Greetings, and welcome to Marriott Vacations Worldwide First Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Jeff Hansen, Vice President, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Rob. Welcome to the Marriott Vacations Worldwide First Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call. I'm joined today by Steve Weisz, President and Chief Executive Officer; and John Geller, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial and Administrative Officer. I do need to remind everyone that many of our comments today are not historical facts and are considered forward-looking statements under federal securities laws. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, as described in our SEC filings, which could cause future results to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by our comments. Forward-looking statements in the press release that we issued this morning, along with our comments on this call, are effective only today, May 3, 2018, and will not be updated as actual events unfold. Throughout the call, we will make references to non-GAAP financial information. You can find a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures referred to in our remarks in the schedules attached to our press release as well as the Investor Relations page on our website at ir.mvwc.com. I will now turn the call over to Steve Weisz, President and CEO of Marriott Vacations Worldwide.

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…

Thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. I'm very pleased with our strong first quarter results. Adjusted EBITDA totaled $63 million, which is $9 million or 17% higher than the first quarter of 2017. As I mentioned on our last earnings call, we adopted the new revenue recognition accounting standard at the beginning of 2018. With the adoption of this new standard, we have restated our prior year financial information. To help you better understand the impact to the prior year, we have included additional schedules in our earnings release to reconcile restated information for each quarter in 2017 to our previously-reported financial results. As you may recall, one of the major changes from adopting this standard is the timing of when revenue from the sale of vacation ownership products gets recognized. Previously, we recognized this revenue when the contract was out of its statutory rescission period and we had received a minimum 10% down payment. However, with the new guidance, we now defer revenue recognition until the contract is actually closed. We estimate that this change defers revenue previously recognized in the last 30 days to 40 days of the quarter to the following quarter. Therefore, when we have higher contract sales in the last 30 days to 40 days of a quarter than in a previous quarter, our results will be impacted by unfavorable revenue reportability. And this is exactly what we experienced in the first quarter of 2018, with our adjusted EBITDA being negatively impacted by roughly $8 million from the deferral of revenue. Contract sales from the fourth quarter of 2017 that were recognized as revenue in this year's first quarter included sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas, a slower-than-normal sales period due to the season. However, the revenue being deferred out of the first quarter includes…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Brian Dobson with Nomura. Please proceed with your question.

Good morning. So you outlined a few of the opportunities for revenue synergies. As you're thinking about those, which ones do you think you might tackle first, offering the biggest opportunity? And what kind of timetable do you expect in terms of reviewing ILG and assessing best practices?

Thanks very much for the question. First of all, as you might imagine, through due diligence, we were able to get through kind of the top-level review, and we have some ideas along the way. I'll share some of those with you. As far as specific timing, we're still a little early on in that. But as you might imagine, we'll get to that as quickly as we possibly can, post closing. So here are a couple of obvious things. Obviously, linkage opportunities, which, today, we have exclusivity on in the vacation ownership space. As soon as the businesses are combined, that exclusivity will now include everything under the Vistana Signature Experiences area, which really gives us exclusive marketing rights into 15 of the Marriott lodging brands. If we think about call transfer, once again, where we have an exclusive -- we will certainly add the Westin and vacation locations from the VSE portfolio into the call transfer program. And then the other thing that we're probably as excited, if not more excited about, rather than calls transfer, is the whole digital idea. Keep in mind what that is. This is essentially taking the digital-analog to call transfer, where people are calling into a reservation center to either make or change a reservation, where we eventually see if we can speak with them about scheduling a tour, which -- you now do it in the digital space, where, as you well know, the Marriott website is one of the top 10 retail websites in the world as it exists today, before you combine it with the Starwood platform, et cetera. And so we think as more and more people transact with Marriott in a digital space, that we will get the benefit of that coming to us in terms of the effective -- without a different word, the effectiveness of digital call transfer versus physical call transfer. So we see those things. I mean there are some other things that we see kind of right on the top of the line. We think we can actually have some influence to grow financing propensity between the businesses. We've had some great success in our portfolio by virtue of some of the things that we've done later. We think there are some ways in which we can continue to grow revenues that way. Those are just some examples. And obviously, we're going to continue to work hard on trying to quantify as much of this as we can between now and the time of closing, which we hope to be at the -- call will be at the end of September. But that's the approach we're going to take.

