Originally Posted by
iahphx
It's a shame that travelers staying at mid-priced American motels don't demand that level of sophistication.
That said, I do think things will change over the next decade. Choice USA definitely serves "your father's cheap motel breakfast." There's no way a younger, more sophisticated, more health-and-freshness oriented crowd is going to tolerate the over-processed junk served by Choice. I suspect we'll start seeing changes sooner rather than later.
Over at other hotel programs, they're creating new hotel brands to appeal to that crowd, more than morphing existing longtime brands.
So Choice USA may change that, but it's not necessarily going to be
the Comfort Inn brand at which they'll change it. They already changed Comfort Inn breakfasts since you started this thread, by adding
hard-boiled eggs, which
don't seem over-processed to me (and made 100% of the difference between me hating the Comfort Inn breakfast before and not complaining about it now for 1-night stays, though it does get boring for multiple nights at a time).
The problem with these new "lifestyle" brands is that they take forever to have any decent "footprint". Most of them or in only a handful of cities in the USA, and it seems like it'll take forever for them to be everywhere you want to go.
Anyway, the question is not what these younger, more-sophisticated, health-conscious travelers expect from a free hotel breakfast. It's (a) do they any have interest in "budget" brand hotels at all, and (b) even if so, do they plan to eat breakfast at the hotel anyway? It could be that they don't consider breakfast something you eat at a hotel period (ie, they assume they'll have to go out for breakfast like they have to go out for dinner, when staying at limited-service hotels.)