Panel here, which is our REIT panel. I'm very excited to have both Ryman and DiamondRock here today. Really, I think that where I'd like to start off here is that we often hear that REITs get bucketed into a single category, a single macro category. I think that each of you have a very different business in a lot of ways. Maybe if you could just talk to what sets each of the companies apart from just the broader REIT universe, and then also maybe a little bit about some of the strategic priorities that you're pursuing that you think will continue to differentiate the businesses. I'll start closest. I was going to say any of my cynicism doesn't apply to Mark here. I would say, particularly when you look at the public market for hotel REITs, and I do sort of put Ryman in its own special category. When you look at it, the majority of the companies that are out there tend to be brand managed, and that's where we, I think, are a little bit different. We really ascribe to have more flexibility and control in our portfolios. We have about 95% of our hotels unencumbered by brand management. We also have about a third of the portfolio that's just independent of brand. Again, that comes back to control, whether it's the strategic direction of your asset, control over CapEx, cash at the properties. We tend to be able to drive better margins. That, to be clear, is not the same for every asset that exists in the industry. It's for the types of assets that we go after that we think we can be more profitable. That's how we really differentiate ourselves versus our peers. For Ryman, we operate two very unique businesses. Our core business, the hotel business, we focus on large destination assets that really service the group customer, and then also the leisure transient customer. We also own and operate an entertainment business that's focused on the country lifestyle consumer. Two businesses that are very focused on very specific consumer groups, very unique assets, really irreplaceable assets. From a brand perspective, it's another thing that makes us unique. All of our hotels are branded with and operated by Marriott. Having that single owner and manager is an important part of what we do because about 66% of our revenue is recurring as we rotate these customers from market to market by year. Having consistent ownership where you have the economics aligned and having consistent management where you have the same service model is critically important for us. What do you think is the most important KPI that you track, and maybe what is the most overlooked KPI that you'd want investors to think about? For us, in terms of what we look at and think about every day is really our booking pace. As we look long term, what does that book of business look like when you look out over the next four, five, six, 10 years? What rate is it trading at, and are we on the right demand curve to hit the beginning of the year at 50 points of occupancy? We enter the year with 50 points on the books. Yeah. In the short run, we really monitor group behavior, lead volume, outside the room spending, those types of attrition and cancellation behavior. That really gives us the shorter-term view of what's happening in our business. Yeah, I would say it's not too dissimilar. We're not as group-heavy as Ryman is, but we're about a third of our portfolio is group, and we enter the year with about 70% of our business for the year on the books. It is booking pace that's where you begin to see hotel folks get more confident when they feel like they're getting a little more confidence or visibility, I should say, in the future. It even matters on traditionally transient hotels. A lot of our resort properties, we do not rely on group business, so you can ultimately sort of yield manage to higher profitability, I think, over time. The booking windows are different for that than it is a large group that you folks would have. No, I think booking pace is a big part of that. At a very macro level, it's going to be things like private fixed investment, big one, employment tends to be a big driver of demand in the industry. I thought you might take it a different way. We had earlier, somebody brought up in our private equity panel that they're saying RevPAR sounds great, booking sounds good, but wages going up in a number of markets, cost to renovate, cost to build going up. ROI was something that they were trying to ask. Are you seeing any improvement there? How do you think about effectively return on invested capital and the trajectory there, and what's going to drive that? It's a big focus for us. We, in the last two or three years, have really become to the point of being accused of being a bit of a broken record, really kind of a free cash flow per share driven business. There's a lot of steps that we can take, whether it's distancing ourselves in some situations where frankly, being branded doesn't work for that hotel, or it's just trying to be much more cost-effective around the capital that's required at those properties. Because the CapEx that's oftentimes required by a brand to be consistent with their brand standard does not make sense for every hotel. It will make sense for some, but not all. We try to be diligent about where we choose to brand and where we choose not to. I would say an ROI standpoint, I think that's where you will see more variation or polarization to whether it pencils or not. Yeah, look, to the point you made, costs are increasing, right? If you look at our advanced bookings, we're growing rate at mid-single digits out for the next several years, and that's really being driven by a couple of factors. One, in our segment, there's really