All right. Good morning, everybody. We're very excited to have with us a longtime attendee at the forum here, Michael Brown, Chief Executive Officer of TNL. Thank you for your attendance. Maybe we could start off and just talk about sort of the, you know, maybe in relation to the Investor Day a couple of Septembers ago, what the strategic priorities are, maybe how they've differed or have been enhanced since that time frame, and then maybe how you're tracking in the aggregate relative to some of those longer-term financial targets that you set out then. Yeah, absolutely. So it's a few years ago now, and we really laid out a two-prong approach to how we wanted to grow the business. Our vacation ownership business represents about 70% of the company's EBITDA, and our travel membership is about 30% of our company's EBITDA. And our objective at the time was, in the short term, to really grow our travel club or travel membership business, and then long term, to transition our Wyndham Vacation Ownership business into a multi-brand vacation ownership business. The last two years, two things have primarily been headwinds, and then we've had one pretty big tailwind that I'll share with you. When we had our Investor Day, the rising interest rates that caught all of us have really impacted our ability to drive interest income in the last two years and have created about $30 million headwind last year, $30 million headwind for us this year. Our travel membership business, which we expected to grow really dramatically, has not performed as well as we wanted it to, and we've recently reset those expectations. On the vacation ownership side, when we went from Wyndham Destinations to Travel + Leisure, our goal was to become a multi-brand vacation ownership company, and in doing so, we've been able to launch a Sports Illustrated Vacation Club in the fall of last year. Most recently, in Q1, we were able to acquire and close an acquisition of Accor Vacation Club, allowing us to really start to expand beyond Wyndham and Margaritaville and add Sports Illustrated and Accor. It's safe to say that the rebranding has allowed us to execute on that multi-brand strategy, which will really start to play out in 2025 and 2026. Great. You know, the bulk of your EBITDA, as you said, 70%, the bulk of your equity valuation is related to the vacation ownership segment. How do you look at the sort of longer-term growth algorithm there? Particularly, you know, the conversations we have with folks isn't necessarily a nit or a criticism, but just trying to understand, you know, longer-term volume per guest, just given anticipated mix changes, you know, as you're trying to build up more new owners, reduce the mix related to, you know, sales to existing owners. Yeah, it's a, it's a great question, and, and just to level set what we believe is the right place to be in the long term for how we look at the two major components of VOI growth, which is tours and volume per guest. Coming out of COVID, the owner business represented 70%-75% of our sales. We know that for the long-term success of the business, you need about 35% of your sales to be to new owners, because very simple stat is if someone buys $1 a timeshare today, they're gonna buy $2.60 in the future. And the way the math works is 35% creates a very stable algorithm going forward on future sales of those new owners who are—will eventually be owner upgrades. This year, we are projecting to be at 35% new owners, which means that we now set the new base for our go-forward, that our VPGs should be stable, and our 35% new owner growth allows us to sort of stick at that rate and grow VPG going forward. So VPG in that $2,900-$3,000 range is kind of plus or minus the next few years? That's the expectation is—this year is an interesting year for us because our VPGs are 30% higher than they were pre-COVID, and the $2,900 VPG to $3,000, if that's where we end up this year, which is our guidance range, and we're at 35%, that really are the anchoring two numbers on a go-forward basis. And, you know, we'll see how the first quarter plays out, but consumer demand remains strong and our plan this year puts us at those VPG levels and the 35%, like I said, is where we want to be for the long haul. Great. And when you've worked at all the major timeshare, vacation ownership companies, where were and where are your peers relative to that 35%? I believe HGV is higher and VAC is lower. We've always, at least for the last two years, I can't say the last quarter or 2. There's been a lot of noise, but we've tended to be in the middle. There's no magic to 35%. It's just a good anchoring point for us. Some years we might be 36, 34. It's just a good run rate to be at. And you know, people always ask: "How are you investing back in your business?" There's no greater asset for our business than satisfied customers. Our satisfaction rates have never been higher. Seven out of eight of our owners have fully paid off their timeshare, which means they don't have a loan. They're going on vacation for the price of their maintenance fee every year. So the fact that we've invested back to get to the 35% from roughly a 25% in the first year after COVID shows that we're able to generate new owners, and this year we expect our new owner tour growth to be about 10% more than it was last year. Great. How are you thinking about things from, I guess, a geographic perspective? Yeah. One of the things that we, you know, had written about during I guess, the earlier part of the pandemic or coming out of the pandemic and the recovery, was that, you know, you were sort of this drive to timeshare operator and maybe had a benefit there. Are you seeing the sort of drive-to, fly-to mix change now that, you know, we've sort of gotten past that and, you know, how are you thinking about things geographically? Well, in our drive-to pre-COVID was 75%, and right now our percentage is 75%. Seventy-five percent. What was interesting is during COVID, when there was so much uncertainty, two things massively changed. Drive-to went to about 90% and, booking window went from 120 days back to 90 days. People wanted to create their own certainty, and they did it in a car, in the comfort of their, own sanitary environment. And as well, they left decisions to later. 