ALIS PLANNING MEETING LOOKS LIKE A BLOCKBUSTER!

Over 50 of the nation’s hotel investment leaders will be heading to Chicago on April 30, 2001 to attend the inaugural planning meeting for The Americas Lodging Investment Summit (ALIS). The number of confirmed attendees is expected to grow by the time of the planning meeting, making it possibly the largest gathering ever for the kick-off of a major hotel investment event.

Jim Burba, ALIS Chairman, stated, “I am absolutely stunned at how well the ALIS model is being received. Not only are people excited about the program’s freshness, they also seem to really appreciate the financial support that ALIS will provide to help educate our future hotel industry leaders.”

ALIS will be held February 3-5, 2002 in Los Angeles, California at the new Renaissance Hollywood Hotel, part of the ambitious Hollywood and Highland redevelopment project. The event’s founders and co-hosts are the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA) and BHN. ALIS is designed to provide an annual meeting place for hotel executives, investors, lenders, developers and the professional advisory community in the hotel and tourism industry. The event will bring together leading experts and investors to discuss important trends and to identify new hospitality investment opportunities. Perhaps the most important and unique part of ALIS is its organizational structure and commitment to the hotel industry. ALIS will benefit the Educational Institute (EI) of AH&LA and The American Hotel & Lodging Foundation.

John Russell, AH&LA Chairman stated, “We are getting calls every day from hotel industry executives who want to be involved in ALIS. We are very excited by the overwhelmingly positive response, and it looks as if it will be standing-room-only at the planning meeting in Chicago.”

BHN is the organizer of some of the world’s largest and most prominent hotel investment conferences, including the recently held 4th Annual International Hotel Investment Forum in Berlin, Germany, the 5th Annual Caribbean Hotel & Tourism Investment Conference to be held in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles in April and the upcoming 12th Annual Hotel Investment Conference to be held in Hong Kong in October. In addition, BHN was retained by the Government of Montenegro to organize the “by invitation only” Montenegro Hotel & Tourism Investment Conference in May 2001.

AH&LA, founded in 1910, is a federation of state lodging associations throughout the United States, with some 11,000 property members worldwide, representing more than 1.4 million rooms. AH&LA provides operations, technical, educational, marketing and communications services, plus governmental affairs representation to the lodging industry.