Tom Bardenett Start out a little bit about telling you about RLJ, what we own, and our investment thesis. We'll talk a little bit about our multiple channels of growth and how we create shareholder value. We'll talk a little bit about our balance sheet and our strong, well-covered dividend to talk about the returns that you can expect. Before I do all of that, I just want to take a step back and talk about the lodging industry backdrop that we are a part of, and it's a very exciting time to be in lodging today. If you see our industry's performance so far this year, we've seen a lot of upside. The numbers have seen strong performance. Industry RevPAR, which is really a product of occupancy and rates, up nearly 5% through May. All of that really paints a good backdrop for our industry, which frankly, last year was a difficult backdrop because of Liberation Day, ICE raids in a number of markets, the government shutdown last year. All those things are behind us, and we're seeing a lot of positive momentum that's driven. I would also mention on the lodging front, when we think about fundamentals, we have the demand coming back, but the supply backdrop in our industry is extremely favorable. It used to be the supply growth was about 2% long-term average. Right now, we are averaging 0.5%, and we see that continuing on for a number of years going forward. As we think about the industry, I framed that for you. Within the industry, when you look at urban markets, and we'll talk a little bit about that because that's where our portfolio is concentrated. The demand-supply situation is even better. What I mean by that is if you look back between 2009 and 2019, supply growth was 3%-4% every year, and demand growth was also about the same. Today, it's the opposite. Supply growth is about 0.5%, 0.6% in urban markets, but you have demand coming back, especially because of what's happening on the business travel front and also on the leisure and urban leisure front. We'll talk a little bit about some of those trends that are out there. Just moving and touching upon these fundamentals a little bit more, I'm going to move to slide five in our investor deck, which is, by the way, also on our website. The slide here kind of ties into urban demand. We'll talk a little bit more about our portfolio in a minute. What is really driving the return of business travel, which is very important for us, about half of our business is business travel, is that non-residential fixed investment, which is the chart to your left, has been really ramping up. Driven by the growth of AI, driven by growth of manufacturing, and some of these other things. We think this is a sustainable trend. Companies will cut back on a lot of different things, but they will not cut back on technology because then you're just left behind. Business travel is a good positive trend and should be a sustained trend for a number of years, and we are seeing that translate into how our business travel is performing, which is the chart to the right. If you look at last year, we had some dips, mainly because of what was happening in the macro environment. Since fourth quarter of last year, we've seen business travel accelerate. It was nearly up 10% for us in Q1, and in April it was up 11%, and we think that that can continue. We're enthused by what we are seeing on the business travel front. Go to the next slide. Another element for us, given the nature of our portfolio, which is urban markets, is what's happening with urban leisure, and that's an important component. When we think about urban leisure, we think about experiential travel. That people visit a city for concerts, for sports, for different events, shows, all of those things. What we've found is the chart to the left kind of shows you that post-COVID, the consumer spend on experiences has really, especially things like sports and entertainment, has really ramped up. People are spending more on these events. What we've seen with our markets is that, not only are we seeing more events in our markets, we're also seeing that the attendance and the size of these events are increasing. As much as we think about, yes, there's a concern on the consumer side with inflation and all the other things, what we can say is that when we think about how our portfolio is leveraged to the consumer, we tend to operate in the top 10% or 15% of consumers. That's where the wealth effect is really helping us, so to speak, and we're seeing a lot of that spend, and you see that in the chart to the right. That is our urban leisure growth, which was up 3% in 2024. Last year, even with everything that was happening with the noise around all the macro events, we were still up roughly 3%, but this year it's accelerating up to 4.3%. We are seeing urban leisure perform very well for us. I'm going to stop for a second and just let my colleague, Tom, talk a little bit about another big event for us this year, which is the World Cup and the 250th anniversary of America, which kind of speaks to the other things that are yet to come and will drive our portfolio performance forward. Tom, if you want to just start on maybe slide seven. Thanks, Nikhil. What Nikhil is referencing with these events, I think it's interesting when you look at these logos here on the right-hand side. It's a great setup not only for 2026, but we also feel, based on our portfolio being the Smile of America in urban locations, we're near attractions on a regular basis because of our scale. For instance, and I'll talk about World Cup in a second, but the Super Bowl last year was in New Orleans where we have four assets, and this year it was in Northern California, San