Ryman Hospitality at Nareit REITweek: Strategic Moves and Future Plans

On Wednesday, 04 June 2025, Ryman Hospitality Properties (NYSE:RHP) presented its strategic vision at the Nareit REITweek: 2025 Investor Conference. The company outlined its focus on group bookings, cost management, and capital allocation, while addressing challenges such as market softness in Nashville. Despite these challenges, Ryman is optimistic about future growth, particularly with its recent acquisition of JW Marriott Desert Ridge and plans for the Opry Entertainment Group (OEG).

Key Takeaways

• Ryman anticipates a 6% increase in Average Daily Rate (ADR) for future years.
• Operating expenses are expected to rise by 4% compared to the previous year.
• The company has identified $1 billion in capital investment opportunities over the next four years.
• Plans to spin off OEG into a separate public company to enhance shareholder value.
• JW Marriott Desert Ridge acquisition aims to expand customer base and leverage economies of scale.

Financial Results

• Occupancy:

- Ryman starts the year with 50% occupancy already booked.

- Targets a sustainable 75% occupancy through leisure and in-the-year group bookings.

• Future Bookings:

- Expects a 6% increase in ADR for future years.

- Projects 9% and 13% better rooms revenue on the books for future years compared to last year.

• Operating Expenses:

- Forecasts a 4% increase in operating expenses, with labor costs as a significant factor.

Operational Updates

• Group Bookings:

- In-the-year bookings remain flat despite a reduction in leads earlier in the year.

- Government-related business, which is about 2% of the portfolio, shows some softness.

• Leisure Performance:

- Leisure business constitutes about 30% of total operations.

- Nashville faces softness due to new supply, whereas Orlando benefits from the Epic Park opening.

• Cost Management:

- Focus on labor costs with a high single-digit CAGR increase for union contracts.

- Post-COVID structural changes have reduced labor hours per occupied room.

Future Outlook

• OEG Spin-Off:

- Intends to separate OEG to create a public company, viewing an IPO as the most value-creating path.

• Capital Allocation:

- Emphasizes investments to enhance properties, including meeting space renovations and new food concepts.

• Chula Vista Gaylord:

- Will monitor performance for potential acquisition if it aligns with strategic goals.

Q&A Highlights

• OEG Valuation:

- Believes OEG will trade at a higher multiple than hotel REITs, justifying the spin-off.

• OEG Exit Strategy:

- An IPO will allow Ryman to gradually exit its interest in OEG.

• Chula Vista Potential Acquisition:

- Plans to assess the Chula Vista Gaylord’s performance before considering acquisition.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed understanding of Ryman Hospitality Properties’ strategic initiatives and financial outlook.

Full transcript - Nareit REITweek: 2025 Investor Conference:

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: Alright. I’ve been I’ve been given the go ahead. Good morning, everybody. My name is David Katz from Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst with Jefferies here in New York. And I am honored to have the privilege of, you know, moderating the next discussion, which is going to be with Ryman Hospitality Properties.

Representing the company today, Mark Fioravanti, president and CEO, EVP and CFO, Jennifer Hutchison. And just by format, we’ve prepared a bunch of topics. I do want to leave, you know, a few minutes, ten or so, toward the end if there happen to be any questions in the room. You know, if not, you know, I can I can certainly keep going all the way through? Just by way of background, I started covering Gaylord Hotels in about 02/2005.

And, you know, Mark was with the company at the time, and I’m not sure if you were there.

Jennifer Hutchison, EVP and CFO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Toileting the bowels of the accounting.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: But but, you know, I do have a long history with the kinds of assets that they have, the business model that they have. And while the structure has changed, you know, to to a a a REIT, you know, the the fundamentals are the same and equally compelling. And, you know, it’s been interesting over these two years to watch the company grow. I’m gonna have Mark just give you a very quick introduction on the company for those in the room just to level set the group, and then we’ll get into some of those topics. Mark, take it away.

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Just a quick overview for maybe those who of you who are not familiar with Ryman Hospitality Properties. We operate two businesses. Our primary business is a hospitality REIT.

And we are unique in that we’re the only lodging REIT that focuses on the large group business. We operate a portfolio of large, high quality convention resorts and we really service a single customer segment, really two customer segments across all of those resorts. That’s the large group meetings business and the leisure transient business. We don’t really service the business transient customer that many hotel companies do. What makes us so unique is that by servicing this single customer with a consistent delivery of service across the platform, we can have long term multi year relationships with these large groups and rotate them property by property, year by year.

