Ryman Hospitality at Raymond James Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, 05 March 2025, Ryman Hospitality Properties (NYSE: RHP) presented at the Raymond James & Associates’ 46th Annual Institutional Investors Conference. The discussion, led by CEO Mark Fioravanti and CFO Jennifer Hutchison, highlighted the company’s strategic positioning in the large group hotel sector and its entertainment division, Opry Entertainment Group. While Ryman projects steady growth, it also faces challenges from ongoing capital projects.

Key Takeaways

• Ryman anticipates RevPAR growth between 2.25% and 4.75% for 2025, despite disruptions.
• The company maintains a strong balance sheet with $1.2 billion in available liquidity.
• Opry Entertainment Group may separate from the hotel REIT to enhance shareholder value.
• Ryman’s group business benefits from long-term contracts and high customer retention.

Financial Results

• RevPAR Growth: Expected between 2.25% and 4.75% for 2025, with a midpoint of 3.5%.
• Adjusted EBITDA: Projected between $749 million and $800 million.
• AFFO: Estimated between $510 million and $555 million.
• Dividend: Maintained at $1.15 per quarter, representing a payout rate over 50%.
• Net Leverage: Ended the year at 3.9 times trailing adjusted EBITDA.
• Available Liquidity: $1.2 billion, including $478 million in unrestricted cash.

Operational Updates

• Capital Deployment: Investments in expansions and renovations across the portfolio until 2027.
• Group Business: 74% of revenue comes from the group segment, with a three-year booking window.
• Customer Retention: 69% of groups are retained, having met with Ryman in the last two years.
• Gaylord Rockies & Palms: Renovations and expansions to attract higher-rated corporate groups.

Future Outlook

• Supply Demand Dynamic: Favorable conditions with limited supply of large meeting facilities.
• Capital Strategy: Focus on internal capital deployment rather than recycling.
• Strategic Acquisitions: Targeting accretive acquisitions in the large group business.
• Opry Entertainment Group: Potential separation from the hotel REIT to maximize value.

Q&A Highlights

• Revenue Outside Rooms: "We generate about 1.5 times our room’s revenue outside the room," noted CEO Fioravanti.
• Shareholder Returns: Since becoming a REIT, Ryman has achieved a 14.1% annualized total shareholder return.
• Balance Sheet Strength: CFO Hutchison emphasized the company’s strong balance sheet and liquidity to support growth initiatives without additional equity issuance.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript of the conference call below.

Full transcript - Raymond James & Associates’ 46th Annual Institutional Investors Conference 2025:

Operator: Good morning, everybody, and thank you for coming out. I know, Wednesday morning is a lot after a busy week, but we appreciate you guys attending. We’re very happy to have Ryman Hospitality Properties here presenting. We’re going to have an overview of the company, and then we’re going to open it up to Q and A. So feel free to raise your hand as we go through the presentation, and we’ll get all of your questions answered.

And so I’d like to turn it over to Ryman. Thank you guys for attending.

Mark Fioravanti, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Thank you. Thanks for having us. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for being here. I’m Mark Fioravanti.

I’m the President and Chief Executive Officer of Ryman. And I’m joined by Jen Hutchison, our Chief Financial Officer. So we’ll take you through a quick overview of the company, as he said, and then we can answer some questions. And I think there’s a breakout session as well after. So the Ryman is composed of essentially two businesses.

Our largest business is our hotel business. It is a unique platform that services the large group, large group industry. And what really makes it unique is, there’s a couple of factors. First, we’re the only group focused publicly traded REIT. We’re in five of the top 10.

We have five of the top 10 largest non gaming meeting facilities in The U. S. We’re in five of the top 15 markets. In fact, we’re in four of the top eight, the fifteenth market being San Antonio with the JW Marriott that we purchased last year. One of the unique features of our operations is the amount of meeting space we have per room.

We have two sixty square feet per guest room. Our competitors average about 150 square feet. And what that allows us to do, you’ll see the segmentation at the bottom. It allows us to drive about 74% of our business from the group segment. And there’s a lot of benefits to have that heavy group waiting.

