Paul B. Dykstra
Analyst · Northcoast Research
Thanks, Joe, and thanks to all of you for joining us today. We greatly appreciate your continuing interest in Viad. Our financial results for the third quarter continued the momentum generated during the first half of the year, and we're at the high-end of prior guidance. Total revenue for the quarter increased 36.2% to $299.8 million from $220.2 million in the comparable quarter of 2013. Segment operating income of $33 million was up 76.3%. The strong growth was driven by positive show rotation, continued same-show growth, better-than-anticipated visitation to our Glacier's catalog and contributions from acquisitions. Both business groups posted substantially increased year-over-year results. Viad's Marketing & Events Group third quarter revenue increased 44.8% to $226.7 million from $156.5 million a year ago on the strength of positive show rotation, same-show growth and new business wins. Segment operating results increased by $10.3 million to $2.4 million. Marketing & Events U.S. segment revenue grew by 39.5% to $168.1 million, with segment operating income growing by $4.8 million versus the third quarter of last year. This growth was driven primarily by positive show rotation of approximately $34 million, a 3.4% increase in base same-show revenue and new business wins. The International segment of our Marketing & Events Group posted a third quarter revenue increase of 59.2% to $64.2 million with segment operating results increasing $5.5 million to $1.3 million. Excluding foreign exchange rate variances, revenue and operating income increased by $21.3 million and $5.4 million, respectively. This growth was primarily driven by positive show rotation of approximately $14 million in revenue and new business wins. We also benefited from the acquisition of Blitz Communications, which we closed on September 16. During the third quarter, we provided services on a number of major events, including the International Manufacturing Technology Show, the Farnborough International Air Show and Magic. The International Manufacturing Technology Show or IMTS is one of the largest industrial trade shows in the world and occurs every 2 years. This year's event covered nearly 1.3 million net square feet of exhibit space and hosted over 2,000 exhibiting companies. The Farnborough Airshow is another biannual event and one of the world's largest exhibitions and air displays. The show provides a wealth of dedicated and focused business platforms, and a total of 81 military delegations from 50 countries attended this year's event. Magic is the world's largest fashion marketplace attracting over 60,000 industry insiders. It takes place every February and August to showcase the latest trends in apparel, footwear and accessories for fashion retail buyers. I'm proud to say that GES has been successfully providing services on these marquee events for many years. We also produced the annual Mary Kay Seminar in Dallas and serviced the Commonwealth Games in Scotland, which were both new wins. We recently expanded our relationship with Tarsus, a global event organizer based in the U.K. Our great work on Tarsus' North American shows and label Expo in Europe laid the foundation for a new multi-year global agreement with Tarsus. It covers 11 events that take place in North America, the U.K., Europe and the UAE. Additionally, Merck Oncology selected us to produce 2 new exhibits to support its tradeshow marketing efforts. One debuted this September at the European Society for Medical Oncology's 2014 Congress in Madrid. The other will showcase Merck at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual meeting in 2015. Our scope of services, global reach and proven expertise in delivering successful events and exhibit programs were integral to securing these and other wins. On the whole, our sales team is delivering the organic revenue growth that we targeted for the year. And year-to-date, we've delivered an operating margin of 4%, which is up 110 basis points from the prior year. We are pleased with our results thus far, but we haven't consistently hit the mark on all of our stretch goals this year. This is a dynamic industry, and the nature of our business is somewhat unpredictable. We've experienced stronger-than-expected growth in U.S. event revenues ; however, a handful of large events had changes in the scope of work and challenges related to certain venues that hampered margins. Additionally, sales to corporate exhibitor clients and U.K. event revenues, while up from 2013, are falling short of our stretch goals and are coming in at lower margins, driven by the mix of business. As a result of these factors and acquisition integration costs, we now expect GES's full year operating margin to be in the range of 3.2% to 3.3%, which is short of the 4% target we set out at the beginning of the year. That said, it's still up considerably from 2.4% in 2013, which included a nonrecurring gain of $4.8 million from the sale of our New Jersey facility. We are focused on managing the factors we can control and continue to look for ways to drive efficiencies throughout the business, including enhancements to our labor management tools to help drive productivity gains. Looking ahead, we continue to expect to deliver an operating margin of 5% or better by 2016. Our recent acquisitions demonstrate the progress we are making, as we continue to execute against our strategic growth plan to position GES as the preferred global full-service provider to the live events market. This involves expanding our offering to include adjacent services that are valued by our customers, but differentiate GES from our competition and that will yield attractive returns for our shareholders. We have identified audiovisual and event housing as logical complementary services that can increase revenue and drive margin expansion for GES and, most importantly, better serve our clients. In late 2013, we formed an in-house U.S. AV team that has already produced a number of events and has a growing sales pipeline. The AV and event housing markets are large with attractive margins, and we are excited to accelerate our growth in these areas with the recent acquisitions of Blitz, onPeak and Travel Planners. Blitz is a leading AV staging and creative services provider for the live events industry in the United Kingdom and Continental