And what that does for us is gives us tremendous visibility in terms of future business. Our average booking window is about three years in advance. And it also gives us stability. That business is booked in contract form. And so when a group can’t travel or travels fewer room nights than they’re under contract for, we collect

And so that fee collection in times where, you know, you have recessions and other disruptions in the economy, that fee helps minimize the profit downdraft in our business. The other business that we have is an entertainment business, Opry Entertainment Group. We are uniquely positioned in the country music space. We own a number of the most iconic venues and brands in country music, including the Grand Ole Opry and the Ryman Auditorium. That’s a business that we own and operate in a taxable REIT subsidiary.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: And longer

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: term, it’s our view and plan to separate that business from the REIT and create a separate public company. We think that’s the that is the path forward to create the most value for shareholders. So that’s That was excellent. Quick.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: That was an excellent intro. I do want to talk about sort of the group bookings, right, which is the core of the business. And if you could level set the group on what you’ve said about recent trends, about forward bookings. And particularly I want to touch on in the year for the year, right? You know, like it or not, we street people are always focused on, you know, what’s happening in the moment, and I think that’s that is a relevant part of what you’re doing.

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Yes, so from an in the year, for the year perspective, we just so that everyone’s on the same page, we enter a year with about 50 points of occupancy on the books. So the majority of our business is booked when we enter the year. During the year then, we layer in leisure and then in the year for the year group business to get to the kind of that sustainable 75% kind of occupancy level. What we saw in earlier in first quarter really in March was we did see as there was more talk around tariffs and some of the other activity around Doge, etcetera, we did see a reduction in the year for the year leads. We have since seen that stabilize and recover somewhat.

Leads are still down in the year for the year. If you look at our in the year for the year bookings, we’re essentially flat with prior year. So that business still has remained relatively stable. We are that window is now closing. By the time you get to June, you basically have if someone is going to travel in the current year, they will have already booked their business.

So we’re really coming out of that phase now into the back half. It’s while there’s been less interest in the year for the year, it’s bookings have remained stable. Right.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: It would be, I think, helpful also to just break down who those groups are and where they come from because all groups are not created equal. And, you know, I do think we should touch on particularly government driven groups. It’s a topic that comes up, you know, across hospitality and what you’re seeing and hearing from those groups. Yeah.

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: So so government government related business or government specific business is about 2% of our portfolio, maybe a little bit less. We have a very diverse our portfolio almost looks like basically the national economy. It’s a very diverse set of associations and companies that we service. And what we have seen is we have seen some softness with Doge and some of the other activities that we’re hearing about with the group business. It varies by function within the government.

We just hosted a large government meeting with the US Postal Service at Opryland. That meeting actually performed better than our expectation, both in terms of room nights and outside the room spending. Other departments, we’ve seen a pullback in government activities that relates to meetings for the year. But it’s not a significant portion of our business and obviously the sales teams at our hotels will work to replace that business with other segments.

Jennifer Hutchison, EVP and CFO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: And I would just also add in that as Mark pointed out earlier with the long booking windows, given the contractual nature of the business that we have the books and how we’re selling into the future, you also have insight even beyond in the year for the year to what 2026, ’20 ’20 ’7 and beyond look like. And those trends are very strong. We were able to see about a 6% increase in ADR for the future all future years for the bookings that we have in contract form. And that’s translating into, you know, nine percent and thirteen percent better rooms revenue on the books for those years compared to the same time last year.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: Got it. Now, there is a portion of the business that’s leisure driven, right? It’s not the primary for us.

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Yeah, it’s about 30%.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: Right. Can we just talk about what you’re seeing, you know, leisure wise, given the difference in your assets versus what we see in the lodging business broadly?

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Yeah. So leisure is about 30% of our business. We essentially to fill our hotels when groups aren’t traveling. So holiday periods, Christmas time especially, summertime when kids are out of school. And we leverage these resorts with leisure amenities and we sell into the leisure segment.

What we’ve seen as it relates to leisure thus far this year is, you know, leisure has been stable for us really across the portfolio. There’s been a we’ve seen a little bit of softness in Nashville, but that’s really less around leisure volumes and more around absorption of new supply in that market. Orlando is a market that was challenged last year. We’re seeing some strength there this year. A lot of that strength is being attributed to the Epic Park opening, Universal’s new park opening when and it where people delayed trips last year to this year, so they could experience the new park.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: I hear it’s spectacular, by the way. I mean, I I Yeah.

