Mark Wang
Analyst · Wolfe Research. Please proceed with your question
Morning everyone. Earlier today, we released our second quarter results. Over the past several months, we acted decisively to respond to the global pandemic with an emphasis on protecting our owners, guest and team members along with making critical decisions to support our business model. We've re-opened many of our properties and are beginning to see positive signs that our customers are responding favorably as evidenced by recent conversion trends. Our contractual recurring revenue streams, continue to generate meaningful income and while we're cautiously optimistic, we're being prudent in our evaluation of travel environment and the fact that it will take time to fully recover. We're prepared to sustain the business during this period of uncertainty by effectively managing our cost structure to ensure we're protecting cash flow and by taking necessary actions to preserve our liquidity, and we kept an eye on the long-term to make sure we're well-positioned to lead the travel industry out of the crisis and return to a path to sustainable growth in cash generation. First, I'd like to cover the status of our resorts and sales centers along with some of the initial results that we've seen since opening. We reopened our first major resorts on May 21 welcoming guests back to our properties in South Carolina, Orlando in Utah and subsequently open their on-site sales centers in the weeks that followed. We heard great feedback on our HGV enhanced care initiative and our guests were overwhelmingly positive that the guidelines to make them feel safe without feeling constrained during their vacation. We saw solid levels of occupancy at our South Carolina and Utah resorts, particularly over the Memorial Day and 4th July holidays. Our South Carolina occupancy levels have consistently held in the 70% to 90% range since we reopened, and Utah has been in 85% to 95% range. Orlando occupancy levels have remained in the 30% to 40% range down from prior year levels to some popular tourist attractions either remain closed or were running at reduced capacity. In mid-June, we opened our Las Vegas properties and sales centers where we also saw occupancies in the 30% range. However, similar to Orlando many casino destinations are currently operating with significant capacity constraint. We expect that we'll see improved trends in these markets as restrictions are lifted and utilization rates improve. As of today, approximately three quarters of our resorts have resumed operations. We continue to monitor the situation in Hawaii, New York City and Chicago and anticipate rolling openings of our sales centers in those markets based on factors including government restrictions and more normal levels of travel demand. Overall, since we began reopening, we've seen our members returning and our occupancies improving, and we've got a robust pipeline of over 400,000 marketing packages that we sold to potential new buyers and that we've recently started to activate. Ultimately increases in occupancy will lead to more tours, which in turn drives our sales cycle. In the weeks following our resorts reopening, we also resumed operations at several of our sales centers, although they've initially been running at lower levels of utilization as we re-engage our marketing efforts will continue to ramp our sales operations in response to tour flow levels, and we believe the process improvements we've made over the past few months will enable us to service the same level tours as we did in 2019 with a leaner and more efficient team. Yet despite lower tour flow, our sales execution in this challenging environment has been commendable. Our close rates improved significantly for both owners and new buyers driving in mid-teens improvement in our new by our VPG and a nearly 20% gain in our owner VPG for the quarter. Those improvement in close rates combined with a mix shift to owners drove overall VPG up 41% to over $4700. As a result of these efforts during the month of June, our teams were able to generate contract sales at 21% of last year's levels on only 40% of last year's tour flow. We anticipate our VPG to trend toward more historical levels, as we add back additional tours and sales staff, although the process and organizational changes we made as part of our strategic priorities should result in a sustained improvement in our efficiencies. The defensive characteristics of our business model were also evident this quarter. The EBITDA of our financing business was relatively flat despite carrying a lower receivable balance, and our cost savings program allowed us to grow our E-Club and Resort EBITDA despite a revenue headwind from lower transaction related fees. These stable sources of EBITDA are one of the key differentiating factors of our business model. So, there were some nice positive trends of 0.2, but there are also clearly challenges that remain outside of our control that are drag on our tour volume. Travel restrictions remain in place in a number of markets and others have various limitations on businesses that appeal to travelers. New York and Hawaii for instance, accounted for over a quarter of our tour flow last year and we'll likely see limitations on travel through the rest of the year. And nearly half of our tour flow was generated in Las Vegas and Orlando, which are still experiencing capacity limitations on their key tourist attractions. We've recently seen upticks in COVID cases in several key markets including Florida, South Carolina and Nevada, and the new cycles continue to focus on hotspots in various areas of the country. And while we'll continue to do our utmost to provide a safe environment for our guests and team members, we think that consumers will continue to show varying levels of comfort with travel