We’ll share that with you in a few minutes. Our hotels are all under one roof. So we have meeting space rooms, food and beverage spa, retail, etcetera. And what that allows us to do is to drive a significant amount of spending outside the room. We generate about 1.5 times our room’s revenue outside the room.

And so we’re capturing a greater share of the consumer’s wallet when they’re on property. And then lastly, what’s unique about our structure is the fact that we have a single manager, which is Marriott International. Many of our peers have multiple brands and multiple managers as they try to, they view it as a risk to have a single manager. We view it as a strength because it allows us to capitalize on the rotational nature of these large groups and service them consistently across the portfolio and ultimately maximize the total revenue that the portfolio can create. Other businesses is our entertainment business, Opry Entertainment Group.

We have a very privileged position in live entertainment and specifically in country music. We have some of the most iconic brands in country music. This is a Nashville based company that’s in live entertainment, as well as we create some content around country music. And we’ll talk a little bit about this. We own 70% of this business in conjunction with Ateros, which is a private equity firm whose primary backer is Comcast.

And we also have a direct investment from NBCUniversal, and we partner with them on a number of different opportunities from a media perspective. In terms of investment highlights that we’ll kind of take you through as a part of this presentation, I would tell you that we ultimately drive sustainable earnings. We’ve driven sustainable growth. And when we walk you through some of our capital programs and plans, you’ll see that we’ve been very efficient in how we deploy capital and generate returns. We have a management team, proven track record.

We have we service attractive customer segments in both our businesses. And we’ve driven growth both in our hotel business as well as in the entertainment business. In terms of the management’s track record, the management team who operate Ryman today are the same team that created the Gaylord brand and built, built this hotel brand physically. So we have a tremendous amount of expertise as it relates to the large group business. And we think that that’s one of our competitive advantages as a management team.

We have been judicious in how we deploy capital, and you can see how that’s manifested itself in terms of our returns. Since we converted to a REIT in 2013, we’ve generated a annualized total shareholder return of approximately 14.1%, which is far in excess of our peers. And you can see our dividend growth rates and AFFO share per share growth rates there as well. Again, significantly better than full service lodging REITs. So we feel very good about our success thus far.

And we feel like the model that we’ve created and and have been talking about since we converted is continuing to bear fruit and demonstrate the strength and uniqueness of our operating model. In terms of how we deploy capital, obviously dividends is really the first and foremost use as part as being a REIT. We do distribute 100% of our REIT taxable income. We declared a first quarter dividend of $1.15 dollars which puts us on a run rate of about 7.5% based on our or excuse me, about 4.7% in terms of a dividend yield. And we’ve generated a 7.5% growth rate since we converted in our dividend.

We have a number of enhancement opportunities in our hotels, both in terms of the physical facilities, in terms of servicing the existing guests, as well as expansions to continue to grow our market share. We’ll talk a little bit about that. And then we’ve also done some limited acquisition work, most recently being the JW Marriott. That’s a very focused strategy for us. Our acquisitions will be in the large group business.

And we can talk a little bit about kind of what our strategic imperatives are there as we look at opportunities to grow through acquisition in the future. We do do ground up development, as I said, that our five existing Gaylord Hotels were ground up developments by the company. And we’ll talk a little bit about what that supply demand dynamic looks like and some of the challenges with development with assets this large and ultimately how it is a real competitive advantage for us in terms of barriers to entry going forward. And then lastly, obviously, if there’s an opportunistic use of cash to repurchase shares, we would consider that. But as we go through this presentation, you’ll see that with the capital deployment opportunities that our platform presents, we can generate, we think, significant returns to shareholders by deploying capital back into the business.

What you won’t see us do is capital recycling. We’re not a trader of assets like a typical lodging REIT. We don’t buy, try to predict a market buy, hold for a period of time and then sell. We really focus on creating long term value through by focusing on a large group customer, delivering value and ultimately continuing to deploy capital into those assets to build our competitive advantage and leverage that infrastructure to generate higher rates of return. And we think this is incredibly important because oftentimes it’s what you don’t do is more important than ultimately what you do do in your business.

