Chicago is a world-class city and a top destination for tourists. Granted, we’re biased, but over 800,000 Condé Nast Traveler readers voted Chicago as the “Best Large City in the U.S.” In fact, Chicago has now won this award 5 years in a row, including 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.

Nearly 60 million tourists visit Chicago annually. They enjoy Chicago’s world-class architecture, incredible parks and lakefront, renowned museums and institutions, outstanding theaters and vibrant restaurants and neighborhoods. Authenticity is the trait that connects them all.

There are over 140 hotels and 45,000 hotel rooms in downtown Chicago which cater to a wide variety of visitors to Chicago. While business travelers many prefer business or conference hotels, many heritage tourists to Chicago seek high-quality, authentic experience in a historic hotel. Hotel rooms may be commodities to the hospitality industry, but they are “home sweet home” to a Chicago heritage tourist for a few days.

The hotel experience is so important to a tourist’s experience, yet the mainstream hotel booking sites focus location and price miss some of the most important differentiation factors that matter most to a tourist seeking an authentic Chicago hotel experience; uniqueness, historic richness, captivating “origin story”, and proximity to other tourist destinations.

The goal of this project is to create a content-rich and visually-captivating website focused on unique, authentic Chicago historic hotels and creative adaptive reuse in historic buildings. This website would provide rich, original content focused on each hotel’s unique story, glorious physical spaces, and captured by outstanding architectural photography. This would allow the hotels selected for our site to compete not only price, but based on their unique value propositions, including quality, authenticity, uniqueness, and historic interest.