particularly among new buyers. We do believe that as we progressed through the pandemic, we'll see our KPIs return to normal run rate levels although the timing remains uncertain. With that said, our strategic priorities have guided our approach, leading up to and during our opening process. And while there is more work to be done adhering to these priorities as we navigate through this crisis will set us up for strength as we complete our property reopening and proceed through the period of recovery. The first priority is to safeguard our owners, guest and team members. We've been extremely focused here and along with social distancing and free PP&E for our guests, we've rolled out our enhanced care program in alignment with Hilton's own clean stay initiative. The program further elevates our already rigorous cleaning and hygiene process in a way that is thorough, visible and continuous. And as I mentioned earlier, we saw great feedback from our guests about the enhancements. The second priority is to streamline our operating and capital spending. Last quarter, we shared the steps we took to bolster our balance sheet and provide 22 months of available liquidity and we made further strides this quarter with a credit facility amendment and securitization as Dan will share with you shortly. Turning to our operating expenses we've been laser-focused on controlling cost and reducing our cash burn to a minimum. And we were nearly breakeven on an EBITDA basis in June, despite contract sales being only a fraction of last year's levels. We're in the process of identifying additional permanent cost savings. As I indicated earlier, we won't be able to fully optimize our expense structure until we return more normalized operations, but we do know that will come back even more efficient than we were prior to the crisis bolstering our historical record of margin outperformance. Our capital spending plans on inventory, development and technology have also been revamped to strike an optimal balance between returning to growth and preserving capital. The third priority is to protect our recurring revenue and embedded value. Our teams have been working tirelessly with our member base to assist them with reworking or changing their vacation plans this year, and we've made sure that none of our members loss any other point values due to travel disruption related to COVID-19. We began to reengage our members with special offers and highlighted our enhance care guidelines promote a return to travel particularly at 70% of our locations that are drive to. The results of these initiatives is that the attrition rate within our owner base remains low. All of these efforts are in support of our fourth and final priority, which is of course to grow our business. We've introduced several new projects as far in 2020 starting with Ocean Tower Phase II and The Quin followed by Maui in June and our Cabo project in coming months. As we reopened our resorts, we've begun to activate packages from our marketing pipeline to drive new buyer tour flow. And as I just mentioned, we're working with our owners to preserve their ability to travel when they're able to do so. We care these efforts with promotional offerings and enhanced value to encourage upgrades and new sales. At the same time, we've embraced the evolution of the timeshare business model during this pandemic having successfully expanded our virtual sales process and transition some of our staff to a more efficient work from home model. And we continue to evaluate distressed opportunities with a number of new and familiar fee partners although it's still too early in the cycle to see compelling assets hit the market. Focusing on our strategic priorities has enabled us to concentrate our efforts during this unique time by giving a shorter-term objectives and guidelines as we navigate our way through the recovery. To sum up, I'm proud of our teams and our execution today. While Q2 likely mark the bottom, the path to truly unrestricted travel and increased consumer comfort remains uncertain and will require patience to return to our prior run rates. As we've seen in past crises, it's not a matter if our owners and guests were return, but when. In addition, our customers have a strong affinity for the HGV brand and our owners 70% who own their intervals outright have a prepaid vacation waiting for them. We continue to see a desire and willingness to travel under the right circumstances, as evidenced by our booking data. While our bookings are down just 9% compared to last year and first quarter bookings for 2021 are actually ahead of where they were at the same time a year ago. While not necessarily indicative of future occupancy, these trends give me confidence that our owners and guests are eager to return and we're better positioned than any other time in our history to withstand the current environment and lead the travel industry on the path to recovery. As I mentioned earlier, we have more than 400,000 packages in our pipeline. Near that most we've had in our history and the vast majority of these package holders have not yet booked vacations. And we have nearly 330,000 owners, an all-time high that it's a result of decades of focusing on NOG. Ultimately this means we have three quarters of a million opportunities to engage and win new business in the coming quarters as travelers return. In the meantime we've shown that we can operate efficiently and approach breakeven in a low volume environment. And we've also proven, we can flex our business quickly to respond to different levels of demand. In closing, my conviction in our operating model is as strong, is it's ever been led by our multi-channel marketing strategy, embedded owner base, and strategic competitive advantage of our Hilton relationship. I’ll now turn the call over to Dan.