Francisco, where we actually have 12 assets in and around the East and West Bay Area. We also get the benefit of many major events that are happening outside of what he talked about, meaning concerts and sporting events, whether it's Final Four, March Madness, the variety of golf tournaments that occur that continue to rotate around the country. When we think about Super Bowl as an example, next year it's in L.A., then we have the Olympics in 2028. When we think about our portfolio and our scale, we get the benefit of these every year. It's a matter of where those rotate and where they go. Specifically, the World Cup, because we're in the heart of it, and hopefully you're watching some of the football games with a U instead of two Os. We are the benefit of that because of our footprint. There are 104 games, we have nine markets where we have 63 of the games that will have an impact. The way we played strategically is we wanted to get certain hotels that get teams in locations like Houston and Philly and Fort Lauderdale, where the occupancy isn't as high in those markets typically from the prior year. In markets where occupancies are already high, we really were playing with the strategy of making sure we took advantage of the average rate in the New Yorks and the Bostons and the L.A.s and San Francisco, where the occupancy is already high to begin with. We're very pleased to report that we expected it to be about 45 basis points at the beginning of the year, and it's meeting our expectations. Not only the beginning of the year, we started well because of corporations and BT and our footprint, but we still expect very good results June, July, because of FIFA, in addition to the 250th anniversary of our country, where we have markets in D.C., Philly, Boston, and New York, where we're going to have some special events that will draw continued compression. If you just move to the next slide, if you could, JP. One of the things that we were talking about in regards to the World Cup, you can see that our footprint really helps us in regards to about 30%-35% of our portfolio will get the benefit of that, of the 104 matches, and 62% of the matches are going to be played in our markets. We feel that that's going to be a nice backdrop going into June and July as we're welcoming many international visitors. Also a significant amount of domestic travel is happening to these games, and we're finding that in our Fan Fest locations, where in Northern California, it's in downtown. In Boston, it's right next to our Beacon Hill asset. There's a significant amount of demand as the games move into the next quadrant, because those are the teams that will start to really travel, and their teams will have fans that will actually come for those events in July, where the finals will be in New York and the semis will be in Atlanta, as well as South Florida, the consolation game. I'll kick it back to Nikhil for a little coverage in regards to how our footprint is set up and how we invest RLJ in regards to premium brands. Thank you for that, Tom. Let's just talk a little bit about RLJ and our founding and to give you a sense for who we are. We've been a public company since 2011, but prior to that, about for 10 years, we were actually in the private equity space. The company, we've been in business for, call it, 25 years almost. In our history as a public company, we've always had a dividend. I want to point that out that even today, our dividend is well covered. It's a 5% dividend yield based on current price. We've always had a dividend, so that's an important element to note for us. As we think about what do we really own, and what is our investment thesis? What you see on this particular slide is that we have 92 hotels. We're one of the largest publicly traded hotel REITs by number of hotels we own. The average size of our hotel is between 100-300 rooms, and it's by design. We tend to look for efficient boxes, which don't have a lot of extra space that you have to spend money heating, cooling, and all other stuff. Efficiency is an important element for us. We also look for, as part of our investment thesis, hotels where 80%+ of our revenues comes from room revenue sales or room sales. That's very important because that really is the highest margin revenue stream at a hotel. As you add more F&B, some of the other things, your margins actually tend to go down because those are lower margin businesses. By virtue of that, we tend to drive much higher margins than many of our peers. Our typical margins are in the 27%-30% range across our portfolio, which is also in the top half of our peers, which allows us then to generate free cash flow, and then obviously distribute that as form of dividends, and we've done share repurchases as well. When we think about who do we affiliate with. As you can see on the bottom of the slide, we tend to be affiliated with what we consider to be the best brand families in all of hospitality worldwide. Think about Marriott, Hilton, or Hyatt. The reason really behind that is that these brands that are long established have a very good customer loyalty base. If you think about many of you may be members of Bonvoy program or Hilton Honors. We really benefit from that. They also tend to run much higher RevPAR index. In any location, if you're affiliated with these brands, chances are you're punching above your weight relative to other hotels in that particular market. We benefit from that. The fact that we are one of the largest owners of hotels within these brands also gives us a lot of leeway in terms of when we come to brand negotiations, franchise negotiations, brand changes, conversions, all