Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Inc.

To all sites on hold, thank you for your patience in holding. We ask that you please continue to stand by. Your call will begin momentarily. Again, to all sites on hold, thank you for your patience in holding. We ask that you please continue to stand by. Your call will begin momentarily. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good day and welcome to the Wyndham Hotels and Resorts fourth quarter and full year 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. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Jeff Belotti, 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'll also be referring to a number of non-GAAP measures. Corresponding GAAP measures and a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to GAAP metrics are provided in our earnings release, which is available on our investor relations website at investor.windomhotels.com. We are providing certain measures discussing future impact on a non-GAAP basis only because without unreasonable efforts, we are unable to provide the comparable GAAP 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 thrilled to report that our Q4 results finished stronger than our expectations, with full-year reported global RevPAR growth of over 16%, net room growth of 4%, and adjusted EBITDA of $650 million. We generated $360 million of free cash flow in 2022 and returned over $560 million to our shareholders, which represented 7% of our market cap. By all accounts, it was an outstanding year for Wyndham hotels and resorts. We grew net rooms by 4%, including 80 basis points of growth from the acquisition of our 23rd brand, Vienna House by Wyndham. Excluding Vienna House, we opened 64,000 rooms for the year, more than one hotel each and every day. This represents 20% more rooms than we added last year. Here in the United States, we added 27,000 rooms with some great new hotels, like the Stonehill Lawrence, a AAA three-diamond hotel outside of Kansas City, who converted to our trademark collection brand. And the opening of our first two dual-brand, new construction, La Quinta Hawthorne suite hotels in Texas, a combined extended stay and select service hotel in a mid-scale space designed to streamline development and operational costs by utilizing a shared lobby, fitness center, meeting rooms, bar, and other amenities. Internationally, we opened 37% more rooms organically in 2022 than we did last year, and 2% more than we did back in 2019. Latin America led the way with 14 luxury resort additions to our registry collection brand across the Caribbean and Mexico. And in the fourth quarter, Our Latin America team welcomed our first Wyndham Grand to Mexico with the opening of the beachfront Wyndham Grand Cancun Resort, centrally located in Cancun's hotel zone. Our EMEA region also had a tremendous year, opening 57% more rooms organically than they did last year, or 6% higher than 2019, with impressive fourth quarter additions like the Balkan Jewel Resort, a trademark collection conversion in the resort town of Raslog, near Sofia, Bulgaria, and the Ramada Riyadh King Fahd, the first new Ramada edition since buying back our master license agreement in Saudi Arabia. In Southeast Asia, we grew net rooms by 5%, opening 40% more rooms in 2022 than we did in 2021. And after many years of development, we welcomed the beautiful new 949-room Wyndham Da Nang Golden Bay Resort directly on the beach in this former French colonial port, marking the 14th hotel opening for our Asia-Pacific development team in Vietnam. And finally, our China direct development team grew net rooms by another impressive 10%. And despite the sporadic lockdowns and travel restraints many of our team members continue to face throughout the fourth quarter, which have now thankfully dissipated, the team added more direct franchise rooms than they did in the fourth quarter of 2019, and nearly twice as many rooms than they did in the fourth quarter of last year. With the opening of hotels like the Wyndham, the Wyndham Grand, and the La Quinta Shang Si, three beautiful new hotels located in the business district in the heart of Shang Si province, featuring quarter direct access to Shang-Chi's International Convention and Expo Center. And this new La Quinta Shang-Chi represents our second new construction La Quinta to open in China in 2022. On the retention front, we improved for the second consecutive year to a record high global rate of 95.3%, including the first time that our international retention rate has exceeded 95%, an indication of our ever improving owner first value proposition. We grew our development pipeline sequentially by 3% and by 12% versus prior year to a record 219,000 rooms and 1,700 hotels. This marks Wyndham's 10th consecutive quarter of sequential pipeline growth. Our teams awarded 882 contracts globally for over 113,000 room additions which is over three new contracts awarded each and every business day. The number of domestic contracts signed in the fourth quarter was 40% higher than what we awarded last year and nearly 90% higher than what we awarded in the fourth quarter of 2019, reflecting record developer interest in our brands. For the full year, we