Bill Crow : I want to focus just really on the shift from 1Q to 2Q, where you’re going from almost down 3% RevPAR growth to up is, I think you said mid-single-digits. How much of that is driven simply by Easter and the holiday shift? We’re now starting to hear that maybe April’s not so good that the Passover holiday holidays actually impacting April. You’ve got both March and April impacted by holidays. How much did — I know it’s a multi-part question, same subject, but how much did Hill Country benefit from Easter shift? Any color you can give us on that, or is it just that comps get easier in the second quarter and that really helps you.
Colin Reed: Patrick?
Patrick Moore : Absolutely. To your point, the comp is a little bit easier, Bill. The shift from Easter, which we’ve talked about is about 13,000 room nights that shifted between the two quarters. There’s definitely a benefit there. But I would tell you how April is going for us, we’re still working through the preliminary results, but we expect April to be the best April ever in the history of the portfolio. On a same store basis, we expect it to be the second best EBITDA month ever in the history of the portfolio on a same store basis. Catering looks very, very strong and we expect Opryland will probably come in with the best catering performance in any hotel in any single month, in the month of April. The comps are easier, but we are seeing really strong group performance, especially on the catering side. And so, we feel good about where we’re heading and helps offset some of that transient normalization that we’ve seen.
Colin Reed: We’re seeing that same catering performance in the third quarter as well as we look ahead.
Patrick Moore: And we have more group room nights on the books for the second quarter and the third quarter than we did same time last year. We think we’re really well positioned for these next two quarters. And then fourth quarter is obviously heavily dependent on transient, but our holiday programming allows us to do things that maybe buck the market trends that are normally in place.
Colin Reed: But we’ve also got good group business on the books for the fourth quarter too, which gives us a lot of confidence about the fourth quarter.
Patrick Moore: About three points of group business higher than we were same time last year.
Bill Crow: If I could just do a follow-up question, and only because Marriott touted the performance of the forward bookings at the Pacific — the Gaylord Pacific. I’m just curious, are you seeing rotational business kind of exiting some of your properties to now include Pacific? I know we’ve talked about that in the past but just wanted to revisit that topic.
Colin Reed: You want to check it?
Patrick Moore: Sure. Bill, we have seen some good production coming out of Pacific. It’s driven about 82,000 room nights into the Gaylord hotels and multi rotational pieces of business that have been booked in unison with Gaylord Pacific. But what really is going to drive the benefit is not here in the pre-sale period of time. It’s going to be after some of these groups that are brand new to the Gaylord brand. Because Pacific is stealing a lot of share from the state of California. When those groups travel to a Gaylord for the first time and have their minds open to what a Gaylord is and how unique it is, then they will start rotating into the other Gaylord around the U.S. It’s exactly what we saw at National when we opened it back in 2008. It’s what we saw at Gaylord Rockies when we opened it in 2018. And so the best is really yet to come as that property gets opened and starts pushing folks through it and then opening them up to the rest of the brand.
Colin Reed: And they’re booking at a higher rate. Most group will rotate at a higher rate.
Patrick Moore: That’s correct.
Operator: Our next question comes from Smedes Rose with Citi.
Smedes Rose: I wanted to just ask a little bit about the growth definite room nights and net definite room nights booked in the quarter. I know you noted it was a tough year-over-year comp and acknowledging that the rate that you looked at was record high, but it was still lower than like first quarter ‘19 and ‘18 and ‘17. And I’m just wondering if you could provide just a little more color around how you think that will kind of trend and if it means anything.
Patrick Chaffin : Sure. Hey, Smedes. This is Patrick. I can’t underscore how much impact clearing out the funnel in the fourth quarter of 2023 had on the first few months of 2024. The sales team blew it out, did a great job, and have been rebuilding that funnel. We are very encouraged by what we’re seeing there. There is two things going on that give us a lot of encouragement and we believe that the team is going to deliver another tremendously strong performance from a sales advanced gross group bookings in 2024. And those two things are, number one, you heard me talk over the past 24 months about the fact that we had really great production in lead volume in T+1 through T+4. And late last year, we started seeing beyond T+4 lead volumes increasing.
And we’ve seen just in the past few months, association leads really coming back very, very strongly. So that allows us to know that we’re starting to — we have more opportunities to place for future years, some of those big associations that serve as the foundation for our book of business. The second thing we saw was in April, a material increase in corporate room nights, which bodes very well for us as we’re in the primary booking window for filling up 2025. So we are seeing everything coming together nicely as they’re rebuilding that funnel. And while yes, the first quarter was a little bit down versus previous periods, it was expected, our rate continues to be very, very strong that the sales team’s doing a great job there and both on association and corporate lead volume, we see a lot of good things coming together for the future.
Patrick Moore : And that’s the key to all of this. What is the activity of the meeting planner into our system? And that activity, Patrick is as good as it’s ever been right now. And as you just said, we booked what, 40,000 more room nights in April in this last month than we did in April of last year. And lead volumes have jumped again to fairly very, very healthy levels. So we’re very excited about what’s going on in group right now.
Operator: We’ll take our next question from Shaun Kelley with Bank of America.
