136 – Check In with Kevin Carey, Interim President & CEO of the AHLA

Suite Spot: A Hotel Marketing Podcast

Interim President & CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, Kevin Carey, joins the Suite Spot in the very first episode of Check-In with Kevin Carey! Get the latest news, updates, and information on the hotel industry in this series, and find out what efforts the AHLA is getting involved in to impact hoteliers and hospitality at scale. From policy legislation to industry events and the rebranding of the Hospitality Show, this episode is full of content! 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, and welcome to another episode of The Suite Spot. This is your host, Ryan Embree, with a very special episode today. We have a first-time guest, but I'm sure, widely recognized by the entire industry, Kevin Carey, interim president and CEO of the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Kevin, thank you so much for joining me on the Suite Spot. Kevin Carey : Good morning. Happy to be with you. Ryan Embree: We're gonna cover a lot today, Kevin, so let's jump into it. Speaking of being busy, we are about to enter a busy summer travel season. I'm sure all the hoteliers listening to this podcast, wherever they're watching or listening from, are excited about that or reaching the halfway point of the year, which is crazy to say. I was there to witness live your keynote at the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference back in March in Atlanta. You shared some really great accomplishments so far, year to date that AHLA has been able to achieve. Could you share with our audience a little bit about some of the efforts and wins so far in 2024? Kevin Carey : Well, I'd be happy to and, I think your assessment is, is right on the mark. Uh, it has been a busy first four months of the year. Certainly, you hear that through, uh, we're in earning seasons now. You're hearing a lot of our member companies report out. Uh, so you'll hear some of the things happening across their scope of their operations in our environment representing the industry. It has been a very significant and busy first four months of the year, whether that's here in Washington, working with the Congress and the administration in so many state capitals, with the legislatures in session, and really across the scope of our activities whether that's, uh, the support we provide to our members through our many committees or events or, or the great work our foundation is, is doing a few key accomplishments. I point to one of real significance was the defeat of the, the joint employer rule. And that was significant, not only with action that the House took but the Senate as well as a favorable court ruling, in the Eastern District Court in Texas, blocking the implementation of that rule, because that posed some real challenges for the industry, and in particular the franchise operating model, and would've created complexities and uncertainty there in this environment. We also, a month ago, announced the rollout of our collaboration with the Hotel Association of Canada and our launch, uh, of the Green Key Global Initiative. And then finally, uh, we rebranded our, our very successful regional set of events as the Hospitality show supporting, uh, our trade show and conference, uh, which will take place in San Antonio this year, October 28th to the 30th. Uh, and we've got a number of those events planned over the coming weeks, uh, alongside the seven that we've held thus far this year. So it's been busy, as you said. Ryan Embree: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Super busy. And we're gonna talk about some of those things that you mentioned. I wanna go back to Green Key Global rather. Uh, we just celebrated Earth Day.