Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Inc.

Please stand by. Your program is about to begin. Good day and welcome to the Wyndham Hotels and Resorts Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode and the floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star 2. Lastly, if you should require operator assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to turn the call over to Matt Capuzzi, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Jeff Bilotti, our CEO, and Michelle Allen, our CFO. Before we get started, I want to remind you that our remarks today will contain forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risk factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. These risk factors are discussed in detail in our most recent annual report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and any subsequent reports filed with the SEC. We will also be referring to a number of non-GAAP measures. Corresponding gap measures and a reconciliation of non-gap measures to gap metrics are provided in our earnings release, which is available on our investor relations website at investor.windowhotels.com. We are providing certain measures discussing future impact on a non-gap basis only because without unreasonable efforts, we are unable to provide the comparable gap metric. In addition, last evening we posted an investor presentation containing supplemental information on our investor relations website. We may continue to provide supplemental information on our website in the future. Accordingly, we encourage investors to monitor our website in addition to our press releases, filing submitted with the SEC, and any public conference calls or webcasts. With that, I will turn the call over to Jeff.

Thanks, Matt, and thanks, everyone, for joining us this morning. We're pleased to report another strong quarter where we delivered $191 million of adjusted EBITDA and generated nearly $100 million of free cash flow, demonstrating the continued resiliency and consistency of our business model while returning over $160 million to shareholders, bringing our year-to-date capital return to $400 million or 5% of our market cap. Global REVPAR grew 12% to last year, finishing 11% above 2019 levels. Here in the United States, REVPAR for Q3 ran 250 basis points higher than last year's record third quarter and finished 10% above 2019, the highest absolute quarterly REVPAR ever recorded for our brands. Year to date, US REVPAR closed the quarter 15% ahead of 2021 and 8% ahead of 2019. And for the first three weeks of October, demand for our brands has continued to accelerate, with U.S. RevPar up 9% to prior year, driven by both rate and occupancy gains. Internationally, RevPar ran 46% ahead of last year and 17% above 2019, driven by our EMEA, LATAM, and Canada regions, which all generated RevPar well in excess of both 2019 and 2021 levels. International occupancy, which improved from down 23 points last quarter to down 16 points this quarter to 2019 levels, will continue to provide a meaningful tailwind for us in the coming quarters as demand continues to grow overseas. Our select service franchisees here in the United States were among the first in the industry to see their businesses fully recover from COVID last year. While the majority of these small business owners have said that 2021 was the best year they've ever experienced financially, most of them are again telling us that 2022 will be an even stronger year than last year from a revenue and margin standpoint, despite the broader macroeconomic climate. As our results to date are demonstrating, we've seen no signs of any slowdown here in the US. The seasonal occupancy declines that historically occur heading into the fall have been significantly less pronounced than in years prior to the pandemic. On the leisure front, we continue to see year over year double digit increases in our web traffic and booking windows continue to increase compared to 2021. And on the business front, our weekday occupancy was the highest on record for the month of September as we continue to capture new infrastructure related accounts. As we look beyond 2022, infrastructure bookings represent a significant tailwind for our business as more projects commence and construction ramps up on the largest public work bill signed into US law in 70 years. We grew net rooms by over 4%, including 80 basis points due to the acquisition of our 23rd brand, Vienna House by Wyndham, which added over 40 hotels and more than 6,400 rooms under long-term franchise agreements predominantly in Germany. This high quality and accretive brand was acquired from an institutional developer and a current owner of other Wyndham branded hotels who continues to grow its European network of by Wyndham brands. Our team in Europe is looking to expand the size of the Vienna house portfolio over the next few years as we plug the brand into our strong European infrastructure and distribution network. Excluding Vienna House, we grew net rooms organically by over 3%. And this was the first quarter since the pandemic that all of our regions around the world returned to positive sequential net room growth. We opened some spectacular new hotels this quarter. Here in the