And we’re very, very focused on that large group customer in a very specific strategy. Why we like the group customer? There’s a number of reasons. First of all, the visibility and stability that this segment provides, we have an average booking window of approximately three years as these large groups book years and years in advance. And those long term bookings are contractual.

So the majority of our business each and every year is contractual. And if those groups don’t perform, they either pay attrition or cancellation fees. And you can see on your right how those fees have helped buffer our profitability in terms of downturns. If you look at the great financial crisis, we captured we collected about $43,000,000 of cancellation fees during that period. And we captured over $180,000,000 of fees through COVID.

So this is an important an important characteristic for us in terms of having visibility into what our bookings look like over many, many years going forward. And then also as the travel date approaches, should those groups not perform, our ability to capture fees to help protect our profitability. In terms of how groups are performing currently, we look at a number of leading indicators. And as we looked at ’24 and really into the first quarter of twenty five, those indicators continue to look very positive for us. And the things that we look at are outside the room spending, how much groups are spending when they’re on property in terms of food and beverage and catering, AV revenue, etcetera.

That’s an indication of whether groups are continuing to spend or they’re beginning to pull back their spending in anticipation of a downturn. We look at meeting attendance. Obviously, if attrition rates are rising and fewer people are traveling, we begin to see that in our attrition rates as well as cancellations if groups are cutting costs and are canceling meetings. And those typically are occurring in the year for the year. Lastly is bookings production.

With that three year booking window, we have quite a lot of insight into how companies, meeting planners and associations are thinking about future periods. So we look at lead volumes. We look at what booking production is occurring, the length of time from lead to closure as well as rates. So there’s a number of ways that we can look at behavior to try to get a better understanding of how meeting planners and organizations are thinking about their future spend. We had an excellent year last year.

We booked 2,900,000 room nights for all future years at a record ADR of $282 So again, from a forward perspective, group demand continues to look very, very good. How this manifests itself in terms of pace, and this is an important slide for us as we look at the next five years, how our business is shaping up, how we think about our ability to drive pricing. You can see on the top slide, our same store revenue on the books year over year for T plus zero, which in this case T plus zero would be $20.25, T plus 126, etcetera, etcetera. You can see that we’re driving significant improvements in our overall production. We entered the year with 3% more revenue on the books than we entered 2024.

And we typically enter with about 50 points of occupancy already on the books. So two thirds of our occupancy as we enter a year is typically contracted and on the books. The bar chart below is the ADR growth. And this is also important. The relationship between those two, if you would look at 2026, we’re plus 11% in terms of revenue, plus 6% in terms of rate.

The differential there is where we’re at as it relates to occupancy. So about five points of that premium is driven by occupancy. Or in other words, from a room night sales perspective, we’re about 5% ahead of our pace as it relates to historic demand patterns. And what that tells you is, is that we’re in a position where we continue to can continue to push rate, as we sell into next year. The other thing that’s driving that rate growth year over year over year is our capital deployment strategy where we have been making enhancements to our portfolio to continue to improve the mix of higher rated groups and over time increase our average rate across the portfolio and drive more profitability.

Obviously, the flow through from rate is very, very high. Really your only incremental cost is the management fee to Marriott. Everything else would flow through the bottom line. So rate is an important component of our revenue model. The other thing that’s driving some of this growth is the fact that we the segment, the group segment that we live in has a very favorable supply demand dynamic.

While group demand continues to grow and that growth continues to be in larger groups, there’s very, very limited supply. These are very difficult projects to build. They typically need government incentives. They’re typically more than $1,000,000,000 per copy. So if you look over the last twenty years or so, there have been nine of these projects built.

These are hotels with over 150,000 square feet of meeting space. We’ve built three of them. We acquired the fourth in the Hill Country. So of the nine over the last twenty years, we control four of them today. There’s only two currently under construction.

That is the Gaylord Pacific, which is a sister hotel of the brand, which we’re not an owner in, in Chula Vista, California, South Of San Diego, and a Kalahari Water Park outside of Virginia, which while it has more than 150,000 square feet of meeting space, it is a different consumer. So quickly moving to the platform, it is the asset itself in terms of how it’s built. It’s this retention focused business model that we have, where we rotate customers from year to year through the hotel, which creates a recurring revenue model for us, which we think is an important part of our model. And then the ability because of their scale and because of the fact that we rotate these customers, we have an opportunity to deploy capital at high returns and enhance these hotels. It’s very difficult to enhance a 300 room hotel that has limited facilities.

