Marriott International : MAR MS Conf TRANSCRIPT 6 3 25 FINAL

Published: 2025-06-24 16:29:05 ET MAR

Published on 06/24/2025 at 16:29

But April looked pretty good. We -- on a global basis, we saw RevPAR up in April, a little over 2 percent. If you adjust for some of the holiday timing, it was up closer to 3 percent. International with the benefit of the shift in holiday was actually up 9 percent in April, and U.S. and Canada was down a little less than 1 point. But if you adjust for Easter timing, we were up about 2.

So it feels like that bit of shock we saw in March is stabilizing a little bit. But the challenge is really the booking window today. So for Group where we have more medium-term visibility, Group was the bright shining segment in Q1. We were up 8 percent. Both Leisure and Business Transient were up 2 percent in the quarter. But the transient booking window is sub three weeks. So I think we're feeling cautiously optimistic.

And the one caveat to that feeling, is how quickly that can change given the shortness of the booking window. When you talk with our operators, I think generally, they're optimistic. They just - their uneasiness to the extent they have it is because the booking is happening so late. And I think that reflects a little bit of uncertainty in the consumer's mind.

1Not a verbatim transcript; extraneous material omitted and edited for clarity and misstatements.

On the Transient side, lots of promotions and highlighting of destinations through the Bonvoy platform, looking -- working with our continent leadership on limited time offers to try to fill in gaps in demand.

I think the lower ends of the chain scale are seeing a little more headwind but more so in pricing. I mean demand feels okay in that space. I think the lower income households continue to prioritize travel, but they've got some personal economic headwinds they are trying to navigate.

remind us how much of your overall demand comes from, broadly speaking, international inbound, outbound, how much of that's coming into the U.S. versus U.S. going out?

And so what that would suggest is while your question is a fair one, why invest in hotels. It would be a more relevant question to somebody that was sort of jumping in and out of real estate sectors trying to time the market. For those who are investing long-term in the sector, they fundamentally believe and are voting with their development budgets in a long-term belief in travel and tourism.

Across chain scales, some of that is really by region and impacted heavily by the necessity of conventional financing. So if you go to many of the markets in Asia Pacific, many of the markets

in the Middle East, where those developers are not seeking traditional debt financing, we see growth across the chain scales, including strong luxury growth.

In a market like the U.S., where most of the projects do, in fact, require conventional financing. If you're an optimist, you look and you say, thank goodness that the strength of our brands and the track record of our development partners is allowing us to capture a disproportionate share of the new construction debt financing that's out there. The problem is it's not flowing as freely as we would like. And so there's still a bit of constriction there.

Number two, I think we have sharpened our focus and our approach around conversions to be very owner-friendly in terms of the speed with which we can respond in terms of the practicality and pragmatism that we bring to PIPs and timing of renovations and the like. And in selected instances, our willingness to be creative with some tools like what we call white label. So a decade or longer ago, you would have come to me with a conversion for a St. Regis. And I would have said, great, in two years, when you've completed your renovation, we'll put it in the system.

In select instances, we might say, let's plug you into the reservation system now. As The Stephen, not as a St. Regis. And then we'll flip it into the system -- yes, once that conversion is done. So I think you throw all of that into the blender, I mean, you know I was in development for most of my career, I've never seen us better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities in conversions.

And the other thing I would say to you, I used to think what a terrific business we had in strong economic times, you would see recessions -- or conversions fade into the background and a big uptick in new build. Then when you started to see some economic weakness from a macro perspective, we'd see a slowdown in new build and a spike in conversions. I actually think that all of the factors that I described even when the economy is booming, I don't anticipate a pullback in conversions. I think that is going to be a strong and consistent part of our growth story going forward.

MGM, in many ways, was a unicorn and thank goodness, we found that unicorn. The opportunity to bring the world's largest lodging company, the world's largest gaming company together in a unique partnership is something I'd love to do. I would do 1,000 out of 1,000 times. I don't think there are hundreds of those sorts of opportunities. And when you think about the way we structured the transaction, it had to reflect the strength and the value that both of those brands brought to the relationship. If we saw another unicorn out there, we would certainly get excited about exploring whether we could make something work. But I think that will be in the small minority of the types of transactions we do in the future.

Disclaimer

Marriott International Inc. published this content on June 24, 2025, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on June 24, 2025 at 20:28 UTC.