no new supply. These are really tough assets to build. They take a long time, and they require incentives. The other aspect is from our capital deployment strategy, having these big platforms allows us to deploy incremental capital into these hotels to drive high return projects. That's what's really driving a lot of our rate growth. As we position these properties more and more up the premium scale, we can drive higher rates. We heard from that panel too, broad-based strength across a bunch of different types of portfolios. How would you characterize the health of the industry now and the sustainability of some of the trends we perhaps seen? I would say that I think what's, surprise is maybe too strong of a word, but I think what's been beneficial this year is it feels to me that this is the first time in five years where we've had effectively every demand channel working in the same direction. Business transient, leisure transient, and group. If you go back to the last five years, there was certainly that time in 2021, 2022, when it was all about leisure. Yeah. Just took off. As people came back to the office, you saw corporate transient and group roar back, and then you could see markets like Florida begin to retrace a little bit. It just feels like this year we came in with really sort of broad-based strength. When you think about a hotel over the course of a seven-day period, you can't sort of kill it from just getting five nights during the workweek or two nights on the weekend. You really have to have all the days of the week working, and so I think that's been one of the reasons why you've had a little bit of an inflection this year in fundamentals. It feels like you're finally sort of finding a normal that's more like the days pre-pandemic. Look, group has continued to perform well, whether it's short term when you look at attrition rates or you look at outside the room spending. We continue to see groups turning up and spending. Lead volumes are good. We're seeing good rates in terms of future bookings. Outside the room spending has been terrific. Group is healthy. We've seen a good demand out of leisure. Spring break was positive. Summer seems to be shaping up, and we'll see. For us, the holiday period, as you know, is an important part of our year. We'll see how that performs in the fourth. Mark, just to dig in there a little bit on the group side. Somebody had referenced earlier, I keep going back to another panel. I'm sorry. It'll be interesting to hear your perspective here because there was a comment about the type of group has changed. They were seeing actually weaker trends in smaller groups, but very strong trends in larger groups. I guess, are you seeing that same dynamic play out? Is there a shift in that group mix between association, large corporates, or other? Well, I would tell you, I wouldn't call the small group demand weak. What we've seen over the last several years is that most of the growth that's occurring in group business is in large group. There are more of them, the large groups are getting larger. As you look at the business that we're in, with anywhere from 400,000 to 700,000 sq ft of meeting space, that large group is really our core customer. We've seen that for, gosh, the last three or four years. If you look at the STR data, you'll see the same thing, where growth in group is in that big meeting segment. As demand trends have strengthened, are you seeing any change in the transaction markets that comes along with it? I'd defer to you. Yeah. No, because we have a very. Yeah. Set of criteria. Do you not buy any one of these every quarter? No. No, there's definitely been an inflection. We were earlier today over at the NYU Hotel Conference, and I would say it's a pretty striking difference that if you think of the industry events that tend to bring all the brokers and owners together, it's NYU now, and then it's the ALIS conference in January out in Los Angeles. I would say the prior three conferences, in early and mid 2025 and also early 2026, it felt like they were recycling the same sort of book of offerings. This is the first one where there's definitely a lot more enthusiasm. One of the brokers said that their activity is up 40% year to date. It definitely feels like things are turning a corner. Some of that is when you think of it versus last year, call it April to April. Last year when you had liberation Day, I feel like it had multiple impacts on our industry, where we are seeing sort of peak all-time lead volume for group, but very low conversion to someone wanting to sign a contract because there was just a lot of uncertainty in the industry with tariffs. That if you're planning like a big trade association event or what have you. At the same time, interest rate spreads blew out on hotels, and it took a while. It felt like the stock market recovered, and we're still watching that spread come back down. It just really made transactions difficult, and now you're coming into this year where, yes, borrowing rates are probably 150 basis points tighter than they were this time last year, and there's a lot more visibility on booking trends and patterns this year than there was last year. It definitely is somewhat a sharp sea change. I think you were talking earlier, there's probably two dozen sort of upper upscale luxury assets in the marketplace right now. That is more than I've seen in some time, and they're probably all spoken for. Oh, wow. Do you want to sell into that strength, or are you more likely to be still interested in acquisitions? It's a little bit of both. Frankly, we have more lines in the water than I think we've had historically for disposing of assets. We