2 CALIFORNIA LODGING NEWS www.calodging.com Dhruv Patel CHLA Chair MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR As I begin my year as Chair of the California Hotel & Lodging Association, I want to look ahead to 2024 by looking back at 2023. Our industry nationwide, but more so in California, has faced a lot of challenges lately. We are still trying to get back to pre-pandemic levels of occupancy and revenue. At the same time, we have had to fend off unsustainable demands by unions and local governments. Sometimes we have faced an existential challenge, as in Anaheim last summer when the city asked voters to approve a minimum wage mandate for hotels. That union-backed effort, ostensibly a “living wage” issue, would have been ruinous to our business—and somehow making us singlehandedly responsible for addressing the complex issue of affordable housing. Yet, we were able to defeat that mandate at the polls because of the efforts of small, local property owners who worked hard and passionately to convince voters how that measure would destroy local small businesses along with the jobs and economic activity they support. So, if there is one overriding theme that I want to stress in my role this year, it is the vital importance of local engagement. If we want to continue to grow, prosper, and succeed as we did in Anaheim, we need every CHLA member—especially small owners and operators—to be proactive in that effort. As a local hotelier in Oakland, I learned early on the importance of being engaged in order to ensure the business my family built one property at a time would have an environment where we could continue to succeed. I spent a great deal of time building relationships with local elected and other civic leaders, getting to know members of the City Council. Importantly, I took it as part of my job as an owner to educate them about what we actually do as an industry. Instead of them seeing us strictly as a source of TOT revenue, I worked to help them understand how much benefit we provide not only from taxes, but from the jobs we create, the local businesses we support with our spending, and enabling the city to have a vibrant tourism economy. We can’t take for granted that local officials understand the scope of our contribution to the community. It’s important to let them know— in terms of dollars and cents—what those contributions are. It’s also important to remind them of the connection between those dollars and their policy decisions—every event that doesn’t rebook has a direct negative impact on local government coffers. There’s another, intangible benefit to this kind of education and engagement. Instead of being a building or a brand, we become real people, faces, and names. It is much harder for someone to say no to you when they know you, when they see you at the grocery store or the next council meeting. And it’s so important to build those relationships before there is a contentious issue, when it will be much harder to be heard. I am proud of our industry, of the hard work of so many people—owners, managers, staff—that together maintain a vital part of California’s economy. I am proud of the fact that our industry is one of the few in our state that offers a solid and rewarding career path without the need for a college degree. I am proud of the diversity of our industry and for the many acts of kindness and goodwill our people do behind the scenes for guests, the community, and each other—not to gain public recognition, but simply because service is what we do every day. So I start my tenure here not only asking for you to be engaged, but also with the pledge to be an engaged Chair in service to my fellow CHLA members. I am excited to have this opportunity to give back to the industry that has given so much to me.
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