These are much larger, more dynamic facilities that you can continue to invest in and drive returns and leverage your existing infrastructure. From a revenue perspective, as I said, we have a we do have a recurring revenue model about 50% of our group business is multi year. It’s either multi year rotational as you see there at 31. So they go they rotate from year to year to market to market and about 21% are multi year at a single property. So we know these customers very well.

We have good relationships with these customers. And ultimately, they come back to us again and again. About 69% of our groups are retained in that they’ve had a meeting with us in the last two years. And so when you aggregate that with with the with our multi year leisure guest, which is about 16% of our leisure consumers, about 50% of our revenue is recurring revenue. It’s these are customers that we see with high frequency and we have very strong relationships with.

As I said, our capital deployment strategy is an important part of our not only the returns, but also of creating value for our group customer and moving that rate over time. And we’ve announced and are in the midst of a kind of a multiyear capital program. And this chart just shows you where we’re investing across the portfolio between now and 2027. It’s a combination of expansions and room renovations, meeting space renovations and new food and beverage. Each of these hotels has unique opportunities and needs.

And so through research with our consumers and looking at the operating data, we make decisions and deploy capital into each of those to try to maximize the value and the revenue and profitability potential of each one individually. What’s consistent here is that we want to be able to deliver a consistent product across all of our hotels so that as these groups rotate, they’re getting the same high quality experience that they would expect from a Gaylord Hotel. Just to show you a few shots of some of the most recent work, this is Gaylord Rockies. We made a number of changes here. We, you can see on the top left, that’s the Grand Lodge, the center of the, really the heart of the hotel.

In its original design, all the, this is the corner of Main Street and Main Street as it relates to the hotel. And all that space was theming with a, kind of an indoor lake and circulation area plantings, etcetera. And we’ve converted that now into sellable space, increasing our food and beverage capacity and taking space that didn’t generate revenue and now generates revenue and profitability through incremental spending. On your right is a 26,000 square foot events pavilion, again adding another offering and increasing our ability to, for group capacity. And then we’ve added food and beverage seats with some new food and beverage concepts here at the Rockies.

All of these things are in preparation longer term to expand this hotel. This is a 1,500 room hotel in Denver, Colorado. We think that over time, it can become a 2,500 room hotel and drive more and more meeting space. Denver has been a terrific market. They have incredible airlift for groups to get in and out.

It’s a very desirable location for groups. So we’re really here where we’re priming this hotel ultimately for an expansion. We just completed a full rooms and lobby renovation at Gaylord Palms. Here’s just a few shots. You can see the before picture of the room on your left.

And then on your right, the new room as well as the new lobby area. This is this hotel is in Orlando, very successful hotel here in Orlando. And it really repositions this hotel to capture higher rated corporate groups. And the reception to these changes has been very, very good from the meeting planner and from attendees. So this is the JW Marriott.

This is our really our first acquisition in Gaylord Hotels. We purchased this hotel in mid-twenty twenty three. And the reason that we like this hotel is, as I said earlier, it checks all of our strategic boxes. When you think about the facility and what it has and the opportunities that it provides us to add value post acquisition. 1,000 rooms, 60% group.

It’s in a top meetings market that is under, with an airport that’s under a dramatic expansion in terms of airlift capabilities, as well as it’s a market that is a net beneficiary of kind of the economic migration that’s happening as it relates to San Antonio. It’s Marriott managed. So there are portfolio, synergies for us, both operationally as well as from a customer and revenue perspective. And it’s an area where it’s a business where we can apply our group expertise to create value. So as we check through those things, it checks all of our boxes.

In addition to that, it was an acquisition that we were able to purchase at an accretive purchase price. And that’s obviously an important aspect to our acquisition criteria as well. So we’ve operated this now for about a year and a half. We’re in the process of beginning to make some of the physical changes. We’re master planning it for ultimately for a potential expansion, potentially adding 300 or so rooms here and more meeting space.

