Operator: Thank you. And the next question will be from Matt Fassler from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Lizzie Dove: It’s actually Lizzie Dove from Goldman Sachs. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to see just see your thoughts on CapEx, especially — you have Universal opening, EPIC in the summer of 2025. You’ve got Disney announcing that they’d spend an extra $60 billion on its parks and resorts over the next 10 years, which I imagine a decent chunk of that is going to go to Orlando. So in light of all that, how does that kind of change how you allocate your CapEx in terms of the new rides that you’ve talked about versus hotels or all of those different things?
Marc Swanson: Yes. Let me take that question. I mean, a couple of things. One, I think we’ve been pretty clear that our goal is to have something new in each of our parks. And certainly, that would include SeaWorld Orlando each year going forward. So we’ll continue to obviously invest in Orlando and in our other parks. But just a reminder on Orlando because occasionally, people do ask this question. I really like being in Orlando, right? It’s the largest tourism market in the United States. We’ve been here since the early 1970s. And if you think about it, we had one SeaWorld Park. And if you think about all the parks that have opened since that time, including us, we opened two others, Aquatica and Discovery Cove, and then you got all the Disney Parks that came, all the Universal Parks that have come.
All the other ancillary things, whether it’s LEGOLAND or up of the pig [Ph] whatever it may be, there’s been a lot of investment in the market. And I think we’ve obviously continued, I think, to benefit from that. So we welcome the investment. We have a differentiated product. I think that sets us apart in a lot of ways from our competitors. So we’ll continue to, I think, benefit from being in a market that’s growing, and we’ll continue to find ways to take advantage of that like we have over the last 50 years. I mean it’s pretty remarkable when you look at the investment into this market over that time. Since we opened SeaWorld in the early 1970s. And I think we’ve continued to be performing in this market. And well enough that, obviously, we opened two additional parks that we are really proud of.
So we like the investment. We welcome the investment. We’re glad we’re in Orlando.
Lizzie Dove: I appreciate that. That’s helpful. And just 1 follow-up, if I may. Earlier in the year, you talked about expecting a record year in EBITDA. I think you had not fully committed to that last quarter. I’m curious how you’re thinking about that? Obviously, you’ve had some challenges with the weather and also kind of the outlook for 2024, especially when you have seen some improvements on the OpEx side, which James called out earlier.
Marc Swanson: Yes. Look, I don’t have anything to guide you to other than — I mean, you can see what our LTM number is. But look, we’re going to work our hardest to finish — finish this year. I already — in a strong fashion. I like our lineup of events with Christmas that we’ve talked about. So we’re going to finish as strong as we can here for the rest of the year. We’ll see where that ultimately lands in total for the year. As far as the — again, I’m not going to give you guidance for 2024 or anything like that. But just — I kind of mentioned this in my prepared remarks, how we think about growing the business. And it’s, I think, a pretty simple formula. If you can grow your attendance 1% or so, if you can grow your per caps 2%, 3%, 4% or so, and if you manage your cost well while you’re doing that, you can expand your EBITDA, your adjusted EBITDA probably in the 5% range.
And that’s — I’m certainly not guiding you to anything, but that’s how we think about it on a normalized basis. And then if you think about where we once were as a company, we did over 25 million in attendance back in 2008. So we still have a lot of runway left to get back to that. So that gives me confidence that we can — we’ve achieved something in the past. And there’s reasons that if we achieved it in the past, why can’t we achieve it again in the future? So that’s kind of how we think about the business going forward. And then you layer on really the efficiency efforts that you’ve talked about, the pricing efforts, all the other things that we’ve talked about. So again, not guiding you to anything, but just to give you some color on how we think about the go forward.
Still a lot of opportunity, especially to get back attendance that we want to achieve, whether it’s 2008 or other years. So a lot to think about there.
Operator: And the next question is from Robert Aurand from KeyBanc. Please go ahead.
Robert Aurand: Hi, thank you for taking my question. I wanted to follow up around the group bookings commentary. You had said up double digits. Can you just remind us, is there any kind of easy comp dynamic playing into that? And maybe you could give us kind of how group bookings compared to 2019 at this time of the year?
Marc Swanson: What I would tell you, Robert, is that was the revenue trends that we talked about. I don’t know that we have back to 2019. But what I would tell you is we feel on the revenue trend there, the group business, we feel has come back in a lot of ways from a revenue standpoint versus the dramatic slowdown after COVID. So I think we’re optimistic that we can continue to grow that part of our business. And we have a great product to showcase at our parks. We have opportunities for groups to come in here and do things that, again, are like I’ve said, are differentiated and unique to us and that you’re not going to find another park. So we’re going to I think, showcase that better and try to do a better job of that on a go-forward basis.
