Chris Nassetta: Yes, modestly. I mean we think they will be lower in performance, but we think our forecasting and outlook is they will be positive but modestly so. And those were impacted in the first quarter by the things more dramatically the things that I described. And by the way, comparability because the first – if you look broadly in the first quarter of last year, from the standpoint of how we perform relative to the industry overall, we had a much better performance than the industry, and that was really driven by the select service brands. And so they have lapped in the first quarter over very, very difficult comps. That gets easier, pretty difficult comps in Q2 for the record as well, but we think that gets much easier in the second half of the year from a comp issue. And so our expectation is they would be positive but lower than other higher change case.
Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Robin Farley with UBS. Please go ahead.
Robin Farley: Great. Thanks very much. I wonder if you could kind of remind us where we are – you talked about the group being up – position up 13% year-over-year, but where we are with group and business transient relative to 2019? And then I kind of have a part two of – of the question, which is just when we look at the broader STR trends and occupancy in the U.S. has been down for – it depending on how you measure a month there from sort of 7 to 12 months with all the RevPAR coming from rate increase. And just wondering in your long experience looking at trends over the years, how – does that worry at all that occupancy is down even with, I think, not getting back to 2019 levels yet and kind of what that might mean for rate and RevPAR later in the year?
Chris Nassetta: Yes. Hi, taking one at a time. In terms of group and BT versus ‘19, they are both eclipsing from a revenue point of view, but from a demand occupancy point of view, they’re both below business transient modestly, pretty minor group a little bit more so, I think, like 500 basis points or something like that from memory. They can, in fact, check me. And that has – so let me cover in reverse order business transient I mean group is just a function of gestation period for this to ramp up. I think by the time you get to the second half of the year, and certainly, by the end of the year, group demand will be finally back to where – just based on the underlying strength in that space. Business transient, as I said, is a little bit off.
The – if you break it down between small, medium businesses versus the big corporates, the small, medium businesses are already demand-wise over, and the big corporates are under. But as you saw, we had pretty big growth relative to a quarter that wasn’t a lot of was more leisure-oriented because of the holiday shift in big corporates, and that’s what we’re hearing from our big corporate customers as they’re traveling more. So that is coming back. Their balance sheets are strong. Earnings are still – maybe they’re going up at a lower rate or whatever, but they’re still relatively strong. And so our expectation is by the end of the year from a demand point of view, we think there’s an awfully good chance that BT will get there, too, just with continued growth in the big corporates in very resilient SMB business.
And that’s sort of how we’ve baked our outlook. In terms of occupancy and rate, that sort of answers the question then because we think you are continuing to build occupancy through the rest of the year. I think you got to be really careful in the first quarter. The first quarter is super messy with the things that we’ve talked about going on. It’s really hard to like glean much from that. But if you look at the group trends, they are really strong, as I said, and that provides a tremendous platform to yield manage that we really haven’t had in the way that we’re starting to have. And if you agree with the sort of the underpinnings of business transient and occupancies are not ragging up but are sort of grinding up. Again, that gives you a pretty good setup for some modest occupancy gains.
Those are going to come in BT and group, not in leisure. In fact, you could have slight occupancy declines in leisure, but I think in the core of the more days of the week than not, you’re building more pricing power, which I think allows you to continue to have the ability to push rate.
Operator: Thank you. The next question is from Shaun Kelley with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Shaun Kelley: Hey, good morning, everyone. Chris, just hoping we could get a little bit more color on sort of the regions. You gave some in the prepared remarks, but specifically, to dig in U.S. at the lower end of the range. So I think we’ve talked a little bit about what could get that coming. But anything you’re seeing on April there in terms of some of the shift back from Easter. And then I think more importantly, you called out some strength elsewhere, Europe, Japan. Could you dig in a little bit there? And specifically on China, just flattish, the exit rate wasn’t that great. What needs to happen there one way or another to impact Hilton? Thank you.
Chris Nassetta: Yes. Thanks. I’m going to ask Kevin to take that.
Kevin Jacobs: Yes, Shaun, I’ll take this one. I think, yes, in the U.S., we’re seeing so far is in-line with our expectations, right? The Easter calendar shift flipping back the way we thought April is in-line with what we thought. And so if you think about our 2% to 4% guide for the whole company, I think the U.S. will be at the lower end of that range, but I think you’ll see the U.S. go back to positive I think around the rest of the world, I said it in my prepared remarks, but Europe remains really resilient, up 10% in the quarter. There’s a lot of lot of noise in the economy in various European economies and war and whatever else is going on, it still seems to push through, and we still seem to get pretty good performance.
