Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the InterContinental Hotel Group Q3 Conference Call. My name is Fay, and I’ll be your coordinator for today’s conference. For the duration of the call, you will be on listen-only. However, at the end you will have the opportunity to ask questions. I will now hand it over to your host Catherine Dolton to begin. Thank you.

Thanks Fay. Good morning everyone. This is Catherine Dolton, Head of Investor Relations at IHG. I’m joined this morning by Paul Edgecliffe-Johnson, Chief Financial Officer. Before I hand over to him for the discussion of our results, I need to remind you that the following discussion, the company may make certain forward-looking statements as defined under U.S. Law. Please check this morning’s press release and the company’s SEC filings for factors that could lead actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking statements. I’ll now hand over to Paul.

Thanks Catherine. Good morning and thank you everyone for joining us today for our third quarter trading statement conference call. I’ll begin with some of the key highlights in the period before covering each of our regions intern and then I’ll open the call up to questions. We delivered a strong performance in the quarter, leveraging our global scale and executing against our winning strategy to drive continued growth across our portfolio of preferred brands. Total RevPAR growth of 4.8% on a constant currency basis marked some acceleration in the second quarter and we signed more than 16,000 rooms into our pipeline, our fastest rate of hotel signings for seven years. We increased our net rooms count 4.3% year-on-year excluding our acquisition of Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants, this figure was 2.7%. Consistent with previous years, we expect our pace of openings to accelerate in the last quarter. We continue to focus on the quality of our portfolio, exiting rooms to maintain the attractiveness of our brands to both guests and owners and full-year renewable guidance remains in the range of 2% to 3% of opening system sides. Our quarterly signing pace continues to grow year-on-year and we now have a pipeline of 218,000 rooms, which represents a 14% share of the global industry pipeline. This compares to our existing supply share of 5% of open rooms and sets up well for continued organic market share gains. The Holiday Inn brand family is the main engine for this growth and represented approximately 70% of both our signings and openings in the third quarter. In what is truly a global brand, we have opened new properties in more than 20 different countries so far in 2015 and specifically in Q3 we opened more new rooms for the Holiday Inn brand than ever…

Thank you [Operator Instructions] and our first question is from the line of Steven Kent from Goldman Sachs, please go ahead.

Good morning and this Laura step in for Steve. Just two questions for us, could you first layout from options that you are considering for the InterContinental Hong Kong proceeds and then also just in the U.S. why can't you push rate a little bit more at this stage of the cycle when you're already at peak occupancies? Thank you.

Okay thanks and good morning. So in terms of proceeds from Hong Kong, we said earlier that we would make an announcement that the full-year result of February as to what we would see with the proceeds from that. And our longstanding positions in terms of proceeds that we get from asset sales is that we'll either return it to shareholders, invest them in the business or use them to pay down debt and obviously with the balance sheet where it is now I mean that's appropriate given what we have talked about in terms of our desire to have an efficient balance sheet. If you look back over our history, we have returned very significant amounts of capital almost $11 billion to shareholders and the board will make a call what it does and we'll announce that in February. In terms of can we push rate more? If you look at the performance that we had where we pushed rate up 4% the Holiday Inn brand family has a rate premium already and so we continue to work at that. I was reasonably pleased with the rate performance we saw in the third quarter, you do have some corporate pre-negotiated rates that our set earlier in the year and so you to work within those parameters, but we continue to work it out. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Chris from MKM Partners, please go ahead.

Thanks very much, good morning Paul.

Hey Chris.

First question, in terms of the oil and gas, states in the U.S. I think it's 13% of your portfolio. Are you seeing any signs of stabilization or is that continuing to be a headwind sequentially?

Yes, it’s about 13% versus about 10% across the industry as a whole and but not really, we're seeing a similar impact as we did in the first half of the year, it's about a one to one and a half point headwind on America's RevPAR.

Excellent and can I ask about the lowest price promos that you are trying to holding and express UK. What are you looking to see before extending the trial and what other brands geographies can you or will you look to extend and then final question on that what’s the reception being or feedback from owners? Thank you.

Yes. I mean this is something we talked about at the half year, so just giving a bit of an update on that. It's interesting and its performing well and its driving up digital revenues as well and it's increasing our number of online join ups to the loyalty program. It is good for owners, because it's a low cost channel, and there is no rate dilution from the discounts. So it’s something we will continue to evaluate. Nothing to say now on where we might go next with it, but we’re happy with progress.

Thank you and one last question if I may. What do you tribute the outperformance in China to that you mentioned and what is the mix of rooms filled with rewards members in China relative to the rest of the group? Thank you.

We are performing pretty materially and we have been for some time now. It may sound a little bit self-congratulatory but it really is operational excellence. We have been there 31-years, we have a team in Shanghai in our China business that knows that business inside out that is largely national. We have got fantastic locations for our hotels. We’re very picky as to what we take, that we won’t take hotels in the locations where we don't think there is good demand drive and we think that they won’t succeed. So you go in early and you take those centre main locations, you are with good owners and you do then tend to see better performance overtime. And as long as you keep investing in the business and we've done that. If you look at the regional overhead that we have had in China, we've continued to just double down in terms of our investment into the region and it's really paying off for us.

Thank you.

In terms of loyalty members, we don't disclose on a regional basis. It's 40% globally.

Okay. Thanks.

Thanks Chris.

Thank you [Operator Instructions].

I think that probably brings us to a close this morning. So I really appreciate you joining us as ever and good to talking with you. I'm sure we will be in touch soon. Thanks very much, bye for now.

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