Europe. Blitz has built a strong reputation in the market over the past 25 years by helping to stage exhibitions, product launches, awards dinners, conferences, annual meetings and roadshows for some of the world's leading organizations. Blitz provides AV services across the live event spectrum and is the in-house AV service provider at 5 major conference and exhibition centers in the United Kingdom. OnPeak and Travel Planners are leading event housing service providers based in the United States. With more than 60 years of combined experience, onPeak and Travel Planners provide best-in-class housing services to approximately 60% of the top 250 U.S. events. We have already begun the process of merging these 2 businesses, which are now operating as onPeak GES under the leadership of Michael Howell, the former President of onPeak. Since we haven't discussed housing services on prior calls, I'd like to briefly discuss the service we provide. When we are contracted by an event organizer to be the exclusive provider of housing services for an event, we research and recommend local hotels, secure room blocks, market these reserved blocks to event attendees and exhibitors, manage attendee and exhibitor reservations and address any housing concerns during the event. We are able to leverage our scale as a major room buyer and our industry-leading technologies offer convenient and affordable hotel accommodations to event attendees and exhibitors. For the event organizer, we manage the complexities of hotel booking administration before, during and after the event, and we provide valuable data to the organizer. For the hotels, we help drive RevPAR by acting as a direct sales channel to high-value professional guests. With the acquisitions of Blitz, onPeak and Travel Planners, we have immediately gained well-established and leading positions in the U.K. audiovisual market and the U.S. event housing market. This allows us to offer an increasingly comprehensive and convenient approach to service delivery for our customers by serving as a single point of contact for their event experiences. We believe that as we more fully develop the synergies of these businesses with our traditional contracting business, we will have a significant differentiator from our competitors in the market. We are very excited about the possibilities ahead and firmly believe these acquisitions will not only deliver strong financial returns, but also set us apart from the competition. I want to thank Steve Moster and the entire GES team for their hard work and dedication as they continue to forge ahead in expanding the business, while also maintaining a vigilant focus on efficiency gains and prudent cost management to better position the business for greater market share and stronger margins in the years to come. Our Travel & Recreation Group realized significant growth during its busiest quarter, driven by the addition of 2 properties to our Glacier Park portfolio, the new Glacier Skywalk and strong organic revenue growth at Brewster. Third quarter revenue was $73.1 million with group operating income of $30.6 million. Excluding foreign exchange rate variances, revenue increased by $11.6 million or 18.3%, and operating income increased by approximately $5 million or 18.9%. Our new Glacier Skywalk attraction continues to outperform with strong past year accounts in the third quarter. And the July 1 acquisition of the West Glacier Motel & Cabins, the Apgar Village Lodge and related assets, proved to be a strong strategic fit driving meaningful growth in this high-margin segment and further increasing our presence at Glacier National Park. The Glacier Skywalk continues to receive international recognition. It was most recently awarded first place as this year's Outstanding Design Build Project by the Canadian Design Build Institute at its annual conference. The Skywalk is performing well above expectations with a total guest count for the third quarter exceeding 200,000 and more than 280,000 on a year-to-date basis. The success and recognition of the Skywalk is driving new visitors to the area and having a very positive effect on passenger volumes at our Columbia Icefield Glacier Adventure tour, where we saw a 22% increase in year-to-date passenger count. The combination of the Skywalk and the Glacier Adventure tour makes for a very compelling day of unique activities for our guests. Passenger counts were up at all of Brewster's high-margin attractions. The Banff Lake Cruise is tracking to have its most successful year since we took over the operation in 2007, with the year-over-year increase in third quarter passenger count of nearly 28%. In order to address capacity constraints resulting from increased demand and maximize profitability, we will be adding an additional boat for the 2015 season. We continue to experience year-over-year growth in occupancy and RevPAR across several of our hotels, including the Banff International Hotel, the Glacier View Inn and Grouse Mountain Lodge. As expected, results at Alaska Denali Travel were below the prior year, partially due to early season closures caused by flooding at the Denali Backcountry Lodge. We expect stronger performance at Denali next year. I'm pleased to report that our newly-acquired West Glacier properties operated at high levels this quarter. These properties in the Glacier National Park area complement our existing assets by adding scale and additional location options that enhance our guests' enjoyment of this majestic area and reinforce our position as the gateway to Glacier. With this acquisition, we now own properties that book end the main entrances to the Park along Going-to-the-Sun Road with the West Glacier Motel & Cabins on the west side and St. Mary Lodge on the east side. I want to thank Dave McKenna, Cindy Ognjanov and their teams at Brewster, Glacier Park and Alaska Denali Travel for doing a great job providing memorable experiences for all of our guests, as we continue to expand those businesses. I appreciate their focus in continuing to drive strong operational and financial results. At this point, I'll turn the call over to Ellen Ingersoll, our Chief Financial Officer, for a more detailed review of our financial results. And then upon the completion of Ellen's comments, I'll provide some concluding remarks, and then we'll open up the call for your questions. Ellen?