120 days is pretty much the same as it was pre-COVID, and 75% Drive-to is pretty much the same, as it was pre-COVID. What that says to me is, not only are people comfortable in this current leisure travel environment, is those are good indicators for us on the margin of: is consumer sentiment changing materially or even immaterially? And the behavior out there says that the consumer for our leisure product is strong. Great. You and many others offer a points-based timeshare sales system as opposed to a time duration type of sales system. Can you talk about two things? One, the value of a point or the cost of a point to a consumer today versus 2019. Maybe how that compares to sort of broadly the average room rate of hotels in the U.S. over that same time frame. I think there's probably still a pretty good value proposition there. And then sort of part two of a points-related question is that are consumers today buying more points versus say 2019, adjusted for the new and the existing mixes? Yeah. So, let me start with the value equation. First of all, we never lowered price during COVID. And we also, by the way, did not eliminate our dividend. We were one of the few hospitality companies that didn't do that. That's, that's the confidence we had in our cash flow. But when you look at what we did on the pricing standpoint, we moved our pricing somewhere between 3%-6% up on an annual basis. And you said, "Well, hotel rates increased by 33% or 25%. Why didn't you increase yours the same way?" The value in our business model is value for the consumer and a person who will spend $1 on timeshare today, we know that they will spend another $2.60 in the future. So to get an extra $500 on the sales price today is de minimis compared to the lifetime value of getting that incremental buyer. So what we saw is close rates dramatically move up as hotel rates increased dramatically, and we were locking in embedded value for the long term. Okay, we might have lost $500 or $750 at the initial point, but we were getting close rates that were 20%-30% higher than they were pre-COVID. Those have come back, those close rates have come back, but they've still come back noticeably higher than pre-COVID. So, we never discounted. We increased our prices 3%-6%, and we were able to grow our new owner base, which is our future embedded high-margin sales, at a close rate that was significantly higher than it was pre-COVID and remains much higher than it was pre-COVID. Great. Can you talk about the demographics? You've talked about how the average timeshare consumer in your portfolio is younger today than pre-pandemic. Can you talk about what has driven that? How much of it is your efforts? How much of it is it just sort of what's going on in sort of the travel environment? Well, just to put it in perspective, we have, I think, 63% that are Gen X, Millennials, and yes, we have some Gen Zs. We had our first Gen Z percentage in 2022. The reality of our demographic is we want vacationers, and vacationers want us who want a branded experience, want amenities, and want flexibility along with value. So you tend to find those consumers, as they enter family, defining family dynamic, which tends to be in the late thirties, early forties. Average across the industry, average purchase, new purchaser to timeshare is 38 years old. Ours is a bit higher. But yeah, by being focused on new purchasers, we're naturally bringing down the age of our first-time buyer into the upper forties. Given that you're looking for lifetime value for the consumer, as well as embedded value for our future top-line growth, that's where we want to be. People used to say: Why don't you market to the millennials back when the millennials were 22-25? Because that's not who we are. That's not our consumer. Our consumer is for the branded experience, amenities, certainty in their vacation with a lot of flexibility, and I think that's true for all the brands, and that's why the industry's now probably 80% of sales are to branded hospitality companies. Well, it's a disadvantage if you're not a branded vacation ownership- Well- - product, right? Well, it is because a few things. You know, I think people still view timeshare back to what it was in the 1990s, which was 80%-85% single-site developers that had one destination, and you went in March for the second week of March in your two-bedroom that looked northeast because it was the same unit on the seventh floor. Now, if you buy, you know, Wyndham or any of the hospitality companies, you get to avail yourself of, in our case, 250 resorts around the world. You get to avail yourself, exchange your points to the hotel company, Wyndham Hotels. So flexibility and brand reputation has fundamentally changed the industry since the great financial crisis of 2008. Sure, and, you know, not only the connectivity with a brand in terms of all the things you just highlighted, but it's also the connectivity of a brand with respect to using the brand's hotel database as a sales tool to, - particularly for the new owners. Can you talk about where Blue Thread is? I mean, it's- Yeah. ... it's something that seems to be talked about less and