Mark Wang
Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your questions
Good morning, everyone. Glad you're able to join us today to discuss our first quarter earnings results. We finished off Q1 with an exceptional two months to produce a really strong result for the quarter, despite getting off to a slow start in January due to the Omicron disruption. In fact, we produced a number of records this quarter, including record VPGs driven by record close rates, record sales to domestic U.S. buyers in Hawaii, and the biggest March contract sales ever at both HGV and Diamond, all of which supported another quarter of EBITDA above 2019's combined levels with very impressive margin gains. This is a testament to the hard work that the teams have put in throughout this integration process, which is beginning to pay off. And there's other positive news to share with you today. In early April, we officially launched our new integrated membership program, and we also opened our first set of rebranded Diamond properties. In addition, the team's diligent work has enabled us to identify another $25 million in cost synergies to improve our long-term efficiencies. Taking these factors together gave us the confidence to raise our EBITDA and cashflow guidance for the year. And I'm very happy to announce that the Board approved a $500 million share repurchase plan, which was earlier than expected. We're conscious of the macroeconomic factors impacting certain parts of the consumer environment, but our direct-to-consumer model, loyal member base, and value propositions are built to provide a hedge against inflation, which gives us a competitive advantage in these changing landscapes. Our targeted owners are higher-income consumers for whom travel occupies a special place in their list of spending priorities. And we're seeing some of the positive travel behaviors that emerged during the pandemic become the new normal, including longer vacations, a demand for larger family-oriented spaces, and more people relying on the flexibility to work remotely from vacation destinations. So, overall, I think the timing of our Diamond acquisition couldn't have been better. With our new membership, rebranded resorts, and recent inventory additions, I think we're in a really great position to capitalize on the environment. Before we jump into the integration and quarterly results, let me talk a little about HGV Max, our newly launched membership program and what it means for us. HGV Max is a key to unlocking and evolving our membership into an immersive platform of experiences where owners can choose their own adventure based on their leisure needs and life stage through a simplified and flexible customer engagement model and under the unified promise of the Hilton Grand Vacations Service Excellence. With HGV Max, members will be able to access a broader range of experiences and services through our new Max Point system, including the entire network of destinations in more than 150 properties across North America, Japan, and Europe. Our ultimate access portfolio of curated experiences, selected and offered to our members based on their preferences and use occasions and an ecosystem of partners ranging from complimentary travel providers to lifestyle brands where owners can use their points and enjoy exclusive benefits; matching Hilton Honors status; and a new set of exclusive benefits for stays as Hilton Hotels, which is our owners' preferred travel accommodation options after our properties. The customer experience is designed with feedback from our owners in mind, keeping the best of legacy HGV and Diamond's programs and enhancing the whole value proposition by creating more flexibility and point usage, adding compelling new ownership tiers to incentify more engagement at key points in the owner lifecycle and simplifying the transaction process by bundling annual fees. This new program provides compelling and differentiated value and we're confident that in addition to new buyers, many existing honors will decide to become Max members. The enhanced value proposition will also allow us to meet the needs of a broader set of customers. We started offering Max on April 4th in all of our HGV sales centers and 13 rebranded Diamond sales centers. For reference, those locations generated nearly $2 billion in contract sales in 2019 or 85% of the pro forma combined contract sales produced that year. We'll continue making progress through the second quarter, adding new markets like Lake Tahoe and Palm Desert, California and Kitty Hawk in North Carolina. And going forward, all our new buyers and owners purchases and rebranded sales centers will automatically become Max members. We expect to have full program usage available for members by later this summer. And by year-end, we'll have all of our sales centers rebranded to have Max available across our entire distribution network, which is well ahead of its schedule that we contemplated in our acquisition proxy materials. I'm proud of our team for their efforts, particularly, in light of a tight supply chain environment. Recall, that rebranding the Diamond sales centers is the primary driver to unlocking our revenue synergies, because it enables us to sell both HGV Max across all three of our brand collections. Turning to the rebranding of our properties. In April, we opened our first five Hilton Vacation Club Collection Resorts in new markets of Scottsdale, Sedona, Williamsburg, and Virginia Beach, as well as in our existing Orlando market. We've heard great feedback from our guests and we've seen a nice pickup in our forward