United States, where we opened more rooms than we opened in Q3 of 2019, we welcomed the Grand Over Resort and Spa, one of North Carolina's best golf and meeting destination resorts, to the Wyndham Grand family. We were also very proud to open our latest La Quinta del Sol prototype, the new all-construction La Quinta by Windham outside of Denver, Colorado. Internationally, we opened more rooms than we did in both Q3 of 2021 and back in the third quarter of 2019. In Latin America, where we grew net rooms by over 25%, we opened 10 more luxury registry collection hotels with the Palladium Hotel Group, adding 5,000 rooms across the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Mexico, and Panama. Our China direct franchising business grew its system size by another 8% with new Days Inn, Microtel, Wyndham Garden, Wyndham Grand, and half a dozen new Ramada by Wyndham hotels opening across the country despite the sporadic lockdowns and travel restrictions. And our EMEA region grew net rooms organically by 9% with impressive new additions like the 425-room trademark collection, Frankfurt Airport, the luxurious Wyndham Residences on the Palm in Dubai, and the new five-star Wyndham Grand Doha West Bay Beach Hotel with its multiple spa, restaurant, and pool facilities in the heart of Qatar's financial district. We grew our development pipeline by 10% to a record 212,000 rooms and over 1,600 hotels. Notably, we awarded another 48 Project ECHO new construction extended stay contracts this quarter to established developers and experienced extended stay operators, bringing the total number of contracts awarded to 120 hotels in just six short months. We had our first Project ECHO ground break in September in Plano, Texas with Gulf Coast Hospitality, who is committed to build 25 new construction Project ECHO hotels. And next week, Michelle and I will be visiting Virginia for the first ground break of Sandpiper Hospitality's 27 Project ECHO hotels that they have committed to build. Our record development pipeline marks the ninth consecutive quarter of sequential pipeline growth. as we awarded 120 new contracts in the United States and approximately 95 contracts internationally, which in total account for more than 30,000 new rooms. Year to date, our teams have signed over 565 new contracts, which is nearly three contracts awarded each and every business day. The number of contracts signed was 42% higher than what we awarded last year and 47% higher than in the third quarter of 2019. In the United States, we signed 114% more contracts than we did in 2019. Year over year signings of our cost efficient new construction prototype have increased approximately 40% above 2019. The percentage of our pipeline that would poured new foundations for new construction increased 250 basis points compared to this point last year. And we have more new ground breaks planned for the remainder of 2022 than we did in both Q4 of 2021 and in Q4 of 2019. Our award-winning Wyndham Rewards loyalty program has been recognized as the best hotel loyalty program for the fifth consecutive year by the readers of USA Today, along with the Wyndham Rewards earner card as its best hotel credit card. Total Wyndham Rewards membership grew 8% over the past 12 months and now stands at over 97 million members. Revenue generated in the U.S. from direct bookings on our brand.com sites grew over 10% in the quarter compared to 2021, outpacing the rate of growth across all third-party channels, driven in large part by the Wyndham Rewards loyalty program with nearly 50% of all U.S. guests representing Wyndham Rewards members. As our Wyndham.com channels hit an all-time record of contribution, Third-party OTA channels as a percentage of total bookings remain below 2019 levels. Our commitment to encouraging diverse hotel ownership continues to grow. Next week, BOLD by Wyndham, which stands for Black Owners and Lodging Developers, will co-host a Black Hotel Ownership Symposium with our inaugural member at his mixed-use development project in Atlanta, Georgia. We've designed this educational event to help black entrepreneurs get started on their journey to hotel ownership. An interest in Bold, along with Wyndham's Women Own the Room program, continues to exceed our expectations with over a dozen Bold hotels and over 20 Women Own the Room hotels now in our development pipeline. From a sustainability perspective, we are very proud that Google is now displaying Wyndham Green Certified Hotels with its eco certification badge when searching for accommodations. We are one of only two hotel programs that Google has recognized for this certification. Additionally, we added search functionality this quarter so that our guests can easily identify Wyndham Green certified hotels on our brand.com websites and mobile app. With our franchising business performing at record levels and our brands attracting more interest than ever from owners and developers, We are confident in the continued stability of our franchise business model and its ability to deliver outstanding value to our franchisees, our customers, and our stakeholders in any environment. This confidence allowed us to raise our full year outlook, which Michelle will now cover in further detail. Michelle?