In this special edition episode of Suite Spot, we recap the recent 2018 Lodging Conference. It took place at the beautiful Arizona Biltmore resort in Phoenix, AZ. Host Ryan Embree is joined by Travel Media Group’s Senior Director of Product, Jason Lee as they discuss the current state and future of the hotel industry.  Listen and learn, as they analyze the opportunities and threats to the current prosperous era for hoteliers. This episode is a great way to get insight into what the power players and brand leaders are saying about the hotel business today. Episode Transcript Our podcast is produced as an audio resource. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human editing and may contain errors. Before republishing quotes, we ask that you reference the audio. Ryan Embree: Welcome to the Suite Spot where hoteliers check in and we check out what's trending and hotel marketing. I'm your host, Ryan Embree. Ryan Embree: Hello and welcome everyone. You are listening to the Suite Spot. This is Ryan Embree, your host. Thank you for listening today. We've got a very special and exciting episode of Suite Spot where we are going to be reflecting on the most recent 2018 Lodging Conference which happened here at the end of September of 2018. I had the pleasure and was fortunate enough to attend the conference myself as well as our guest that we're going to be having on today and we're going to give you a couple of takeaways and get a good grasp on some of the key points. So today let's go ahead and welcome Jason Lee. He's our senior director of product and technology. I was fortunate enough to travel with Jason to the Lodging Conference. He has been to the conference multiple times, so he's going to have a some different insight on what the differences might have been in the past versus this year. So let's go ahead and welcome Jason in. Jason, welcome back to the show. Jason Lee: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me back. After my last performance, I was hoping that you would invite me back. I didn't know for sure. Ryan Embree: Absolutely. So today, as mentioned, we're gonna be talking about the Lodging Conference and this isn't the first time you've been, you've been a number of years now. I wanted to get your impression of, you know, this year's overall sentiment and how maybe this year's Lodging Conference has been different than years past. Jason Lee: Yeah I think like in terms of different from years past, you know, I remember going to the Lodging Conference right after the recession, you know, the 2010 / 2011 times and, and I think there was a lot of like, hey, you know, or we do see some trends going the right way, but are we ever going to get back to 2007 / 2006 levels of occupancy and revenue? Um, and I think, you know, over the last few years we've seen a lot of optimism and a lot of like, hey, the state of the industry. It looks really great and it's really awesome and I think this year you're seeing the same numbers as the previous probably five years of like, Hey, this is good, good growth. Um, but now it's a little more like, how long is this growth gonna go? Can we keep this going? Um, some people, they're feeling very optimistic and thinking that we're, we're, you know, the, that the, uh, the hotel supply line is correct. We're not overbuilding. The influx of travel seems to be going well. Millennial travelers and baby boomer travel seems to be, you know, on the rise. So you're looking at good segmentation and solid revenue projections. Um, but then at the same time it's like, or there could be some sort of economic collapse or there could be some kind of other thing that could happen that could cause a derailment that everything right now looks very, very positive. Ryan Embree: Right. And we heard "cautious optimism" a lot throughout the conference and you're right, you know, we've been hearing it from brands, we heard it from management groups that,