SeaWorld Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE:SEAS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Paul Golding: First, I wanted to ask about the suboptimal staffing levels here. You also noted that mobile ordering is at 50% of food venues, I believe. I just wanted to ask where we may start to see an offset between those 2? In other words, what we could expect in terms of staffing up from labor hours perspective to get to optimal levels to hit those per cap opportunities versus filling that in with technology and the expenses associated.

Marc Swanson: Yes. So I can take that. Look, we talk about the mobile app a little bit there in my remarks, and we’re at over 50% of the restaurants that we’ve targeted to have mobile ordering and we’ll continue to hopefully grow that over time. And we know clearly, like you would see in other companies, there are some benefits to doing that as far as convenience and generally lower costs and things like that. As far as the optimal staffing, I mean, we’ve called that out because we know at times, there’s areas of our parks that we want to have better staffing at. And we — and opportunities for more revenue generation from being better staff, primarily in our food and beverage areas would probably be the area we’d see that the most.

So there’s, I think, a desire to not only increase the mobile app, but also make sure for those that aren’t using the mobile app, we still have opportunities for them to spend money. I don’t know when that exact intersection will occur. But one of the things we’re doing with our labor management is really a pretty meaningful project around kind of labor optimization, scheduling deployment, things like that. And I think those are the type of things we would take into consideration.

Operator: Thank you and this concludes the question-and-answer session. And now I would like to turn the floor to Marc Swanson for any closing comments.

Marc Swanson: Well, thank you, Keith. On behalf of Jim and the rest of the management team at SeaWorld Entertainment, I want to thank you for joining us this morning. As you heard today, we are confident in our long-term strategy which we believe will drive improved operating and financial results and long-term value for stakeholders. Thank you, and we look forward to speaking with you next quarter.

Operator: Thank you. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.