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Good day. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Cedar Fair Entertainment Company 2021 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please note that today's call is being recorded.

if you require any further assistance please press star zero i would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today mr michael russell corporate director of investor relations thank you sir please go ahead thank you stacy and good morning to everyone welcome to our 2021 second quarter earnings conference call earlier this morning we distributed via wire service our earnings press release a copy of which is available under the news tab of our investors website at ir.cedarfair.com. On the call with me this morning are Richard Zimmerman, Cedar Fair President and CEO, and Brian Witherow, our Executive Vice President and CFO. Before we begin, I need to remind you that comments made during this call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements may involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those described in such statements. For a more detailed discussion of these risks, you may refer to the company's filings with the SEC. In compliance with the SEC's regulation FD, this webcast is being made available to the media and the general public, as well as analysts and investors. Because the webcast is open to all constituents and prior notification has been widely and unselectively disseminated, all content on this call will be considered fully disclosed. With that, I would like to introduce our CEO, Richard Zimmerman. Richard?

Thank you, Michael, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate all of you being with us today. On the call today, we will focus our remarks in three specific areas. As usual, we will review our year-to-date 2021 operating results, including the performance of our parks during the quarter, as well as a more recent look at operating trends in July. We will provide an update on our business optimization program, which is well underway. And lastly, I will conclude with some comments on our outlook for the business and why I'm so confident in the future of Cedar Fair and our ability to emerge from this crisis stronger and better positioned for growth and value creation. Let me begin by saying I'm very pleased to report all our parks are now open and the 2021 season is off to an excellent start. We came into this season focused on the same strategies that drove our record performance in 2019. We are delivering a high-quality guest experience while offering more immersive events to complement our world-class attractions. The continued execution of our strategy has produced strong results, highlighted by the following performance trends. First, we are generating strong volume at all our properties, confirming pent-up consumer demand for travel and leisure activities, especially outdoor entertainment. Second, we are seeing new highs for in-park per capita spending, with our guests showing a strong propensity not only to spend, but to spend more across all product categories. Third, We are driving sustained sales of advanced purchase products such as season passes and all season products. With our total number of season passes valid for the 2021 season now exceeding the record number purchased for the 2019 season. And finally, guest satisfaction scores continue to trend towards historical norms at most of our parks. Every day we are reinforcing the long-held perception among our guests that our parks offer highly valued, high-quality entertainment experiences. Achieving and maintaining high guest satisfaction is key to our success in taking pride and driving repeat visitation. Our excellent performance across these measures was achieved despite disruptions during the second quarter to our park operating calendars, seasonal staffing challenges, and the delayed reopen of Canada's Wonderland, one of our largest and most profitable parks until early July. Now let me highlight a few of our observations so far this season. Healthy consumer demand has driven attendance at several parks to near historical highs established in 2019, a record year for us by nearly every measure. Over the past five weeks, attendance has approximated 85% of comparable same-day 2019 levels, a trend that supports our optimistic outlook for the second half of the year when we have historically enjoyed some of our busiest days. Also underscoring our optimism for the balance of the year was the July 5th reopening of Canada's Wonderland, which represented another step forward for our company. This marks the first time since late in 2019 that all our parks are open simultaneously, and it positions us well for a strong second half. While city-mandated capacity restrictions are still in place at the park, we hope to operate Canada's Wonderland at near full capacity later this season. In addition to strong attendance trends this year, we have also generated record levels of guest spending, including growth across every revenue category. In the month of July, in-park per capita spending was $61.93, which represents roughly 120% of 2019 spending levels. The growth of in-park per capita spending has been largely driven by increased spending on extra charge attractions, including our front-of-line Fast Lane products, as well as higher guest spending across all other in-park revenue categories. As I previously noted, a strong share of Wallet has our guests buying up and spending more with each visit. The trends we have seen since opening our parks in mid-May through this past Sunday are encouraging and suggest consumer confidence is quite strong. We anticipate that our strong recent momentum will continue as we move into some of our historically busiest days of the year, including our tremendously popular Halloween weekends that usher in an active fourth quarter at most of our parks. Continued strong demand will present opportunities to take price at our gates and within our parks and allow us to create additional incentives for guests to spend on goods and services during their park visits. Now let me switch gears for a moment to address the issue of labor availability and its impact on staffing levels at our parks. On our last call, we shared our views around our challenges attracting candidates for seasonal labor positions, like many other companies in the leisure and hospitality industries. These challenges were compounded this year by a shortage in the number of students available through the J-1 visa program. a program we typically rely upon to help supplement local labor pools in several of our key markets. To attract the large number of applicants needed to fill thousands of seasonal openings across our parks, we quickly increased hourly rates, offered incentives for candidates to stay on throughout the season, and utilized our dormitories to expand our marketing reach beyond our local markets. At each of our parks, we have gone from being market competitive to being the market leader in terms of pay rate. This change in compensation strategy generated thousands of applicants within a very short period of time, significantly improved staffing levels, and allowed most of our parks to return to their original operating schedules. I mentioned last quarter how we view recent changes in the labor market as structural. fundamental shifts that appear more permanent than transitory. With that view of the labor market in mind, we are taking a fresh look at our seasonal labor model to determine whether there are incremental benefits to retaining a portion of our associate base on a year-round basis. This coincides with our view of incremental revenue opportunities that would utilize park assets on a year-round basis, much like our resort properties, the Knott's Marketplace, and the Cedar Point Sports Center. Based on what we see at Knott's Berry Farm, a park that already relies more heavily on full-time and year-round part-time associates, we believe that shifting a portion of our seasonal labor force to full-time or year-round part-time positions will improve the training, supervision, and retention of our seasonal workforce, meaningfully improve operating efficiencies and guest service levels, lead to higher guest spending levels, and ultimately support our strategy for expanding the operating calendars at our parks and other resort properties. We will keep you apprised of our progress in this area as we go along. Before I turn the call over to Brian to review our financial results in more detail, I want to update you on the progress we have made on our business optimization program we introduced earlier this year. The program aims to streamline our business processes, realize efficiencies, and bring new ways of thinking to how we entertain our guests in order to continue to drive profitable and sustainable growth. First, we remain committed to delivering the previously communicated $50 million in annual run rate benefit over the next two to three years once the program is fully executed and the business has returned to historical attendance levels under normal operating conditions. Second, because we expect the lion's share of the benefit to be realized beyond the first year, the progress we share with you in the early stages of the program is more qualitative in nature. The steps we are taking in 2021 are focused on laying the foundation to realize the significant benefits of the program beginning in 2022. While our original cost-saving assumptions have been challenged by recent headwinds, including higher labor costs and inflationary pressures on other goods and services, we have remained flexible and continued to adapt our program by identifying new opportunities for cost savings in procurement and other areas of our business. Also, we are successfully achieving the meaningful savings in advertising and marketing we projected earlier this year. In addition, our procurement team is already achieving quick wins in areas like office supplies, small parcel, and printers. Although not particularly large spend category, they will deliver significant run rate savings on a percent of spend basis and are indicative of the order of magnitude we hope to achieve in other areas. In addition, our business intelligence team is now fully integrated into our pricing and workforce management processes and is driving meaningful improvements in areas like advanced sales, ticket yields, and increased revenue per food and beverage labor hour. I believe we will continue to find more cost efficiency and pricing opportunities as we deepen our analysis in other areas, which should help mitigate the effects of anticipated cost pressure and keep us on track to realize the program's long-term target benefit of $50 million. I'll pause here and turn it over to Brian for a review of our financial results. Brian?