ADRs and booking activities after rebranded locations. Those resorts are also now part of the Hilton Honors network, and are available to book through Hilton.com. We're already capturing some of the synergies from the rebranding efforts as we move away from Diamond’s third-party-centric platform and onto hilton.com. We expect to see similar benefits with several more properties planned for rebrand in the second quarter and we remain on track to meet our goal of having over one-third of our identified keys rebranded by the end of this year. We've also made solid progress on our cost synergies, ending the quarter at a run rate of $120 million in savings versus the $74 million run rate last quarter and we've identified an additional $25 million of synergies, bringing our total cost synergy target to $150 million. And finally, as you recall from last quarter, we've seen success out of the gate with our Ultimate Access Experiential platform. We've continued to receive positive feedback and inbound requests from our members about the offering. As we will Ultimate Access to our entire member base, we think it will not only enhance our overall -- our experience, but it will provide us with additional consumer data that will allow us to further tailored events we offer and the tour desk we select. So, overall, I'm very pleased with how our integration has progressed and the work our teams have been doing in a relatively short period of time. Now, let's take a look at this quarter's performance. Contract sales for the quarter were $509 million, or 96% of 2019's pro forma combined sales. Legacy HCV showed further recovering contract sales for the fourth quarter and Diamond finished with contract sales a couple points ahead in 2019's level, a marked improvement from Q4. Last quarter. I mentioned that we had a lot of heavy lifting from a personal perspective at Diamond and today's results show how well they've adapted to those integration changes, as well as how quickly they've come together as part of HGV's team. Looking at demand indicators, we finished the quarter with occupancy levels of 75%. We saw our occupancy gap against 2019 grow in January around Omicron and its various challenges, followed by a sharp narrowing of the gap in February and March as the wave passed and travel trends rebounded. Our consolidated on arrivals on the books through the rest of the year are in line with 2019 and our rental arrivals are pacing ahead of where we were in 2019 with particular strength in the back half. As it relates to our new buyer demand, our Q1 new buyer package pipeline saw sharp acceleration in year-over-year growth and was up 23% versus the prior year. The heavily subsidized nature of our vacation packages makes the value proposition stronger than ever in this high ADR environment and it's a good forward indicator of future new buyer demand. Importantly, our mix of packages with a set tour date was at its highest level since 2019 and the number of these data packages in our pipeline is up 42% from December, which was double the rate from when we last reported. We're very focused on converting our package pipeline into tour flow and we're making investments in our marketing channels to build that tour pipeline to support growth in the back half and ended next year. VPGs for the quarter was nearly $4,900, a record level that increased both sequentially and year-over-year. Average transaction price again increased year-over-year due in part to the contribution of our new projects. But the improvement in closed rate was the largest driver VPG gains we saw in the quarter. I think there's a few factors that contribute to this outsized VPG growth. Consumer balance sheets remain strong and spending continues to shift from goods to experiences; new resort product; and anticipation of the improvements from our Diamond acquisition has drawn a lot of interest. The loyalty of our owners has continued to show throughout the pandemic and the enhancements we made to our customer scoring models has optimized the quality of the tour flow that we're seeing through our sales centers. The high flow through from our VPG gains underpin our strong EBITDA results for the quarter with margins 500 basis points ahead of both 2019 and 2021, along with strong free cash flow conversion. Our new buyer tour flow mix improved to the highest level we've seen since the pandemic began and we expect that the investments we're making to activate our package pipeline will further improve in the back half of the year. For the quarter, our legacy HGV NOG improved to 2.1% and Diamond also added nearly 1,600 new members. That growth in new owners supported the strong trend in our finance and Resort and Club business with EBITDA from those two recurring segments making up half of our segment even in the quarter. And finally, our rental business topline continues to benefit from improve occupancy and strong industry ADRs driven by the world-class travel environment. So, to sum things up, after slow start, we had a really impressive finish to our quarter and we see this momentum continuing. This performance, along with gaining line of sight into additional cost synergies, underpins our confidence in the increased EBITDA guidance for the year with the launch of HGV Max. In our first wave a property rebrand, we've passed some of the biggest milestones our integration journey and our focus for the rest of this year is to execute on our rebranding plans and to capture the revenue synergies that we see ahead. I'll now turn the call over to Dan to take you through our financial details. Dan?