Hyatt Hotels Corporation (NYSE:H) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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But it is also true that we just continue to find more and more conversion opportunities. And we see it coming from many different sources. One significant dynamic that’s underway right now is that a number of portfolios of hotels many of which are self-managed are owned by families and a lot of European families some Mexican families and there have been generational changes either because of the prior generation dying and leaving the business to their kids or a change in circumstance in terms of the family holding. And those are opening up significant opportunities because they are relatively larger. It usually involve multiple properties. And in most cases we’ve been able to unlock ways in which we can uniquely structure how we assist these families to achieve their goals.

In many cases they want to continue to hold the real estate. So we are signing up management relationships for a number of hotels. The incidence of that is increased. And so we’re getting more and more confident that we’ve got a pipeline on to itself that will continue to provide a baseline against which we then will see a recovery in new starts as the capital markets start to normalize over the course of the coming year. So I would say extremely confident in short.

Shaun Kelley: Really helpful. Thank you. And then the follow-up and again, I really apologize, if we’ve kind of covered this in a way that I didn’t totally detect. But just as it relates to ALG and the outlook there and this is specifically on the package RevPAR side I believe in the quarter package RevPAR was up something like 9.5%. And I think you said that pace and I’m not sure if this was for the second half but I think you said second half pace was up 8%. So I kind of wanted to both validate are those apples-to-apples? And is that kind of decel the sort of what’s embedded in the outlook, or are you embedding a more dramatic deceleration, specifically on the packaged RevPAR side just given again some of the seasonal normalization. And again I know you’ve talked about that a lot.

Mark Hoplamazian: It is apples-to-apples. The 8% is on the books business. So it doesn’t include tentatives and stuff like that. That’s not the way we provide data. And rates are higher in the second half. And yes, it is one of the drivers of our outlook with respect to continued normalization over the back half of the year. And just in the vein of completeness, I just want to remind everybody that we did have $30 million of release of travel credits and $4 million in the third quarter and $24 million or $25 million in the fourth quarter. So you have to take that out as a means of doing a comparison. But I would say, we are diving in deeply right now on how we go to market and how we’re organized with respect to commercial services in ALG.

We kicked off a pretty comprehensive review of that. And I do think that that will yield benefits over the course of the remainder of the year but they’ll be most realized next year. By the way everything I’m talking about including – so the other thing I don’t think came up is that we had $4 million of investments in a specific technology platform capacity for ALGV and Trisept in the second quarter, which are not recurring. So we said that we were going to be investing further behind the platform. We have and we will continue those investments into the year. 100% of what I just covered is included in our full year guidance and outlook.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating and have a wonderful day. You may now disconnect.

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