sold one, the small one earlier this year here in New York. We continue to look at selling assets, but we're also trying to be acquisitive in situations where we can recycle that capital into something that'll grow a little faster if it's not our own shares. On the recycling of capital front, maybe moving just to spending on the existing portfolio, what are some of the biggest ROI projects you're each working on, and how do you think about prioritizing where you are spending those dollars? Yes. Probably our biggest enhancement project right now is at Opryland. We're building about 110,000 square feet of incremental meeting space. We just finished a large food and beverage and events lawn complex, and we're in the middle of a full ballroom renovation. So we've got, in total, that's probably a quarter of a billion dollars that we're spending across all those projects at Opryland with the intention of bringing Opryland, its fit and finish, up to the level of the rest of the portfolio. That hotel will be 50 years old next year. To begin to remix that hotel for more premium groups, premium corporate business, that's why we're building the breakout space, but also premium across all segments. Begin to shed some of the lower-rated business that might be in that hotel and get higher-rated association, higher-rated SMERF groups, et cetera. Does that move across the portfolio, or do you think that'll end up being incremental? You can find those new kind of. We can- those folks. We can find new meetings, but it's also about rotating premium groups that are in our other hotels, like at the Rockies, who don't rotate through Opryland. They'll now begin to do that. We're seeing that happen. For us, for example, last year around this time, we put a property under the knife. We own hotels in Sedona that we ended up upscaling and effectively consolidating them. They were two adjacent hotels, but at very different price points. One was sort of $1,000-$1,200 a night, and one was about $300. It was sort of bringing the $300 one up to the level of the higher-end one. I think publicly, we've said it would be sort of a low double-digit IRR or cash yield on that, and it's been surpassing that right out of the block. That can be very impactful. I mean, from a dollar spend standpoint, it can be a fraction of what you guys are spending. From an impact to our bottom line, it can be very significant if you're kind of earning a double-digit return on that, it can add a couple of points to your EBITDA growth. In my intro remarks this morning, I highlighted that lodging was one of the best-performing sectors within gaming, lodging, leisure broadly. It's also outperformed the S&P 500. I think that the hotel REIT space has gotten a little bit of a rap that there's something broken as being a public REIT versus perhaps either being private or otherwise. How do you think about the pros and cons of being a public company hotel REIT, and how has that changed over time? Look, I think that for the types of assets that we own, the public structure is the right structure, given the size of these assets, the concentration that you have. I think they're typically not assets that private equity want to hold. From the perspective of being a hotel REIT, one of the things that I would love to accomplish is getting people being to think about us a little bit differently than a pure hotel REIT. Just because of the nature of our business, some of the characteristics of it, the growth, the stability, it performs more like an infrastructure REIT, frankly, than it does. a hotel REIT. I've watched this industry for a very long time, and I think 10, 20 years ago or longer, it was sort of sufficient just to be branded. That was kind of the differentiator, if you will. Right. We're to own large assets or to own luxury assets, I think there was this implied faith that ultimately the owner was somewhat passive in that equation. You're entrusting the brand to go to do the right thing for you. I would say that, being a little facetious, but I would say that there's many times where the brands are doing the right things for their system, but that doesn't mean that it's good for me. At the end of the day, I always joke that I'm the capitalist, I don't have to believe in their socialism. It just depends where you want to place your bets. I think that what's changed in the REIT space, there's no question, it's been a difficult performer, you guys accepted, and over the last few years. I think that that's changing, because I think the market has to realize that it is an active investment strategy, that you need to be much more hands-on in influencing what's going on at the property level, and also taking a different view on branding and management. It's all about trying to drive value there constantly, as opposed to just entrusting that a third party is going to do it in your best interest. Is bargaining power improving from an owner standpoint with the brands? I think so. We just actually had a franchise agreement at our Westin in Boston come up. It's a 800-room hotel at the convention center. It's probably a top 25 convention center market, and there was extraordinarily robust demand because you know they're very focused on unit growth. I do think there's a lot more flexibility that we as owners can have. That's one of the things that really differentiates us versus a lot of the more conventional full-service folks, is that about a third of our portfolio is unbranded and the majority are not brand managed. To the extent that it's appealing for someone to take key money, that's an option that you have with our assets that you don't have with our peers. Mark, how do you think