They may not yet be ready to exchange gifts on holidays, but it looks as though Choice Hotels and the Asian American Hotel Owners Association have patched up their differences that nearly got the mega-franchisor booted out of the influential 10,000-plus-member hotel owners’ organization. In a letter sent late last month to Choice President & CEO Steve Joyce, AAHOA leadership outlined a list of changes Choice has promised to make that will qualify the company to renew its AAHOA membership.

Most of the items were fairly basic and involve Choice’s impact policy. A few other things on the list, while important, aren’t earthshaking. In one bullet point in the agreement, Choice agreed to commission a study to address the mission and structure of its owners’ council. Part of that discussion will be whether to refocus the council as a completely independent group, similar to the IHG Owners Association.

Last September, the AAHOA board sent a letter to Choice telling the company it needed to change its attitudes and practices toward its franchises or face rejection of its membership renewal for 2012. Those membership privileges include access to the AAHOA annual and regional conventions, events where thousands of current and, more importantly, potential franchisees attend.

The rift between the two groups and its relatively swift (four months to the day) resolution may mean a growing détente between the big franchise companies and their owners. My friend and franchisee advocate Stan Turkel disagreed with me last fall when I commented that the Choice-AAHOA disagreement wouldn’t escalate into full-fledged warfare. I seem to be right this time. AAHOA had a problem with Choice’s conduct, and it made its feelings known in a direct and consequential way. And, by all appearances, the two sides were able to sit down, hammer out their differences and agree on a course of action. For a change, there was no PR campaign in the press or inflammatory remarks made on the stages of various industry conferences to make the situation worse.

I hope I’m right. An adversarial relationship between franchisors and franchisees (and their AAHOA proxies) is a healthy thing. It’s not healthy, however, when either side strays from the key issues and resorts to grandstanding.

I congratulate both Choice and AAHOA for taking the high road to solving their differences this time.

I got a big chuckle this week reading an online think piece in Crain’s New York Business. The story, titled “The Trauma of Tourism” and written by Erik Ipsen, recounts the disgust some New York residents have for tourists fouling their otherwise-perfect lives. In particular, people living in SoHo are ticked because so much retail has gone into the neighborhood that sidewalks and cafes are jammed with these out-of-town interlopers. Likewise, the hipsters in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn don’t like that some of the city’s 50 million annual tourists make their way across the Brooklyn Bridge to drink in the neighborhood’s bars.

Sorry, but I don’t have much empathy for these people. Coming from a city with precious few tourists (save those who come for a ballgame or to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) and an economy to match, I find it outrageous that people turn up their noses at the rich economic engine that is tourism. Tourists, especially those who visit New York, arrive with lots of cash they’re willing to spend on tiny $300 hotel rooms, $55 steaks and $18 cocktails.

Then, once their wallets are depleted, they get back on a plane or in a car and leave. They don’t send their children to local schools or usually don’t use the city’s healthcare system. They come, they spend and then they leave. I wish we here in Cleveland were so lucky as these brats in New York. They need to wake-up and appreciate what they have: prosperity fueled by tourism.

God bless, the revenue manager. He or she may be the most valuable player in any hotel organization. At any given moment, they’ve got multiple balls in the air and have multiple masters to please. Their job, of course, is to maximize the revenue stream of a particular hotel or set of properties using all of the distribution channels at their disposal. But that’s the problem: Every hotel has a plethora of distribution channels to employ, ranging from brand.com and its own website to transparent and opaque OTAs to the GDS to social media channels and more.

What’s more, the revenue manager must take cues from a range of stakeholders, which can include the owner, GM, director of sales & marketing, even brand and/or management company headquarters. Juggling these options and the sometimes-conflicting priorities of management make for a big headache.

And yet, while revenue managers are certainly the linchpins for the success of most hotels, they’re often overworked, under-experienced, under-paid and under-appreciated. As someone said to me recently, “Does it really make sense to entrust the fate of a multi-million-dollar investment like a hotel in the hands of a $27,000-a-year revenue manager who’s probably a year or two out of hotel school?” Probably not, but that’s the case in many hotels. It’s no wonder a lot of these people fail or burn out within a couple of years.

Instead, the industry—starting with hotel schools and continuing through the brands and management companies and down to the property level—should elevate the status, compensation, requirements and expectations of the revenue management function. The revenue manager should be part of any hotel’s executive committee, perhaps above the director of sales & marketing in influence in the hotel’s decision-making. They certainly should have a seat at the table when short-, medium- and long-term financial and performance goals are set.

In years past, the traditional route to become a GM went through food and beverage or the rooms department. The GM of the future may still use those routes but also must have solid grounding in both the strategies and tactics of successful revenue management. Once that’s the norm, GMs will give their revenue managers the respect, authority and compensation they deserve.

