According to this article from The Dallas Morning News, Wyndham International, the hotel chain that landed at the bottom of the NAACP’s annual lodging report four years ago, came in second (behind Marriott International) in the latest NAACP rankings. In fact, the turnaround in Wyndham’s diversity-friendliness has even landed the chain’s chairman, Fred Kleisner, the job of chair of the NAACP’s corporate giving program and chairman for the American Hotel and Lodging’s new Multicultural & Diversity Advisory Council.

After getting a “D” grade four years ago, the company got moving to make its hotels diversity-friendly: It nominated women and minorities to its board, contracted with more women- and minority-owned companies, and “established an external diversity board to help guide how the company pursues minority customers–a strategy similar to the one it launched in 1997 to court women business travelers,” the article says. The chain also launched an ad campaign to get a piece of the lucrative gay and lesbian market earlier this year.

And all the effort is paying off. The chain has quadrupled its revenues from minority customers (from $1 million to $4 million), and landed a three-year contract for the 3,500-attendee Black Enterprise magazine’s Entrepreneur conference. The Wyndham Palace Resort & Spa also snagged next month’s “Gay and Lesbian Day at Walt Disney World” in Orlando, Fla.

“’Some associations and groups started doing business with us because of our diversity initiatives,’ said Donna Deberry, Wyndham’s executive vice president of global diversity and corporate affairs, in the article. ‘They wanted to do business with hotels that shared their values.’”

All I can say is: What a great turnaround story! And what a great example for others who may not be quite as accommodating to all as they should be.

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Today’s Buzzword of the day is priceless:

B U Z Z W O R D O F T H E D A Y

MEETINGS: Meetings have become so tainted they now go by a number of other names. These definitions from a recent Jared Sandberg column in the Wall Street Journal were so accurate BuzzWhack decided to share them with its readers:

BRIEFINGS — meetings that last longer than intended

SEMINARS — expensive meetings with handouts

PRESENTATIONS — meetings preceded and followed by many other meetings

VIDEOCONFERENCES — meetings with technical difficulties

CONFERENCE CALLS — meetings with eye-rolling

John Walston
BuzzWhacker-in-Chief

To see the full Buzzword Compliant
Dictionary, go to buzzwhack.com.

From a really interesting article on hotel-online.com:

“Westin, Seattle: Changed incandescent bulbs to energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs and improving control mechanisms. Result: Achieved 66 percent reduction in guest room wattage and an annual savings of $400,000.

“Hotel Bel Air: Undertook a comprehensive environmental program. Result: Saved $10,000 in 10 months plus increased revenue from the sale of cardboards.

“Hyatt Regency, Chicago: A comprehensive waste reduction and recycling program. Result: Recovered approximately 70% of recyclable materials and cut waste hauling costs in half. Recycling program has resulted in recovery of $120,000 in hotel items.

And that’s just the start. Going green saves money AND the environment. What’s not to like about that?

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According to a panel at the recent American Hotel & Lodging Association U.S. Lodging Industry Summit, here are some of the latest hospitality trends:

-More people are researching and booking through the Internet—from $1.27 billion in 2003 to $1.66 billion in 2005, a 30 percent increase.

-Last year’s 1.6 percent average daily rooms-sold rate will increase to 4.5 percent this year.

-Occupancy will increase from 59.2 percent in 2003 to 60.8 percent in 2004; average daily rates also will go from $83.12 (0.1 percent) in 2003 to $85.11 (2.4 percent) in 2004. Demand also will be heading upward.

-Generation Xers are starting to catch up to Baby Boomers in their travel-spending habits.

-All the new construction and re-flagging leading hotel companies have been doing will add up to more than half of the total lodging available this year: a total of 165,138 properties.

-Security concerns are taking a back seat to the economy when it comes to reasons why travel is difficult for them.

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A few years ago, I was looking for small-scale furniture to fit a nook in our house, and found just what I wanted at a conference center. Unfortunately, they couldn’t sell it to me, and their distributor only worked with facilities, not individual buyers. Well, that’s all changing, according to this article from the Denver Post, which explains how hotels are now selling everything from robes to a $4,000 Ritz-Carlton bed set. The Broadmoor actually has turned this into a tidy profit center, with $500,000 annual room amenity sales.

From the article: “High-end hotels, coming off three years of record-low occupancies, have turned guest rooms into virtual retail showrooms, offering for sale nearly everything in the room.

“’It’s catchy, it’s new, it’s different,” said Robert Mandelbaum, an Atlanta director at PKF Consulting, a hospitality research firm. “But I don’t think most people think, ‘Oh, wow, let’s go buy hotel furniture.’”

I must be ahead of the times on this one—that’s exactly what I thought at that conference center. And I have often found myself lusting after various beds and armoires I came to know and love during a hotel stay.

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A recent meeting hosted by the Travel Business Roundtable with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce brought together government folks—including Secretary Of State Colin Powell and Norman Y. Mineta, Secretary, U.S. Department of Transportation—and industry leaders to talk about how to both keep the U.S. safe and keep our doors open to travelers from outside the borders.

While it sounds like Powell’s presentation was basically a “we’re with you on this one,” feel-good type of thing, Miami Mayor Manuel Diaz pushed for a cabinet-level post for travel and tourism. “His remarks were met with a resounding applause from the audience,” says the article on the meeting. Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND), Chairman, Senate Democratic Policy Committee also had a concrete agenda: extending the deadline for new biometric passports and the launch of an international travel and tourism promotion.

While folks from hotels, airlines, and other industry segments were optimistic, another terrorism attack could throw us back into turmoil. Also, “Curtis Nelson, President and COO, Carlson Companies, said that the rebound had been phenomenal, but distinguished between leisure travel, which remained quite strong, with business travel, which is the last to see recovery. Robert Crandall, Retired Chairman, President and CEO of AMR Corporation and American Airlines addressed the challenges of the airline industry, which continues to lose money. He also stated his belief that it is wrong to continually pose higher fees and taxes on travelers.” To which I say, then cut it out!

While it’s nice to hear that some in government understand and care about this industry’s issues, I’d like to see a little less talking and a little more action to make what they’re talking about happen.

Scary article from USA Today on high-tech ID cards designed to “prevent armed terrorists from boarding a plane by posing as airport workers or law officers…The Transportation Security Administration still is experimenting with biometric identification systems, which match people’s unique physical characteristics to confirm who they are.” These cards, which the article says are already commonly used in nuclear plants, hospitals and businesses, still are doddering along when it comes to their use to keep unauthorized people out of secure areas of our airports.

Why is this important? According to the article, “congressional investigators created fake law enforcement IDs from software they downloaded from the Internet four years ago. Undercover agents were 100% successful penetrating federal buildings and two commercial airports using the phony IDs…A copy of the report on the penetration test was found later in an al-Qaeda cave in Afghanistan.”

Then again, with all the money it would cost to develop and implement these cards, they could probably hire security guards to watch all these areas! Either way, I wish they’d stop nattering and get a system in place. This ain’t rocket science, folks.

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Congratulations to James Youngblood (shown at right in the photo), chief executive officer, Heart Rhythm Society, and Richard B. Green, CASE, vice president of industry relations and association sales, Marriott International, who were feted by more than 1,000 people at the recent PCMA Education Foundation Dinner Celebrating Professional Achievement. Both men received the 2004 PCMA Professional Achievement Award for their leadership and contributions to the meetings and convention industry.