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Why you Should get Involved the Local Hotel Association

Las Vegas, NV, USA 1-18-2024: Scenes from PPAI Expo. Many booths line up advertising their promotional products. PPAI Expo is the largest promotional products trade show in North America.

Local, state, and national hotel associations exist to share resources, and they can provide many benefits under the right circumstances.

Sometimes, a hotel leader might unknowingly miss out on those benefits even as their competitors enjoy them.

At any rate, you want to ensure that you have exhausted every resource to position your business best in the community. That could mean a bi-monthly meeting with other hotel leaders and government personnel.

Given how many different sectors of the economy hospitality and lodging have to interact with, it’s smart to rub shoulders with people who know what battles those in your industry have to fight. 

For example, the Georgia Hotel & Lodging Association calls itself a trade group that lobbies officials in all parts of local and state government and the federal government. According to their research, almost 10 percent of the workers in Georgia are employed by a hotel somewhere in the state.

That’s an example of hotels’ relative importance to their community and the state.

You want to know what issues impact businesses of similar stature in your community. If those issues are impacting you yet, they will be. You also may find some competition if you can respond more quickly or more forthrightly than others, but the first step to doing so is being aware of what you need to deal with.

Travel Media Group suggests that associations like these can help buttress properties against taxes and other policies that might hurt them. The strength in numbers may make local government personnel reconsider their ways or establish a carve-out under the right circumstances.

If and when it makes sense to collaborate with another hotel or some other type of business, local hotel associations can make those connections much more quickly, per RevFine. Having too many contacts built over some years in the area can make finding what you need when you need it easier.

Sometimes, there are larger concerns that a trade group is better prepared to handle than your hotel or a group of hotels in a given city.

Consider how the American Hotel Lodging Association responded after a landmark ruling by the United States Supreme Court in late 2023 as an example of how a large group can positively impact the future of many individual hotels.

In short, the United States Supreme Court took the decision on a particular lawsuit to an appeals court. In the lawsuit, a woman sued a hotel group for not having accessibility information readily available on its website.

Judges found that the woman involved had no intention of actually staying in the hotel(s) in the crosshairs when she filed the lawsuit, and they threw out her lawsuit as a result. The court also noted that the woman, Deborah Laufer, was a serial litigant with a litany of physical disabilities.

The Georgia association mentioned earlier in this piece is an offshoot of the larger national group. In this case, and plenty of others, they will find attorneys to fight for the hotels they represent.

Given the scope of this case, the sheer amount of resources that come from representing that many places helps a bit. In another situation, per Hotel Management, the same national interest group sued the National Labor Relations Board.

The group did so to keep hotels from having to collectively bargain with their employees, which is a larger issue than one hotel would be concerned with.