Tom Fisher: Bill, and then the second part of your question, international inbound, just a couple things to note on that. At least year-to-date through March, international inbound is over last year, so that shows it’s improving. In fact, March on a percentage basis was closest to 2019 than any month in recovery. So it’s heading in the right direction. It’s still driven more by the transatlantic versus the Pacific demand. But encouragingly, you noted on a couple of the airlines calls this recent quarter, they’re forecasting record summer travel, especially as relates to international. Now, a lot of that, of course, is U.S. outbound. And we encourage more Americans to stay here to travel then go to Europe, but it does represent it and it more increased a number coming up and that itself significantly from the pandemic, but it’s heading in a good direction.
Bill Crow : Thanks guys Thanks for sharing.
Jon Bortz: Thanks Bill.
Operator: Thank you the next question is coming from Shaun Kelley of Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Shaun Kelley : Hi, good morning, everyone. Ray or Jon, like one thing that’s come up on some of the other travel calls this earnings season has been a bit of a rebound on the technology side. I think this would probably be more on BT. I think we’ve talked a lot about group this morning. But kind of curious on what you’re seeing. You have exposure, a lot of exposure in San Francisco, plenty in the PAC Northwest as well. So just are you seeing signs of life on the sort of large technology accounts? How has that trended? And is there more room here? I mean, we’ve heard you’ve been pretty clear that by segment group’s still the strongest. But I’m kind of curious if you’ve seen at least maybe some increased lead gen from the BT side from some of those technology accounts.
Jon Bortz : Sure. So I think our general comment is, business transient travel continues to recover and it’s noticeable. It’s represented in the stronger weekday occupancy numbers. As we look throughout our portfolio, there’s no doubt that we’ve seen significant increases in the technology firms that represents itself in markets like San Francisco like Boston our Santa Cruz property, which doesn’t benefit from corporate transient in the technology side, but has seen a very significant change in lead volume and group bookings from the technology firms in the adjacent Silicon Valley. So there’s no doubt we’re seeing it in technology. We’re also seeing increased corporate transient in the consulting businesses, on the financial side in your business as well.
And these are in a way this sort of, I don’t know if it’s the later to recover sectors or the ones that just got, maybe in the case of technology, maybe got ahead of itself during the pandemic and went through this period of time over the last 12 or 18 months of job cuts and a little more cautiousness in total spend. And we’ve definitely seen that turn around so far this year.
Shaun Kelley : Great. Thank you very much.
Operator: Thank you. The next question is coming from Michael Bellisario of Baird. Please go ahead.
Michael Bellisario : Thanks. Good morning, everyone.
Jon Bortz : Good morning.
Michael Bellisario : Jon, I just want to go back to your expense commentary and maybe help us. What’s new? What’s incremental compared to your prior forecast or prior outlook? And then how much of the savings that you’ve recognized in 1Q and expect to recognize in 2Q? What’s a run rate savings look like? And how much of it is maybe just more one-time savings that you’ve been able to achieve on the expense side? Thanks.
Jon Bortz : Sure. So it’s a combination of the two. I mentioned the real estate taxes. I think we were pretty clear in our call 60 days ago that we did not forecast any real estate tax benefits, because we had no idea of timing and long and behold, 60 days later we’ve seen some success in at least one of our major markets within the portfolio. And of those real estate tax benefits. I mean, those — much of that is one-time, but there is a reduction in the run rate in our taxes that relate to those properties, which are primarily in Southern California. And as it relates to the other expense, I mean, we have — I mean, our number one initiative within the company right now is a focus on efficiencies, creating efficiencies within the portfolios, collaborating with our partners to do that, getting back to fundamentals, reimplementing all of our best practices, taking advantage of new learnings.
Some of these efforts have — were put in place years ago. And Ray, you can talk a little bit about our workers’ comp program, but that we put in place and what we were doing before. But those are ongoing run rate savings. The bulk — the vast majority, I mean, maybe almost all of the savings in Q1 related to our efforts to lower expenses that should result in a run rate reduction and give us much more confidence in our ability to be well in the range in terms of our expense growth rate, of course, depending upon whether if we get a material acceleration in revenue in the second half beyond what we’re currently contemplating, well, there are going to be expenses that come along with that and increase the growth rate. But obviously, that would dramatically increase the bottom line as well.
So we feel really good about where we’re going. We have a long way to go on this effort. There’s a lot of programs and projects that are in place to reduce costs, and I think we’ll be increasingly effective over the course of the year.
