The property has tremendous leisure capabilities, and we want to continue to respect that because it drives a tremendous amount of leisure business, but we do believe with the acquisition of this 41 acres, we do believe there’s some opportunities for us to look at growing the pool additionally from where it is today as well as potentially some meeting space and additional rooms. And so we already had architects visiting the property and then my team is digging in with the property to start asking ourselves to what level do we think it would make sense to potentially grow this property long term. So that will be ongoing, and we’ll be talking about that more in the future. But a lot of short-term things that we’re going after and then longer term, figuring out how to maintain the integrity of what this JW has been able to do, but also bring some strength to it from what we know how to do on the group side.
Chris Woronka: It’s a very successful hotel. Pat, you may want to just touch as well on our thoughts about the overhauling of food and beverage in that hotel as well because we think there’s great potential there as well?
Patrick Chaffin: Yeah. I mean you’ve heard us talking about this over the past 18 months to 24 months in the Gaylord Hotels brand. we see food and beverage as an area that continues to emerge as more and more of a differentiator. And we want our attendees and leisure guests to be leaving the hotel saying they had a culinary experience, not just that they got fed. And so we continue to refine what we’re doing on the banqueting side. And like the Gaylords, we think the JW Hill Country has some potential upside in the type of offering they have on the food and beverage restaurant perspective, the number of seats they have and just the innovation and creativity around those concepts. We’re going to be digging into that. We think there’s substantial opportunity there.
Chris Woronka: Okay. Very helpful. Appreciate all the color there. And then as a follow-up, a lot of talk about expansion, right? And I think a lot of people first go to Rockies and then they think about the JW now. But I was hoping to kind of go back to Nashville and it may seem like a silly question because you’ve got 2,900 rooms and more if we include the in across the street. But I know at one time, you had talked about doing a different kind of hotel, for family oriented or up luxury hotels, something like that. So any thoughts on just the Opryland itself? I mean, is that possible for expansion at some point?
Patrick Chaffin: The answer to the question is yes. And again, here’s the reason why we don’t expand because we wake up one day and saying, you want to be nice to expand. We expand because we induce demand. And then when we cannot fulfill that demand, that’s what triggers it. And so we were ready to pull the plug on an expansion, which was going to be in rooms expansion and meeting space expansion back in 2019 because as we were looking into ’20 before COVID, this hotel as you quite rightly say, almost 3,000 rooms was our pro-formas for that year for ’20 had us operating over 80% in occupancy. And so very efficient deployment of capital to generate really, really good returns. Now as our business is building back and the other thing that’s going on here, of course, in Nashville is the halo of the city is getting stronger and stronger.
The group segment in overall in Nashville is growing, but leisure is really growing. So the answer to your question is, yes, we’re looking at this. We’re looking at complete re-overhaul on food and beverage in this hotel, major investments on food and beverage, major investment on potentially a big sports bar here. And we are also looking at potentially expanding both rooms and group space.
Colin Reed: Chris, if you look across our portfolio, we’re extremely fortunate in that we are in markets where those markets are continuing to grow economically. And they’re business friendly, frankly, whether it’s whether it’s Texas or whether it’s Nashville, Orlando, Denver, these are all markets that are long term appear to be a very, very strong group and leisure markets.
Mark Fioravanti: And let me just put a fine point on Opryland, Chris, because we are very excited about what we can do there. Opryland’s coming upon 50 years here pretty soon as far as how long it’s existed. And when Opryland was built and the first few expansions that went through, the focus and the needs of the customer was more towards exhibit halls. And Opryland has done phenomenal job with the space that they have, but they’ve been at somewhat of a disadvantage in terms of premium carpeted space per guest room that’s available to the meeting planner. And so as we look at the opportunities, we think there’s an opportunity to rebalance the type of groups going into this hotel by adding potentially more carpeted space and giving Opryland a little bit more of a more level playing field with its sister hotels, and we think that creates substantial upside for the hotel.
Charles Scholes: Okay. Outstanding, very helpful. Thanks,, guys.
Colin Reed: Thanks, Chris.
Operator: Our next question comes from.
Colin Reed: Travis, we’ll do a couple more questions, and then we’ll shut it down and let people get on with go live (ph).
Operator: Our next question comes from Dori Kesten, Wells Fargo.
Dori Kesten: Thanks. Good morning. Can you talk about the Q2 bookings that you have at $650 million. Is there anything notable between corporate association, MRF, either on demand or rate?
Patrick Chaffin: Hi, Dori. Tt’s Patrick. Good to hear from you. Yeah. The Q2 bookings, there’s a couple of things that stand out to me. Number one, to your point, the rate, we saw really, really strong bookings in terms of rate. And again, like I was alluding to earlier, really, really strong growth on the corporate sector. One of the things that is most encouraging to me is over the past 18 months or so, we’ve been talking a lot about the growth in the funnel and the lead volume funnel for the current in-the-year for-the-year business as well as T1, T2 and T3. We are starting to see a lot of substantial growth in the funnel for T plus 4 and beyond. The reason that’s encouraging to us is we were definitely meeting our short-term needs, but because of the amount of re-bookings that we did, we had concerned that maybe we had skipped a booking cycle with some of the association groups that book out further.