Our next question is from Patrick Scholes with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, good morning. A couple of questions here. I wonder if you can talk a little bit on international demand trends that you're seeing of late. Certainly, we've been hearing this earnings season from the hotel owners and operators that they're noticing a pickup in inbound international. Are you seeing anything similar?

Nothing that I would point to with any significance. The reality is when our resort portfolio -- and we run close to 90% occupancy across the system. If anything, what we're going to see if there's additional demand there, it gives us a little more pricing power. But I can't call out to you, and certainly, we can follow up with you further if there's anything that we can see through. But nothing has jumped off the page at us as being a significant point of difference.

Okay, thank you. Moving on, there's been -- may be aware of a little bit of chatter out there about wood it makes sense for RCI and then the Interval exchange network to combine. And, perhaps dating myself here, but I recall quite a few years ago that CUC and Cendant had to spin out II due to antitrust issues. Do you think antitrust issues would be an issue today given the changes in that part of the industry in the last 15 years to 20 years?

I certainly don't have a lot of purview as to what -- how the FTC might think about that. Let's just say that, at this point in time, we have no plans to spin off the Interval International business or combine it, but I guess all things are possible.

Okay, fair enough. Then lastly going back to revenue opportunities with the acquisition. One thing I think about is you folks have grown your inventory repurchase program considerably and it's a little bit of an unknown what's going on with Interval with them. I'm wondering how your repurchase program compares to Interval's and --.

Yes. We think ours is a little bit more robust than what we see in the ILG space, and we think the volumes that we put through the -- our repurchase program is a little higher than what we see in the ILG side. There may be opportunities there. Obviously, one of the benefits of that is it allows people that have been very happy owners an exit path that we think is appropriate. Plus it allows us to recycle some inventory at a very reasonable inventory cost.

Yes. I mean, to be fair, Patrick, we've talked about this before. The Points product that we have really enables that to be very effective in reselling it because we put it into the Points product and sell it. And historically, they've sold more of a week-space product. They've gone to the Points, which actually will help facilitate that, but they, to Steve's point, I'm not sure they've done a lot of that. And as we've talked about, because with the week-space, when you repurchase those, you don't have certainty to -- to get that into the system and resell it. So folks that sell week-space product have a much harder time efficiently recycling that week-space product.

Okay, thank you. And then a last question for now. A large part of the Interval's -- the ILG story was all of the inventory for sale coming up in the next couple of years. Certainly, they had a massive amount. With this acquisition and that large amount of inventory, does that change how you think about your -- or the legacy Marriott Vacations spend on inventory the next couple of years?

Yes. One of the nice benefits that we get, which is never captured in anybody's EBITDA multiple, is ILG's made significant investments in their inventory pipeline and have -- I believe it's 700, 800 of completed units down -- they have obviously down in Cabo, their [Nanaya] project. So that's great for us because that's a lot of good inventory. We don't need to go out. I think over time, Patrick, we would look to do a very similar model like we do today, which is we're looking to add new flags, add new sales distributions and time the spending of our inventory to replace what we're selling off the shelf each year. And so that's strategy long term. In the near term, we're going to have the opportunity, because of a lot of great locations they've built, to look at near-term opportunities on our inventory spend. So obviously, we'll be updating you on that as our plans get a little bit clearer and we determine what we're doing.

And Patrick, this is Steve. I want to make sure I didn't give anybody, including yourself, the wrong impression on Interval International. We have absolutely no plans to sell or spin off that business. I mean, to be honest, you took me a little bit by surprise because when you mentioned that there was chatter out there about RCI and II coming together, I'll be honest, that's the absolute first time I've ever heard that. So I want to make sure that everybody understands that we put great value on the Interval business, and we think it's a very attractive business with great cash flow profile and a relatively low CapEx profile to it. And so we have no intentions to move in that direction.

Our next question is from Edward Engel with Macquarie Group. Please proceed with your question.

Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. On the tour flow side, could you maybe highlight how many basis points of growth the hurricanes in the calendar compares that maybe shaved off?

Yes. I think from a -- I don't have those specifics. We can clearly get it. When you talk about the hurricane impact in the first quarter from a sales perspective, it's roughly three points of our growth. And as we talked about in Steve's comments, we've got the St. Thomas one, albeit a much smaller sales center, without the linkage from the hotel that used to be a Marriott next door that's being rebuilt. Its ramping back up, but it's not going to get, obviously, back to a normalized sales pace this year. Obviously, we need the hotel and the linkage there. So that will abate, obviously, as we move through the year, and then the -- in total, the other piece we talked about was Marco Island. So once again, with all the new units we added down there which just opened, that obviously drives our in-house tour flow, and it will drive tours in Marco, which, as we go through the year, year-over-year, we'll get, call it, 1 point or 2 of growth there. So I don't have -- those are more the sales numbers, not the tours, but you can probably back into that with the average VPG.

