146 – Check In with Kevin Carey

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Join the Suite Spot in this quarterly series to hear from American Hotel & Lodging Association President & CEO, Kevin Carey, on the state of the hospitality industry and recent developments being made by the AHLA to move the industry forward. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what's trending in hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree. As always, thank you for listening. We've got a fantastic episode for you today. Another industry check-in with Kevin Carey, interim president and CEO at the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Kevin, thank you so much for taking the time and joining me today. Kevin Carey : Hi, Ryan. Good day. It's good to see you as well. Ryan Embree: Yeah, we're excited to have you. You know, we're gonna jump right into it. We spoke last in the spring season, right before a busy summer travel season. Listen, the travelers have been busy traveling to hotels. Hotels have been busy hosting, but AHLA has been busy as well, advocating for hoteliers and everything that you guys do for our industry. Let's catch up with some of those big accomplishments and some of the most pressing issues right now. We know we, there's always those issues that rise up. What are some of those that hotels should be most aware of right now? Kevin Carey : Oh as you said, it's been an incredibly busy period of time. Certainly first and foremost for the industry. The support and the service our member companies provide for guests and the environment they create for our associates and workers is certainly first and foremost, our team here, both in AHLA and, uh, the foundation have been incredibly busy as well. Um, over the first half of the year, it's been, uh, a, a peak period of activity at a state and local level with state legislators and legislatures in session, uh, and certainly in Washington here, uh, as, uh, the Congress starts to look towards end of the year in the election. So, we've been advancing our work, uh, at a state level on short-term rental sets of issues in Washington here around the passage in the house, uh, of the Hotel Fees Transparency Act. Um, and, and also work to ensure that we defeated the, the joint employer rule as well. There's just a number of areas that we feel proud about as a team and that are really meaningful on behalf of the industry as well. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. And but there's still with all those wins, and congratulations to your team, there's always work to do as you know, and some of those pressing issues that are at the forefront right now for our hoteliers. What, what are some of those that, again, hoteliers, even though it might be something regional, they still should be aware of because it has, it's gonna have an impact on the entire industry. Kevin Carey : Absolutely. And really to identify two that are certainly getting a lot of our team's attention and the industry attention. So first and foremost, in New York City, a bill was introduced in the city council several weeks ago, approaching about a month ago at this point. And this bill, the so-called Safe Hotels Act, has been positioned by his proponents as a simple licensing bill. And the bill sponsors have represented that hotels are unregulated, and that there's an increase in crime occurring in hotels. This bill would do grave damage, not only to the hotel industry, to travelers, to workers, who represent and are employed by the industry and the city economy and the tourism economy itself. So this is bad for everyone. And we've been very actively involved in New York several times, meeting with members of the city council organi...