A BU Hospitality Professor Organizes a Round Table of

Professional Hotel Owners

Leora Lanza, a Boston University professor of hospitality
marketing principles at the school of Hospitality Administration,
has spent the past few months organizing a round table of
members of the InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) Emerging
Leaders Council. The council is made up of eight hotel owners
under the age of 40. The round table will take in Atlanta, Georgia
this upcoming week.
IHG is a multinational hotel company with nine hotel brands.
It is one of the worlds leading hospitality companies with over
4,700 hotels and nearly 674,000 rooms in nearly 100 countries
around the world. Their Emerging Leaders Council is part of the
companys executive committee. Lanz has been working closely
with IHG in order to coordinate the round table.
Brainstorming for the round table began months ago in the
Dominican Republic. Lanz met with Jeff Higley, Editorial Director of
HNN, at a hospitality conference there. They discussed what can
be done with the IHG owners association and how to benefit HNN
with exclusive publication.
Lanz reached out to the members of the council, with
permission of IHG, to meet and have conversation about issues
that affect hotel ownership. She describes the eight hotel owners,
All of them are under 40. Some are legacies, some of them its
not a family business. There is one woman, a number of Asian
American owners. Theres a little diversity in the group. All of
these people extremely smart and successful. Some owner
multiple hotels, others only own a few. Hotel News Now (HNN), a
major online hospitality news resource, will be covering the round
table. They will be video and audio taping the meeting and
producing exclusive articles about it.
The purpose of the round table is to discuss hospitality topics
from the point of view of hotel owners. According to Lanz, some of
the topics that will be discussed include, technology, social

media, the role of Online Travel Agents (OTAs), distribution

channels, third parties, and new issues emerging in the market,
like Air B&B. The hotel owners will be able to describe things in
terms of their generation and how they see things changing in the
future.
Lanz has had a major role in planning the round table. She
describe her role in the planning process, I have been working
with IHG to do everything for the event to get permission to
reach out to the hotel owners and the sponsor, to book the hotel
rooms and rooms for conferences. I have also been working
closely with editors and directors of business development in
order to connect with people to find a sponsor. Luckily, we were
able to find one of the affiliated members to be an executive
sponsors. The sponsor will be covering all the cost of the event
including hotel room, conference room, and travel charges.
The eight hotel owners and council members have been
working with Lanz in order to prepare for the round table. HNN
wants the conversation to be as naturally as possible. The
majority of the owners have not been in front of camera or the
media before. Lanz describes her role in preparing them; I have
been working to get them comfortable in front of a camera. I am
preparing them not to mess up, look back, or make the editor
think its posed. This includes teaching them how to interject in
the conversation, and how to say quotable things with numbers,
statistics, and personal information. I have urged them to do more
research and read more about the topics. This way they can form
opinions. An editor from HNN will be facilitating the round table
and a second editor will be taking notes, writing down quotable
things.
Lanz is representing the brand, IHG, through her work in
coordinating the event. If anything goes wrong or if any of the
owners says anything inappropriate, she will get penalized.
According to Lanz, I am responsible. A lot is at stake but I am
confident that the round table will be successful. The event is
communications based. Lanz will be traveling to Atlanta, Georgia
this upcoming week for her highly anticipated event.

Leora Lanz completed her undergraduate education at

Cornell University. She received a Masters in Communications,
focusing on Public Relations. She attended Boston University for
her graduate program, where she focused on Public Relations in
Hospitality Management. She has worked on a number of projects
in the hospitality industry and has been an active member of the
hospitality sector.