InterContinental Hotels Group PLC

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Intercontinental Hotels Group PLC Q1 Trading Update Conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session through the phone lines, and instructions will follow at that time. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Stuart Ford of IHG Hotel and Resorts. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Gavin. And good morning, everyone from me. As Kevin said, welcome to IHG Hotel and Resort conference call covering the 2026 first quarter trading update. So I'm Stuart Ford, Senior Vice President, the Head of Investor Relations at IHG. And I'm joined this morning by Ellie Maloof, our Chief Executive Officer, and by Michael Glover, our Chief Financial Officer. Just to remind listeners on the call that in discussion today, the company may make certain forward-looking statements as defined on the US law. Please refer to this morning's announcement and the company's SEC filing for factors that could lead actual results to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by any such forward-looking statement. For those analysts or institutional investors who are listening via our website, May I remind you that in order to ask questions, you will need to have registered using the details on page two of this morning's R&S release. The release, together with the usual supplementary data pack for the first quarter, can be downloaded from the results and presentation section under the investors tab on ingplc.com. Now over to Eli.

Thanks, Stuart, and good morning, everyone. I will begin today's call by providing a brief overview of our global trading and development performance in the first quarter, as well as some other operational highlights. I will then hand over to Michael to go through each of the three regions and their respective growth drivers in more detail. I'll provide some concluding remarks, and then we will open up a call for Q&A. Let me start by thanking our teams across the business for delivering a very strong trading performance in the first quarter of the year. demonstrating yet again the strategic advantage and resilience of our globally diverse footprint. I would also like to sincerely thank our colleagues in the Middle East. Their unwavering commitment and dedication to supporting guests and owners during these challenging times demonstrates what true hospitality means at ISG. And we continue to do all we can to support them. We remain confident in the enduring appeal of the region for both business and leisure travel, and we expect trading activity to bounce back when the conflict ends and flight capacity is restored. Turning to Q1 trading, global ref bar grew by 4.4%, driven by strong performance in all three regions and across all brands. ADR grew by 2%, and demand was robust with occupancy increasing by 1.5% points. All three drivers of stay occasions contributed to the ref bar growth. Rooms revenue on a comparable hotels basis for groups was strongest, up 7%, followed by business up 6%, and leisure up 1%. Looking ahead, while many of you know that our booking window is short, we are pleased that our comparable on-the-books global revenue for Q2 indicates continued growth. with the impact of the Middle East conflict and some wider disruption to international travel flows expected to be more than offset by increases in demand elsewhere. Importantly, in the US, which is by far our largest market, the underlying fundamentals for the industry remain robust with record employment levels, continued real wage growth, wealth creation, and the unprecedented levels of investment into areas like infrastructure, data centers, and artificial intelligence. Turning to our global development activity, we opened 14,900 rooms across 82 hotels in the quarter, including six brand launching in new countries. Highlights include opening Six Senses London, an incredible hotel that is redefining the ultra luxury experience in the ski city, Our first hotel Indigo property opened in the Turks and Caicos Islands, expanding our luxury and lifestyle presence in the Caribbean, and it will soon be followed by Intercontinental and Kinton. And our essential conversion brand Garner also made its debut in Greater China with the opening of Garner Beijing Art District. This hotel opened just one month after signing, highlighting the speed at which conversion deals can move from signing to opening. Together, our global openings exceeded last year's very strong first quarter and took our global estate to more than 7,000 hotels. This led to 6.6% gross growth year on year and 5% net growth. Year to date, net system growth was 0.9%, 20 basis points higher than the equivalent this time last year. We also added 21,400 rooms into our pipeline in the quarter, an increase of 6% year over year when excluding the Ruby brand acquisition in 2025. Signings included our first new premium brand noted collection in the UK, our first Ruby hotel in the US, and debut signings for Six Senses and Kempton in Beijing. This led to a closing pipeline of 343,000 rooms, which is 3% higher than a year ago and equivalent to 33% growth on our current system size. Conversions represented 53% of signings reflecting the breadth and attractiveness of our brands and the benefit to owners of joining Ice Cheese Enterprises. And we are very pleased with the progress of Garner, which has reached almost 200 open and pipeline hotels globally in 17 countries, less than three years since launch, and already exceeds 100 hotels in the Americas. we have released the latest episode of ISG Checks In On Today. This features brand milestones, including the rapid progress of Garner, the success of internationalizing the Hotel Indigo brand, and the incredible heights that the Intercontinental Tales Resorts brand itself has reached as we celebrate its 80th anniversary this year. Turning briefly to some updates on our co-brand business, We announced back at our results in February that a new co-brand debit card agreement with Revolut and Visa in the UK. And those card products are on track to launch in the coming months. We also said we are looking at further co-brand priority growth markets, with Japan being one. We're delighted to announce a new agreement with Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company, one of the largest credit card issuers in Japan, along with Visa. These new co-branded card products in Japan will launch in 2027 and mark further progress in a priority growth market where we already have around 60 hotels and more than 20 in the pipeline and millions of Aishi One Rewards members. Finally, a quick update on the great strides we're making on the technology front. At full year results, we laid out our approach to AI, which we group into three distinct areas. The first is guest acquisition and loyalty. The second is hotel commercial optimization. And the third is corporate cost efficiency. In the guest acquisition and loyalty area, we have made excellent progress in developing an AI-powered conversational search tool that will be launched on our website and mobile app in the coming months. Guests and loyalty members will be able to use natural language search capabilities to describe in their own way and own words where they want to go, and they'll tell features and local attractions that are important to them. This is a significant development that will transform how guests discover and book stays across our 7,000 hotels while also attracting more direct bookings. We are also on track to begin deploying our new AI-powered content management platform this year. This new platform will ensure the right hotel information shows up in the right channels at the right time while making it easier for AI-powered assistance to understand, recommend, and prioritize ICHI hotels as travel search patterns evolve. Furthermore, we are refreshing our loyalty platforms and rolling out a new cloud-based CRM tool powered by Salesforce so that our hotels can deliver more personalized experiences, offer more relevant promotions, and extend loyalty rewards faster and more effectively. Each of these initiatives within guest acquisitions and loyalty are designed to elevate the guest experience when searching, discovering, booking, and staying at our IHG hotels, and more importantly, to keep guests coming back. There are, of course, many other initiatives underway in this fast-moving space that keep advancing our leading technology platforms, and we will provide further detail in these areas with happier results. So the year has seen a great start for trading performance and development activity, and we are delivering on our strategic priorities and growth algorithm. With that, let me now hand over to Michael who will provide more color by region. He will also detail for you that while still early in the year, we are confident in achieving full year consensus growth forecast and profit expectations underpinned by the strength of our performance year to date.