Adjusted EBITDA grew 3% on a comparable basis and our adjusted EBITDA margin improved 250 basis points to 83%. First quarter adjusted diluted EPS was 78 cents, up 1% on a comparable basis, reflecting adjusted EBITDA growth, as well as benefits from our share repurchase activity, which were partially offset by higher interest expense. During the first quarter, we executed $275 million of new forward-starting interest rate swaps on our Term Loan B Facility, which will begin in fourth quarter 2024 and expire in fourth quarter 2027 at just under 3.4%. As a result, nearly all of our Term Loan B is now swapped through the end of 2027 at a blended fixed rate of 3.3%, more than 200 basis points lower than current SOFR level. Free cash flow before development advances and transaction costs was $102 million, up 5% year-over-year, primarily reflecting adjusted EBITDA growth.
Development advanced spend increased $18 million year-over-year, reflecting our ongoing efforts to capitalize on opportunities in the competitive landscape, particularly in attracting higher fee-per-property to our system across the globe. We returned $89 million to our shareholders in the first quarter, through $57 million of share repurchases and $32 million of common stock dividends. We ended the quarter with over $580 million in total liquidity and our net leverage ratio of 3.4 times within the lower half of our target range. We are planning to finish the year at a net leverage ratio of at least 3.5 times, which provides over $400 million of capital available for share repurchases this year or 7% of our outstanding shares at recent price levels.
Additionally, depending upon the availability and actionability of M&A opportunities, we could increase our leverage to 4 times, which would provide us with over $750 million of available capital, which would equate to 13% of our outstanding shares. And with the Board’s recent approval of an additional $400 million in share repurchase authorization, we now have nearly $800 million available under the program. Turning now to outlook. We’re increasing our adjusted diluted EPS projection by $0.07 to a range of $4.18 to $4.30 to account for our first quarter share repurchase activity. This outlook is based on a lower diluted share count of 81.6 million shares and as usual excludes any future potential share repurchase activity. Our outlook for RevPAR remains unchanged.
You’ll recall from our February call that we expected a challenging comp in the first quarter with gradual improvement moving throughout the remainder of 2024. Last year in the second quarter, we began to see a shift in travel patterns as COVID restrictions were lifted. Cruise and inexpensive air travel to destinations like Mexico and the Caribbean opened back up, while domestic leisure and drive-to hotels experienced demand declines, especially along the coast. We saw domestic RevPAR gradually deteriorate in 2023, starting modestly at down 1% in the second quarter and then deepening to down 4% by year end. We are now beginning to lap these effects. Geoff already touched on some of the improving trends that we began seeing in March, April and May.
When combining these recent trends with our expectation of incremental infrastructure capture as we move into the second half of the year and strong positive growth internationally, we continue to expect full year global RevPAR growth of 2% to 3% this year. There are also no changes to our expectations for the marketing funds. For Q2, we expect the funds to overspend by $5 million to $10 million, bringing the first half overspend to approximately $20 million, which we then expect will reverse in the back half of this year. Combined with the $7 million we recorded during 2023, we now expect cost relating to Choice’s fail takeover attempt to approximate $50 million in total, down from the previous $75 million estimate. The vast majority of this amount will be paid out in the second quarter and remember that these costs are excluded from our 2024 outlook.
In closing, our first quarter results reflect strong execution on our growth strategy, despite softer industry-wide RevPAR in the U.S. We continue to accelerate net room growth and pipeline growth. We generated significant ancillary fee growth and improved operating margins, driving incremental earnings growth. And we continue to generate significant cash while maintaining a strong balance sheet with ample leverage capacity to further enhance shareholder returns over the remainder of the year. With that, Geoff and I would be happy to take your questions. Operator?
Operator: Thank you, Ms. Allen. [Operator Instructions] We’ll go first this morning to Joe Greff of JPMorgan.
Joe Greff: Geoff, Michele, I know you talk to your developers and developer community frequently. I would love to hear from you about some of your recent conversations that you’ve had with them, particularly after March 11th, the date that Choice decided to stop its pursuit of buying you. Are you seeing or are they communicating to you an acceleration or a pivot with respect to development? So whatever pause you may have seen, has that reversed? And is there anything within these conversations that may be more brand-specific or conversion-specific that you would call out? And just my last follow-up question with respect to this topic is, is it fair to think that it starts to really pick up and accelerate now and maybe you’re kind of closer to the 4%, the higher end of your net rooms growth target for the year versus the midpoint? And that’s all for me. Thanks.
Geoff Ballotti: Yeah. Thanks, Joe. Absolutely. We are seeing a lot less uncertainty out there in the development community. We are talking to our franchisees, obviously, daily. Our team’s had great success, as I think it was your question last quarter on the first question off, in terms of could last quarter have been better. We had a great fourth quarter, a record full year of openings and we’ve had, again, our largest first quarter of openings since going public six years ago. But certainly to your question with the deal noise dissipating, owners who are uncertain on committing to deals with us, those who did not want to wind up in the Choice system, have agreed to sign. And I think there’s no better example of that than the dozen WaterWalk conversions that we did this month.
So, yes, I mean, the conversations, the trend, the pause, if there was one out there has reversed and we’re certainly seeing a lot more activity on both the conversion and the new construction signing front. Our teams had a really good quarter, not only on the conversion side, our conversion room openings, from a signing standpoint, were up over 20%, I believe, in the quarter. But new construction executions were also up. They were up double digits, up over 20%, I think, versus the first quarter, even back before COVID. And so, yeah, we’re really positive with the tenor of conversations that are going on out there with our franchise development teams and any uncertainty that was out there in terms of doing business with us has certainly gone away.
Joe Greff: And then with respect to maybe the higher end of net rooms growth is more reasonable than sort of the midpoint?
Geoff Ballotti: Sure. Look, I mean…
Joe Greff: Can you speak on that?
