[Excerpt] To what extent will current industry best practices stand the rest of time? Will existing excellent practices become integral to the organization or become obsolete and be discarded? The answers to these critical questions rest on the process of continuous reassessment and renewal that is a feature of organizational learning. Organizational learning often begins with an individual champion who recognizes a gap between what is and what could be, engages in a process of discovery and data gathering, and then develops an idea – often in the form of a new practice – to produce a change in the organization.1 The question we discuss in this paper is how well best practices persist. Specifically, we discuss whether the best practices chronicled in a comprehensive study of the U.S. lodging industry five years ago are still being used and the extent to which they have been refined or modified over the years.2 The original best-practices study constituted a compilation of what industry practitioners and customers considered to be the most effective strategies and techniques used at the end of the twentieth century by the lodging industry’s best operators to create excellence for all stakeholders.