Hi, I'm Ed Brock and I'm here with Jeff Tabati. He's CEO of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts and we were at the AHAA 26. What's going on? How's it going, Jeff?
It would not be an AHAA in any year if we weren't talking to your listeners and talking about how excited we are here at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. When you look at all of the shows we go to, we would say that aside from the show we do every 18 months, which you come to, and you were at Vegas last at the Wyndham Global Conference. They're synonymous. And that was my point. The Wyndham Global Conference 2024. You were there in Vegas. We're about to do another one that we're soon to announce. Aside from our own global conference, this is for us our favorite show, right?
We have over 100, well over 100 by the end of today because we're very close to our world headquarters in Parsippany, New Jersey. But we have over 100 franchise sales, development professionals. We have our sales, our marketing, our operations, our IT technology team all here because it is such an important show. From the start of it yesterday, I don't know if you caught all 100 of us up on stage.
Which they allow us to do before the opening of the first general session. There's a certain optimism and I'd say excitement in the air. I think people are feeling much better about where we are today than where we were this time last year, where there was a lot more uncertainty.
You were at AHAA 2025. We were all in New Orleans.
Yes. And this was a period where you saw in the industry, you saw RevPAR start to really soften, right? And you've continued to see that in the select service space. April was weaker than March. May was weaker than April. And that continued all the way through to December. You know, here we are now in April and we've seen three consecutive months where demand in our industry has picked up, right? And so I think franchisees, small business owners that are here at AHAA for this conference are feeling a lot more optimistic about the business ahead than they did this time last year. And our teams are certainly feeling that here in the booth.
Sure. Yeah. Well, we were talking a little bit this morning about there's a sort of a divide going on between two groups of people, you know, one saying we need to be better to the brands, saying well the franchises need to be taken care of. What do you think about and kind of came to the agreement that unification, more of a unified front particularly with advocating for the industry, right?
Sure. Yeah. I mean, look, we look across the country, there's never been a more important time in our nation's 250 years of advocacy than there is today in terms of the bipartisan nature of what's going on out there in Washington DC today. So, associations like AHAA are really important. Associations like the American Hotel and Lodging Association, as we were talking about this morning, are really important. Advocacy matters. What matters most to congressmen and women is that they're hearing not from brands and suppliers who are here, but that they're hearing directly from the small business owners, right?
We've been a huge supporter of AHAA since its foundation, right? We've talked, you and I have talked a lot about 37 years ago, our chairman, our then chairman, Mr. Henry Silverman, and our then CFO, Mr. Stephen P. Holmes, who is my chairman today of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, decided that there was a need for advocacy among small business owners in the select service economy and mid-scale lodging space and we wrote a check for $100,000 that launched AHAA right in the offices of Days Inn in Atlanta, right? And that famous picture that was shown yesterday is HP Rama received his award. Yeah, it was HP Rama, a young officer at AHAA, standing in front of a Days Inn sign in our world headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia for that brand. We've been proud AHAA supporters ever since.
As we were talking this morning, our support has never wavered. Through the one year there wasn't an AHAA, I mean, we were still participating and contributing. We do everything we can to support its cause. Its officers, they're all coming to New Jersey, I believe, the week after next to meet with our team, at our world headquarters. And it's an important relationship. And this is really after our show, the most important conference for us because these are our customers.
Yeah. Everyone who's here either owns a Wyndham or would like to own a brand of ours, our 25 brands that are proudly represented today by all of our brand leaders and all our operating professionals that you see behind me.
