Bob HazardLong-time industry veteran Bob Hazard will be honored with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit (ALIS), January 26-28, 2015, in Los Angeles. Hazard served as chairman, president, and CEO of Choice Hotels International from 1980 to 1996. During that period, he and his team grew Choice from a regional group of 339 Quality Inns into a six-brand, global hotel company with more than 3,800 inns, hotels, and resorts, offering over 330,000 guest rooms in 43 countries. Additionally, the value of Choice Hotels rose from $15 million in 1980 to over a billion dollars when the company went public in 1996 on the NY Stock Exchange. Hazard is credited in the hotel industry as "The Father of Hotel Segmentation." Under his leadership, Choice became the first hotel company to offer multiple brand names at different price points with the introduction of limited-service, luxury-budget, and new construction Comfort Inns in 1980. This was followed by the addition of Sleep Inns, Comfort Suites, Quality Suites, and Clarion Inns, Hotels and Resorts, and later Econolodge and Rodeway Inns. This same multi-brand strategy later became the preferred business model for other hotel franchisors like Marriott, Hilton, Starwood, InterContinental, Carlson, and Wyndham. Additional Choice innovations included becoming the first hotel company to set aside a mandatory block of "no smoking" rooms in all its hotels, and Sleep Inns as the first brand to use magnetic cards to replace metal room keys.