Ryman Hospitality Properties, Inc. (NYSE:RHP) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Shaun Kelley : Just wanted to go back to the transient activity and I know we’ve kind of hit this. So, my question is just specifically I think in the prepared remarks, you said that you, the assumption now is that continues into Q2. Obviously, it sounds like you’ve already seen a piece of that perhaps continues through April, but was that correct? And then kind of what does that imply? The assumption is for the balance of the year, specifically Q4 since you alluded to how important transient is for that period. So just help us think about how conservative maybe that outlook is. That’d be helpful.

Patrick Chaffin: Hey Shaun, it’s Patrick. Good question. We actually have, we didn’t just take what we saw in Q1 and roll it through April and May. We’ve done our best to project what we think is going on and continue some of that softness and adjust our Q2 and Q3 accordingly. Again, our Q4 has a really strong all three remaining quarters have really strong group business. And our fourth quarter, because of the holiday programming, we’re going to continue to watch that because we do believe we can buck the macro trends in each market. So we’ve adjusted Q2 and Q3 appropriately and still feel that we’re in a great position to maintain our guidance. Rate continues to be a huge upside opportunity for us, even though we are seeing some of that normalization on transient.

Shaun Kelley : And then my follow-up here would be it’s kind of intriguing to me that you did see it on the rate side and you’re definitely not alone. We’ve heard effectively similar comments from a number of people in the hospitality space, but I’m kind of curious how you didn’t see, it doesn’t feel like you saw anything on the entertainment side. Could you just talk a little bit about like customer behavior there on entertainment and specifically ticketing, like just any changes on how people were acting and uptake there? I’m sure it moves around given the event schedule that you have and maybe even the comps, but just kind of what did you see from the consumer across entertainment and any concerns or risk factor that what you see in transient could impact outside of the house too?

Patrick Moore: What I would say is an aggregate, we haven’t seen any material change in consumer behavior for the entertainment business across the board, in part because some of those markets are drive to markets and don’t require a room night. But we’ve seen fairly healthy trends across all of our major venues. We did have the modest disruption for one to two weeks in the Tennessee markets for the five assets that are in Tennessee. But other than that, so far, and first quarter is the smallest quarter of the year, but so far we haven’t seen any material changes in behavior.

Operator: And we’ll take our next question from Dori Kesten with Wells Fargo.

Dori Kesten : Can you give us a quick update on your T plus one, two, three rate growth on the book?

Colin Reed: It stands at the end of March, you said T plus one, two, and three, is that right?

Dori Kesten : Yes.

Colin Reed: We’re in the mid to high-single digits on each of those years on rate growth as far as what’s on the books as it stands today. And that’s net bookings.

Dori Kesten : Is there anything to note about the makeup of your lead volume that they sit today between corporate association — or is it rather normalized and just trying to determine what the rate trajectory might look like, when we do start to see your Q2, Q3 gross bookings?

Colin Reed: Like I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been watching association waiting for it to come back strong, and it’s coming back very strong. And we continue to as we’ve done for many, many years, focus on getting the most premium, highest rated association groups and then increasing our mix of corporate. And so, corporate has shown great strength here as of late and association’s been rebuilding over the past six months or so. It’s not abnormal as far as what we see on the books, just a higher volume than we’ve seen in the past. And so we think from a rate perspective, as we continue to select the highest rated groups and go after the more premium groups and put the investments in place to attract them, it bodes very well for our continued growth in group rate.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Jay Kornreich with Wedbush Securities.

Jay Kornreich : A little bit of a follow up to the last question. As we think about in the year four, the year group book is, can you give just some perspective on how your conversations are going with meeting planners, especially on the corporate side, and are you seeing any changes in the booking window or appetite to get corporate employees together within the year?

Colin Reed : Yes, we have not seen any change in the booking window whatsoever. I’m not sure I caught the first part of your question. Could you repeat that?

Jay Kornreich : In the fourth year?

Colin Reed : In the year fourth year, like I said, we are in a position for the remainder of year. We’re about 34,000 room nights ahead as far as what’s on the books and our expectations for what we need to book to hit our internal expectations is in line with largely in line with what we did last year. So, we’ve seen no change in behavior, whether it’s on the booking window or resistance to growing group rate. And we continue to see lead volumes improving. So we think all the right factors are in place for us to hit our end of the year fourth year. And thus far this year end the year, fourth year has been very encouraging. In April alone, we outperformed in the year, fourth year and our T+1 was up significantly over where it was same time last year. So, all the short term metrics are pointing in the right direction.

Jay Kornreich: And then just one quick follow up. You gave some comments on the construction efforts on the hospitality and entertainment projects. Just curious, any changes at this point to your initial assumptions, either for ROI, EBITDA displacement or is everything starting out as initially planned?

Jennifer Hutcheson: Yes, we haven’t changed the assumptions within our full year guidance, Jay, in terms of what the disruption impact will be from those projects that we outlined. And we said that was about $10 million to $11 million on the hospitality side and $8 million to $10 million on the entertainment side for the full year.