about the relationship with Marriott and how that's evolved over time? As I said earlier, the manager relationship with us is critical because we operate these as a single portfolio, really as a single almost operating business. So who we have and what their relationship is with the meeting planners and their reputation is critical. This goes all the way back to when we converted from an operating company to a REIT in 2012, where we did a significant amount of primary research with meeting planners, and Marriott was consistently ranked as the number 1 manager for large meetings, and it's part of what drove us to select them as our manager. I think that given the uniqueness of our portfolio, the scale of it, and the capital that we deploy into those assets, it does give us a lot of leverage and buying power with Marriott. The relationship is quite good, and overall, they do a tremendous job. Jeff, you have a chart in your deck, I think, showing higher EBITDA for key third-party managed properties. Now, every asset's a little bit different, and it seems like that's clear from either dichotomy between the two businesses. Are there situations where brand managed makes sense in your portfolio? Oh, for sure. The property that really kind of leaps to mind is we only have two that are brand managed, but our Chicago Marriott, it's 1,200 keys. It's on Michigan Avenue. It's a tremendous amount of meeting space. It's unlike the rest of the assets in our portfolio, but that's where I would call Marriott's sweet spot. They do a very good job in that sort of big box experience. No different than the Marquis next door, for example. I think that's where they're very good in sort of leaning into that. I think the reason why we would always say that it's just a choice at the end of the day is that I would use the example of just because you went there for a conference doesn't mean I want to stay at a Marriott in Sedona at the end of the day. I want something that's more authentic when I'm in those leisure destinations. That's why I say, for us, it's just a choice depending on what the asset is. In a situation like our Chicago property, they do a very good job. I can tell you that we've eclipsed where we were pre-pandemic, and we're one of the stronger performing group assets in that market. Jeff, I want to go back to something you said about the transaction market, both being interested in buying and selling, and more lines out there. What markets or property types, if you had your druthers, would you want to be seeing more of? If price was no object, I would buy independent resorts. I say if price was no object, because that's probably where the gap is widest. Some of the assets we were talking about earlier today, they're sort of 5% and 6% cap rates. Think of that as almost 20 times EBITDA. We trade at probably 8.5-9 cap right now. I guess I would say I'm speaking my book, but we probably have more leisure assets and resort assets than anybody, and yet we actually trade at one of the greatest discounts to our implied. It's not a leverage question. We have one of the lower leverage balance sheets, too. I think it's just how people bucket hotels, and they kind of just put the same multiple on everybody. Right. They assume there's not much difference. Yeah, I would say the independent side, it just gives us much more control. I think in your segment, the CapEx investments are great because you're a really unique niche that you can monetize that. I think in lots of cities where the brands tend to mandate renovations every seven years. The time clock doesn't always make sense, candidly. You could be the best performing asset in the market, you don't need to renovate. Right. They're very time-based, and that's where it's just we tend to have a lot of friction with that view that you have to be reinvesting, whether or not the asset needs it or whether or not it will benefit. Are there operational flexibility that comes with that as well as you think about independence and that exposure? Oh, for sure. We can influence what staffing will be, and that really is beneficial with margins. To your point about when we look at our independent hotels, that our margins tend to be much better. One of the unique things about our portfolio, given the scale and the scale of the projects that we work on, we do most of that internally. We really drive timing of spend, how dollars are spent, both in terms of maintenance as well as enhancements. We have internal design and construction teams that manage. We manage all our own room renovations, design, et cetera. We've taken control of that part of the value creation. Mark, going back to the Opryland renovation, or I should say convention expansion, will that be something that we should then assume will build over time because of the long lead times of some of these groups? Well, we start selling meeting space the day that we approve it and start construction. Okay. Sales teams have sales goals for that expanded space. They're selling off of renderings and doing site visits and walkthroughs during construction. In most cases, when we open incremental rooms or we open incremental meeting space, it really almost opens the utilization. That's great. Other topic du jour is around AI. Are you seeing any change in either customer behavior or even any thoughts that you have on the long-term impact from AI on either demand or margins? Whether it's AI, or I'll just call it technology, because I do think there will be some aspect. When I say like robotics, I don't mean like humanoids walking around, but whether it's something as simple as a Roomba. You've got to meet Adam Jonas, our thematics analyst. He will tell