Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Ashford Hospitality fourth quarter 2009 earnings conference call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Thursday, February 25, 2010. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tripp Sullivan. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning. Welcome to the Ashford Hospitality Trust conference call to review the company's results for the fourth quarter of 2009. On the call today will be Monty Bennett, Chief Executive Officer; Doug Kessler, President; and David Kimichik, Chief Financial Officer. The results as well as notice of the accessibility of this conference call on a listen-only basis over the Internet were released yesterday afternoon in a press release that has been covered by the financial media. As we start, let me remind you that certain statements and assumptions in this conference call contain or are based upon forward-looking information being made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements are subject to numerous assumptions, uncertainties, and known or unknown risks, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. These risk factors are more fully discussed in the section entitled "Risk Factors" in Ashford's annual and quarterly reports and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this conference call are only made as of the date of this call and the company is not obligated to publicly update or revise them. In addition, certain terms used in this call are non-GAAP financial measures, reconciliations of which are provided in the company's earnings release and accompanying tables or schedules, which has been filed on Form 8-K with the SEC on February 24, 2010 and may also be accessed through the company's Web site at www.ahtreit.com. Each listener is encouraged to review those reconciliations provided in the earnings release together with all other information provided in the release. I'll now turn the call over to Monty Bennett. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thanks for joining us. 2009 was a challenging year on many levels. We believe however that our strategies worked to mitigate the impact of the severe economic downturn. We implemented a wide array of initiatives to maximize performance and reduce costs in three key areas, operations, debt management, and share repurchases. The primary goals have been shareholder value creation and cash flow stability. Regarding operations, our asset management team working in conjunction with our management companies exceeded our cost savings goal. For the year, we achieved 53% flow-through from the decline in revenue to a loss of EBITDA thereby minimizing the operating margin erosion year-over-year with a performance of 406 basis points down for the year, and 297 basis points down for the fourth quarter. These metrics exceeded the performance of many of our peers. Our affiliate management Remington who was responsible for 32% of our EBITDA significantly contributed to these cost savings and flow-through benefits. We continued to make very good progress with both Hilton and Marriott to incrementally right size cost structure with revenue. Our RevPAR yield index for the year was 120.3% compared to 119.3% a year ago reflecting a gain in market share of 100 basis points. Our debt management initiatives resulted in 285 million of new financing, load extensions or modifications during the year. Our interest rate strategy that we implemented in 2008 to swap our debts from fixed rate to floating rate contributed significantly to our bottom line. We expect additional savings in 2010 based upon the Fed’s commentary to keep interest rates low for an extended period of time. During the fourth quarter, we repurchased 6.3 million of common stock for a total of 30.1 million shares during 2009. Since the inception of our buyback initiative, through the end of…

Thanks Monty, good morning. For the fourth quarter we reported a net loss to common shareholders of $76, 874,000, adjusted EBITDA of $47,905,000, and AFFO of $25,999,000 or $0.32 per diluted share. We reported CAD of $17,825,000 or $0.22 per diluted share. At quarter’s end Ashford had total assets of $3.9 million, including $165.2 million of unrestricted cash. We had $2.8 billion of mortgage debt for the blended average interest rate of 2.95%. Including the $1.8 billion interest rate swap, 98% of our debt is now floating and the weighted average maturity is 5.2 years. Since the length of the swap does not match the term of the swap fixed rate debt, for GAAP purposes, the swap is not considered an effective hedge. The result of this is that the changes in market value of these instruments must run through our P&L each quarter as unrealized gains or losses on derivatives. These are non-cash entries that will affect our net income but will be added back for purposes of calculating our AFFO and CAD. So the fourth quarter it was a loss of $17,616,000 and for the full year, it is a loss of $31, 782,000. At quarter’s end, our portfolio consisted of 102 hotels in continuing operations containing 22,141 rooms. Additionally, as of December 31, we owned a position in four performing mezzanine loans with total book value of principal outstanding of $75.9 million with average annual unleveraged yield of 5.1%. Hotel operating profit for the entire portfolio was down by $19.1 million or 25.5% for the quarter. Our hotel operating profit margin decreased by 297 basis points for all hotels and our flow-through from loss revenue to hotel operating profit for the total portfolio was 58%. Our quarter end adjusted EBITDA to fixed charge ratio now stands at…

Thanks and good morning. Our capital market strategies have been a deciding factor and have continued to weather the very challenging operating climate. We recognize that several of these strategies set us apart from our peers. We are the only REIT in our peer group significantly capitalized on the downward pressure on asset and stock valuations through our disciplined share repurchases. Since inception through year-end, we have acquired 66.4 million at an average price of $2.96. This represents a significant 46% reduction from our peek of 144.6 million shares at an average price that is 78% below our peek price of $13.48 per share. These repurchases represent nearly $200 million of value creation based on yesterday’s closing share price. The current state of the capital markets continues to amaze us. A large amount of equity at depressed share prices has been raised over the past year. The dilutive impact of that idle capital cannot be ignored. We believe we have created more value for our fellow shareholders through our repurchase strategies. I say fellow shareholders because management and insiders continue to be the largest owners of the company at 16.9%. There is no doubt that we are very much aligned with our shareholders. Additionally, we are one of the only REITs in our peer group to actively seek to offset the economic downturns impact on NOI flow-through with our interest rate strategies. The benefit of our capital market strategies is clear. Through the combination of our swap and flooridors, we were able to save $52.3 million in interest expense in 2009. We believe the global recession is expected to keep LIBOR low for some time. However, it is worth noting that given the structure of our interest rate hedges, it would take greater than a 50 basis point movement upward…

Thank you. (Operator instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Will Marks with JMP Securities. Please proceed.

Thank you and good morning everyone. Can you talk about maybe year to date what you have been seeing in your markets and also I want to hear a little about (inaudible) growth.

Sure, this is Monty. That is providing too much guidance for the quarter, which we try not to do. Our portfolio typically attracts the national averages, for each month maybe a few points above or a few points below. So what you are seeing nationally usually is not too different from what we track, and I think that the figures came back till last week nationally were pretty positive. I think last week it was down just 3% or so in RevPAR. So we are pretty encouraged by that, pretty encouraged for the whole industry seems to be recovering at a pretty good clip. I think most predictions were down zero or flat to down 5% for the year. It looks like it will be towards the higher end of that range at least if this pace keeps up. And what is the --

Sorry, should we be looking do you think at the total US or, I mean, last week for example the luxury side, I know you are not in the luxury side, let’s say the upper upscale side was flat. Upscale was down 3%. How do you think we should focus on the segment side?

We have got one luxury asset and the balance half is upscale and the other half is upper upscale. And again, we will typically track a couple of points above one of those segments or a couple of points below those segments depending upon the mark but pretty close to it. On the supply side, Doug is just going to make a comment here.

Hi Will. I think there was a study that one of your banking peers produced -- looked at all of the public companies and did a fairly granular micro analysis of specific markets and the exposure in supply and it confirmed what we already knew, which is that our portfolio is one of the lowest exposures to new supply coming in, in directly competitive sub market. So, we feel pretty good about the diversity of the portfolio and the lack of exposure to any impact. We are really focused on the recovery of the market.

Great, thanks, just one final question, did you talk about or publish a number of year-to-date share repurchase?

No, we have not disclosed what the year to date number is although we have been in the market since January 1, and we still are interested in share repurchases.

Great, thank you.

Thank you. (Operator instructions) Mr Bennett, there are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call back to you. Please continue with your presentation or closing remarks.

Thank you for your participation in today’s call. We look forward to talking again at next quarter’s call.

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your lines.