Ryman Hospitality Properties : Transcript (1fa477)

Published: 2025-06-09 16:00:08 ET RHP

Published on 06/09/2025 at 16:00

Transcription by https://www.RealtimeTranscription.com

discussion, which is going to be with Ryman Hospitality Properties.

Representing the company today, Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, and EVP and CFO Jennifer Hutcheson. And just by format, we've prepared a bunch of topics. I do want to leave a few minutes, ten or so toward the end, if there happen to be any

questions in the room. You know, If not, I can certainly keep going all the way through.

Just by way of background, I started covering Gaylord Hotels in about 2005, and, you know, Mark was with the company at the time, and I'm not sure if you were there.

I'm going to have Mark just give you a very quick introduction on the company for those in the room, just to level set the group, and then we'll get into some of those topics. Mark, take it away.

Just a quick overview for maybe those of you who are not familiar with Ryman Hospitality Properties. We operate two businesses. Our primary business is a hospitality REIT. And we're unique in that we're the only lodging REIT that focuses on the large group business. We operate a portfolio of large, high quality convention resorts, and we really service a single customer segment, really two customer segments across all of those resorts. That's the large group meetings business and the leisure transient

business. We don't really service the business transient customer that many hotel companies do.

What makes us so unique is that by servicing this single customer with a consistent

delivery of service across the platform, we can have long-term multi-year relationships with these large groups and rotate them property by property, year by year. What that does for us is gives us tremendous visibility in terms of future business. Our average

booking window is about three years in advance. And it also gives us stability. Those --that business is booked in contract form. And so when a group can't travel or travels fewer room nights than they're under contract for, we collect a fee. And so that fee

collection, in times where you have recessions and other disruptions in the economy, that fee helps minimize the profit downdraft in our business.

The other business that we have is an entertainment business, Opry Entertainment Group. We are uniquely positioned in the country music space. We own a number of

the most iconic venues and brands in country music, including the Grand Old Opry and the Ryman Auditorium.

That's a business that we own and operate in a taxable REIT subsidiary. In longer term, it's our view and plan to separate that business from the REIT and create a separate

public company. We think that is the path forward to create the most value for shareholders.

So that's a quick...

bookings, which is the core of the business. If you could level set the group on what you've said about recent trends, about forward bookings, and particularly I want to touch on in the year for the year, right?

Like it or not, we Street people are always focused on what's happening in the moment. I think that is a relevant part of what we do.

on the books. So the majority of our business is booked when we enter the year.

During the year, then, we layer in leisure and then in-the-year for-the-year group business to get to, kind of, that sustainable 75%, kind of, occupancy level.

What we saw earlier in the first quarter, really in March was, we did see, as there was more talk around tariffs and some of the other activity around DOGE, etc., we did see a reduction in-the-year for-the-year leads. We have seen that stabilized and recover

somewhat. Leads are still down in the year for the year. If you look at our in-the-year

for-the-year bookings, we're essentially flat with prior year. So that business still has remained relatively stable.

We are -- that window is now closing. By the time you get to June, you basically

have -- if someone is going to travel in the current year, they will have already booked their business. So we're really coming out of that phase now into the back half.

But it's -- while there's been less interest in the year for the year, it's -- bookings have remained stable.

think we should touch on particularly government-driven groups. It's a topic that comes up, you know, across hospitality, what you're seeing and hearing from those groups.

And what we have seen is we have seen some softness with DOGE and some of the other activities that we're hearing about with the group business. It varies by function within - within the government. We just hosted a large government meeting with the

U.S. Postal Service at Opryland. That meeting actually performed better than our expectation, both in terms of room nights and outside-the-room spending.

Other departments, we've seen a pullback in government activities that relates to meetings for the year. But it's not a significant portion of our business, and obviously the sales teams at our hotels will work to replace that business with other segments.

beyond in-the-year for-the-year to what 2026, 2027 and beyond look like. And those trends are very strong. We were able to see about a 6% increase in ADR for all future years for the bookings that we have in contract form, and that's translating into, you know, 9% and 13% better rooms revenue on the books for those years compared to the same time last year.

What we've seen as it relates to leisure thus far this year is, you know, leisure has been stable for us, really across the portfolio. There's been -- we've seen a little bit of softness in Nashville, but that's really less around leisure volumes and more around

absorption of new supply in that market.

Orlando is a market that was challenged last year. We're seeing some strength there this year. A lot of that strength is being attributed to the Epic park opening, Universal's new park opening, and it where people delayed trips last year to this year so they could experience the new park.

But you know, insurance on that list, too. What are you seeing on the cost side, and how are you best able to deal with that?

operating expenses to be, you know, 4% higher than what we saw last year from the labor, which is the biggest component of our operating expenses. That's a big

improvement in those kind of immediate years after COVID, where we were seeing much higher rate increases.

So we've largely seen that stabilize, and for us we only have one property on the hotel side that's exposed to union labor. That contract was negotiated late last year for --over a four-year period, CAGR increase of about high 5% or in that first year of that.

So -- I would also point out that in our last update on our outlook for the full year of this year, we were able to maintain our profitability guidance for EBITDA, even against the current backdrop of a little bit of near-term uncertainty in terms of demand.

And so we've been really able to control costs, I think, pretty well with our asset management group being really proactive working with our manager, Marriott, to control what we can.

manage that down dramatically with some of the changes, structural changes, we made coming out of COVID to improve efficiency. And we've been able to maintain wage

margins despite, you know, a number of years of increasing wages with the inflation that's been in the environment.

manager for your entire portfolio is unique within lodging -- the lodging REIT space.

We think it's a critically important part of how we create value because having that

consistent experience from a product perspective and having alignment with owner and manager is critically important when you're dealing with the same customers who are

rotating year by year from market to market.

You know, we negotiate multi-year, multi-location contracts with these customers. And without having alignment of management and ownership, it's very difficult to negotiate those contracts. It's very difficult to be competitive.

So, as we've looked at, you know, what are our target markets and what are the target assets that we're interested in growing the portfolio, we were the -- we created the Gaylord Brand, and our hotels up to this point have been ground-up developments. Hill Country being really our first acquisition in the hotel space. We were looking for -- you know, our ideal target is we want, obviously, high quality meetings markets with good airlift.

Disclaimer

Ryman Hospitality Properties Inc. published this content on June 09, 2025, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on June 09, 2025 at 19:59 UTC.