you all about humanoid robots coming. Yeah. I do think that when you look across the industry, that the opportunity is probably greatest for owners. I don't say that just because we're talking our book. I just feel like when you think about the owner, we're the beneficiary of the revenue and the expense savings. I think when you think about lodging, it's one of the higher cost to operate segments of real estate. When you just think about the broader real estate sector, any office building out the window has no employees in it. I mean, employees of the office building itself, maybe no employees otherwise. Same thing with retail apartments. I think we have more inefficiency that can be solved. I think on the revenue side, it's the same. I think that will ultimately be propelled by owners in some way, shape, or form, because a lot of the brands and our third-party managers, they're all paid off the top line. I don't know. I haven't seen many brands expend a lot of money on trying to find ways to save owners money. They tend to just think about driving top line. I think that the AI beneficiary, whether it's labor management or sort of complex jobs that, like accounting type jobs at the property that might get consolidated, I think those will accrue to the owner's benefit. Yeah. Look, for us, again, because of the lead time and selling rooms 8-10 years in advance, we think that ultimately there's a lot of opportunity for us in terms of pricing and yielding and how do you maximize revenue? It's a pretty complex yield management exercise for us because of the amount of inventory that we're selling at any given time. Right. Being able to crunch big data and with a lot of variables, AI should be helpful. A bit of a back and forth in terms of will AI reduce jobs? Will it add jobs? Are you seeing any signs in your business, whether it's maybe leads that are coming from new AI startups or otherwise? You mean in terms of are bookings coming through LLMs, or do you mean? No actually the employers themselves or? Yeah, employers themselves or even if you just see any kind of change in corporate demand one way or another that could be associated to it. If you look in a market like San Francisco, There's a variety of reasons why San Francisco is working. It's fallen so far that it's effectively concerned. I think there's a lot more enthusiasm in the San Francisco market around AI. We have a property in Sausalito, sort of under the Golden Gate Bridge that does a lot of midweek group for tech companies, like the 50 to 100 person offsite. Yeah. You see a lot of the who's who of technology companies go there for meetings. Thank you. We haven't really seen it in our hotel business that much in terms of changing consumer behavior at this point. We're obviously experimenting with it in a variety of ways as it relates to the pricing. Then, in our entertainment business, we've started to deploy, particularly around things like dynamic pricing. How we market to concertgoers, and those types of opportunities. We've gone to a fully automated call center in our entertainment business now. Since you're talking about the entertainment business, perhaps you can set the stage a little bit for folks that are less familiar or maybe more focused on the lodging side of the space. Just what are the various brands and platforms that you own and operate? It sounded like in the last call you were a little bit more excited about that business or positive about that business. What are you seeing there? Well, we've always been positive and excited about the business. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Opry Entertainment Group, it is a live entertainment business that's really focused on the country music consumer. We own a number of highly acclaimed brands, specifically the Grand Ole Opry, the Ryman Auditorium, Austin City Limits Live, in Austin, Texas. We have a number of verticals that all service that same customer, where we're in the venues business. We're in the artist partnership business. We have a brand with Blake Shelton called Ole Red and another called with Luke Combs. We're in the festivals and amphitheater business as well as the content creation business. All of those verticals really focus on that singular customer, the country music fan. It's a genre that's growing rapidly along with, obviously, with Nashville, as a tourism market, but also just as a city that's attracting a lot of high-quality employers. That's a business that we've owned and operated forever. It was 100 years old last year. We operate in a TRS, and it's about 15% of our revenue and 15% of our EBITDA. For 100 years, how would you characterize the competitive moat of that business? How does it remind us of the interplay with the hotel side of the business? Are these totally run separate or there's still synergies within them? Well, they are run separately. With Marriott as our manager and us operating the entertainment business where we have opportunities to work together, primarily Opryland and the Grand Ole Opry, because they're geographically next to each other. Those are all just arm's length commercial transactions. It's an incredibly unique business. As I said, country music's growing very rapidly. Ultimately, our view of the business is that it shouldn't be in a TRS inside of a hotel REIT. As it continues to scale, ultimately we'll separate that business in one form or fashion and let it stand on its own. An incredible collection of brands in a really rapidly growing market. Maybe you can elaborate on that a little bit since you talked about scaling it up. What does normalized margin for this business look like? That business today runs in the high 