And but we’re very, very excited about the long term value creation opportunity here. Just a second for those of you who aren’t familiar with Opry Entertainment Group. This is our entertainment business that represents about 15% of our company. It is in a very privileged position in country music. We own probably two of the most iconic brands in the country space, the Grand Ole Opry as well as the Ryman Auditorium.

Essentially, the strategy here is to serve the artist as well as the music fan across a variety of platforms. And we really focus on that country lifestyle consumer, whether that’s in venues, food and beverage, or whether that’s in media and content creation. As I mentioned, our partner, Eteros, NBCUniversal, we sold them 30% of the business and helped us mark this business to market. They’re also a strategic partner. We’ve done a number of things with them, particularly with NBC, in terms of creation of the People’s Choice Country Awards, things like Opry Christmas specials.

We’re celebrating the Opry one hundredth birthday this year. Later this month, we’ll have a three hour NBC special celebrating that birthday live. We’re taking the Opry to The UK in the fall at Royal Albert Hall. We will likely broadcast that show as well as a way to build some brand presence in Northern Europe where country music is quite popular. We’re very, very excited about our position in this market.

And like the group business, the live entertainment business, the live entertainment business is growing very, very healthy. And when you talk to consumers, live entertainment spending is one of their top discretionary items and one of the last things that they will reduce in a downturn. So we like the durability and the growth in live entertainment. Long term, we think this business should be separated from the hotel REIT. There’s no strategic reason for this property to be within the REIT.

It’s a legacy business. And we think we can maximize value from a shareholder perspective by creating two independent businesses. Let me just turn this over to Jennifer. She’s going to take you through balance sheet and talk a little bit about guidance for this year.

Jennifer Hutchison, Chief Financial Officer, Ryman Hospitality Properties: Great. I know we just have a few more minutes in this room, but just a quick overview of our balance sheet and our financial position. Balance sheet is in really good shape. The message here is that we’ve got the capability, the balance sheet, the liquidity to be able to support

Mark Fioravanti, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ryman Hospitality Properties: the

Jennifer Hutchison, Chief Financial Officer, Ryman Hospitality Properties: growth capital initiatives that Mark covered without having to issue additional equity. We ended the year with about $1,200,000,000 in available liquidity. That’s $478,000,000 of unrestricted cash. And in addition to that, have $99,000,000 of restricted cash set aside in FF and E escrow accounts to also contribute to funding a lot of the capital initiatives from a maintenance and FF and E standpoint. Debt maturity ladder is very manageable, got a nearly five year average weighted average maturity there.

Most of our debt being at fixed rates, 85% of that, and through secured unsecured instruments. Net leverage is also well within our target range. We ended the year at 3.9 times trailing adjusted EBITDA, and that’s in the context of our target of four to 4.5 times. And then lastly, 2025 guidance and our outlook for where we might finish the year financially, at the top line, estimating RevPAR growth of 2.25% to 4.75% over 2024 or 3.5% at the midpoint. And to give you some context on that, I think the broader lodging outlook is about 2%.

So and that is for our portfolio even considering the relative impact of the near term disruption of some of the projects we have going on this year, that estimated RevPAR impact in the range of 2.5 to three and a half two fifty to three fifty basis points, That’s considered within the 3.5% year over year RevPAR growth guidance that we have for 2025. On a total RevPAR basis, that range is 1.75 to 4.25% or 3%. Just take into the account that our mix of business this year within our group segment had a very strong mix of corporate business in 2024, and we have more normalized mixes in 2025. That puts us generating consolidated adjusted EBITDA in the range of $749,000,000 to $8.00 $1,000,000 this year and flowing down to AFFO of about $510,000,000 to $555,000,000 As Mark mentioned, we have a dividend today at 1.15 per quarter. And taking into account this guidance for 2025 would still put us at an over 50% payout rate.

So I think we might be right at time. This presentation is available on our Investor Relations site. So you have all this information if you want to refer to it later. And I’ll turn it back over to you, RJ.

Operator: Great. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, Mark. We are going to conclude here just given time, but we do have a breakout session downstairs in Cordova 5.

So please join us down there for some Q and A. Thank you.

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