less, I think only because it's been working and not necessarily something that's emerging, but we'd love to hear an update on that. Yeah. Well, absolutely. It just... You know, one of the initial misnomers as the branded timeshare companies became public, was it was only a benefit to the timeshare companies. The reality is the Wyndhams of the world grow, it inures to the benefit as well back to the hotel company, because you're growing their loyalty program, you're putting room nights back into the hotels. And, you know, I've worked for all three brands. You find that your timeshare customers, because they're owners, are the most loyal back to the hotel because they're staying more nights than, say, your typical rewards member. For us, Wyndham used to not be a branded timeshare company. We now have 106 million loyalty members in the Wyndham Rewards. I say "we" because we have such a tight relationship with the hotel group, and that, that's gone from $10 million of annual revenue to last year, we were over $100 million of sales, and I believe that number will continue to grow into the future at a pretty significant rate. The hotel group is doing a great job up in Parsippany, and we're the beneficiary of that, and we have a, a mutual, sort of a two-way street of loyalty going back and forth between the two companies. Great. Maybe this is a question for Mr. Hug, but if interest rates come down later in the year or starting in June or whatever the latest set of broad investor expectations are, how does that influence the timing of accessing the ABS market? Well, we're sort of typical issuers of the ABS market, about three times a year. Marriott just went out, and they reported yesterday. Mm-hmm ... a very good execution. Ours hasn't closed, but we're in the market as well. The market is good for ABS at the moment, and we will typically access it three times a year, somewhere in the range of $300 million-$450 million of issuances. So it's more, I guess for you, it's more of a capacity issue versus trying to exactly time it perfectly? No, we, we won't, we won't try to overly time them, to time the market. What I would say for the forward projection on interest rates- ... is that in 2023, we took about a $30 million headwind against our EBITDA, which we grew 6% last year despite the headwind for the rising interest expense. We expect another $30 million this year, and that's included in our guidance of $910-$930. But as interest rates begin to fall, it is a very clear natural tailwind to our business because the duration of our loans is about 3.5 years. So as the higher issuances roll off in 2025 and 2026, without changing anything, we get interest income tailwinds that are, you know, as long as the Fed does remotely what is anticipated, a nice tailwind for us that we've been fighting against the last two years and overcoming. Can you loan loss provision used to be maybe topic number four years ago, for investors with respect to the TNL investment story. Can you talk about trends that you're seeing on that front and, you know, maybe how you look at as a norm—what is a normalized loan loss provision? Because it's been pretty steady, really, even throughout the pandemic. It's been very steady in that we've guided this year 18%-19%. We're continually focused on growing our portfolio because when you look at our results, we're back above 19 in all respects, except for really, our portfolio is about 80%, 75% the size it was, which means we've lost all that interest income. So we're focused on growing our portfolio. You know, the I don't even wanna call it provision, but the, there was the whole issue around exit companies back in 2015 through 2019, and even into 2021, 2022, and it was a sort of this great unknown. And you know, I think the truth has been found out about many of the exit companies' situations. You only need to go through court cases to see what's happened to many of them. which is, which has meant that what was always the underlying nature of our portfolio is just playing out, and you're seeing it in a very consistent loan loss provision and delinquency rates and portfolio performance. Ultimately, and we've said this for many, many years, is to the extent that we put our customers on vacation, our owners on vacation, satisfaction's up, VPGs are up, and delinquencies are down because we have 98% retention on that, those people that have paid off their timeshare. So if we do our job of getting people on vacation, the rest of the business, including our portfolio, usually takes care of itself, and it's very stable. Great. Maybe we could switch over to the exchange and the travel clubs business for a second. I think you guided to flat to 2% EBITDA growth for the exchange business, low single digits- Right ... growth in the exchange business. It's been sort of flattish, but hi- Yes ... a relatively high EBITDA margin business and a pretty good source of free cash flow generation. How do you think about that growth? What are the building blocks there, and then how do you think about that the next couple of years? Yeah, that's sort of low single digits growth, the profile being higher margins than the vacation ownership business, and high free cash flow generation is the model that we plan to pursue with Travel and Membership. The growth portion of our business will be more on the vacation ownership side. But I think back to your original question, your first question, is in the structural nature of the exchange business has changed dramatically with the consolidation of the industry. Mm-hmm. You know, we've launched new businesses that are supporting that growth element. We think our travel club business is gonna grow this year, our transactions. And so