Stephen Grambling: This first one, maybe a follow-up to those comments on ECHO and just development more broadly. We just hoping to dig into the components of your loan growth guidance in the context of gross additions and attrition especially in the contract pipeline, I guess, it’s now up 13% year-over-year in attrition rate that they continue to improve. So any color you can provide kind of splitting out as we think about the guidance in gross adds, attrition and any nuances by geography?
Michele Allen: Yes, sure. So I would say from a net room growth perspective, we don’t see significant impact in 2023 from the growth in the pipeline. 80% of the pipeline today is new construction. And in the U.S., construction starts within about a year or 2 of the deal being signed. So on average, there is a 18- to 24-month build from there. So it’s typically in the pipeline 4 years. And internationally, it’s a little longer. So overall, we would expect the pipeline to be realized over a 4- to 5-year period. So — and a big part of our pipeline growth is the ECHO brand, and that’s not going to have a material impact to 2023, as Geoff just mentioned. Moving our net room growth, that will also then require — as we’ve always talked about improvement and the retention rate.
And I think if you look back to pre-2019, we were in 93%, 94% range, and we’ve been steadily improving at 20 to 30 basis points every year since then, and we’re marching toward that 96% target. But when you see us get there, that’s when you should expect to see our overall net room growth expectations left.
Stephen Grambling: Sounds good for ’24 and ’25 then. Maybe changing gears. You had some good details on China and the direct component there. Can you provide a bit more color on how the reopening there may not only impact domestic RevPAR in the country, but also the broader region as outbound potentially resumes?
Geoffrey Ballotti: Yes, we see the — as outbound resumes a big beneficiary, certainly for our hotels were the Chinese are going to be looking to travel. I mean, we’re already seeing and hearing from our teams in South Korea, where we have over 10,000 rooms that they’re seeing more Chinese arrivals, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, Singapore. Those are all big beneficiaries. China represented over 150 million international travelers in ’19, Stephen. And that number, as we know, dropped to under 20 for the last 2 years. So we’re excited to see that. On the ground, we’re just encourages all get out to see the strong rebound during the Chinese New Year. Our last 3 weeks of RevPAR were up 60% in China to last year and 8% to 2019, given that pent-up family holiday travel demand.
And our resorts in the vacation destinations, we got big resorts in Hainan and Sanya came back really, really strong. I mean through the last 14 days, after Chinese New Year, our Wyndham Sanya was up 30% to last year. Our hotel in Hainan, our big win gate was up 60% to last year, but importantly, they are up over 10% and 30%, respectively, to 2019. And while that was Chinese New Year driven, it was great to see the results that came out last night from Smith Travel, where overall China last week RevPAR was up 1% in what was almost a clean comp week versus ’19, with occupancy running around 90% in ’19 levels. So we’re really, really excited about what we’re hearing from our teams over there and just thrilled with everything our team accomplished despite the challenges with that 10% Q4 net room growth in our direct franchising business and how many more hotels they were able to open in a tough quarter than they were last year.
Operator: Our next question comes from Dany Asad with Bank of America.
