Mark Wang
Analyst · Wolfe Research. Please proceed with your question
Good morning, everyone. Earlier today, we released our first quarter results. I'd like to start by saying that this call is going to feel very different from the ones before and that's because we're in a very different environment. While I'll discuss the performance of the business, I believe it's also critical to address what we're facing today. It's clear that the impact of coronavirus has been sudden and significant and that this period of disruption remains uncertain. While we saw minimal effects from the virus in January and February, it should come as no surprise that we saw a significant falloff in trends in March as the effects of the virus spread to the U.S. Health and travel advisories began to appear in late January and February in our major markets, which cascaded into a full lockdown and self-quarantine orders, as we moved through March in markets such as New York, California, Hawaii and Florida. We took immediate action to ensure the safety of our team members, owners and guests by shutting all of our sales centers and suspending operations at most of our U.S. resorts. It was clearly an unprecedented decision that I never contemplated having to make particularly over the span of just a few short weeks. Fortunately, we entered this period with a strong business model, engaged owner base and solid balance sheet and we took further steps to ensure those strengths will carry us through this time of uncertainty. Today, I'd like to talk to you about three things. First, I'll provide more context about, what we've done to address the urgent needs of the business and our people. Second, how we view the industry its relative resilience during these times and our position within it. And last, I'll share four strategic priorities we are committed to and I believe will position us for success today and as we exit these restrictions and enter a new period of recovery. First, let me walk you through some of the swift actions we've taken already. In mid-March, we paused our on-site sales operations to protect our staff and guests. We waived all cancellation penalties for our guests who plan to stay with us prior to the end of May and refunded all reservation fees associated with those days. And we waived online transaction fees for owners, who book a stay by the end of May for travel in 2020 and 2021. We've kept our customer service centers fully operational to answer questions take future bookings and continue to provide our owners with a high level of service. And we made temporary changes to our booking rules and we will continue to evaluate and adjust them as necessary to ensure owners travel is protected. At the same time, we took immediate steps to safeguard our future marketing pipeline post recovery. Our IT teams moved quickly to transition our call center staff to work-from-home and maintain continuity with our Hilton call transfer program along with the ability to service our customers booking future vacations. We also built out infrastructure to allow our top sales directors to work remotely, enabling them to begin sales to our top clients. At the resort level, we worked with our HOAs to keep our properties in pristine condition during the pause. Prior to the shutdown, the rooms and common areas were deep cleaned and many resorts took advantage of the slowdown to get ahead of planned maintenance projects that will allow us to have more rooms in service in the latter half of the year. We also acted quickly to protect the business with additional steps to defend our cash flow by adjusting our operating expenses and inventory spend. Nearly 60% of our total operating costs are variable providing a natural hedge against periods of reduced business activity. And our Hilton license fee is almost entirely variable. To lower our fixed costs, we implemented cost controls including a pause in our discretionary spending, a hiring freeze and a temporary halt to our 401(k) match. To adjust to the suspension of operations, we made the difficult decision to furlough approximately 6,100 of our valuable team members representing nearly 70% of our employee base. And in addition, we reduced salaries for all team members and management across all levels of the organization. On the inventory side, we identified over $200 million of budgeted spend for the year that can be deferred with minimal impact to the planned sales launch schedule for our new projects, representing over 50% of the previously budgeted spend over the next three quarters. As the situation evolves, we'll continue to revisit our planned spend as we balance cash needs against the availability of new inventory. In addition, we also drew down our revolver and warehouse to strengthen our cash position and Dan will speak to those in more detail. Collectively, these actions have significantly reduced our fixed cost burden minimized our cash burn rate and strengthened our balance sheet to enable our business to weather an extended period of slowdown. Next, I'd like to highlight the strength of our sector. The timeshare industry has both business model and product advantages not shared by other parts of the hospitality industry. Our business model is differentiated by a solid foundation of owners that provides a stable source of recurring EBITDA and protection from fluctuation in asset utilization. For example, approximately 40% of our segment EBITDA last year was generated from financing and resort and club divisions and 90% of our member fees for this year have already been collected. Our business is fortunate in that these maintenance fees fund all the operational costs of our resorts. This reduces the fixed asset burden commonly seen in other areas of hospitality industry. Further the timeshare product is better positioned to recover from a pandemic. Owners often return to familiar unit resort, which truly makes it feel like their home away from home. Because of this, they know the HGV staff and have a comfort level that is closer to