Faculty & Research
Steve Hood
Senior Vice President of Research
STR
Steve is Senior Vice President of Research for STR (Smith Travel Research, Inc). He has been with STR for 16 years and was involved in the original development of the STAR program. Steve played a major role in the historical launch of programs that incorporated daily, group/transient, and international data. He is currently responsible for research-related activities at STR, while managing STR’s relationships with their largest customer, the US government. Steve also serves as the Founding Director of the SHARE Center, STR’s outreach to universities around the world. Most recently he has been involved in the Distribution Channel Analysis, a study that has collected and analyzed booking channel data from over 25,000 hotels. Prior to STR, Steve served as Vice President at two database consulting firms in the Northern Virginia area. He represents STR at national and international lodging and tourism events and you can see his articles in publications such as Hotel News Now (www.hotelnewsnow.com). Steve currently serves on several advisory boards for industry and academia. Steve grew up in the Baltimore/Washington area, received his undergraduate degree from the University of Maryland, and now lives in Nashville with his wife and four children.
STR is the leading authority on lodging industry performance trends and performance benchmarking. This has been accomplished through STR’s commitment to confidentiality and accuracy, and tireless effort to continue to develop products to enhance the hospitality industry. This effort has led to the development of the STR family of companies, which include: STR Global, RRC Associates, HotelNewsNow.com, STR Analytics and the Hotel Data Conferences.
STR recently launched the SHARE Center (Supporting Hotel-related Academic Research and Education) a global partnership with ICHRIE. The SHARE Center provides training materials, train the trainer programs, sample reports, publications, reference information, raw hotel-related data, and additional resources to universities and professors around the world to assist in their research and classroom activities.