Day one of this year’s Americas Lodging Investment Summit underway in Los Angeles produced no surprises: no big announcements, no rhetorical gaffes, very few laughs and only a couple of spontaneous applause lines. It’s the beginning of the year, following a pretty good year for the industry, so the mood among the 2,400 delegates at the JW Marriott at LA Live is one of optimism on what the rest of 2012 will bring.

At yesterday’s opening general session in the spacious (7,000 seats vs. 2,400 attendees at ALIS) Nokia Theater, conference chairman Jim Burba unveiled results of a delegate survey that demonstrated the giddy optimism that probably resonates throughout the industry. More than nine out of 10 of those surveyed believe RevPAR will grow again in 2012 and their individual companies will also show positive growth this year. Perhaps more surprisingly, 53% of the group believes they’ll be more hotel development this year than in 2011. Of course, STR says just 373 new hotels opened last year, so it won’t take much to post an increase in lodging construction.

The data gurus from STR, PKF-Hospitality Research and HVS also fueled the general upbeat outlook. Using the catchphrase “see the green in 2013,” Jan Freitag of STR forecast a year that will beat 2011, a year in which the industry sold a record one billion-plus roomnights. Mark Woodworth of PKF-HR described the future as “headwinds diminish, tailwinds develop.” And Suzanne Mellen of HVS sees hotel transactions increasing this year and spreading to more diverse markets than the top 10, which saw 73% of the action last year.

With all the good vibes floating around the JW Marriott, it’s hard not to jump on board the future is bright train. That attitude, of course, can lead to excess, not this year certainly and probably not soon, but eventually.

The only wave of dissent that seems to fill the conference hallways centers on the conference’s new anti-lounge lizard policy. In order to keep non-payer gatecrashers from cruising the hotel bars and restaurants during the conference, the organizers have barricaded entrance to the hotel beyond the front desk to anyone not wearing a valid badge. The tactic led one pundit (me) from paraphrasing President Ronald Reagan’s famous speech in Berlin as a possible slogan for the dissenters: “Mr. Burba, tear down this wall.”

Next week’s Americas Lodging Investment Summit will provide the hotel industry with a good early barometer to the outlook for the business in 2012. And, as it is at most industry conferences, it won’t necessarily be what is said on the podium of various general sessions and breakout discussions that will be important. The real mood of the conference (and the industry) will be divined in the thousands of conversations held in three days in the hallways, hospitality suites, bars, restaurants and coffee shops of the host hotel, the JW Marriott at LA Live.

Everyone going to next week’s ALIS wants to be optimistic, but nearly everyone will approach the meeting with at least a few nagging doubts in their minds: Where is the economy headed? What will be the end game in the European financial crisis and how will that affect the U.S. and our tourism industry? Who will win the presidential election in November, and how will that change the economic outlook? Obviously, ALIS won’t produce any clear-cut answers to these questions and others, but most attendees will walk away from the meeting feeling either good or bad about what’s ahead.

ALIS conference chairman Jim Burba and his crew seem to have an optimistic outlook. Last summer, the ALIS planning committee met in Dallas to design the 2012 program. At that meeting, Burba said the conference theme was “Rebound.” However, he wasn’t sure whether Rebound should be followed by a question mark or an exclamation mark. Apparently, optimism won over, as the official conference collateral material boldly shouts the theme as “Rebound!”. That may be an unscientific indicator, but it shows some in the industry believe 2012 will be even a better year than was 2011, which was pretty good.

Naturally, this year’s ALIS has its share of star-power speakers (Bill Marriott, Sam Zell, Donald Trump), but there are a few less star-studded sessions that should provide a good sense of where the business is headed. A pair of panel discussions on Tuesday—one with private equity fund executives and the other with leaders from hotel REITs—will be a good barometer of who’s buying what in the coming year. And the final session of the conference, the annual scrum among members of IREFAC, will probably produce a lively, often-humorous, but only occasionally definitive outlook for the hotel investment climate.

Given last week’s announcement of Room Key, the six-brand online booking consortium, distribution, revenue management and social media will be another hot topic at ALIS.

This year’s ALIS is on track to have the second-largest number of attendees since 2007, which set the attendance record for the 11-year run of the event. For more information or to register, go to the ALIS website.

Here’s some unsolicited advice for any of the candidates running for President this year. When the topic comes around to creating more jobs—and in my mind that should be the signature issue of the entire campaign—a smart candidate will veer the conversation away from foolhardy promises of recreating the nation’s once-vast manufacturing base. Instead, he should utter one word as his antidote for our ailing economy: tourism.

All he needs to do to prove the point is to cite the data from the Department of Commerce, as was trumpeted in a recent Office of Travel & Tourism Industries press release. In the third quarter of 2011, travel and tourism-related employment rose by an annual rate of 1.4%. That followed a 2.4% increase in the second quarter. By contrast, total U.S. non-farm employment rose an anemic 0.9% in the third quarter. No one can argue with the impact of those numbers.

