Colin Reed: Let me weigh in on this just for a sec. Chris, you’ve been around our organization now for almost a decade, I think. And you understand the journey we’re on here. We’re continuing to upgrade the quality of these assets and the relationship that we have built with the customer. And so, the key to the long-term success of this business is making sure we do business with high worth customers. customers that don’t bring low-rated business to our product. And that is the journey we’ve been on here for a while and it’s the journey we’re going to be on for the foreseeable future. And I think we’re making great progress. And this is one of the reasons why we are so transparent with you guys about what is going on, not only in terms of room nights book, but the rate in which we’re booking these room nights. And we are seeing really high-quality growth in rate that comes back to the long-term sustainable growth in profitability here.
Chris Woronka: Yes. Yes, for sure. Very helpful guys. A follow-up, if maybe we could go back to the DC to National for a second. You had really strong performance, particularly, I thought on the bottom line in Q3 all the way around, really. But you’re getting the margins up there. You talked about that. That was a high priority. Where are you on kind of what you want to do there, whether it’s a top line, your occupancy, you’re still building that? What inning are we in getting the national to kind of where you think you’re going to get to?
Unidentified Company Representative: You want to start? Yes. I would tell you, you’re right. We talked a lot during COVID and in the first year after COVID about the efforts that we’ve been making to improve the fixed cost side of that business, and we are very successful in doing so. I would tell you that the remaining opportunity for us is on the transient side. This hotel does an outstanding job from a group perspective and very pleased with where their satisfaction scores are heading. So, we’re capturing the revenue and we’re delivering the satisfaction. But from a transient perspective, this hotel has always remained having a lot of opportunity. And so, we’re looking at what we’ve done at the other hotels and whether or not a transient demand generator like a water amenity would make sense for that hotel. So, I would say that the next couple of years, we’ll really be trying to unlock some of the potential on the transient side.
Mark Fioravanti: You’ll recall, Chris, that we spent about $65 million renovating the rooms in that hotel during the pandemic, and we really just finished reconcepting the food and beverage there, kind of top to bottom. So, the product there is terrific. And I think that consumers are recognizing that and are willing to pay for it.
Colin Reed: And the service level improvements that we’ve seen in that hotel led by our friends at Marriott, have been pretty good. So, it bodes well for the future.
Chris Woronka: Okay. Very good. Congratulations on other great quarter.
Operator: Our next question comes from Jay Kornreich with Wedbush Securities.
Jay Kornreich: Looking into the fourth quarter, specifically the December holiday season with the ICE! presentation, which is robust leisure transient ADR well above 2019 levels, but with some concerns facing the leisure customers currently and just ADR you can achieve. Can you just comment on how you expect this coming holiday season to perform relative to last year?
Unidentified Company Representative: Obviously, most of those customers book in a much more condensed booking window. But so, we normally watch how the tickets are pacing even though it’s early. And our ICE! tickets, as Colin mentioned earlier, have been pacing very, very well. We’re ahead of 2019 in a sizable fashion right now versus where we were several years ago in 2019, and we’re currently ahead of 2022. We’ve talked about our concerns that there was a lot of pent-up demand that traveled in 2022. And that may still be the case, but the early indications are very favorable and very encouraging for us. And so, we obviously, like everyone else in the industry saw a lot of the domestic U.S. travelers go international during the summertime.
But early indications are that folks may be staying closer to home for the upcoming holiday season. We’ll watch and see how it goes because there’s a lot of that business still needs to be booked in the next four to six weeks, but we’re encouraged where we’re at right now.
Colin Reed: The other thing that I think you should think about here, Jay, is that the overall quality of our leisure experiences in these big hotels is pretty, pretty compelling. And then what we have layered on top of this, this entertainment that we’ve layered on top of it with things like ICE!, things like dinner shows, things like light exhibitions is very, very different to what the vast majority of this industry does through this holiday period. And we’ve had now years of experience at this stuff. I mean, we’ve been doing it for on a decade now. And I think we’re going to have a decent fourth quarter. And we’re not sitting here wringing our fingers hoping like hell a city that we’re in business in performs okay. We’re driving demand. We’re inducing demand into our business by the quality of our products and the quality of the entertainment that we’ve put in place.
Jay Kornreich: Got it. That’s helpful. And then just as a follow-up, you commented on T+1 and T+2 bookings being up over 10% from a year ago. And so, I wanted to see if you can just speak to which groups are driving these bookings? And if there’s anything within those bookings in terms of segmentation that surprised you?
Colin Reed: It’s a good corporate business.
Unidentified Company Representative: Yes. I would tell you that 2024 right now has a higher mix of corporate business, not a marginal amount, but a pretty substantial increase, which is very encouraging to us and back to our conversation a few minutes ago with the previous caller, that bodes well for what we think will happen on the catering side of the business. T+2, it’s — there’s really not a substantial number of room nights on the books to really be able to say, but it’s pretty much consistent with what we’ve seen in the past. But 2024 is very encouraging from a corporate perspective.
Colin Reed: Speak a little bit about the rate trajectory and what this should do for T+2, T+3, to our business.
Unidentified Company Representative: Yes. So, we were talking — we have about 25 points of occupancy of the 39 points of occupancy on 2025 that was booked prior to our focus on rate growth in early 2022. So, as we’ve commented, as we get into 2024, we see more impact from the group rate increase, 2025, roughly 50% of that group business will be booked in a very different and much more aggressive rate environment than 2026; we’ll see an even greater proportion. So, we’re very encouraged that as we’re moving forward, the group rate focus that we’ve put in place will really start paying dividends. And a lot of that was set up by the fact that we were able to capture so many of the cancellations into rebooking’s for future periods, which set up our book of business in a much healthier point or healthier status and allowed us to really start pushing on the group rate. So, we think that there are some really good things ahead for us from a group rate perspective.