those things. There's a lot of advantages that come to us because we are part of these brands. Just to talk a little bit about going back to the urban theme that we have mentioned. JP, if you go to the next slide. Just at a very high level to frame how to think about our portfolio and what is the unifying theme within our portfolio. We own primarily urban hotels located in heart-of-demand locations across all major markets, economic centers. We have a smaller footprint on the resort side, which is we have a few resort hotels that benefit from leisure in places like South Florida and then also in California. That's really not the core of our portfolio. We have that because obviously those markets also benefit from business travel demand and groups and some of those other things. Predominantly what we really look for is hotels that are located in heart-of-demand locations, have seven-day-a-week demand patterns. During the weekdays, they benefit from business travel, all universities, healthcare, in many cases, other types of demand. On weekends also benefit from nightlife, from events, concerts, and all other things. That really is a unifying theme within our portfolio. As you'll see from the next set of slides, you will see what is the quality of our overall portfolio. We tend to say we own brick-built, not stick-built. We've been very deliberate in reshaping our portfolio to a very high standard. That's what you're seeing here with what we've done. Another element of our portfolio, and this is a good slide to be on, is over the last few years, we've realized that consumer trends are moving towards what we call the lifestyle segment. It used to be that people wanted consistency. When you go to a Courtyard by Marriott or a Hilton Garden Inn, you knew exactly what the decor is going to look like, what the experience was going to be. People want something different, and they want more boutiquish and that higher lifestyle experience. We've been moving our portfolio in that direction through a lot of brand changes by acquiring hotels that fit that lifestyle, seven-day-a-week demand pattern. What you see on this slide are some examples of that. The hotel on the bottom left is a Moxy in Denver, which really feeds that particular segment. It does incredibly well, both weekdays and weekends. That's a big push for our portfolio as we think about repositioning our portfolio. J.P., if you want to just Yeah to that. Just to stop here for a second, I'm going to talk about two things. About geographic diversification within our portfolio, that's important because if you see where our portfolio's located, it's bi-coastal, but it's also in what we call the Smile of America, which is the Sun Belt markets where we have demographic growth. Population growth. Those are our half of our portfolio today sits in that belt. We benefit again. We are located in key urban markets in top economic centers. That's where we tend to concentrate. We have a lot of benefit from when the economy does well, we tend to benefit more disproportionately because of that. The one other element I would point to is Northern California, which is an important market for us with 11% of our exposure. That was the one market that was slow to recover post-COVID, but is now firmly on its track. I'm going to just send over to Tom to talk a little bit about Northern California, because that's a source of upside for our portfolio specifically. What occurred after COVID is the dense cities were the last to kind of reopen and get started, and Northern California, in general, was a little bit behind the others. Most recently, in the last year and a half, we've seen a resurgence for a couple of reasons. One, the political environment has really been much more healthy, and we're pro-business with the mayor there. In addition to that, Moscone got a renovation in 2019, and they started to bring conventions back. Most importantly, the AI investment has been the tip of the spear in regards to why growth is happening in Northern Cal. Not only in Northern Cal, but throughout the country, we're seeing that corporations diving into AI investment, which is causing travel and demand to continue to come back. We're very pleased with our footprint. We've got some hotels in Silicon Valley. This is a multi-year tailwind for us, San Francisco comeback, just given our exposure in that particular market. JP, if you want to go to slide 18, please. Just transitioning now over to capital allocation and how do we view our capital allocation and the drivers to drive shareholder value. When it comes to our portfolio, we have basically multiple channels of growth to drive shareholder value. We'll talk a little bit about internal growth, which is a way we've been trying to unlock the embedded value within our own portfolio, given the size of the portfolio with 92 assets. We'll talk a little bit about our external growth and the assets we've acquired, we'll talk a little bit more about the capital returns, dividends and share repurchases and what we've done for shareholders in this particular section. If you look at the map here, we've got a couple assets in CBD, two in the area of the airport. We're in Burlingame in South San Francisco, where they continue to invest in biotech, life sciences, as well as AI, and then a couple over in Emeryville, which looks over the city of San Francisco that continues to have growth because of the university business from Berkeley, in addition to what's happening on that side when compression happens from San Francisco. To Nikhil's point, we believe that has room in the tank, and that's where continuation and growth's going to