H World Group Limited (NASDAQ:HTHT) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And what is the impact to the RevPAR growth versus 2019? Third question is, you commented the business travel hasn’t recovered to 2019 level, but can you give us more details on the – like recovery in business travel like even year-on-year or versus 2019? Yes, that’s my question. Thank you.

Jin Hui: Okay, thanks for your questions. So, Yes, we understand that quite a lot of you are concerned about the RevPAR and the ADR. So, that’s why I would like to elaborate a bit more details and express and emphasize on our views again by taking this opportunity. So for us, since the year beginning during our budgeting process and during our last year earnings conference call. So, our views keeps with the cautiously optimistic unchanged. And I hope you can understand this. So, our views has been no change since then. And in terms of the RevPAR and ADR, I think it is quite a complex combination, especially for us. And talking about the China markets, we have the lower tier cities, we have the leisure markets, we have the upper scale, we have the upper mid and middle scale.

It’s very diversified market. Undeniably, talking about the business traveling, given the impact of the economic cycle and some of the business traveling demand are not fully coming back yet, but we do see a lot of you know local demand, especially from the leisure traveling demand side, it’s quite strong since the year beginning to now. And you can also realize that a lot of activities happened here and there such as the , which is also supported by the government on the leisure traveling activities. And another front is, if you’re looking at – until recovery in the April, we observed that the airline business actually is not fully recovered, but if you’re looking at the railway, I think they are very much well recovered or even exceeded the 2019 level, supporting quite strong demand as well.

And for us, again, in terms of the long-term sustainable RevPAR growth, we are still concentrating on building our core competencies through branding products and services, and we have different product mix and we also not only the upper mid-scale, but also the lower tier cities penetration. And it’s a very complex combination for us. So, if you remember like maybe two years ago you asked us, whether your lower tier cities penetration will negatively affected our RevPAR growth in the future. So, that’s why, given we are doing a lot of developments in China, not only the lower tier cities, but also the upper-mid and upscale, so I think this could be very complicated and it’s very difficult to us to predict or give very accurate guidance at this moment.

Thank you. Okay. Yes. So because China experienced three years of COVID, so obviously, you know at the initial reopening, especially in the first quarter, definitely there are some lot of pent-up demand, people are keen to traveling and keen to go outside and businessman and franchisees are keen to resume the business as quick as possible. So, definitely the confidence and the consumption power at this moment was quite strong. And the reasons, basically some of the gap or some of slight slowdown recently, we think it’s quite normal if you compare to the global market because we traveled quite a lot to Europe. If you see the Europe recovery currently, it’s not as strong as before and especially considering China experienced three years of COVID, but I think Europe market experienced only 1.5 years.