Like me, a lot of people in the hotel industry were a little shocked at last week’s news that the U.S. hotel development pipeline shot up by 9.2% in April. The report from STR, the parent company of HotelNewsNow.com, also showed an 18.5% increase hotel rooms under construction, when compared to April 2012.

These numbers reinforce a trend I’ve seen for a number of months: Hotel developers, lenders and brand companies are back in the game of building hotels. The question remains, however, whether this renewed enthusiasm for hotel development will lead to the curse of overbuilding, which in the past often resulted in an industry downturn. Maybe this time it will be different (although I doubt it).

In my travels, I’ve been to some poor countries in Central America and Africa, but I’ve never seen poverty as abject, infrastructure as broken and an economy as crippled as I did last week in Haiti. I was there as a guest of Best Western International and Aimbridge Hospitality as they showed a press delegation the recently opened Best Western Premier Pétion-Ville, a suburb of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

And while the levels of sorrow and economic depression were intensely high, I also saw an uplifting spirit and sense of optimism that, not surprising to me, is driven by the prospects of development in the tourism sector. Across the world, and now in Haiti, private and public sector leaders are realizing that well-thought-out, economically feasible hotel and other tourism development can be the key to providing much-needed jobs, import dollars and, ultimately, lasting economic growth that can spread through a community and a country.

There were a lot of high-fives in the tourism community last week when President Obama nominated Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker to be the next United States Secretary of Commerce. Even Marriott International President and CEO Arne M. Sorenson gave a shout-out to her nomination during his quarterly earnings call with stock analysts.

To be sure, there should be advantages to having someone with direct ties to the hotel business (her father co-founded and her family retains a major interest in Hyatt Hotels Corporation) at such a high-level, policy-setting position in U.S. government. As far as I can recall, it’s an unprecedented honor for the hotel industry and, perhaps in a small way, it shows how the industry is finally achieving long-sought-after respect in Washington, D.C.

There was a time when hotel company executives liked to brag about their humble beginnings in the industry. When he was president of Western International Hotels (the forerunner of Westin Hotels), every press story about Harry Mullikin touted his start as an elevator operator in the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, Washington. Steve Belmonte, one-time president of Ramada Hotels, still brags that he became a success in the industry without a college degree.

Is that kind of upward mobility still possible for anyone with his or her eye on the executive suite of a hotel company, particularly one of the major brand groups? Probably not, given that most major brand companies are now publicly traded and many of them operate as either pure franchise or extreme asset-light companies.

Hoteliers have the best job in the world, and most of them know it. They get to make vacationers' every dream come true. They help facilitate the drudgery known as business travel. And sometimes, such as this past week, they're able to help guests who are scared, lost, alone and out of touch with loved ones.

As Boston coped with the awful bombing tragedy at the Boston Marathon and the subsequent manhunt and unprecedented lockdown of the city and suburbs, the hotel community acted with utmost professionalism, care, compassion and most of all, an attitude of hospitality. News reports recounted the many simple and grand ways hoteliers took care of their guests.

The front doors to the United States—the airports in gateway cities—are in terrible shape and, if not fixed, could stall the tourism industry’s efforts to lure more global travelers to the country. Beyond that problem, the rest of the nation’s infrastructure, including roads, bridges and transit systems, isn’t much better, creating further barriers to tourism growth.

While it’s hard to quantify the terrible shape of the nation’s airports, it’s easy to see for yourself: Fly in or out of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and you’ll experience it first-hand. But Jonathan Tisch, co-chairman of Loews Corporation and chairman of Loews Hotels, has a more descriptive explanation, which he related to me in a phone conversation last week.