[Imports] Bulk Import of Hotels

[Chris Clemson]

Hello everyone,
I work for the company, who owns  and franchises Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn
Express, Crowne Plaza and  Intercontinental hotels amongst others.
A while  ago (before my time) we  had a project with Google  Earth to plot
all our  hotels.
I have spoken to one of the guys involved in the project and they seemed
happy to contribute the same data to OSM.
I have no idea what format the data  is  in, but I'm guessing it's node
coordinates with metadata.
Can someone point me in the right direction  of what   format is required
for bulk  imports, and how to keep them  synced when the next import is
done?

I've never done any importing, I've  just used  JOSM to  edit maps and GPX
traces.

In the archives (last nov?) a conference call was mentioned.
Has this taken place?
I would be interested in joining if the time wasn't too crazy (I'm in
GMT0/BST).

Thanks,

Chris