MANALAPAN, Fla. — Chip Rogers, president and CEO of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, kicked off the final day of the 2022 My Place Hotels convention at the Eau Palm Beach with updates from the past two years and a look at some current issues the association is focusing on.
While the association generally focuses on about five to seven major federal issues and five to seven major state and local issues at any one time, COVID-19 shifted the focus to simply staying afloat. But with travel rebounding and hotel occupancies returning to 2019 levels, the AHLA is back to focusing on a variety of federal and local challenges.
Most recently, the association worked with the United States General Services Administration to increase per diem rates for government travel in the continental United States for fiscal year 2023. The rates had been frozen for two years, Rogers said, which kept an estimated $1 billion each year from the industry. The increase will bring an that money into hotels, he said.
The AHLA also has been working with local jurisdictions on how to spend federal funds to promote travel and tourism. “When President [Joseph] Biden came into office, he gave all this money from the American Rescue Plan to the states, and sometimes to the cities and counties,” Rogers said, pointing out that about 20 percent of the money was earmarked for hospitality and tourism—but the recipients did not receive any further instructions on how the funds should be divided. “So our job has been to partner with our state association, our city associations to go in and tell them, ‘Here's a good way to spend the money. Here's how we, as a hotel industry, would like you to spend the money.’” Each receiving state, county and city has until 2024 to designate where the money will go and until 2026 to spend it, Rogers added, so this process will be ongoing. While Texas is using its $180 million to promote tourism, he said the AHLA worked with Georgia’s legislature and Gov. Brian Kemp to have much of the $150 million grant delivered to people in the hotel business.
To encourage more people to join the hospitality labor force, the AHLA has stepped up outreach efforts and are seeking out 18- to 24-year-olds who have left school but are still seeking employment with room for advancement. The AHLA Foundation’s Empowering Youth Program is training 2,000 individuals for hospitality jobs, and Rogers said the apprenticeship program has a retention rate of more than 90 percent.
The association also helped prevent the land use and replacement housing ballot initiative in Los Angeles, which would have required hoteliers in the city to accept homeless people in their otherwise unused hotel rooms each night. “None of these folks that work in our hotels are trained to help people who have mental health issues,” Rogers said. The California Hotel & Lodging Association, the AHLA, the Hotel Association of Los Angeles and AAHOA all urged the L.A. City Council to oppose immediate implementation, and the council voted 12-0 against immediate enaction in early August.
Laboring
Rogers said labor was another “important issue we need to keep an eye on,” with the Protect The Right to Organize (or PRO) Act top of mind in Congress. The act, he said, would eliminate “right-to-work” states and would promote card-check elections, which are easier for unions to win.
The act also codifies the joint employer standard the National Labor Relations Board enacted in its 2015 Browning-Ferris decision, which was overturned by the Trump administration’s NLRB. Under the standard, any businesses that control a worker’s terms of employment (for example, a franchisor and a franchisee) would both be considered employers of that worker and both would be expected to bargain. “It sounds stupid because it is stupid,” Rogers said. “You don't want the franchise business to share your employees and jointly employ them. Franchisees don't like that. Franchisors don’t like that. Nobody likes it except for unions.”
Overtime pay for salaried employees also is a concern. For years, salaried workers making $24,000 or less per year were eligible for overtime, and the Obama administration looked to raise the minimum to $47,476. This was struck down by a federal court and the Trump administration adjusted the current minimum salary threshold to $35,568. “So any employee you have that is making under that amount, even for salary, they get paid overtime,” Rogers said. Now, the Biden administration is considering raising that minimum again to $85,000, which Rogers cautioned could be devastating for hoteliers given the nature of the industry and the hours workers often are on the job. The AHLA has participated in listening sessions with the Department of Labor, Rogers added, and expressed concerns about the possibility.
Rogers also highlighted the new The Hospitality Show, which the AHLA developed with Questex, the parent company of Hotel Management. The event, which will be held June 27-29, 2023, at The Venetian Las Vegas, will offer education through thought-provoking insights from expert speakers, an exhibit hall to discover and evaluate new products and solutions, personalized business matchmaking as well as a host of other networking opportunities.
“I hope everybody joins us in Las Vegas [from] June 27 to 29,” he said at the end of his session.