Who We Are & What We Do

1. Doing our part to stop the spread of the virus to enable meetings, events, conventions and more business openings.

2. Doing our part to have our local, regional and state leaders to totally understand how vital American Airlines and the Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) have been for the remarkable growth of our region. Now more than ever, it is critical for all of us to do whatever is possible to help with American Airlines’ survival, which will result in success for all of us. American Airlines and CLT have provided Charlotte with phenomenal accessibility, which has been the main catalyst for Charlotte’s remarkable business and tourism growth and will be even more critical going forward to recover from economic losses of this pandemic.

3. We all need to do our parts to have our leaders to continuously focus on public safety issues and keeping our community safe. Relative safety of our region has been a major tool for retention, expansion and recruitment of major businesses. It should never be taken for granted and should always be a priority for all of us to improve safety of our community.

4. As we have heard from CEO’s of our major companies repeatedly, they are in Charlotte or moving here because of our accessibility, public safety, access to young talent and being a vibrant community which enables them to attract new workforce. Let’s do more to enhance our assets.

5. As we do our part to restore our economy, we must be more proactive in working with our local and state officials on enhancing our regions quality of life issues which include: effective transportation, quality education (K-12 & higher education), infrastructures improvement, housing, green space and business friendly policies. If you don’t think these issues don’t impact tourism, think again.

6. Quality of leadership is ultimately the deciding factor between success and failure for businesses and communities. While we are fortunate with our political leadership overall, there is much room for leadership improvement in our community as this pandemic has demonstrated the flaws of many. We must get more involved and elect more people who care more about our community than being a puppet for Democratic or Republican parties.

7. We must prepare for massive regional and statewide advertising campaign to attract visitors to our region. We also need to work extensively with our federal elected leaders to provide incentives for Americans to travel. There are current pending legislations to provide a tax deduction for travel and also making business meals 100% deductible to help restaurants.

8. Those of us who have dealt with restoring business after recessions, economic disaster of 9/11 and the economic meltdown of 2008, know that new construction has always served as a savior for economic challenges. We need to work a lot with our political leaders to not only ease the burden of building for developers, but invest heavily in building needed sport facilities, infrastructure improvements, light rails and roads for our still growing community. We recently passed San Francisco to become the 15th most populated city in the nation.

9. The economic devastation of Coronavirus has drastically lowered the value of many hospitality related businesses in the region. This will require us to work on addressing tax values and the tax payment specific businesses should be required to pay.

10. The eviction ban issues, which was never intended for transient guests or guests at hotels, has been a nightmare, not only for hotel operators but also law enforcement. We must focus on a legislative definition for what constitutes a transient guest or a resident in North Carolina.

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