In preparation for HST's F3Q 2013 earnings release tomorrow, we’ve put together the recent pertinent forward looking company commentary.
GROUP
- Room nights are probably about flat, but we've got a pretty solid rate increase for the second half of the year.
- Over 50% of the [Group] rooms that we would expect to do in 2014 are on the books. We're continuing to trend ahead of where we were at this time last year for 2014.
- We are also pleased with the strength of our higher-priced group segments, as the weakness in demand has been largely focused in the lower-rated discount segment.
- Short-term group will continue to be slightly weaker than last year.
- We expect that group will be weak in the third quarter, as the middle of the quarter tends to be more influenced by discount business, and a few events such as the presidential nominating convention will not repeat this year.
- Fourth quarter group bookings continue to be quite strong both in demand and in rate. Looking out further into 2014, both group room nights and rate continue to trend ahead of last year.
TRANSIENT
- Advanced transient bookings continue to look quite solid. Transient pricing should also begin to accelerate further.
M&A
- We are hopeful of completing at least a couple more sales over the course of this year. And we will be intending to put about a handful of properties on the market in the fall with the goal of selling all of them.
- We still hope to be a net buyer.
HOUSTON
- We expect Houston to continue its robust first half growth trends, as solid group and transient demand will continue to facilitate a shift in the mix of business to higher-rated segments.
SEATTLE
- We expect our Seattle hotels to have a good third quarter due to a solid group base on the books and strong transient demand, creating compression that will drive group and transient ADR.
ATLANTA
- We expect our hotels to continue to outperform in the third quarter due to a strong city-wide calendar.
SAN FRANCISCO
- With continued high transient demand, we expect our San Francisco hotels will see strong results in the third quarter.
LOS ANGELES
- We believe that Los Angeles should also experience third quarter – solid third quarter as transient demand strength persists.
BOSTON
- In-house groups failed to materialize at the pace we had anticipated, but we expect our Boston properties to improve in the third quarter.
NEW YORK
- We believe the third quarter should continue to hold up relatively well when compared to the New York market.
- Supply growth in New York will be fairly considerable next year. I think we're looking at numbers that approach 7%, which is a pretty big number, especially given the amount of supply that has hit over the course of the last three years there.
- We'll find that New York is still going to be not as strong as we'd like it to be because of the supply coming into the market.
CHICAGO
- We expect our Chicago hotels to continue to outperform.
DC
- Given the continued weakness in government travel, we expect our hotels in DC to underperform the portfolio in the third quarter.
- As it relates to D.C., we're still not seeing group bookings or convention bookings picking up for 2014. I think the general sense was that 2014 would be relatively flat to 2013.
CALGARY MARRIOTT
- Due to the flood, out-of-town demand significantly decreased. Therefore, we expect the Calgary Marriott will underperform in the third quarter.
EUROPEAN JV
- We remain cautiously optimistic about the third quarter for our European hotels. We expect to see some occupancy increasing, while ADR will likely decrease due to the inflated rates during the London Olympics last year.
F&B
- We are not forecasting F&B and other revenues to increase at the same pace as the second quarter....We're estimating in our guidance that food and beverage could range from 2.5% to 3.5%. The midpoint of that is obviously 3%, so that would suggest that we'd be about equal with what we achieved in the first half of the year.
OTHER COSTS
- We expect support costs to increase slightly for the remainder of the year, and we forecast that utility rates will likely increase.
CAPITAL ALLOCATION
- If you look at it for the rest of the year, we're forecasting that we'll issue another 5 million shares for the rest of the year.
