Charles Protell: Yes. I’ll give you an overview of that, and Blake will add to that, I’m sure. So I think when we — what the comments I mentioned were that we ended up at about 77% occupancy for the quarter, very comparable to last year. But where you really see the difference is weekend versus midweek. So we were basically full on the weekends and running less than 70% occupancy during the week. I think from a rate perspective, we feel pretty comfortable about where we are and we like where we’re heading. And this leads into why we feel that we should be renovating more rooms. We’re getting a $15 to $20 premium on those rooms that were renovated. We saw that through the first batch. And so again, we think in order to prepare for these big traffic drivers that everyone is well aware of from F1 to Super Bowl to more conventions to March Madness coming into town that we need to have a competitive product to benefit from that.
The specifics around what are missing are 144,000 midweek room nights relative to 2019. And so if you just take the midweek rate, which is roughly around $110, including resort fee, average spend per visitor, assuming double occupancy and run that type of flow-through through the various components, whether it’s gaming revenue or F&B, that is where we see $30 million in revenue and $20 million EBITDA opportunity just to get those folks back. So does all of that matriculate in this year with the convention calendar and those drivers? We certainly hope so. But even if we get half of that back, it’s meaningful of the property in addition to those growth initiatives that we just noted.
Blake Sartini: Yes, I think, obviously, what Charles is saying is we’ve been focused on what’s going on citywide to produce more of our room bookings going forward this year but also a key component to what we’re doing. And I think you have to look at The STRAT, what we’re doing at The STRAT kind of in components as we build on each component. But the capital investment as you recall, when we first took ownership of that property, there was little or no bookings — direct bookings happening through the property. It was all OTA and online in addition to what to the city of Las Vegas and what’s happening here. We are — we have instituted a very robust casino marketing program, a very robust direct communication program with our guests that we’re now generating through these investments.
And I think that component, over time, will continue to build, in particular, help us midweek. In terms of a time frame, that’s hard to say. I mean, we know what the special events are coming and the activities that are coming in Las Vegas. Those are pretty easy to predict. But the midweek is obviously where we’re focused and we believe internally a large part of our success lies within ourselves and how we marketed that property as we begin to build out amenities that attract people for longer stays and longer time on the property.
John DeCree: That’s helpful. I think you guys both covered most of my thoughts — questions there. But maybe one. When you’re full on the weekends, are you seeing the ability to push rate comparable to what we see in the LVCVA monthly data? Or do you need kind of mid-week occupancy to come back to kind of help raise rates across the whole property on all days?
Charles Protell: No, we are pushing rates on the weekend. I mean, so that is comparable to what we see in the LVCVA. This property will potentially hurt more than others on the south side of The Strip when that midweek and convention group business isn’t filling up the convention center, isn’t filling up the entire town. So we will probably hurt more in the midweek than they will, but we could actually flex just as much or more on weekends with the room base.