So instead of trying to pretend we can lure long-gone manufacturing jobs back home, the next president should mount a full-court press to support the travel industry in any way his administration can, as long as the result is more foreign visitors coming to the U.S. and more jobs created to serve those people of the world who can’t wait to come to America to see everything from the Grand Canyon to Disney World to Main Street USA. First on the agenda must be repair of the broken visa system. There are literally tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of middle-class Chinese, Indians, Brazilians and others willing and able to hop on a plane to the U.S., stay a week to 10 days in our hotels, spend thousands of dollars in restaurants, shops and at attractions. They just need a fast, efficient and secure way to apply for and receive visas.

And while the Travel Promotion Act created an infrastructure that allows the federal government to partner with the private sector to market the U.S. as a tourism destination, the country still needs a cabinet-level secretary to make sure the government is doing all that it can to help tourism-related businesses attract and serve an increasing number of foreign tourists.

Promoting additional visitations to the U.S. comes with another benefit beyond economics. The more people who come to America, visit its sites, see its abundance and, most importantly, get to know its people, the more likely they’ll return home with a favorable impression of America and its people. Travel and face-to-face interaction may be the most potent peacemaking tool.

If you haven’t decided on a New Year’s resolution yet, here’s one to consider. By all accounts, 2012 will be a good and perhaps great year for the hotel industry. You’ve heard it before: Business travelers are back, leisure guests never left, no new hotels are being built and the economy is limping slowly back to recovery. That should produce a year in which occupancies rise, rates continue to climb back and hotel owners realize a few more bucks of profit. Halleluiah!

This kind of positive turn of events can lead to a little greed and overreach by owners and operators. While it’s been a tough four-plus years since the economy fell apart, and many bottom lines shrunk nearly to non-existence, it’s not the time to treat your guests with anything but respect. That should be your resolution for the new year: no gouging, price manipulation, strong-arm tactics or any other practices that do anything but make your customers feel good about your hotel(s) and the lodging industry in general.

As you may have heard, starting on January 26, a new federal rule requires airlines to quote the full price of airline tickets in their advertising. That means, the advertised prices must include all non-optional fees and taxes, including fuel charges and the 9/11 security fee. Not surprisingly, most airlines are opposing the new rule as “arbitrary and capricious,” but it’s probably a losing battle and one the airline industry (one of the least-trusted businesses in the country) shouldn’t wage.

The lesson for the lodging industry is that hotels need to stop rate creep through the obnoxious trend toward so-called “resort” or “energy” fees. While hoteliers say the practice helps them compete more easily in tough markets, the actual effect of these often-hidden fees is to turn off existing customers and anyone else thinking of traveling more in the coming year. According to news reports, one resort in Florida even told a guest that its resort fee is required by state law, which it’s not.

2012 promises to be a good year for most of you, but that’s not a slam dunk. Macroeconomic factors outside of your control could easily sour the U.S. economy and jeopardize lodging’s solid recovery. It’s time to resolve to respect your guests in all dealings with them. Don’t become a hated industry, like the airlines.

I got a press release last month from NewYorkHotels.org, an online booking service, trumpeting the fact that 73% of visitors to New York City said in a survey they were happy with their hotel stays. That’s an alarming statistic and should be a major call to action for every lodging property in New York and everywhere. Is that the best the hotel industry can do?

According to the survey, 13% of those surveyed gave their hotels a negative rating, and the remaining 14% of the group were neutral about their stays, which to me is as damning as the percentage of people who had a bad experience. If this is the standard the hotel industry collectively believes is acceptable, then every owner and operator needs to reevaluate his or her operation. No business can afford to have one out of four customers unhappy with the product or service they receive. When compared to other sectors of the hospitality industry, hotels should shine in the eyes of consumers: Everyone hates the airlines and the air travel experience; car rental is a commodity buy that provides no sizzle to the customer; timeshare will struggle until the economy gets healthy; and too many people can’t afford or are afraid of the cruise ship experience.

However, hotels should be a place of refuge, romance, fun, comfort, efficiency and exhilaration depending on why a guest is checking in. And, in fact, even a business traveler can be exhilarated by his or her stay at a hotel, and leisure guests, while primarily seeking romance and fun, also want their stays to be efficient and hassle free. Anything less should be unacceptable to anyone who owns, operates or works in a hotel.

This seemingly low standard of acceptable satisfaction reminds me of a story about J. Willard Marriott, Sr., the founder of Marriott who initially resisted his son Bill’s desire to get into the hotel business. Once the company built and opened the Key Bridge Marriott in suburban Washington, DC in the late 1950s, Bill and the group of hotel pros he hired to help start the lodging business went to JW Sr.’s office with the good news that the Key Bridge property hit 90% occupancy. Instead of the expected response (such as atta boy!), Marriott Sr. wanted to know why the hotel hot shots couldn’t fill up the remaining 10% of the rooms.

