American Hotel & Lodging Association’s Marilou Halvorsen serves as Senior Vice President of Government Affairs & Industry Relations, where she leads the association’s nationwide state and local government affairs strategy. In this role, she oversees AHLA’s government affairs team, consultants, and stakeholder engagement efforts across the country, while managing relationships with city and state lodging association partners.

Chirag Shah is the Executive Vice President for Policy Regulatory and Legal Affairs at the American Hotel and Lodging Association.  In his role, Chirag leads AHLA’s advocacy efforts on Capitol Hill and with federal agencies.  He also directs the association's national political strategy.  He previously served as AHLA's Senior Vice President of Federal Affairs.  Prior to joining AHLA, Chirag served as the Vice President for Government Affairs at AAHOA, the nation's largest hotel owners association.  

Matt Carrier serves as the Senior Vice President, Federal Government Affairs for AHLA. In this role, Matt leads the industry’s engagement with Congress and the Federal Government and oversees AHLA’s Federal Government Affairs team.

Kalyn Stephens serves as Vice President of Government Affairs, with a focus on human trafficking and travel and tourism. In this role, she also represents the industry with key coalitions and coordinates invaluable partnerships to advance some the industry’s top initiatives.

Kalyn previously served as the Director of Corporate Relations for AHLA working closely with various departments to coordinate key activities and managing the 70+ person Board of Directors as well as the communication and meetings of its associated committees.

Adrienne leads three teams (Membership, HTNG and Business Intelligence, and Marketing) focused on driving hotelier membership recruitment and retention, revenue growth and strategic marketing. This builds upon her prior role as Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development, in which she grew Allied membership, sponsorship and scaled the Premier Partner program. This role is an integral senior level leadership position that oversees and manages how AHLA captures and optimizes data, builds membership value and communicates it to prospective and current members.

Kiersten Pearce serves as the Senior Vice President , Strategic Initiatives and Conferences and Events for AHLA. Kiersten’s role is to ensure that AHLA continues to deliver a compelling value proposition model to the more than 26,000 members across all membership categories. Kiersten comes to AHLA with extensive experience within the hospitality industry and most recently project managed AHLA’s Consumer Innovation Forum (CIF), where she served as Director of Industry Relations at Kalibri Labs for nearly four years.

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