[Excerpt] In the last two decades of the twentieth century the lodging industry experienced an unprecedented level of consolidation. In particular, mergers and acquisitions among lodging companies took place at record levels in the late 1990s. From 1982 through 2000 the industry saw a total of 57 acquisitions with an aggregate market value in the target companies’ stocks of over $53 billion dollars. Exhibit 1 (overleaf) reports the annual number and annual market value of target stocks for all lodging acquisitions completed during that 1982–2000 period. The sample, supplied by Securities Data Corporation (SDC), includes mergers of both public and private companies in which at least one of the companies involved operates in the lodging industry. A noticeable trend in the data is that the value of lodging mergers increased dramatically since 1993. In 1993 the industry saw two mergers valued at $29.7 million, while in 1998 a total of 11 mergers were valued at $25 billion. That is, the value of acquisitions in the lodging industry was almost 1,000 times greater in 1998 than in 1993.