Embassy Suites recently launched its first major room design change in the brand's 25 year history: a one-room suite that brand leaders said is designed to appeal to business travelers.The new room design, announced in May, preserves the features and amenities of Embassy's traditional two-room suite design but consolidates them in one room that is about 20 percent smaller than the full two-room suite. Jim Holthouser, global head of full service brands for Embassy's parent company Hilton Hotels Corp., said the rooms were designed with business travelers in mind. "The individual business traveler has told us that they would probably stay at Embassy more but just don't need all that room," he said."It's not that radical of a change for a very successful brand like Embassy," he said. "You have all the elements that make it the Embassy Suites room: the wet bar, the sleeper sofa, the king-standard room."The rooms will first appear in the soon-to-open Embassy Suites in downtown Buffalo, N.Y., a hotel that developers are converting out of a federal office building. The company expects newly constructed Embassy Suites properties to begin incorporating the room later this year.Embassy Suites also designed the room with developers in mind, Holthouser said. The smaller room means that developers will be able to fit more rooms and hence drive more revenue from their projects.They can decide whether to incorporate the rooms depending on the property's location, he said. An office park location that does a lot of transient or small group business travel would benefit more from the new rooms than a location near a theme park that hosts mostly family business, for example.Developers are allowed to use the one-room suite design for no more than 20 percent of the rooms in a project. "This brand is so established and well-known that if people show up and want to have a two-room suite, you still have to have them to sell," Holthouser said.Originally published June 22, 2009