TIA, TBR Partner To Amplify Travel Industry's Voice

The Travel Industry Association of America and the Travel Business Roundtable recently announced a partnership through which the organizations will combine resources and pursue lobbying efforts with "one voice."

TIA, which represents 2,200 members, and TBR, an association of roughly 75 CEO-level industry executives, have joined forces in what TIA president and CEO Roger Dow deemed a "strategic partnership." While the groups will remain separate and distinct, two members of each organization, likely including Dow and TBR chairman Jonathan Tisch, will sit on the board of their partner association.

"The way I look at it is, TBR becomes the lobbying effort and TIA brings to the table great depth and research, our communications department and our ability to bring the message out further to the grass-roots area," said Dow in a conference call. "We become the government action group to begin pulling this through from the state and county level right through to the federal level working with TBR. You will not see us lobbying on Capitol Hill under the name of TIA. It will be TBR which will become known as the government-affairs face of the travel industry." Chuck Merin, managing director of BKSH & Associates and a longtime lobbyist for TBR, now serves as the principal lobbyist on behalf of both organizations.

Dow also said the move does not represent a consolidation of financial resources and will not affect staffing. "The whole idea of this was not about saving money in any way. It was about, 'How do we take our combined resources, the activities we do, the voice that we have, and meld that into one?' " Dow said. "What TBR spends and what we spend on our lobbying now, as a single effort, that's twice as big financially and with people. It was not in any way done to consolidate resources."

With combined memberships representing a cross-section of Corporate America and industry associations, said TBR chairman Tisch in the same call, the group will be able to present a unified front on pressing issues affecting the industry and the nation.

"We will continue to focus on tax-related issues," according to TBR's Tisch. "We will continue to press for the extension of the work opportunity tax credit, the welfare-to-work tax credit, the return of a spousal deduction, and an increase in the amount of the business meals deduction."

Tisch, who also is chairman of Loews Hotels, pointed to the travel industry's recent victory in obtaining a one-year delay to the biometric passport requirements facing countries participating in the Visa Waiver Program as the kind of initiative the two organizations will pursue together. "We will continue to really focus our efforts on discussing and pointing out what an economic engine our industry is for this country. We're the third-largest retail industry and, unfortunately, a lot of our elected officials don't understand that," TBR's Tisch said.

"Through this combined ability now to reach out and discuss these issues, we'll be able to really have an impact and benefit this country and our industry," Tisch said. "We are, as two organizations, as one industry, and now as one voice, very concerned about the image of America overseas and very much focused on how we can change that because it affects inbound travel."

TBR board member Jeffrey Stewart, senior vice president of communications and public relations for Loews Hotels, said that the newly partnered organizations will look for ways to repair what they perceive as the United States' rapidly deteriorating public image abroad.

"Any American company that does business abroad is seeing an impact on its business. Even before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the worldview of America and Americans was not the best and it's certainly gotten worse. There are a lot of causes for the deteriorating perception of America and what studies have shown is that the best way to combat it is to have that interaction," Stewart said. "We know that people's image of America improves if they visit America and interact with Americans. When we encourage people to come here, the 17 million people who work in travel and tourism are, in many ways, our ambassadors."

Joint lobbying efforts by TIA and TBR will focus on obtaining greater funds for marketing and advertising abroad. "The marketing dollars are certainly not up there. Though tourism may be on the rise, America is losing market share," said Stewart. "While the raw numbers are looking better, there's a lot more to be done, so we'll continue to push for increased marketing dollars. That's clearly a very important component of this initiative."