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: All the feedback, you know, they’re they’re a partner in our entertainment business, NBCUniversal, everything that we’ve seen and heard from them, it’s a terrific offering.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: So, look, one of the topics that we discussed with all lodging REITs where they’re seeing some pressure on the cost side. And, you know, labor being probably at the top of that list, I would guess, but, you know, insurance on that list too. What are you seeing on the cost side and how are you best able to deal with that?

Jennifer Hutchison, EVP and CFO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: So we entered in the year with an expectation for operating expenses to be, you know, 4% higher than what we saw last year from the labor, which is the biggest component of our operating expenses. That’s a big improvement in those kind of immediate years after COVID, where we were seeing much higher rate increases. So we’ve largely seen that stabilize. And for us, we only have one property on the hotel side that’s exposed to union labor. That contract was negotiated late last year for over a four year period CAGR increase of about high fives percent.

We’re in that first year of that. So I would also point out that in our last update on our outlook for the full year of this year, we were able to maintain our profitability guidance for EBITDA, even against the current backdrop of a little bit of near term uncertainty in terms of demand. And so we’ve been really able to control costs, I think pretty well with our asset management group being really proactive working with our manager, Marriott, to control what we can.

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: If look longer term, David, kind of how the trend if you go back to pre COVID till now, you know, you look at metrics like, you know, hours per labor hours per occupied room, we’ve seen that we’ve been able to manage that down dramatically with some of the changes, structural changes we made coming out of COVID to improve efficiency. And we’ve been able to maintain wage margins despite you know, a number of years of increasing wages with you know, the inflation that’s been in the environment.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: I do want to get to the capital allocation side, particularly since, you know, you recently acquired the JW Marriott Desert Bridge. There’s a lot to talk about there, you know, certainly philosophically as to why, but, you know, given that your assets are already in the Marriott system, this one is coming into the Marriott system, and your ability to add value to that asset as part of the rationale for acquiring it? Sell whatever you like.

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: So prior to the last two acquisitions, Desert Ridge and prior to two years ago, the JW Hill Country, all of our hotels were operated under the Gaylord Hotels flag by Marriott. And having a single brand and a single manager for your entire portfolio is unique within lodging the lodging REIT space. We think it’s a critically important part of how we create value because having that consistent experience from a product perspective and having alignment between owner and manager is critically important when you’re dealing with the same customers who are rotating year by year from market to market. You know, we negotiate multi year, multi location contracts with these customers. And without having alignment of management and ownership, it’s very difficult to negotiate those contracts.

It’s very difficult to be competitive. So as we’ve looked at, what are our target markets and what are the target assets that we’re interested in growing the portfolio, we were the we created the Gaylord brand and our hotels up to this point have been ground up developments, Hill Country being really our first acquisition in the hotel space. We were looking for our ideal target is we want, obviously, high quality meetings markets with good airlift. We want markets that are benefiting economically from in migration from a population and corporation standpoint. We prefer you know, we want large hotels with adequate meeting space, Marriott managed.

We prefer to have some flexibilities that relates to union labor. What else am I missing? Guess That’s it. You know, that’s basically kind of our hit list. And both the Hill Country and Desert Ridge check all those boxes.

And the opportunity for us now by bringing these JWs into our system is not only to leverage the basically the economies of scale that we have with the larger portfolio from a cost perspective, but also to leverage our sales and consumer and customer relationships to rotate customers into and out of those JW properties. And that’s a critically important opportunity for us because when you look at the JW brand overall versus the Gaylord Hotel brand, there’s about $100 rate differential. JWs typically transact at about $100 higher rate. So what this allows us to do now is to create relationships with consumers and rotate them through into the rest of the portfolio at a higher average rate. So we’ll make a number of near and long term improvements to these properties, both on the cost side from a synergies perspective, but then we’ll also look at capital investments to continue to enhance and expand these properties to open these hotels up to more and more of the groups that we service on the Gaylord Hotel side.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: Understood. And the funding on this deal, both equity and debt were both upsized? Yep, you want to talk about

Jennifer Hutchison, EVP and CFO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Yeah, certainly. We take an approach to issuing equity very carefully. We don’t tend to issue equity very often. So when you see us do it, it’s more an accretive transaction that we can explain to folks what we’re using the proceeds for. And in this particular transaction, we financed it both with unsecured notes and an equity issuance.

