Playa Hotels & Resorts N.V. (NASDAQ:PLYA) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Dany Asad: Sorry about that. We’ve heard from some of the other earnings calls in the last couple of weeks about rising property costs and insurance is always a big ticket item for that kept coming up. But we don’t – obviously, you have different geographies and markets that you operate in. So just curious to know kind of what the insurance like landscape looks like for Playa’s properties.

Ryan Hymel: In one word, difficult we kind of highlighted in our last call. So we actually have completed our insurance renewal. We’re in April 12 renewal. And as we anticipated, our insurance outlay and costs increased considerably on a rate for $100 of insured value, but essentially roughly in line with what we outlined and what we were expecting. We won’t go into significant detail on this call that bore everyone, but we did make some tweaks to the structure of our policy to help mitigate some of that explicit cash outlay and exchange for essentially some partial participation of Playa and some of the risk at higher limits. But to be clear, in the case of an average storm, our expected cash outlay deductibles will be the same. And said differently, if we suffered the same large claim that we had in the DR last year, our out-of-pocket expense for deductibles and assumed proceeds from the insurance companies would be exactly the same.

Dany Asad: Got it. Okay. Very helpful. And then my other question is just on like management contracts. I know you do pursue them. Are there any – in your guidance or outlook for the year, is there anything baked in at all into like kind of entering new contracts for the year?

Ryan Hymel: Yes. So in the guidance, it’s just explicit what we have today and the ramp of those that we’ve recently opened at the end of last year and early this year. So not including any new ones. But it’s not a major contributor in 2022, but we expect that to kind of move up into the high-single digit management fees this year and then potentially into the double-digits next year as we continue to kind of grow that pipeline in that funnel. That’s an exciting part of the business. It’s not a big needle mover today, but something that we are acutely focused on now.

Dany Asad: Got it. That’s it for me. Thank you very much.

Ryan Hymel: Thanks Dany.

Operator: The next question comes from Chad Beynon with Macquarie. Please go ahead.

Chad Beynon: Good afternoon. Nice quarter and thanks for taking my question. Ryan, in your prepared remarks, you talked about CapEx, which I believe came up versus previously guided, mainly on the non-maintenance piece of that. So, can you talk about maybe where those projects are? What returns we should expect on that non-maintenance ROI? And then related to that, how are you thinking about buybacks versus other renovation projects within the portfolio? Thanks.

Ryan Hymel: Yes. So, there is a couple of opportunities in and around our portfolio that you have heard us talk about many times, explicitly talking about what we are planning on doing this year. They are more minor in nature to be completely frank. If you think about our portfolio, the vast majority is branded now in pretty good shape. We don’t have a lot of deferred maintenance or anything like that, but we do have some kind of original Hyatts that were converted back in 2013 or in the case of the Ziva Los Cabos, had its last renovation after in 2015, right. So, they are coming up on normal kind of cycles for rooms refresh to soft goods, things like that and specifically Los Cabos, that Ziva is a big contributor to our MICE group business and it needs some work on the meeting space and public spaces.