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First Quarter/Spring Letter from President and CEO Vijay Dandapani
Dear fellow hoteliers and industry leaders:
It is a real privilege and pleasure for me as your Association’s President and CEO to report on an eventful first quarter for our industry. The challenges and opportunities facing our industry and New York City in particular stem from a number of fronts, new and old.
Leading our concerns and having a direct bearing on members is the rapid growth of illegal hotel listings on web platforms. HANYC along with other key stakeholders has been very successful in enabling the enactment of a new law which calls for fines on “hosts” who list illegal hotels on these platforms. We are now working very closely with the City of New York to bring about a stringent enforcement mechanism that will serve to deter and stop commercial operators of illegal hotels. This includes directing those affected to the website www.illegalhotels.org to facilitate complaints to the city.
Last month HANYC was pleased to sponsor along with HeBS (https://www.hebsdigital.com/) the first edition of its seminar series. The presentation held at the InterContinental Times Square focused on the latest tools hotels could employ to minimize the rising costs of distribution by bringing more bookings to hotel proprietary websites. We expect to announce new initiatives in these and other areas of concern to hoteliers in the coming months.
HANYC is actively working with the Department of Finance to find a way to mitigate the continually escalating real estate tax bill of hotels. Apart from trying to find a more accurate and equitable system of assessment, we are working on fostering better policy ideas that will result in a more reasonable outcome for hotels.
Apart from a number of important committees where we have invited participation from any member wanting to do so, HANYC has set up an owners’ council that is actively engaged on the foregoing issues. The presence and high level of interest of ownership groups in these pressing issues has helped and will continue to be of help to us in articulating our concerns in order to ensure better outcomes for the hotel industry in New York City.
Lastly, we have a new website (HANYC.org) that is continually evolving with many new features still to come. Apart from being a platform for communicating where many of our initiatives - including responses to the travel ban and op-eds on other issues - are featured, it is also a forum for us to respond in a timely manner to anyone reaching out. Please bookmark the website and visit it regularly to stay up to date on issues while enabling us to live up to our new byline “The Key to New York Hospitality”.
With best wishes for Passover, Easter and the Season. | 