It was interesting timing to doing both of those transactions. And so we were really pleased with, I think, the execution of how we were able to ultimately come out with that, those both of those those deals.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: I do want to just follow-up on with one more. The JW customer base and the Gaylord, so the current customer base, is there some overlap in there today that you’re building on?

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: There is. There is that, you know, that overlap is somewhat constricted by, you know, one size, right? Given the size differential, not all of our Gaylord customers can fit into a JW. And then with the rate differential that we talked about a moment ago, there are some Gaylord customers that won’t travel at the rate that a JW commands. But if you take portfolio of Gaylord hotels and overlay the rate constraint as well as the size constraint, there’s somewhere between 2530% of those groups that can ultimately travel to both locations.

So the potential to create that rotational behavior and garner incremental market share. If you look at the JW Hill Country when we purchased it two years ago, that overlap with that hotel was approximately 10% in the first eighteen months to two years that we’ve owned that hotel. We’ve grown that from 10% to 14%. So through combined sales efforts, we’ve started to move the needle on capturing more of meetings, share of wallet and growing market share both in the JW, but also in our Gaylord hotels.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: Got it. I do want to talk about the $1,000,000,000 of portfolio investments you laid out at your analyst meeting a while back. Just sort of a philosophical approach to that, how you think about the ROIs on those, where you’re at with it.

Jennifer Hutchison, EVP and CFO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Yeah, one of the other benefits of operating our portfolio of assets as a platform is that you have better information with which to make capital allocation decisions, particularly as you’re deploying them within our assets that we own. So you have the benefit of future customer data in terms of demand patterns and meeting planner and customer desires on where what’s important to them in terms of what improvements we’re making in our properties in order to induce them to increasingly book with us. The turndown data for groups that either can’t or don’t currently want to travel to our properties and how we deploy that, but then also the benefit of replicating capital that we deploy at one property, seeing how that works, learning from it, and deploying it at another property in a similar way. You’re leveraging the existing infrastructure in your existing platform, and then as you’re investing in these properties. That’s why when we think about capital allocation, we do place that highly in terms of prioritization because of the fact that you can get better returns on a risk adjusted basis by doing that.

And so what David is referring to is about a billion dollars of capital investment opportunity we identified last year that we could deploy over about a four year period. And they include things like renovating meeting spaces, adding meeting spaces, creating new food and beverage concepts and re concepting items, where we have the data to understand where we have opportunities with food and beverage capacity relative to our existing moving space and rooms, to, you know, an expansion of the Gaylord Rockies and potentially adding a few hundred rooms there at that property, as well as adding leisure amenities. So they kind of spanned a broad spectrum of items that again, we can kind of continue fueling the growth of our overall platform.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: Got it. I do want to make sure that we leave some time to talk about OEG or the entertainment group. I think we could use maybe just an intro to it, a bit more of an intro to it. What’s in there? You know, what kind of funding it’s consuming?

You know, where you’re trying to take it? And how we think about, you know, the catalysts for, you know, spinning it as I think you talked about in the intro?

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Sure. So the Opry Entertainment Group is a live entertainment business that’s focused really primarily on the country music space. We have it’s, you know, we’re based in Nashville and really the, you know, the beginnings of that company were the Ryman and the Grand Ole Opry, both of which are, you know, irreplaceable venues and brands in the country music space. In addition to those two venues, we also own and we’ve created a number of other concepts, one with Blake Shelton called Old Red, which is a food and beverage entertainment venue, which we have six locations, including in the Las Vegas Strip. We recently created a new concept with Luke Combs, is a current country music star called Category ten.

And that’s a business that we think ultimately has incremental distribution available to it. And we own another asset in Austin, Texas called Block twenty one. It’s comprised of Austin City Limits Live at the Wynn Theater, so that the Austin City Limits venue as well as a W Hotel at about 50,000 square feet of mixed use development. And then recently, we purchased a controlling interest in a small festivals business called Southern Entertainment. They own several of the most successful country music festivals in The U.

