Marriott International, Inc. (NASDAQ:MAR) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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And as our growth has been outsized in that region, they have a very positive quality of behaving much more like base fees. So I think you should continue to see strong growth there. In Q2, we were looking at about 41% coming from the US and Canada and 30% coming from Asia Pacific. So we’re getting much closer to our 2019 proportion of incentive fees. And again, as we talked about before, when we look for the rest of the year, we do see the reality that we expect IMF to be higher than our peak.

Joe Greff: Great. Thank you. And then my follow-up relates to the — the MGM deal that you recently announced. Can you talk about broadly the economics and how it works for you? And let’s — I know it kind of works in a couple of ways. What you put in MGM’s portfolio and then what you get kind of one-third in the Marriott system as the newer people exporting out to your properties around the world. But let’s say, the direct channel is such where you’re putting in 5% to 10% of MGM’s occupied room nights per year, how much of that indirect annual fees could something like that generate, or can you give us some sort of way of thinking about the fee magnitude? I know, it’s probably different than the average franchise and licensing fee per room. But helping us understand the economics there, I think, would be helpful.

Tony Capuano: Yes. So it may not surprise you, Joe. We’re not going to go into granular detail on the economics of a specific deal. What I can tell you is the structure of the transaction is akin — much more akin to a traditional franchise deal. We are getting paid on room revenue across their US portfolio of 17 resorts. It’s not just some sort of loyalty lockup. It’s structured to look a lot more like a franchise agreement. The reason is we talk about it as a strategic licensing agreement. It’s more broad than what we had with the Cosmopolitan, which was, in fact, a straight franchise agreement. Here, we’ve got a much broader ability with the creation of the MGM Collection portfolio to make this a much bigger play for our 186 million Bonvoy members in terms of the ability to give them access to the wealth of content that MGM makes available, to link the 186 million Bonvoy members and the 40 million MGM Rewards members, and as a corollary, to be a loyalty partner with that MGM.

So, we’ve called it a strategic licensing agreement because of some of those complexities. But in terms of the way we’ve structured the financial arrangements, you should think about it more through the lens of a more traditional franchise agreement structure.

Joe Greff: Great. Thank you.

Tony Capuano: You’re welcome.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Richard Clarke with Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Richard Clarke: Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I just got a question on the remaining occupancy slice you’ve got to get back. Your occupancy today is still sitting about 4% lower than it was in 2019. How much confidence you can get the rest of that back? And is there any need to cut prices to get that back in? Is there any price elasticity you need to drive to get the remaining bit of occupancy back in the system?

Leeny Oberg: So, I’ll–

Tony Capuano: Go ahead.

Leeny Oberg: No, you go, Tony.

Tony Capuano: No, I was just going to say, yes, you’re right, Richard. We’re still down about three points on a global basis. But we see some real opportunities for growth. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we continue to see steady recovery on the business transient side, which gives us some optimism. And we continue to see continued recovery on cross-border travel, which gives us another layer of optimism. And then I would say, third, as I mentioned, in Greater China, which is our second largest market, you’ve still only got about a 40% recovery of cross-border airline capacity. And so in terms of inbound and outbound international travel related to China, we think there’s some real opportunity for occupancy recovery there as well.

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