Steve Weisz
Analyst · Nomura. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Jeff. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our first quarter earnings call. Earlier this week, we announced that we have agreed to acquire ILG, a leading provider of premier vacation experiences with over 40 properties and more than 250,000 owners in its Vistana Signature Experiences and Hyatt Vacation Ownership portfolios. This is in addition to their world-class exchange networks that comprise nearly two million members and over 3,200 resorts worldwide. We are excited about this transaction and are turning our attention to integration planning in advance of the closing, which we are targeting for the end of the third quarter this year. We'll offer some more comments on this transaction shortly, but first, I'll walk through our performance in the first quarter and our expectations for the full year. John will then provide a more detailed look at our performance, including continued color on the recent revenue recognition changes, which went into effect at the beginning of the year. And as a reminder, we have restated our prior year results to incorporate these revenue recognition changes, which provides a more meaningful year-over-year comparison. In the first quarter, company contract sales were $204 million, up 2% over the first quarter of last year, and adjusted EBITDA was $63 million, up 17% over 2017. In North America, contract sales were up just over 2%, as expected, and VPG in the quarter was one of our best as a public company, improving to $3,728. Additionally, tours to first-time buyers continued to grow, improving almost 5% over the first quarter of last year. As it relates to our contract sales performance, there were a couple of headwinds that we had anticipated in the quarter, which were impacting our growth early in the year. First, in St. Thomas, our Vacation Club property remained closed until mid-February due to the continued impact from the hurricanes in 2017. And while the resort opened a small on-site sales center in the middle of the first quarter, the adjacent hotel, which had previously housed our sales center, is not expected to reopen until 2020. The lack of hotel linkage tours and the smaller on-site sales center will continue to impact our ability to generate sales, delivering less than half the volume generated under normal operations. Additionally, at the end of the quarter, we opened 116 new units on Marco Island, adding incremental tour generation by more than doubling the size of the property. While we are pleased that this addition opened at the end of March after several months of delays, we estimate that these combined opening delays impacted our first quarter contract sales growth by more than 3 percentage points. Lastly, as it relates to first quarter headwinds, it's important to note that with the change to our reporting calendar last year, the first quarter of 2018 had two less days, equal to roughly 2 percentage points of negative impact. Excluding the impact of all of these headwinds, our contract sales growth would have been more than 6% in the quarter. With that said, let me walk through a few items that will impact the cadence of sales growth as we move through the year, starting with the impact of the 2017 hurricanes. As I mentioned, sales centers at the properties that continue to be impacted in the first quarter of 2018 are now open. And while St. Thomas is ramping back up without the linkage channel from the adjacent hotel, we expect to see additional contribution from these properties throughout the remainder of the year. And if you'll recall, the impact that the hurricanes had on our operations reached much farther than these two properties as it forced the closure of several sales centers ranging from the Caribbean throughout Florida and up the East Coast. In total, we estimate the hurricanes negatively impacted our contract sales performance in the second half of 2017 by more than $20 million. So as we lap this impact, the overall comparison to 2017 becomes somewhat easier. As it relates to our key marketing channels, tour flow from our Encore and call transfer programs grew 8% over the same time last year. Even more importantly, at the end of the first quarter, our package pipeline from these tours is up 13% year-over-year, and activated tours with an anticipated 2018 arrival date are up over 12%. This is a very positive indicator of our ability to generate contract sales growth from these important channels as we move throughout the year. With respect to hotel linkage agreements, we remain focused on adding new arrangements with Marriott and legacy Starwood-branded hotels. To that end, I'm happy to report that we've recently signed a linkage agreement at the 1,200-room Sheraton Hotel in San Diego and expect to have several more signed in other locations in the coming months, fueling our ability to drive incremental tour flow. Lastly, we expect to see continued growth from our sales distributions that have opened since 2016. In the first quarter, these new locations continued to sustain their growth trends, almost doubling their contract sales volume from the first quarter of last year, and continued to grow VPG, up almost 2%. Most of these distributions are beginning the second half of their 3- to 4-year maturation process, and for that reason, we expect this growth will continue as we move through the year. Staying with our newest distributions, let me take a moment to talk about destinations we plan to have open in sales in the near term. In our Asia-Pacific segment, we are looking forward to opening our Bali sales center later in the second quarter, providing incremental sales growth. This new property, combined with new tour generation from marketing channels across the Asia-Pacific region, should provide additional growth in the second half of the year. In North America, we are on track to open our next Marriott Vacation Club Pulse property in the Fisherman's Wharf district of San Francisco in the early part of 2019. As always, we continue to look to add new locations with strong sales potential to fuel our growth. Last quarter, we laid out our expectations for full year contract sales growth targeting 7% to 12% over 2017. I'm very pleased to say that we continue to drive strong results through the execution of our sales strategy. The majority of the headwinds from the hurricanes are behind us, and our newest sales centers continue to grow, in that we have new sales centers coming online soon, which combined with a strong pipeline of tours already on the books for the remainder of the year and a second half comparison that is in our favor, we are reaffirming our guidance for 2018 contract sales growth of 7% to 12%. I'd like to take just a moment to reflect on our ILG announcement. As I said, we are extremely excited about this transaction, which will provide us with significantly-enhanced marketing potential and opportunities to drive sales growth and shareholder value creation. We appreciate the positive response we've received from analysts and shareholders since we announced the transaction. As we discussed on our conference call on Monday, when we combine with ILG, we will have seven upper-upscale and luxury brands with over 100 vacation ownership properties around the world. Together, we will have access to 100 million members in the Marriott Rewards, Starwood Preferred Guest and Ritz-Carlton Rewards loyalty programs for our six Marriott vacation ownership brands and access to almost 10 million members in the World of Hyatt loyalty program to fuel the growth of the Hyatt Vacation Ownership business. We have shared our expectations that we will achieve a minimum of $75 million in annual cost savings within the first two years. We view this as a realistic and achievable expectation but do not plan to stop there as we will believe -- as we believe we'll be able to find significant operational efficiencies and revenue opportunities through our integration efforts. Additionally, as we've mentioned, the transaction will be accretive to shareholders in the first full year following the closing. To be clear, while we have not provided any estimate for the referenced revenue opportunities, we feel very strongly that they are substantial and, in fact, will prove to be one of the longer-term benefits of this transaction. We see tremendous potential from the combination of the Marriott Vacation Club brands with Vistana Signature Experiences, not only from the additional linkage opportunities those will provide but also from our ability to maximize tour generation from our call transfer program across the broader portfolio. Additionally, while we are already optimistic about the future contract sales growth potential of the digital transfer opportunity we will begin soon with Marriott, the additional marketing opportunities of our combined company creates even more ability to generate incremental sales volume. Simply put, this transaction is strategically and financially compelling for many reasons. In summary, we are excited about what we can achieve with ILG, and we see this combination as a clear win for shareholders, owners and our associates. Now let me hand the call over to John to walk through further detail on the revenue recognition changes and our first quarter results. John?