happen based on the environment that we're seeing there with the investments that are happening out in that part of the country. Starting on slide 20, just to frame for you, unlocking the internal growth within our portfolio. Many years ago, we looked at our own portfolio and realized that in many cases, the markets that we are in have actually improved. Right? With that came the opportunity to rebrand some of our assets higher. We took a comprehensive look across our portfolio. We also realized that in many cases, there were other ROI opportunities within our portfolio, adding more rooms where it made sense, converting some non-revenue generating space into a revenue generating space. In many cases, we also realized that some of the fees that we were paying to our managers, the market had changed, right? We could now drive, especially given our size and scale, we could drive lower fees. There was opportunity to renegotiate some of those fees. We embarked on a journey to do all of those things. The way we came about was we gave some guidance to investors to say, "Here's a phase one of some of these embedded value opportunities that we're going to do," and we gave a target for that. We said we will generate between $23 million-$28 million of incremental EBITDA from conversions that we will do, which is effectively three rebrandings. Right. We'll talk a little bit about that. We will create some ROI opportunities, adding some guest rooms in some places, parking amenity fees, and things like that where we have opportunity, some F&B repositioning. We will also renegotiate some fees from our existing management agreements. We were able to do all of that. In 2021, we gave a target of $23 million-$28 million. We then subsequently increased that target to say we think we can achieve $34 million. That's what you see on the circle chart on the right. We are actually ahead of that today. Right. We are probably more closer to around $36 million, $37 million, and we still have upside from those assets. We'll talk a little bit more about our conversion strategy in a minute. One of the key things that allows us to do that, a secret sauce for us is, we have an internal CapEx team. Engineers, architects, designers, all of those things. Because the size of our portfolio allows us to do that. Many of our peers with smaller room account or hotel account cannot do that. You need to be a certain size to be able to do that. We laid out a phase two conversion strategy, which is currently underway, that had five hotels under conversion, some more ROI opportunities, and we gave a target of about $9 million-$11 million in late 2023 to be achieved for this year. We're already there. That's another element of what we've said we've been able to do. We have a phase three in the works right now, which we haven't announced yet, but that's going to come as well. Again, these are the ways that we are unlocking a lot of value internally within our portfolio. A key element I would also tell you is, in terms of the returns that we are generating from these initiatives, JP, if you go back to slide 20 real quick, is that on our conversions, which is we've taken some brands that were a governor on rate. For example, we owned an asset in Charleston called The Mills House, which was a Wyndham branded asset. It's tremendously well-placed asset in that particular market, but the Wyndham brand was a governor on that. We flipped the brand to a Hilton Curio, again, moved to a lifestyle brand, which allowed us to raise the rate meaningfully at that hotel. The rate today is $150 higher than what it used to be, and we nearly doubled the EBITDA at that property from before it was a Wyndham brand. If you go to page- If you go to page 21 real quick, you can see the quality of the portfolio that Nikhil's talking about. The one thing I would say, I know we got to get to Q&A, we got five minutes left, Nikhil Yeah. If you look at these assets, the common theme is the market rate was already in the market. We were underperforming because the brand that we had on it had upside. When franchise expires, example that Nikhil talked about with Wyndham, we went to Curio, which is the higher end of the Hilton brand market. Same thing as an independent in Santa Monica. We actually look at the pier and became an independent versus a Wyndham. Obviously the upside is the average rate in the market, because these are high occupancy hotels to begin with. Then our incremental capital is where we're getting the return on investment in many of these assets. The two that are in the 2026 focus right now, we just labeled the Bankers Alley Untitled. It's a great hotel with 8,000 sq ft. It's got an art theme, so it's a very cool Tapestry by Hilton. That's the bespoke experience that Nikhil referring to is what customers are looking for. Same thing below, The Autograph was a Renaissance. We stayed within the Marriott family, but we've really enhanced the way that people will participate at this asset and really chase the highest rate in the Pittsburgh market based on its location across from Heinz Field as well as Pirate Stadium. I know we got five minutes left, Nikhil, I think there's some Q&A that we probably want to go through, but if there's anything else you wanted to cover before we flip it to Brendan. Yeah. I will say two other points. One, what you're looking at is the Wyndham Boston. This is our next conversion that's going to occur at the end of this year. We have opportunity there, and we'll be announcing another one in conjunction with our second quarter earnings calls. Again, plenty of catalysts for future growth. The last thing I just want to mention very