyard prototype was Windy Hill, GA, 1983. "Designed by business travelers for business travelers." Features included a working desk, a speakerphone, and two ways out of every room (a legacy of the MGM fire in Las Vegas). Very restricted F&B, with a small restaurant serving three or even two meals (some Courtyards didn't serve lunch).

The concept of "free" breakfast hardly existed in the 80s, and Marriott has always been loathe to offer it. Fairfield Inn didn't even offer it as a brand - it was shoehorned into that prototype sometime around 1996 IIRC. Meanwhile, many Courtyards even eliminated dinner service in the 90s and provided only a (paid) breakfast.

So, for decades the Courtyard DNA has included an aversion to food service of any kind, and a HUGE aversion to giving breakfast away for free. But because it was the first branch of the multi-brand explosions of the 90s and 2000s (Marriott has something like 18 hotel brands today; Hilton, Hyatt, IHG and Starwood all followed Marriott down the path), Courtyard got the best locations, closest to city cores and metro centers - the most convenient of the limited service hotel locations.

So now you have hundreds of Courtyards out there in the US, many of them built from 1983-1998, all of them extremely consistent in build, with a bigger swath of inertia and brand loyalty from business travelers than any of the other, later brands. They've remodeled and renovated over the years, but the F&B footprint remains small and Marriott keeps trying ways to make some semblance of profit out of that portion of the business.