Mark Wang
Analyst · Truist Securities. Please proceed with your question
Good morning, everyone and welcome to our second quarter earnings call. I’m happy to report that we produced another set of strong results for the quarter with contract sales and margins. Well ahead of our pro-forma combined 2019 numbers and EBITDA over 50% ahead of 2019. Our performance was consistent in each month of the quarter, which highlights both the compelling nature of our new offerings and the hard work that the integration teams have done. Our members and consumers remain very much in a travel mindset, despite the risk posed by higher fuel prices and recent travel disruptions. While these macroeconomic forces may create risks to consumer spending, we continue to see high demand for vacation packages, particularly at our new resorts and recently rebranded Hilton Vacation Club properties. Our close rates remain near the record levels we saw in last quarter, underscoring, the value proposition of vacation ownership. We are deepening our relationship with Hilton with the addition of Hilton Vacation Club collection, allowing us to engage with a wider customer base of high-quality Hilton honored members. And we have strengthened our business with the integration of Diamond, adding marketing scale, product flexibility and portfolio diversification that will help us to serve the travel preferences of our guests in every environment. Importantly, these factors continue to support solid trends and forward indicators today giving us confidence in our outlook throughout the rest of the year. Before I provide highlights for the quarter, let me start with an update on our strategy and integration progress. On our last call, we talked about our new HGV Max membership program. We are excited about the increased level of access and new benefits providing a streamlined way to engage our members. This is an important step in our journey to evolve what it means to be an HGV member and provide an even greater value proposition through membership. We are meeting the expectations of today’s travelers through enhanced benefits, simplicity, omni-channel engagement, and focus on experiences, and our strong VPG and sales performance confirm these offerings are resignating with our members and guests. So today, I want to expand on two important capabilities that support these strong results, our ultimate access events platform and our virtual sales channel. HGV Ultimate Access is a collection of premier experiences exclusively for Hilton Grand Vacations members and guests, including a private concert series, access to sporting events, culinary experiences, and more. We believe these events deepen the relationship between our members and HGV brand, because we have seen that engaging experiences inspire our members to create more memories, build relationships, and enhance the overall travel and hospitality experience we offer. I’m really proud of how our teams have expanded on this events platform. And this year, we are on track to deliver a 15% participation rate for members we have offered this, experience to, with a goal of achieving over 25% in the coming years and growing from there. All properties are expected to participate in the program, and we are conducting successful events in major cities to maintain our owners connection HGV even when they are not traveling or staying in one of our properties. We are also seeing a high correlation between member VPG and ultimate access participation. As we expand, we are collecting a significant amount of data that will allow us to further sharpen our ability to engage with more members. Additionally, we are already running successful tests with prospects who are Hilton Honor Members expanding on our universe of potential customers. The other new capability where we have made significant progress is in virtual sales, diversifying how we reach our customers, a critical function, especially as we span on our suite of products and experiences. It is become an integral part of how we engage with our members and prospects as a way to drive incremental sales outside of our traditional sales channels. We are re-engineering the approach across the marketing sales process. For example, we now use AI to provide real time support to our agents, drive consistency and adhere to our compliance standards. We are thinking about this channel as both additive and supportive of this strength of our sales centers and we expect the drive over 50 million of contract sales to our virtual channels this year. Turning to our rebranding, we continue to make excellent progress. The vast majority of our sales network has now been rebranded and it is selling HGV Max offering and we expect this work to be maturely completed by the end of the third quarter, which is ahead of schedule. Since our last call, we completed the rebranding of nine more sales centers, seven of which are in markets that are new to HGV. On the property rebrand side, we added several additional properties to Hilton Club collection in Scottsdale, Lake Tahoe, and Virginia Beach bringing our total property rebrands to eight this year. And we are on track to deliver on our target of having one-third of our legacy Diamond room keys rebranded by year end. Along with rebranding our physical assets, we are also continuing to improve on the service standards at our resorts, ensuring we provide a high quality and consistent guest experience across our portfolio that our HGV members and guests expect from us. We are also executing on our cost synergy capture. Then we will get into more details, but we remain confident in our ability to realize the upsize 150 million of cost synergies that we laid out on our last call. So overall, I’m very pleased with the progress of our integration. Now, let me turn to our performance for the quarter. Contract sales were 617 million or 105% of 2019 per forma combined sales. First, it is great to set a new milestone to move us past referencing 2019 as a prior peak, but we are also pleased with the quality of the growth we saw this quarter. We had broad based improvements in tour flow recovery pace across all segments and geographies led by the mainland region and new buyer demand. And we maintained close rates within 60 basis points of the record close rates we produced last quarter. As I mentioned earlier, we saw consistency in our sales with a steady cadence of growth in each month of the quarter. And I’m encouraged that our product continues to resonate with our tour guests despite negative macro-economic news flow. Turning to our demand indicators occupancy for the quarter was 83% versus 75% in the first quarter, and at the highest levels since the end of 2019. In another positive sign of returning to a more normal business cadence, we witnessed a very typical seasonal trend through Q2 with April stronger than May and June having the highest occupancy of the quarter. Looking out to the rest of the year, our owner arrivals continue to show solid trends through the fall. Our rental arrivals are showing a similar trend with particular strength in the fourth quarter. And in total room nights on the books for the rest of the year are on par with where we were in 2019. We also continue to see exceptionally strong package sales demand giving us visibility into our future new buyer tour flow. In fact, despite converting some of our pipeline and Q2 to drive improvements in new buyer tours, we still grow our package pipeline for the quarter, which now is up to a 0.5 million packages. So it is a great indicator that travel demand continues to be robust in the face of economic headwinds and it should support our investment efforts to drive additional new buyer growth in the second half of the year. VPG of nearly $4,500 remain strong, even as we saw some normalization of our owner, new buyer mix. New buyers drove growth in our member base, which is now nearly 508,000. Our HGV NOG was 3.2% and Diamond added 1,400 net new members in the quarter. Those members fuel steady performance in our club resort business, which alongside our financing business contributed nearly half of our EBITDA. Our rental business had strong growth in the quarter fueled by higher travel volumes and continued strength in ADRs. The combination of those consistent segment results along with our synergies and efficiency initiatives produced EBITDA of 277 million with margins ahead of last quarter and well ahead of 2019. So overall, we had a solid quarter, we saw consistent improvement across the organization and a return to a more normal cadence of business. The strength of our offering helped us to deliver great results and gives me confidence that we are well positioned to withstand macroeconomic noise. We just added new high quality inventory at HGV, we have a very strong new buyer pipeline. We have diversified our portfolio with the addition of 92 Diamond resorts. And we have a loyal base of dedicated members who have prepaid for their future vacations. Last week marked the one year anniversary opposing of the acquisition. I’m thrilled with the progress we have made to date, and I’m also proud of how hard our teams have worked to get us here. Looking forward, we are focused on making further progress, ramping Hilton Grand Vacations club collection, HGV Max, and our ultimate access program. All of which are strong catalysts for continued growth. With that, I will turn it over to Dan to walk you through the numbers. Dan.