Okay. And then if I adjust the tour flow growth, that's still kind of below where you've, been kind of tracking over the past several quarters. Is there anything to keep in mind that maybe limited that or slowed that growth?

No. Once again, I think there's some -- go back to the seasonal stuff from a package tour. As Steve mentioned, we were up but not as much as we're projecting for the balance of the year. In the first quarter, we have much higher owner occupancy at our resorts, so we have less available to house tour packages. So you'll have some seasonality in that, but as we mentioned, we've seen those package tours on the books that have actually gone and booked their reservations. And obviously, we'll see more of those get booked here over the course of the year, kind of in-the-year, for-the-year bookings. We're already at, call it, 12%-plus, and we would expect those to continue to grow. So that tour flow will ramp as you go through the year. So there can always be some little bit of seasonal, like on the tour packages, that could impact you from quarter to quarter.

Okay, that's super helpful. And then if I think about your prior comments about the $100 million to $150 million of incremental contract sales from the Marriott Rewards and SPG combination and then if I actually think about ILG's 2020 plans for $600 million to $800 million contract sales, with the combination, is there any opportunity maybe come in at the high end of those kind of goals and maybe exceed them?

Yes. I mean, obviously, that will be our plan. As Steve mentioned, you got all the call transfer that we were going to get. Now, as we talked about on our year-end call, we won't start call transfer into the legacy Starwood reservation centers until after Marriott gets that stuff combined, which we're hoping is kind of early part of next year. So then we'll start generating those tours. Obviously, that will help, but the big upside in terms of the numbers we gave you at year-end, I think is on the digital side, as Steve talked about. And you look at the marriott.com site, which obviously hasn't been combined with the Starwood hotel site yet, but on a stand-alone, that's a top 10 commercial website in terms of bookings. And now you're going to put those two together and our ability to offer packages, et cetera, we really think that, longer term, once again, that will really help to drive not only our tour flow, but there'll be enough there that we can also use that in the legacy Vistana piece.

Just one other reminder. As you start loading -- as you start taking advantage of digital call transfer, for lack of a better word, or the combination of the call transfer with the combined program, it takes a while once you actually book the package for that package to come through the house. So there'll be a little bit of a lag in there just from a modeling and expectation standpoint, that even though we have high hopes that all this will be ready to go, call it, in the first quarter of next year, we'll begin to get volume coming through it, but we won't start seeing people come through the house for tours until later in 2019 and into 2020.

Okay, that's helpful. And then I guess lastly, kind of going back to your inventory spend plans relative to now having ILG in the system. Does that offer an opportunity to maybe reduce legacy Marriott Vacations' inventory spend for at least the near term?

I'm sorry, tour spend?

No, inventory spends.

Inventory spends.

Just inventory spend. Yes, like I said, that -- we're going to be working on that in terms of our longer-term integration plans and how we're going to position products, which will obviously drive our inventory needs. But what I'd say on a combined basis, as I mentioned, the ILG and the inventory they've built out, we're in a good spot there. And maybe potentially the ability to leverage some of that inventory as we think about our Marriott because under our -- combined for the Marriott licensed brands, that's all on the table, if you will, in terms of how we think about that inventory. So we definitely need to do that work here, and obviously, we'll be back with more updates as we progress through and talk about all the great opportunities that this combination, we think, brings for us.

Ladies and gentlemen, we've reached the end of the question-and-answer session. At this time, I'd like to turn the call back to Steve Weisz for closing comments.

Thank you, Rob. I'm very pleased with our start to 2018 as our new sales centers are performing very well and our businesses are producing great results. With all of this as a backdrop, I'm even more excited about what lies ahead. As we target closing on the acquisition of ILG by the end of September, 2018 should be a transformational year for Marriott Vacations Worldwide, and I'm looking forward to what we can achieve. Thank you for your time today, and I look forward to updating you on our progress on these many fronts in the coming quarter. And finally, to everyone on the call and your families, enjoy your next vacation.

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. We thank you for your participation and your interest in Marriott Vacations Worldwide.