Nashville is known for good music, good food and good company. At the Hotel Data Conference this year, you’ll find that and much more. From Aug. 9-11, participants will have the opportunity to listen and learn from 100+ industry executives on ways to analyze and use data to improve hotel performance. Among those speakers is Frits van Paasschen, former CEO of Starwood Hotels & Resorts, who will deliver the keynote address. AAHOA Chairman Bhavesh Patel and Vice Chairman HP Patel will be participating in panel discussions on day two of the event. The conference, designed to appeal to brand execs, hotel owners, developers, operators, revenue management specialists, destination marketing organizations and pricing analysts, will be held Aug. 9-11 at the Omni Nashville Hotel. There’s still time to register. Visit hoteldataconference.com for more details.

Last week, AAHOA hosted the 2017 Independent Hoteliers Conference at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas. The event met with huge success with more than 200 in attendance. In addition to learning more best practices and strategies unique to independent hoteliers, they also had the opportunity to hear from industry experts like Inder Sharma, a serial entrepreneur known for founding Hotel.com, and Dr. Mar Brettmann, founder of Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking (BEST). Stay tuned for details on the next IHC. 

Join North Carolina Regional Director Rashmikant (Haji) Patel on Tuesday at the Greensboro Coliseum Complex for the North Carolina Regional Conference. It’s a great opportunity to learn more about what’s happening in the market locally, catch up on local business and market trends, network and look into new products and services that could boost business in a big way. As a special incentive, lifetime members who attend the regional will receive a free Nike golf shirt. Don’t miss out: Register today! 

Join us for one of these upcoming town hall meetings for AAHOA updates, a short education session and industry info that every hotelier needs to know.

• Aug. 3 – North Pacific Town Hall – Oakland, Calif. 

• Aug. 5 – Southeast Texas Women’s Town Hall – Houston

• Aug. 7 – Gulf Region Town Hall – Fort Smith, Ark.

• Aug. 8 – North Pacific Town Hall – Fresno, Calif. 

• Aug. 9 – North Pacific Town Hall – Stockton, Calif. 

• Aug. 10 – Gulf Women’s Town Hall – Little Rock, Ark. 

• Aug. 10 – Georgia Young Professionals Town Hall – Atlanta 

• Aug. 10 – Southeast Texas Town Hall – Beaumont, Texas

Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2017, 3-3:25 p.m. EDT

As a small business owner, you play an important role by creating jobs and investing in your local community. When issues arise that impact your business, you should take advantage of the methods available to voice your concerns and spread awareness in your community. In this quick and informative session, you will hear from AAHOA's Director of Government Affairs Communication, Brandon VerVelde, about how to better advocate for your business and your brand by submitting letters to the editor.

The data is provided courtesy of SunTrust Robinson Humphrey (STRH), a leading, full-service corporate and investment bank dedicated to helping its customers successfully manage and grow their companies through a comprehensive range of strategic advisory, capital raising, risk management, financing and investment solutions.

For more information, contact Ron Ketner at rketner@convectex.com.

• First month free for AAHOA members

• Up to 25 percent off ADP payroll and tax compliance services

• Discounted setup fees

Contact Thomas Bell at thomas.bell@adp.com for additional details. 

A single online report of a bed bug could cause 60 percent of hotel guests not to book with that hotel, according to findings from a University of Kentucky report. It doesn’t even matter much whether or not the bed bug report is valid or confirmed, said Michael Potter, entomologist at the University of Kentucky and co-author of "Bed bugs and hotels: Travelers insights and implications for the industry." Even unverified reports can cause major damage to a hotel’s reputation.

West Elm named Portland, Maine, its sixth site for a boutique hotel location with a 150-room property planned to open near the waterfront in 2020. The retailer, part of San Francisco-based Top 100 company Williams-Sonoma, first announced plans for West Elm Hotels in September, targeting first properties in Detroit; Minneapolis; Savannah, Ga.; Charlotte, N.C.; and Indianapolis with opens beginning in late 2018. It now says the first hotels will begin opening in early 2019. Charlotte is off the list, and Oakland, Calif., is now on.

Parsippany, New Jersey-based Wyndham Worldwide is following in the footsteps of its hotel peers Marriott, Starwood and Hilton, as it announced the planned spin off of its Wyndham Vacation Ownership unit, which will be combined with the company’s Wyndham Destination Network unit, which owns RCI. The result would be two publicly trade companies, one a pure-play hotel company and the other combining vacation rentals and timeshares. The latter public company would be the world’s largest timeshare company, as it already is today.

Is it really all that important to see your property’s rating on TripAdvisor increase from 4.5 to 4.6 within a two-week span? Why are people micromanaging these tiny fluctuations? It’s statistically irrelevant. In school, real performance changes were denoted by evaluating your report card handed out at the end of each semester. Much the same way, you can’t judge your hotel on a review-by-review basis, but rather from a quarter-to-quarter appraisal.

This past June Wyndham Hotel Group (WHG) announced the launch of a new independent concept for upper-midscale-and-above hoteliers: The Trademark Hotel Collection. The collection becomes WHG’s 19th hotel brand, positioned among the company’s smart and stylish brands alongside TRYP by Wyndham and the company’s newly acquired Dazzler and Esplendor brands, which embody boutique and lifestyle travel experiences. Today’s Hotelier spoke with Lisa Checchio, vice president of brand marketing and insights, to learn more about the collection, soft brands and what sets it apart.

Word of mouth is a great way to secure business that can turn into loyalty. But today, word of mouth is amplified by strangers sharing information online. The good, bad and the in-between merge to form a property’s reputation – and hoteliers need to know how to protect that reputation if it’s great or fix it if it’s not so great. By protecting the hotel’s reputation, hoteliers can protect their profits.

Support your customers during the Diwali season. Join us in this edition of Today’s Hotelier, which mails right before the festival of lights. View our media kit today.

Thank you for supporting your association!