Within three hours, 25 Santa Fe properties  including the Historic La Fonda Hotel and The Eldorado Hotel  and five Taos properties committed to providing approximately 700 rooms for the evening. Although Santa Fe could accommodate up to 600 evacuees on Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday night, most properties were booked with tourists arriving for the weekend. As a result, NMH&MA contacted the Greater Albuquerque Innkeepers Association and within hours 20 properties had offered rooms, most at the $25 discounted rate, including the Hyatt Regency, the Wyndham Albuquerque Airport, DoubleTree Albuquerque, and the Best Western Rio Grande Inn, which also included a complimentary dinner and breakfast.

"The $25 was a rate was suggested by several of our Santa Fe properties to cover the cost of housekeeping," said Art Bouffard, NHM&MA executive vice president. "Some offered complimentary rooms, but the majority stayed with the discounted rate. We had no idea how long the relief effort would last, and we knew that we would probably have to turn away some business that had not been pre-booked."

During the first weekend, 20 Albuquerque properties provided approximately 2,200 room nights, while Santa Fe properties provided approximately 3,900 room nights from Wednesday through Sunday. In all, eighty properties provided more than 5,800 room nights over a five-day period at a rate of $25 to countless residents. NMH&MA notified state and local officials and provided the list to KOB-TV in Albuquerque, which had organized an evacuation information center. Over the course of the crisis, NMH&MA handled hundreds of calls from evacuees interested in finding shelter at their member properties. In addition, the staff collected information from hotel employees and residents who were offering their homes to evacuees and relayed that information to the KOB-TV center.
 

Although NMH&MA continued to act as a liaison during the second week of the fire, demand for rooms dropped dramatically as residents found homes to stay in, and as insurance companies began dispensing expense checks to the displaced residents. By Sunday, May 21, residents were allowed to return to Los Alamos. In all, more than 250 homes were totally destroyed. The majority of properties discontinued the special rates on Monday, May 22, as the various insurance companies began picking up the cost of lodging and other expenses. In addition to coordinating room availability, NMH&MA learned that a department building in Santa Fe was being converted as an intake center for highly-classified Los Alamos National Laboratory employees. The association contacted three properties, the Eldorado Hotel, La Fonda Hotel, and Hotel Loretto, which prepared sandwiches and drinks for city workers doing the preparations.

Founded in 1934 as the New Mexico Hotel Association and later united with the New Mexico Association it came to be known as the New Mexico Hotel and Motel Association. It is the trade association that represents the lodging industry in New Mexico.  NMH&MA now represents some 300 individual hotels, motels, resorts, and bed & breakfast inns, comprising some 22,000 plus transient rooms or 67 percent of the total room inventory in New Mexico.  Today�s NMH&MA leadership typifies the hotelier of the 90�s - experienced in all aspects of managing a hotel and dedicated to serving the needs of both the leisure and business traveler.  Headquartered in Santa Fe, NMH&MA�s staff is prepared to assist with communications, governmental affairs, marketing, hospitality operations services, conventions, risk management, technology, information, and member relations.  (505) 983-4554 [email protected] http://www.nmhotels.com

"The response and desire to assist our neighbors was beyond all expectations, and I'm delighted our lodging community pulled together and came through with flying colors," said Bouffard. "The fire produced many interesting and heartening stories, like the woman and her three children who were given a room for $25 a night at one of Santa Fe's major hotels that normally carries a rack rate of $220 per night. The story goes on that the policeman on duty carried what items she had managed to grab from her house and helped her get her family into the room, all the while making the children feel like it was a fin adventure."

AH&MA, founded in 1910, is a federation of state lodging associations throughout the United States, with some 11,000 property members worldwide, representing more than 1.4 million rooms. AH&MA provides operations, technical, educational, marketing, and communications services plus governmental affairs representation to the lodging industry.