PHOENIX—The Lodging Conference is reaching a milestone this year with its 20th annual event scheduled to take place from Oct. 20-23 at the Arizona Biltmore here.
In addition to educational sessions featuring top industry executives, the conference will once again pay tribute to several luminaries of the industry. One such figure is Randy Smith, chairman and founder of STR, who will receive the Above & Beyond Award during the upcoming conference.
Smith, along with his wife Carolyn, founded the company in 1985 with a focus on providing overall performance data and trends to the hotel industry. STR, which became widely known in the industry for its STAR (Smith Travel Accommodations Report) program, has since emerged as the gold standard for lodging in terms of tracking data.
Smith was asked by Hotel Business if he envisioned his company having this kind of impact on hospitality. “No, we were merely trying to create a way to track and analyze the industry. We did not foresee that, in creating this tool, it would alter the industry. By creating transparency for the industry, we enabled investors, owners, lenders and operators to make better decisions,” he said, noting the greatest benefit to the industry has been the “enhanced ability to attract capital.”
Smith further stressed the importance of getting the buy-in of much of the industry in order to validate the findings. “We did believe that we had to make it reliable at the market or city level for the reports to be useful, so a fairly significant sample was required. These requirements dictated that the data collected had to be consistent across the industry and be available on a timely basis from the largest number of properties,” he said.
Smith reflected back on his accomplishments and detailed what gives him the greatest sense of satisfaction now: “That my wife and I began STR at our kitchen table with our modest savings and two loans from our parents. From this, we managed to create a successful global company and are in a position to pass the company to our son, Alex,” he said.
Lifetime Achievement Awards are also being doled out at the conference to Ed Watkins, editor at large, Hotel News Now, and Jerry Daly, chairman, Daly Gray Public Relations.
Watkins—who has covered the lodging industry for more than 40 years, the majority of which were with the now-defunct Lodging Hospitality—is retiring at the end of the year. He talked about the evolution of the hospitality industry over the years.
“The two biggest changes are the arrival of Wall Street in the hotel industry and the ascent of Indian-Americans as hotel owners. When I first started covering the industry, most of the companies were private or obscure divisions of public companies. Since then, nearly every major hotel brand company is public, and most of them are global. Indian-American ownership of hotels in the U.S. was not a factor until the mid- to late-1980s, and since that time, that community has become the dominant owners and developers of hotels in the U.S.,” he said.
Daly, for his part, also talked about some of the changes he has seen over the past 35 years. “So much has changed since I began in 1979. Things that are taken for granted now weren’t even thought of then. There were no crisis communications, no cell phones, no Internet, no social media and there was relatively no brand proliferation. Marriott was Marriott and Holiday Inn was Holiday Inn,” he said.
Daly, who estimated he has been involved in as many as 10 brand launches over the years, indicated he has enjoyed his time in hospitality. “I got into the hotel industry almost by accident, and it proved to be the luckiest accident of my career,” he said, adding, “I never worked for companies, I always worked for people. I’m blessed to have a lot of friends as a result.”
Watkins, meanwhile, discussed what the award means to him on a personal level. “Not to project false humility, but accepting this award is an affirmation for all the hard work done by the scores of dedicated journalists who cover the U.S. and global hotel industries on a daily basis. Nearly all of the relevant data, information and perspective on the hotel industry is written and published by these people. I’m just proud to be part of that group for more than 40 years,” he said.