• GBTA Foundation’s monthly hotel benchmarking data on service level and top 25 markets are used in this report. Data is aggregated for service level using year-to-date 2011 and 2010 data (January through November). November data for 2011 and 2010 is used for the top 25 markets.

• On the GBTA Foundation website, detailed reports of U.S. hotel performance is provided using Smith Travel Research data. The first report is the 94 major metropolitan markets (376 cities), each broken into four scales of service (luxury/upper up, upscale, upper mid/mid, and economy). The second report is for the top 25 U.S. markets, each split into their major geographic areas (160 areas). All hotel data includes both occupancy rates and average nightly room rate for the most recent 12 months and for the year-earlier period. Also available is benchmarking against GBTA Peers. The Hotel Rates benchmarking report allows comparison of nightly hotel rate by city and service level to that of other GBTA members.

• Full hotel performance data can be accessed on GBTA Foundation's Benchmarking Tools.