Playa Hotels & Resorts N.V. (NASDAQ:PLYA) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And so now it’s like, “Okay, when is the best time for me, a couple, a family, whoever to experience the resort?” And then, the other thing that we’re benefiting from, and it’s not just in the summer, but it’s also in the shoulder seasons is what I alluded to in the whole remote work scenario, where just people have so much more flexibility coming out of the pandemic. And you cannot underestimate how big that is for people to be able to travel. And I really believe the pandemic caused people to rethink their lives in so many ways. But one of them is no one thought that something as simple as going on a vacation could be taken away from that. And now they say, “Hey, who knows, maybe you have a pandemic next year. Maybe we have something else next year.

I want to go on vacation. I want to enjoy life.” And that’s what they’re doing. They’re going out and enjoying life. And I think that’s going to continue. But we’re seeing it primarily in our pacing, in our bookings.

Ryan Hymel: Yes. Chad, we don’t think that Q3 will — from an ADR perspective, we (ph) reached Q1, but the main point is that, that gap has closed and we’ve essentially reset a floor.

Chad Beynon: Okay. Perfect. Thank you. And then, separately, just in terms of capital, you were kind of quite clear as you think about your grid of opportunities with new projects, with share repurchases, with renovations, you’re kind of leaning towards the repos. On new deals or renovation projects, has the cost just gotten to be more expensive? Are there fewer deals out there? Or are you simply just kind of thinking about your guidance, where the stock is trading and that has just increased in terms of the difference in returns? Thanks.

Bruce Wardinski: Sure. It’s — number one, it was — certainly, it’s been the latter, your last point, okay. So, if you go back over the last few months and really focus on September when we made the first announcement on the share repurchases, we were just trading at a price that was complete, as we say in our script, a disconnect between our operating fundamentals and the value of the company. And so, I just looked at that and we discussed it at the Board level and management level, we just felt there’s no better place to put our money than in our own stock. And so, it just became the baseline hurdle for doing anything. We said, “Okay, let’s look at it from that perspective. We know what we’ve got here. Can we beat it?” And so, there are projects that can beat it.

I mean, the nice thing in our business is it’s a very high free cash flow generating business. So, particularly where we can add rooms, okay, we can expand on rooms, that generates a lot of free cash flow. And you’ve seen that historically. You know some of our case studies with our ROI projects, especially, our expansion projects where we can really drive very significant return. So, we look at those projects, we’re going to keep doing those projects. When it comes to acquisitions or bigger kind of opportunities, I will say that people in our segment are across the board doing well. I think we’re doing a little better than many, but people are doing well. And so, there hasn’t been this need to sell or desire to sell, because they think their business is going pretty darn well.