My introduction to lodging analytics came in the late 1970’s as a 10 year old in the back seat of my parent’s station wagon. Every night at 11pm, my parents would take us kids for a ride around town where we would count cars in motel parking lots. They picked the comp set and we helped to figure out occupancy. A few years later, my good friend, Randy Smith, created [STR] - whose disruptive technology mercifully put an end to these late night family excursions throughout the country. The daily lease nature of the lodging business relies on quantifiable, real time performance data in order to make strategic decisions. Today, STR is utilized as an invaluable industry partner, providing resources and transparency of information across the globe. Congratulations to our friends at [STR] for an amazing journey during these past 30 years. We remain grateful for all that you do to add significant value to our industry.

For Hyatt, participation with STR provides us with invaluable access to aggregated competitive data to benchmark our performance, to assess our marketing efforts and to assist in our global expansion. For the industry, STR has brought increased transparency to the markets that enables investors to evaluate current trends and industry performance. As one of the first participating companies in the STAR program nearly 30 years ago, we consider the STR data to be accurate, reliable and extremely useful.

I have been consulting in the hotel industry for well over 40 years. In the early years, the best you could expect in understanding a market’s performance was a cloudy, rough estimate. When STR started gathering and publishing data in the late 80’s on market performance the whole picture changed. Now the information gathered was accurate and credibility improved significantly for the consulting profession. Decisions made on development and acquisitions now had greater reliability. And all of that has gotten better over the past 30 years. Thank you Carolyn and Randy and STR for making all of us smarter.