Viad Corp

Good afternoon. My name is Nate, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the VADCOR first quarter 2022 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw that question, please press star followed by two. Thank you. Carry along. You may begin your conference.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Viad's 2022 first quarter earnings conference call. During the call, you'll hear from Steve Moster, our president and CEO and president of GES, David Berry, our president of Pursuit, and Ellen Ingersoll, our chief financial officer. We issued our earnings press release after the market closed today, along with some presentation slides, which are both available on our website at viad.com. Certain statements made during the call, which are not historical facts, may constitute forward-looking statements. Information concerning business and other risk factors that could cause actual results to materially differ from those in the forward-looking statements can be found in our annual, quarterly, and other current reports filed with the SEC. During the call, we'll be referring to certain non-GAAP measures, including income or loss before other items and adjusted EBITDA. Important disclosures regarding these measures, including reconciliations to net income or loss attributable to VIAD, can be found in Table 2 of our earnings press release and in our earnings presentation. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Steve.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining VIAD's 2022 first quarter earnings call. As Kerry mentioned, we published our customary earnings press release together with a presentation containing key insights into the first quarter performance and full year expectations on the VOD.com website. During the call, David, Ellen, and I will be referencing specific pages from the presentation as we discuss our business performance. Before we discuss our results, I want to thank our team members who have worked tirelessly over the past two years to overcome the external challenges facing our businesses while delivering extraordinary experiences to our clients and guests. More than anything, it's their creativity, resilience, and determination that has driven us forward to the exciting place that we are today. As we review our first quarter results and the macro trends that will drive our business performance through the remainder of the year, I'm very pleased with our financial results and the strategic decisions we made during the past two years. On page five of the presentation, I'll touch on three key points about the quarter that we'll cover in more detail throughout the call. First, our financial performance was better than our expectations and I feel confident in raising our full year outlook, which Ellen will cover later in the presentation. I think it's important to understand the positive macro trends that influenced our results in the quarter and support our improved guidance. Trade shows are recovering from the pandemic faster than we expected. In Q1, our portfolio of US trade shows was approximately 73% of pre-pandemic scale on a same show basis. This is the third consecutive quarter that we've seen improvement in this metric. Additionally, experiential marketing activity among our large corporate clients is accelerating. Through conversations with our largest clients, we believe corporate experiential budgets for 2022 among those blue-chip clients will be approximately 80% of their 2019 pre-pandemic size. At Pursuit, we're experiencing strong hospitality bookings, as leisure travel activity continues to accelerate. Currently, our pacing for our lodging assets is ahead of 2019 levels, and we anticipate a strong summer in our key geographies. Second, our Refresh, Build, Buy strategy continues to fuel growth at Pursuit. We're committed to finding new opportunities to drive scale at Pursuit, refreshing our existing assets, building new assets, and buying businesses that meet our strategic criteria. In early April, we acquired the Glacier Wrath Company in Montana. This is a great business that will fuel EBITDA growth by adding high margin traction to our existing Glacier Park collection. Later in the call, David will talk about the opening of the Forest Park Hotel in Jasper, which is another great example of our strategy. In addition to these two examples, Pursuit launched three new experiences in 2021, that we expect to contribute to Pursuit's continued EBITDA growth this year. With solid liquidity and additional financial flexibility, our intent is to accelerate the Refresh, Build, Buy strategy. Third, I'm excited to announce that in the quarter, we created a unique identity, SPIRO, for our GES Brand Experiences business. As a reminder, GES Brand Experiences accounted for approximately $330 million of total GES revenue in 2019, while serving as a strategic partner to leading brands around the world. We rebranded the business and introduced Spiro to the market to accelerate our growth by servicing the changing needs of today's brand marketers across a broad spectrum of their experiential marketing needs. This is an exciting opportunity for us to capture more share in the large and growing experiential marketing industry. We are starting in a great position with a strong client roster and we're investing to expand our capabilities to meet the needs of our current and future clients. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Ellen to discuss our financial performance in more detail. Ellen?