instead of sort of betting on the come of growing a business at a certain rate, this year we've just laid out a growth, that 0%-2%, that's around our current book of business, what we can see going forward, and we really wanna have stability in that business in 2024, and spend the vast majority of our commentary- Mm-hmm ... and our EBITDA focus on the vacation ownership side. Got it. So the 2% growth would be more on price versus exchange members, I'm guessing? Yeah. Exchange members is going up very slightly. However, because the nature, they're more inside of bigger clubs, their propensity to transact is lower. So yes, we're. There's some ups, there's some minuses. Mm-hmm. All in all, it's more on the revenue side than it is on actual transactions. Great. Maybe kind of going back to your earlier comments about becoming a multi-brand vacation ownership travel company. Obviously, you started with the name change and buying the IP of Travel and Leisure from Meredith back then. Can you talk about Sports Illustrated and Accor, exactly what you plan to do with each? And, I know it's not a 2024- Yeah ... growth driver, but can you talk about sort of the timelines and maybe the economics associated and the overall contribution longer term? Yeah, it's a fundamental shift that was a concept, now it's a reality, and then economics come next. But as a single-branded timeshare company, as Wyndham, our ability to work with more brands was limited, not because of the Wyndham name, but because no matter your name, you have to figure out if a counterparty will partner with you. When you change your name to Travel and Leisure, Travel and Leisure is considered basically a brand or a hospitality PR company. Mm-hmm. People view it as generally positive. So by changing that name, it opened our ability to even have conversations with Accor Sports Illustrated, because they knew that we were coming to them to grow their brand, not another hospitality brand. So when we went out to do Sports Illustrated, we fundamentally believe that lifestyle is a growing component of hospitality. You look at our Margaritaville brand, not a traditional hotel company—right? But But Margaritaville has been very successful. We view Sports Illustrated as a niche component, that we're gonna be able to grow from ground up very well. Very, very, very similar business model to the Wyndham, business model. Secondly is Accor. </transcript Accor has tons of potential, but with all of their focus on their hotel hospitality components, this car was sort of left in the garage. And we said, "You can entrust us with that, with the keys, and we will not only help grow that business, but we will help to grow your hotel business with all those components of loyalty we talked about earlier- -in, in the session. So, we're, we're gonna take an existing business, Accor, with 30,000 members, 24 resorts, and grow it on all aspects, by starting the car and running it. Mm-hmm. And then Sports Illustrated, it's gonna be, you know, our first resort will be in Tuscaloosa, next to the University of Alabama, and we've got a very robust pipeline for other college destinations. Great. You mentioned this earlier, and you should be proud of it, you were one of the, a finite number of companies that maintained a dividend throughout COVID. You recently increased it- Yep ... for this current quarter that we're in. How do you look at buybacks, share buybacks? Yep Stock has had a nice move here. It's still relatively cheap on any valuation metric that anybody could point to. Yeah. I'd love to get your views on share buybacks here. I would agree with that. Shocking, a CEO saying his stock is cheap. No, no, I know. It's- It's not been thought of here today. No, no, I, our methodology's pretty straightforward. We very much believe in our dividend to grow that with the growth of our business. We just increased our dividend back to its pre-COVID level of $0.50 a quarter, $2 a year. We increased it 11%, which is over a 4% dividend yield. We view that as our first stop on the capital allocation journey. And then from there, we really look at two fundamental components: buying back stocks. We bought back 10% of our shares last year, more than that the year prior. I won't get the exact... I don't want to give it a number, but we've bought back a significant number of shares since we went public in 2018 while paying the dividend. So, you know, between share buybacks at 10% and dividend yield of over 4%, on top of an EBITDA growth of 6% last year, we had a really good year. As we allocate, we're not myopic. We will constantly look at ways to grow our underlying business, 'cause we're in the business of growing our VO business. But we've done that for the last three or four years, and, you know, our history of transactions is really, we were aggressive buyers of stock. We remain very keen on buying back our stock. But when something like Sports Illustrated or Accor comes up, we know that's good for the long-term growth of the company, and we won't be afraid to reallocate the capital. Great. Is there anything else that, that's out there that makes sense from an M&A perspective? Um- And if there is, is it sort of similar in terms of cost to Accor? The industry's consolidated massively since 2008. Do I think it's done? No. But there's just very few opportunities that remain out there, and they vary in size. Mm-hmm. They can be smaller than Accor, the size of Accor, and bigger. With all M&A, you just evaluate the opportunities that are the right time and the right strategy, and that's what we've done for the last five years. Yep. Great. Well, we're exactly at the end of our 30 minutes. Thank you so much, as always. Appreciate your time. Joe, thank you.