In addition, we continued our stock repurchase program, which the Board just extended this past February for another five million shares. In the past three years, Choice has purchased more than 16 million shares, thus reducing its common shares outstanding to 52.6 million.

Last December, management began a restructuring in our corporate organization that has helped streamline our business and enhance our focus on service to franchisees.

Choice is organized better for success now, with a new centralized franchise sales effort and enhanced localized services to our franchised hotels through a realignment in our regional operations from five to three Market Areas. Our field people now will focus solely on providing service to franchisees.

These strategic moves enable us to create a new operating plan that will strengthen our core hotel franchising business and give us new avenues for growth in hotel management and development.

At the same time, we realigned our North American call center network from five to three locations to reflect the ongoing shift in consumer practices from toll-free telephone numbers to alternative distribution channels such as the Internet, and the Global Distribution Systems (GDS) run by major airlines and travel agencies. Even so, we continue to deliver an exceedingly strong reservations performance, which assures franchisees and consumers that we can reduce costs in the system without disrupting service.

All this is especially good news for existing and prospective franchisees. It demonstrates a franchise system that continues to deliver solid business to hotels and value-added services at the property level in a cost-efficient manner.

As the worldwide Choice system grows, we have to be mindful to preserve the value of the investment already made by franchisees. Even as we tighten standards, and under-performing hotels leave our brands through termination or attrition, we continue to grow. At year-end 2000, the number of hotels worldwide had grown 3.4% to 4,392 and the number of rooms had reached 350,351.

That’s the good news on unit growth, which is fundamental to the success of our business. However, new hotel development has slowed in the past two years. We expect that trend will continue, given a tighter financing environment and uncertainty regarding the future growth in the economy.