a second home than a hotel. Additionally, our product is structured to allow us to reduce the reliance on communal features. For example, most units include in-room kitchens and laundry facilities. Rather than needing to dine at a common restaurant our owners and guests can prepare meals for themselves in the comfort and safety of their accommodations. Within the industry, we are starting from a strong position because of our NOG strategy, flexible inventory sourcing and the strength of our balance sheet. We entered the year with nearly $1 billion in liquidity and we've managed a conservative balance sheet with very low leverage and significant cash on hand, which provides a staying power and the ability to protect our customers' interest. And while we can't be sure when the turn will come or what the path to normalcy will look like, one structural advantage that we've always enjoyed at HGV is the strength of our owners. Our 27 years of positive NOG has built a high-quality base of owners, who have an elevated level of connection to our brand. This provides us with historic levels of embedded, upgraded sales yet to be materialized. And 70% of our owners own their intervals outright and have made a material financial commitment to HGV. They're leisure travelers and they have both a desire to travel frequently and a prepaid vacation waiting for them when this disruption passes. Our just-in-time and fee-for-service structure provides us with operational flexibility to tweak our pipeline for shifting needs and market conditions. We think it's important to not only consider the impact of the pandemic, but also the resulting recession. While we can't say what the shape or duration of the recovery will look like, we believe the best comparison we have is the past financial crisis. As we've discussed before HGV demonstrated the strength of our model during and after the last crisis. And we feel we're even in better position to weather the storm and rebound now than we were in 2008. To give a few data points, our owner base today is two times larger. The Hilton Honors loyalty program has grown its members by four times and we're entering with more liquidity. As we've done in the past, we'll continue to manage our business conservatively through this period of uncertainty and take steps to prepare for a return to a new normal as travel restrictions lift and markets recover. Finally, I'd like to briefly discuss our four strategic priorities. The first three are focused on winning the fight today, while the fourth is designed to position the business to win as we come out of these travel restrictions and enter a period of recovery. I will cover every initiative we have planned, but for your reference you can find them on page two of the materials we provided for this call. The first priority is to safeguard, the safety and well-being of our team members our owners and guests. When able we'll reopen our resorts and sales offices complying fully with local regulations and CDC guidance. To ensure the highest level of cleanliness, we created the HGV Clean initiative in alignment with Hilton which we will implement in our properties as we bring them back online. The second priority is to streamline our spending to maintain our strong liquidity position and optimize our inventory assets. We'll continue to manage variable costs flexing them up and down to meet the demands of our business. We'll carefully monitor inventory demand and leverage our flexible inventory sourcing models to ensure appropriate supply, while minimizing the exposure of our balance sheet. The third priority is to protect our recurring revenue streams and embedded value. We said before our owners are one of the foundational strengths of our business. To protect this foundation, we're ensuring owner points and vacations are not lost during these constrained travel periods. We're also planning to promote the return of travel to owners as restrictions allow through drive-to offers and other incentives. The final priority is to grow demand and implement opportunities to create incremental value. The two key factors to create demand in our system are tour flow and inventory. To generate tour flow and relaunch sales, we will focus on our owners and the over 400,000 new buyers we have in our package pipeline with enhanced promotions and marketing offers. Our new inventory investments should create incremental demand for both owners and upgrades and NOG sales as these audiences begin touring again. We'll also continue to grow our new buyer package pipeline through direct marketing and digital channels with Hilton and other partners to ensure we have a robust pipeline of tours going forward. And we've developed a new prepaid term product that was originally scheduled to launch in April that we will now plan to pilot as soon as conditions allow. And finally, in 2008's financial crisis, we benefited from being opportunistic with distressed properties. We'll continue to monitor the market and work with our fee-for-service partners to do the same as opportunities present themselves. To wrap up, clearly this is a time of unprecedented challenges. We acted quickly and decisively to secure our business and control the things that we can control. While this disruption is fundamentally different from others we've seen before, we're confident that leisure travel will recover and that timeshare owners will be at the leading edge of that recovery. And we're using this period of reduced business activity to position our business and lever our strategic drivers to ensure we emerge as a stronger business ready to engage our owners. Before I turn it over to Dan, I want to say how proud I am of the efforts of our team who've been working around the clock to adapt to this situation in real-time and take the necessary steps for us to get ahead of it. And I want to extend our best wishes to all of those affected either directly or indirectly by this pandemic and thank the frontline workers around the globe who are saving lives. Dan?