Best to go it alone

Hotel flags and established names, for real estate developers, are often the easiest and fastest way to get a solid return, given the built-in brand.

But Best Western isn't feeling the love.

Sarasota-based Charter One Hotels & Resorts, which opearates more than a dozen properties in Florida, New York, North Carolina and Ohio, is the latest to drop the Best Western flag. The move comes a few months after Chicago-based investment firm Oxford Capital Group dropped the Best Western name from a hotel it bought in Rocky Point in Tampa for $34.5 million. Oxford renamed the property the Bay Harbor Hotel, the same name it donned when it originally opened in 1974.