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

Tyler Batory: Okay. Appreciate that. And then, the Q1 rate commentary, up 20% year-over-year, is that pretty broad-based? Are there markets that are pacing substantially higher than that? Are different brands in the portfolio pacing higher or lower than that as well?

Ryan Hymel: Well, as you can imagine, Jamaica would be on the higher end of the range, obviously, because they’re still lapping. If you recall, last year in the first quarter, they still had the restriction around entry. So, they would kind of be leading the charge there. But much like the results in the fourth quarter, the ADR strength is pretty broad-based. I mean, like I said, there’s individual pockets within our segments that do better than others. You’ve heard us talk in the past that like Cancun property will outperform market for a number of reasons and things like that. But generally, it’s fairly broad-based across segment and across asset type.

Tyler Batory: Okay. And then, just last one, a more strategic question. Any update on the vacation club that you teased out or discussed a couple of quarters ago? I’m not sure if that’s…

Ryan Hymel: Yes. So, I can jump in there. Yes. So, we will — beginning in 2023, we’ll start to break that out on its own line. It is buried with — it’s in — it offsets corporate expense in our earnings release, and we actually footnote how much it was. But essentially, only selling at three assets and none of them were Hyatt in 2022, we accrued a little under $2 million of revenue. As of today, it’s now rolled out at four or five resorts and the plan is in the schedule that it will be rolled out in all of our resorts, including the Hyatt by end of Q3, essentially early Q4 of this year. So, my expectation is you see a bigger contribution from that fee-driven business in 2024. But our expectation is you should have some nice growth.

Again, it’s not massive dollar contribution, but on a percentage basis year-over-year in 2023. So, we’ll start — while you can find it and see the numbers, again, they weren’t very large, but they should start to grow this year and more meaningfully in 2024. We’re excited. Again, doing a couple of million bucks at essentially two Wyndhams and Hilton Playa del Carmen in 2022, and they weren’t even being sold most of the year, if you kind of extrapolate that out, it should generate some real decent fee income for us in the future.

Tyler Batory: Okay. That’s all from me. Thank you.

Bruce Wardinski: Thanks, Tyler.

Operator: And our next question comes from Chris Woronka from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead with your question.

Chris Woronka: Hey, guys. Thanks for all the details so far. So just — and congratulations on a really nice quarter and year. So just to maybe beat the capital allocation horse to death a little bit more. I appreciate the guidance you’ve given on everything from EBITDA to CapEx. And even before we would think about proceeds from the Jewel dispositions, you’re going to have a lot of free cash flow on a net basis. I mean, is there any reason why you wouldn’t continue buying stock? I know you’ve done some more in year-to-date, but still a pretty big disconnect. So, I mean, I know you don’t want to accumulate cash. So, is there any reason you wouldn’t keep buying back stock?