AMANDA HITE, PRESIDENT, CEO STR Amanda Hite joined STR in Jan 2006 when the company had one office in Hendersonville with 65 people.  She became president and CEO in 2011 and in that role sets company policy and strategy while overseeing daily operations and implementing initiatives for STR's family of companies: Hotel News Now (HNN), based in Cleveland, Ohio and STR’s international headquarters, in London. She is a member of the boards of directors of the U.S. Travel Association (USTA) and the Hendersonville Chamber of Commerce.  Today STR has 300 employees worldwide, with 170 situated at the corporate headquarters in Hendersonville, Tennessee, an international office headquartered in London, a regional office in Singapore, and, in total, 16 offices in 15 countries... and a network of 57,000 contributing hotels worldwide.  Hardly any wonder they are the most important voice in the industry. Read this in the Blog! THE STR REPORT The STR Report was originally called, and continues to be called, the “Smith Travel and Accommodation Report”.  It is the aggregation of data voluntarily supplied by hotels to STR that describes how a set of competing hotels , the ‘compset’, is performing financially relative to a client hotel.  In short the STR report provides a competitive set benchmarking tool to a hotel operator by comparing it against those other hotels that it sees as being competitive to itself.  Hotels provide their financial results to STR and in return are given market level data at no cost.  Or STR will provide compset data to hotel operators who by such data.  Review us on iTunes! REVPAR – A MEASURE UPON WHICH BONUSES ARE BASED The key data points that hotel s look at are occupancy and the average daily rate, but the key metric that drives decisions is what is called ‘Revpar’, or, revenue per available room.  This is calculate by looking at total revenue divided by the total number of available rooms.  The Revpar index is the metric that most hotels use to evaluate their own performance.   Having been in the industry for over 30 years, STR knows that all staff meetings for hotels are usually planned around the delivery of their STR report and in many hotels the general manager’s bonus is tied to performance against the Revpar index.  HOTEL INDUSTRY: NEVER BUILT ITSELF INTO A RECESSION Unique, perhaps, in commercial real estate, the hotel sector has ‘never sent itself into a downturn through overbuilding.’  Any time the sector has had a downturn it has been brought about by external macro-economic factors, and not through the building of excess supply.  And each time there has been a downturn for hotels, the impact has been more dramatic than the last time.  This is likely due to the continuing improvement in the availability of data in the industry, both on the consumer side and the operator side.  When a consumer wants to book a room, there are countless ways that they can find different rates for that same room.  Similarly, when an operator sees a competitor reducing rates next door, they can adjust their rates almost simultaneously and this can lead to a more rapid and precipitous drop in rates and bookings and consequently in the all important Revpar measure.  After the last downturn, the transient demand for rooms came back quickly, but room rates did not climb as quickly as had been expected.  Hotels  are selling more rooms than ever before in the industry, but there are more rooms to sell than ever before, so the hot topic is the new supply and what will be the impact of that supply as it comes on stream. GROWTH OF 2% FORECAST FOR 2017 In total STR tracks in-construction, final planning, and planning phase pipeline, which are the ‘under contract’ pipeline.  As of June 2017, there are 580,000 rooms under contract, meaning planned to be built… though possibly not all of those will actually end up being built.  Of those that are actually in construction and coming out o