quickly is on the balance sheet, and the capital returns element of that. Historically, always maintained a very conservative capital structure. We did some refinancings early this year, which has allowed us to push back our debt. We have nothing maturing up until 2028, 2029, so we have a long runway for that. We have a very well-covered dividend. Our dividend today is only about 43% of our AFFO. Historically, it's been as high as 65%, so we have some good coverage on that. The last thing I would say is why invest in lodging today and in our portfolio today? Even with the run that we've seen with our stock since the beginning of the year, which has been a very good year for us, our multiple is still about a turn lower than where we used to trade historically. In addition to that, if you look at what the underlying quality of our portfolio is, we are trading meaningfully below our NAV and the replacement cost of our portfolio. That should give you some sense that we have some upside with fundamentals going the right way and where our valuations are. With that, I'll turn that back to Brendan and see if anybody has any questions. Fantastic. Well, thank you, Nikhil and Tom, we appreciate the overview. We can open the floor for Q&A here. Why don't we just start with 2026 results. You've had strong revenue growth so far this year. How much of that growth was due to increased volume, and how much was more driven by pricing? Maybe you can tie in trends on RevPAR and ADR. Yeah, absolutely. The good news is that we saw a very balanced approach to growth on both. If you look at our first quarter performance, we were up 4.8% in RevPAR growth. 200 basis points of that was occupancy growth, 300 basis point was about rate. We are seeing both, and that ties to the business travel demand coming back, urban leisure performing really well, at the same time, the paying capacity of the consumer. Got it. That's a helpful one. I know you mentioned you're encouraged by trends you're seeing in the Northern California market with urban business travel. Can you talk about trends in your other key markets that impact urban business? Are you seeing more of a return to office increase or are there other trends in place there? The thing that when Nikhil was referring to the corporate business, that's a proxy of where the demand is coming from. We're seeing both in the corporate world, it's both demand and rate Y, primarily because the national corporations were the last to come back, and now they're traveling again, and significantly because of AI investments. We're seeing it at a broad basis, Brendan, and we're seeing it in a lot of the urban markets where we have those hotels, whether it's Houston, Boston, New York. Even in locations like Southern California, where we have San Diego, LAX area, we're seeing a significant amount of demand coming because of aerospace and what's been happening in our world right now. We're seeing it in a variety of different corporations, and when we look at consultants, finance, healthcare, a lot of those organizations are traveling, and that's where we have hotels. Similar to what Nikhil was talking about with Boston, where we're right next to MGH there with our conversion from a Wyndham to the Tapestry brand. Understood. Does the company always own 100% of each property, or are there any properties where there's a split interest? No, we tend to own 100% of each property. We only have one property where we are 50% owner. That's in a JV, and that's not consolidated. It's a small hotel in New Orleans. Got it. Looking ahead, what do you think is the greatest limit to your future growth? Greatest limit? Yeah. Yeah Potential risk to the outlook. It really is macro. Yeah. If you look at, I framed that, right? If you look at the supply environment, which is usually the bigger issue in our industry, the supply environment is very benign. The only thing that one has to be concerned about is if there's a political event that interrupts the growth element of our industry. What I would tell you is if you look back longer term, right, our industry is a secular growth industry, but in short periods of time, it can be cyclical. Right? When we look at the occupancies in our industry, each peak has surpassed the prior peak. You see the occupancies always grow. Today we're in a political environment where sometimes, if you look at last year, what happened with the Liberation Day and some of those things, those are the kind of things that have hurt us. We're seeing very strong demand this year. It's been positive. Many a catalyst still to come. That's great. When you look at capital allocation, given where your stock is trading at relative to historical multiples, are you buying back shares at this point? How can investors think about allocation? We have a very good track record of buying back shares. Since 2018, we've bought back almost 15% of our float. We look at share buybacks as a tool among many other capital allocation opportunities. Where we sit today, the best outcome for us really is continue to invest in our portfolio and some of the value add opportunities that we just talked about. We'll always look at share buybacks. Even with the stock runoff, frankly, our stock is still very cheap in our view. We'll look at all opportunities. We'll do it in a way where we're doing it on a debt neutral basis, making sure that the balance sheet remains strong. Got it. Well, that's great. Well, Nikhil and Tom, we really appreciate the overview and your time today. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Brendan. Sure. Thanks everybody for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Take care.