Global Business Travel Group, Inc. (NYSE:GBTG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Great. Thanks. And just one more question for me and you guys talked about the $3.1 billion in new wins. I guess could you just kind of give an idea of how much it takes for those wins to ramp and turn that into revenue on your guys income statement?

Martine Gerow: Sure. So to think about it is, it takes two years to three years depending on the customers. You don’t have necessarily 100% of conversion contribution, some of that is what we call partner volumes, so not up prior to the market but our partner market and some of that is a leakage. So we typically have around a 70% conversion and that conversion broadly takes place as a majority over a two-year period, and by the third year, we have all of that 70% volume converted.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Great. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. We now have Lee Horowitz of Deutsche Bank. Your may proceed.

Lee Horowitz: Great. Two, if I may. I’d like to dig into the full year 2022 guide. You guys highlighted that GBTA spend expectation growth of 24% and your guidance suggests, call it, 20% revenue growth at the high end and 5 points to 8 points of share gains or plus organic growth for the year. It seems to sort of stand in contrast to what it is a high degree of confidence in driving incremental share this year. Can you just help us better understand the discount between those two?

Paul Abbott: Yeah. Martine, maybe I’ll start on that one. Look, I think the GBTA prediction is a prediction at this point, but it’s actually also travel spend. And if you look at our plan, that’s sort of the equivalent of our TTV and also TTV plan for 2023 is somewhere in that low to mid-20s as well. So our kind of TTV plan is pretty consistent with that GBTA outlook.

Lee Horowitz: Helpful. Thank you. And then maybe take a step back, a question we often get from investors is around the outlook you’re seeing from distributed teams. Can you help us maybe get to quantify what you saw in 2022 regarding distributed teams driving incremental event volume? And maybe what you’re thinking about in terms of expectations as we look out to 2023 and 2024?

Paul Abbott: Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t quite catch the question. You just cut out. I don’t know apologies if it was — I know it was my end. Do you mind just repeating that?

Lee Horowitz: No worries. It’s in regards to the uplift you’re seeing from distributed teams. We had this question from investors a lot. How much incremental meeting demand from distributed teams is offsetting some degree of compression across the industry due to proliferation of zero and those sorts of things. So if you can have us better understand maybe what you saw in 2022 in regards to incremental volume coming from distributed workforces and/or what your expectations are for that to sustain as we look out to 2023 and 2024, that would be super helpful?

Paul Abbott: Yeah. Sure. No. Thank you. And so as we exited 2022, so you look at the fourth quarter, the number of Meetings and Events that we were managing was actually above 2019 levels. So that gives you a sense of the level of demand. But it does have a slightly different mix. We have a division that deals with meetings for under 50 people to smaller meetings and that is the fastest-growing part of the business. So the number of meetings is at 2019 levels as we exited. But the mix has moved more towards a larger number of smaller to midsized meetings. As we look out to 2023, our adjusted EBITDA from our Meetings and Events division, we will see that at or above 2019. That’s how we kind of see the year ahead. And it’s one of the businesses where we have, frankly, a better view of the future, because the booking windows are so much further in advance for Meetings and Events. So we’re pretty confident in the outlook for 2023 for Meetings and Events.