The same is true of guest satisfaction. No hotelier should be happy or stop trying to improve until 100% of guests say they’re happy, thrilled, overwhelmed, bowled-over and utterly satisfied with their stays. It’s a job that never ends.

Back in the 1990s, I wrote a commentary titled “Taste the Soup,” which in many ways captured the genius of Bill Marriott. The nearly 80-year-old CEO of Marriott International retires in March, although he’ll continue to keep his strong hand in the business as executive chairman. He may be giving up the day-to-day reins to the company his father and mother built, but no one believes he’s leaving the business to sit in a rocker on the porch.

While Mr. Marriott was never known as the most cutting-edge hotelier, he’s best remembered as one who could perfect ideas other visionaries brought to the scene. American Airlines may have been the first travel company with a frequency program, but Marriott Rewards has become the gold standard in the lodging business, if not all hospitality, for the ferocious loyalty of its members. Literally, hundreds of thousands of road warriors start their travel planning with what Marriott property they’re staying at. Other examples abound: Jack DeBoer invented Residence Inn, but Marriott elevated it to tops in its segment; same with Ritz-Carlton. Even timeshare, once a sketchy industry populated by shady companies and characters, became respectable once Marriott entered and perfected the business.

But back to the soup and Mr. Marriott’s lessons to the industry. Whereas some hotel company CEOs prefer to keep company with bankers and other captains of industry, Bill Marriott is happiest when he’s touring hotels, a ritual he performs more than 200 times a year. While news of Mr. Marriott’s arrival in a city sends shivers up the spine of many GMs, it also gives them reassurance that the man whose name is on the door actually cares about the hotels, their guests and, more importantly, the associates who make these properties in demand by travelers and profitable for their owners.

When Mr. Marriott arrives for one of his famous inspection trips, he doesn’t sequester himself in the GM’s office looking at the books or the latest Star Reports or the booking pace for next month. He visits guestrooms, meeting areas, f&b outlets, employee break rooms and even the kitchen, where perhaps apocryphally, he tastes the soup of the day. It’s been this hands-on approach to the business from the man at the top that ultimately makes Marriott International the most-successful, most-copied and most-popular family of hotel brands in the world.

In the coming years, Mr. Marriott may cut back to 100 or 150 property visits a year, but I don’t expect him to ever stop doing what he does best: tasting the soup.

This time next month, many of the lodging industry’s top guns—brand company executives, developers, management company CEOs, equity fund managers, consultants, media and assorted hangers on—will be packing their sunglasses to head to Los Angeles for the Americas Lodging Investment Summit, the first major hotel business get-together of the new year.

Of course, the main question on everyone’s lips—other than who’s got money to lend—will be what kind of year 2012 will be for the hotel industry. Any such discussion has two prongs: the outlook for hotel performance and the climate for investment. Prevailing wisdom seems to be the industry will continue to build on 18 months and counting of positive growth in occupancy, rates and RevPAR. And while demand growth has been outpacing rate increases that equation could begin to equalize next year.

A much larger question is what’s ahead on the real estate side of the lodging industry. We’ve been saying it at the beginning of each of the past three years, but it seems 2012 will really be the year a lot of hotel owners must face some hard decisions. Many CMBS loans generated in 2007 mature next year, and not every owner will be able to meet their obligations or find money to refinance their assets. The result may be a slew of short sales, defaults, foreclosures, auctions, etc. It could get ugly.

These and other weighty issues (and a few flighty ones, too) will occupy the 2,000 or so delegates for three days of panel discussions, speeches, receptions and, most importantly for many, dealmaking meetings. ALIS returns to Los Angeles after three years in San Diego. New site of the event will be LA Live, the impressive mixed-use complex in downtown Los Angeles that encompasses lodging, meeting space, restaurants, residential and retail. Conference poobah Jim Burba said in an e-mail last week advanced registrations are up 12%, and attendance should match 2007, which was the second-largest ALIS ever.

Burba also said the conference organizers have successfully solved what he calls the lounge-crasher challenge; that is, the significant number of people who don’t buy a registration but hang around the hotel all day (typically in the cocktail lounge) meeting people and doing business. One perhaps-apocryphal story is that some wheeler-dealers have hired seat fillers to hold their tables in the bar until needed for meetings. A clever, if unseemly strategy.

This year, since ALIS will take up all the public space in the host JW Marriott hotel and adjacent Nokia Theater, the hotel agreed to limit access to the property to those with an ALIS name badge and photo ID. The advantage for paid attendees, says Burba, is more seating and places to do business. It will be interesting to see if the cheats find a way around this security net.