signed 563 contracts in the US for 62,000 room additions, which is nearly double the amount signed in 2019 and 65% more than last year. Fourth quarter new construction domestic executions increased 95%. Notably, we awarded another 50 ECHO Suites by Wyndham contracts this quarter to established developers and experienced extended stay operators, bringing the total number of contracts awarded to 170 hotels, in just nine short months since launching the brand last March and making Echo the hotel industry's fastest growing new brand launch of 2022. We broke ground on our first three Echo hotels in the last few months of 2022, and we expect to open our first Echo Suites by Wyndham hotels later this year as we break ground on another two dozen Echo hotels in 2023. On a full year basis, new construction domestic executions increased 130% year over year, while domestic conversion executions increased 30% compared to 2021. Developers are selecting by Wyndham new construction offerings now more than they ever have. Our economy new construction brand, Microtel, added 2,200 rooms to its domestic pipeline in 2022, driven by developer interest in its cost-efficient Moda prototypes. While upper mid-scale brands like Wyndham Garden added 1,300 rooms to its domestic new construction pipeline. In the upscale segment, we saw continued strong new construction demand for brands like Wyndham, which grew its U.S. pipeline by 1,700 rooms this year. Consumer demand remains strong. Our middle class customers continue to spend more on travel than they ever have, and they're staying longer than they were back in 2019. given hybrid work environments. We saw booking windows increase 18% versus prior year to over 14 days, with guests planning further ahead given space constraints and the fear of being blocked out as so many were last spring and summer. Thursday and Sunday night occupancies and our guests' average length of stays have both continued to climb in the fourth quarter versus where they were back in 2019. All of these trends are giving our franchisees the confidence to continue to yield up in their pricing with the new revenue management tools we're providing to them. Combined with the constant messaging that real ADR for the select service space remains essentially flat to where it was four years ago. We believe that leisure travel remained the number one priority for discretionary consumer spend among middle income Americans in 2023. as so many recent consumer surveys from organizations such as MMGY and the American Society of Travel Advisors have indicated. At the same time, we've seen strong growth in our infrastructure-related revenues, which makes up about 20% of our U.S. royalties. This area has always been a strength for Wyndham, and with the size of the pies set to grow substantially as the government begins to deploy the $1.5 trillion in infrastructure and CHIPS Act spending, we've been making further investments here to grow our share. Those investments have already begun paying off with domestic weekday occupancy in our economy hotels at their highest absolute levels on record. Our general infrastructure-related revenues increased double digits in the fourth quarter versus 2019, a trend that began back in the second quarter of 2021. And we're confident that it will continue to strengthen throughout 2023 as projects for new roads, bridges, rail, water systems, airports, broadband, and public transit begin. Funneling the hundreds of billions of dollars to the states is a heavy lift that will take time and require coordination from agencies on both the federal and the state levels as these projects commence over the next several years in the markets where our economy and mid-scale small business owners will benefit. We estimate that this new level of spend represents an opportunity for us to generate over $3.3 billion of incremental revenue for our franchisees and over $150 million of incremental royalties for Wyndham over the spend period. Our award-winning Wyndham Rewards Loyalty Program recognizes the best hotel loyalty program for the fifth consecutive year by the readers of USA Today. grew its enrollments by 8% over the past 12 months, and now stands at 99 million members. Winning rewards helped drive a 23% increase in direct bookings to our brand.com sites, outpacing the rate of growth across all third-party channels, and once again representing a record high level of contribution for our brand.com sites. Our core values and our county service culture are at the heart of what drives our growth, And what makes Wyndham such a great place to work? There's no better measure of why we are such a great place to work than our most recent team member engagement survey, which generated record high results. And it was no surprise to see Wyndham Hotels and Resorts qualify as a constituent of the 2022 Dow Jones Sustainability Index, a global index consisting of the top 10% of the largest 2,500 companies in the S&P Global Broad Market Index based on sustainability, and environmental practices. We sincerely thank our valued team members. Without whose support, none of this would be possible. And with that, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Michelle Allen. Michelle?