[1] The company is also the publisher of HotelNewsNow, a website with news on the hotel industry, headquartered in Lakewood, Ohio.

Randy Smith was contacted by Holiday Inn multiple times and urged to create a market share report.

In 1988, the company launched the first Smith Travel Accommodations Report (STAR), a monthly report that includes data from hotels and measures each property's market share performance against a self-selected competitive set.

[8] Two of LJ Research's products were Visitrac, the company's online survey system that is used for customer feedback, and LJ Forecaster, a hotel benchmarking system that monitored trends based on achieved and future performance.

[9][10][11][12][13] In February 2024, a proposed consumer class action lawsuit was filed against CoStar, the parent company of STR, accusing the company of participating in a price-fixing conspiracy, in which it allegedly conspired with a group of luxury hotel operators, including Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, InterContinental Hotels, Loews, and Accor, to keep hotel room prices artificially high, using research reports produced by STR to facilitate the sharing of competitively sensitive information among commercial rivals.