It is with great pleasure and intellectual curiosity that we launch the Baird/STR Hotel Stock Index. It has always been our goal to provide a broad spectrum of information on the hotel industry and this index will add to the cumulative knowledge. Using this index, we will be able to accurately track investor sentiment toward the hotel industry. It is surprising how frequently within the industry we have one view of the outlook while investors have an entirely different view of the industry outlook. This index will provide one more variable in developing an improved model to better understand where the industry is going and how we get there.

Along with the index, we also will start a ticker showing individual stock trades on this website beginning in June. This will enable even casual observers of the industry to track price movements for each of the publicly held hotel companies as economic conditions change and develop on an ongoing basis.

For the first time, by simply visiting HotelNewsNow.com or HotelStockIndex.com, industry participants will be able to follow both individual hotel stocks and the overall performance for the industry at a single glance. Visitors will be able to view the performances in ticker format or in chart format.

We hope that by making this additional information available, in the long term, it will result in a better understanding for both hotel investors and industry players. It will also make it easy to track the impact on individual company stock prices from specific announcements and/or developments released by the major publicly held lodging companies.

We are particularly pleased to be working with David Loeb and his team at Robert W. Baird & Company. They have done an outstanding job of compiling the index and looking at the historical performance of the industry’s market performance. This already has provided us with additional insight on the relationship between industry operating performance and investor sentiment. As we move forward, it will be fascinating to track the index on a regular basis to see how it moves as the industry changes and how it changes relative to other industries and indices.