Hilton Grand Vacations Inc. (NYSE:HGV) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Now we obviously want to get more Japanese traveling to Hawaii, because we do a good business, a good amount of new buyer business there. But it’s going to come back. It’s just going to take longer. Our expectations now is it’s going to be well into ’24 before that fully recovers. But we did see some really good movement in the quarter and by year’s end. We’re expecting to be almost back to 2019 levels for arrival. So really pleased with what we’re seeing there. And then the Japanese business in Japan is also recovering. There’s a lot of domestic. It’s not like the Japanese aren’t traveling. They’re just traveling heavily domestically. And so with our new property in Sesoko, Okinawa, that’s — that we’re seeing great occupancies there. So all in all, we’re happy to see that business coming back finally.

Patrick Scholes: Okay. Thank you. Certainly, impressive trends for a domestic leisure company, you listen to a lot of earnings calls so far this quarter. And I would say, next to the cruise lines, which have probably the easiest of easy comps. To me, it sounds like you have the best going for you, at least for the back half of this year for a domestic leisure company. My follow-up question. When I think about historically the Diamond customer and the legacy HGV customers, certainly, the legacy HGV customer higher financial demographic, more mass market for legacy Diamond. Any differences right now in propensity to spend or take a tour? And anything you’re seeing in the spending — the leisure spending habits between sort of those two legacy customers? Thank you.

Mark Wang: Yes. I would say there is — we’re not seeing a whole lot of difference. I think we’re — there’s pretty good consistency on the purchase trends across those two customer sets. I would say that we’re probably seeing a stronger occupancy of owners coming back to on the HGV side coming back to the property and maybe less — a little bit less demand for the diamond members coming back at this point. But what’s really encouraging is we’ve seen now 90,000 room nights through MAX where HGV members are taking advantage of the new destinations that MAX offers across the portfolio. So really encouraged about that. But all in all, I think from a propensity-to-buy standpoint, we’re seeing pretty similar trends across the board. I don’t know, Dan, is there any differences on the delinquencies?

Dan Mathewes: No, I was just going to add what we’re also very pleased with, and I’ve said this on previous calls, but it’s definitely worth repeating. When we look at the Diamond portfolio versus pre-acquisition, it’s improved materially 500, 600 plus basis points from a default rate perspective. And even if you look sequentially on default greater than 30-days on the Diamond portfolio, it’s actually improved, not much. It’s relatively flat, but you see improvement sequentially. So that, combined with our propensity to borrow on the HGV side being back to historical norms is encouraging. On the diamond side, it still trails pre-acquisition, but that’s really driven virtually 100% by the fact that we’ve eliminated our low down payment program.

So we are enforcing the 10% down payment upon original purchase rather than allowing people to do a low-turn down payment program, which historically has just underperformed from a delinquency default perspective. So the resiliency on the diamond side is really strong and very much akin to HGV just from a movement perspective. So that’s encouraging.

Patrick Scholes: Okay. That’s it from me. Appreciate the color. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is coming from the line of Brandt Montour with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.