Hyatt Hotels Earnings Call Nuggets: Group Business and Cash Resources

Hyatt Hotels Corporation (NYSE:H) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Group Business

Gebhard F. Rainer – CFO: We had some RevPAR growth of 7.5% but our owned and leased margins were impacted by a number of non-operating items. These non-operating items which included higher insurance and taxes impacted margins by approximately 200 basis points of which about half is expected to be non-recurring. Excluding these items, margins would have been flat. Our owned margins were also impacted by weaker international markets, and relatively lower group F&B spend as groups continue to be cautious in their spend. So here a note on geography international RevPAR was weak as I mentioned, which resulted in a weaker GOP performance in the portfolio. However, from costs per occupied room management this was flat and was in line with revenue growth. The underlying margin decrease is good property level management for them which was offset by the non-management items. We faced also a tough comparison as margins increased about 180 basis points in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Mark S. Hoplamazian – President and CEO: If I can just add to that, I think couple of things that we look at over time which is, we forever said that we remain very focused on and disciplined around how we’re actually managing cost at our properties and if you look at costs per occupied room, which is not the only measure that’s relevant but it is A, it is one metric. It’s been flat basically since 2007. So we’ve actually found enough productivity measures and different approaches to providing services to the hotels maintain relatively flat cost per occupied room for full service hotels in the U.S. over that period of time. For our select service hotels, partly by virtue of some shared services initiatives we’ve actually seen a decline over that period of time in cost per occupied room. So the first point I would make is just – the focus remains very high and on the operating side we saw very strong performance at the GOP level is really after you take into account insurance and taxes that we had the problem. The second point that I would make is that given our portfolio, the diversity of regions in which we operate, we will volatility from quarter-to-quarter I think if you just look at the year-over-year comparison we were up 180 basis points in the fourth quarter of ’11 down or flat if you take out the one timers in the fourth quarter of 2012. That pretty much demonstrates that you will see volatility quarter-to-quarter the key for us is over time are we actually continuing to manage well and even with those things that we don’t have direct control over insurance and property taxes or be proactive about seeing what we can do in those areas. And the answer to those questions is yes.

Atish Shah – IR: The next topic is group we received few questions on group business. We’ll ask each one individually, first we have heard from others that the weakest segment is large groups is that the same for you. How is this segment performing?