S. We think that’s an important add on to this business to give us a new vertical in which to engage customers and also a new vertical with which we can expand our relationship with artists. And then most recently, we were awarded we won an RFP to manage a 6,800 seat amphitheater, the Ascend Theater in Nashville that’s owned by the city, we’ll take that over from Live Nation on January 1, and it gives us, obviously, another live performance venue in Nashville at that 6,800 seat capacity.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: Before we just check the room for questions, I do want to spend another second on OEG and just the ownership structure of it and, you know, the optionality that’s embedded within that ownership structure. Sure. If that’s a two minute discussion rather than a

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: I’ll talk fast. So in 2022, ’twenty two, wasn’t it? Correct. Sold a 30% interest in the Opry Entertainment Group to Ateros, which is a private equity firm, as well as NBCUniversal. Ateros manages a significant amount of equity for Comcast, NBCUniversal.

So they’re our 30% partner. We did that for a couple of reasons. Number one, you know, it was a we felt like it was a business that was underappreciated and we wanted to kind of mark that business to market, as well as we were looking for not only for capital, but also for a partner who had some strategic there were some strategic opportunities to help us grow the business. And we felt that NBC, Universal, and Ateros were the right partners to do that. They bought in the 30% of the 17x trailing multiple, which valued that business at the time at about $1,400,000,000 We’ve had a terrific relationship with Ateros thus far.

You know, they’ve brought a number of things to the table including we’ve created People’s Choice Country Awards with them, an Opry Christmas show. We just had an NBC special for the one hundredth birthday of the Opry in March of this year. So we’re doing a number of things with them from a content perspective. They own Sky, Sky platform in Europe. We just started to distribute the Grand Ole Opry in Europe on Sky Arts.

And so we’re now beginning to engage international customers as country music continues to grow with that community. So there have been a lot of what I would call kind of non financial benefits of having them as a partner in this business.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: Understood. So I do want to give the room a chance if there are any sort of questions in the room before I keep going. Yes, sir. So in this spin off, are you expecting that the OEG is going to trade at a higher multiple than the rest of Ryman? Is that the rationale behind the spin off?

I am. But go ahead.

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Well, you’re the salesman guy.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: Well, we do actually have a sum of the parts in our valuation where we do give it a higher multiple than the core hotel business. I believe it’s by about two turns or so on Okay.

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: And if you I mean, if you look at where live entertainment and media properties trade, they do trade at a higher multiple than hotel REITs. I think there’s also a because you have this entertainment business embedded in a hotel REIT, we’re not attracting you know, as many live entertainment investors as we might as a standalone business. And in some cases, we’re not attracting REIT dedicated investors because they don’t have the understanding nor, I guess, the desire to take the time to underwrite and understand how to value the entertainment business. So we think there’s value for both businesses to be separate businesses and there’s the opportunity ultimately for both of these businesses to trade at

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: a higher

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: multiple when they’re separated as opposed to how they trade collectively.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: But just as a follow-up, would there be a consideration to actually selling it as opposed to spinning it up?

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Yeah. We would look at, and we have looked at, a variety of different ways to separate them. Ultimately, our view today is that IPO ing the business is the most value creating. And it also helps with some of the liquidity restrictions that we have as a REIT. When we sell a portion of that of our interest in that, that’s income that goes up to the REIT and it doesn’t qualify as good REIT income.

And obviously, we have limitations in terms of bad REIT income. And so what an IPO would allow us to do would be to exit that, our interest in that business over time, much like a private equity firm would exit an investment. We pay both of them basically a royalty fee for to use their name imaging likeness and for co marketing and appearances and that type

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: of thing.

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: They don’t have an equity ownership in the actual businesses.

Jennifer Hutchison, EVP and CFO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Block twenty one is owned in our taxable REIT subsidiary within OEG, so unlikely to be owned by.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: I have one more, which is I do like to ask about Chula Vista, right? There is a property that another developer built that bears the Gaylord name. You happen to own all the other Gaylords that I’m aware of in the world. What kinds of things should we be looking for in terms of whether you might consider wanting to own that at some point in time?

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Well, for us, we didn’t participate in the development of that asset. Obviously, Aries and Ira who are developing it were our partners at the Rockies. It’s a good market, I think they’ve built a good product. For us ultimately, we wanna see how that property opens and how it matures. And if there’s an opportunity for us to eventually own it accretively, it’s something that we would certainly look at.

David Katz, Gaming, Lodging, Leisure, and Real Estate Analyst, Jefferies: Got it. Before we wrap up, I’ll give the room one more shot. Going, going, gone. Appreciate everyone’s time this morning.

Mark Fioravanti, President and CEO, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Thank you.

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