20s in terms of EBITDA margin. I think over time as it grows, depending on which of those verticals contributes to that growth over time, you'll continue to see that margin in the, I would say, in the mid-20s over time. We've scaled the infrastructure of that business to the point now where when we're adding incremental units, we don't need to add incremental corporate capabilities. Yeah. It'll be a step function over time, but we have a Category 10 right now under construction in Las Vegas. We've announced one in Orlando, and we have a new Ole Red that we're doing with the organization in Indianapolis. We'll be able to bring those units online without driving a lot of incremental corporate costs. Right. We'll start to get some operating leverage. Great. We only got a couple minutes left. I can go to some of my lightning round questions for everybody, but if anyone has a question in the audience, we can do that as well. Got one right here. Hi. This is more of a general REIT question than hotel specific, perhaps. We've seen REITs become a big part of the hotel industry, the casino gaming industry. I'm just wondering why it hasn't become a big part of the amusement park industry, the theme park industry. Are there any. I don't know the amusement park business all that well. I think it's honestly the capital investment in order to keep amusement parks interesting. What little I know of it is just from people I know who've been in the business. Amusement parks sort of thrive on having the hot new rollercoaster, the hot new thing, and the capital investment cycle is very intense. Would you include water parks in there? Water parks are very low CapEx requirement. The other is that compared to the number of hotels in the country, there's not many of them. Concentrated. There's not many of them, but we don't see REITs in any of them. Yeah. Gaming, right? Not so much amusement parks. Okay, thank you. Maybe stay tuned. In terms of the questions that I had, we'll try to keep it tight here, but industry demand, a lot of back and forth. Do you generally think that as we look over the next couple of years, are you more constructive on the trajectory that we could be on, equally constructive or less constructive based on what you're seeing right now? I mean yeah we're certainly more constructive, particularly in our segment. Yeah There's really no new supply coming online. Group demand continues to grow, and so we think we're set up extremely well for the next couple of years. No, I would say the same. I think when I look at our portfolio, while we're roughly in thirds in terms of our business mix between leisure and business transient and group, when you think about the group fundamentals continue to look very good. We've eclipsed prior peaks on demand at higher and higher rates. It's hard to see how that changes. We don't have the visibility that he does, just given the scale of their assets. They tend to have a much longer booking window. I think the trends look good. The part that really makes me enthusiastic and why I was saying independent resorts is that just demographically, you have these two bumps within the population. One is sort of an aging consumer that is at peak earnings and peak spending. They're taking more trips that are longer and spending more on them. At the same time, you have a younger generation that's probably someone in their 30s that also values experiences over things. We, as an industry, haven't built resorts in the country in 30 years. It's not all beachfront. We have stuff in Montana, and I said Sedona. It can be ski-related. It's an industry that has no supply growth, and demand is going to continue to outstrip, I think, inflation over the next few years on the leisure side. Yeah, look, I think you have to be careful that you don't lump all hotel REITs into the same category, right? The winners and losers are going to depend on the quality of the assets, the quality of the service that's delivered, and what's your unique positioning and are you servicing a consumer's needs or not? Right. The last one, and we talked about artificial intelligence, but let's try to narrow it down to a single kind of thing that you think will have the biggest impact. Is it going to be more top line or reducing costs or other? I think for us, top line will be where it will uniquely enhance our capabilities. We're not there yet. As I said earlier, having the ability to better yield manage over a long period of time, I think, can be very powerful for us. I'm mixed on that just because we already operate pretty deeply in three channels, when you think about it, at most of our hotels. I do think there's always opportunities to improve yield management, as long as the increment sort of flows to the owner and ownership, I think it will be beneficial. I think, as I said, on the operations side, any given hotel in the U.S. probably has seven to 10 software systems running, none of which talk to each other. When you sort of think of that as an example of how technology investment has happened in the hotel industry, historically, the brands didn't really focus on that. I think that's where there's just a lot of inefficiency in the business where it's not about replacing headcount. It's like you can provide better service effectively with a little AI investment or technology investment, and maybe it lowers your cost structure, or you can provide sort of for the same cost, a much higher level of service that I think that could benefit revenues as well, but I think it's going to be a mix for us. It's great to get both of your perspectives. Please join me in thanking Jeff and Mark for all their thoughts today. Thank you. Thank you.