Hilton Grand Vacations Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
February 29, 2024

There are 8 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Hilton Grand Vacations 4th Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. A telephone replay will be available for 7 days following the call. The dial in number is 844-512-2921 and enter pin number 137 43,184. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen only mode and the floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. I would now like to turn the call over to Mark Melnyk, Senior Vice President of IR.

Operator

Please go ahead, sir.

Speaker 1

Thank you, operator, and welcome to the Hilton Grand Vacations 4th quarter 2023 earnings call. As a reminder, our discussions this morning will include forward looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from those indicated by these forward looking statements. These statements are effective only as of today. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise these statements.

Speaker 1

For a discussion of some of the factors that could cause actual results to differ, please see the Risk Factors section of our SEC filings. We'll also be referring to certain non GAAP financial measures. You can find definitions and components of such non GAAP numbers as well as reconciliations of non GAAP and GAAP financial measures discussed today in our earnings press release and on our website at investors. Hgv.com. Our reported results for all periods reflect accounting rules under ASC 606, which we adopted in 2018.

Speaker 1

Under ASC 606, we're required to defer certain revenues and expenses related to sales made in the period when a project is under construction and then hold off on recognizing those revenues and expenses until the period when construction is completed. For ease of comparability and to simplify our discussion today, our comments on adjusted EBITDA and our real estate results for further results excluding the net impact of construction related deferrals and recognitions for all reporting periods. To help you make more meaningful comparisons, you can find details of our current and historical deferrals and recognitions in Table T1 in our earnings release And complete accounting of our historical deferral and recognition activity can also be found in Excel format on the Financial Reporting section of our Investor Relations website. In a moment, Mark Wen, our President and Chief Executive Officer, will provide highlights from the quarter in addition to an update of our current operations and company strategy. After Mark's comments, our Chief Financial Officer, Dan Matthews, will go through the financial details for the quarter.

Speaker 1

Mark and Dan will then make themselves available for your questions. With that, let me turn the call over to our President and CEO, Mark Wain. Mark?

Speaker 2

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q4 earnings call. Contract sales in the quarter were $572,000,000 and EBITDA grew 12% to $282,000,000 with margins at 27 percent improving 200 basis points from the prior year. For the year, EBITDA of 1.26 dollars was slightly ahead of our revised guidance of $1,000,000,000 to 1.20 dollars with margins of 26%. Tour flow grew 7% for the quarter with growth in arrivals and improved occupancy levels. Our owner channels again proved to be resilient with tours remaining above 20 nineteen's levels.

Speaker 2

But while tour flow was solid overall, it nevertheless came in modestly below our expectations, reflecting some lingering hesitancy and consumer behavior, particularly on the new buyer side, which we also saw in the early part of this quarter. That said, we're entering 24 with a strong pipeline of booked vacation packages, giving us confidence that the willingness to travel remains steady. VPGs declined 14% in the quarter, roughly on the same trend of mid teen declines that we've seen all year as we lap tough comparisons from 'twenty two. But it also reflects the effects of continued disruption in our Maui market along with a temporary system outage that impacted our legacy deeded sales system early in the quarter. The issue was fully remedied and we subsequently enhanced our backup systems to mitigate any future risk, but it did create a modest drag on our sales and VPG results in the quarter, which Dan will get into in a minute.

Speaker 2

In that context, I am happy with our underlying EBITDA performance despite these issues, which highlighted the adaptability of our business along the benefit of our recurring EBITDA. On the cost front, we have a natural hedge due to our largely variable expense base and we also implemented additional short term cost saving measures to protect our margins. Looking at sales, we adjusted the use of some of our more expensive marketing channels to improve our efficiency and we made changes to some sales processes and new sales incentives to focus on our highest quality tours and help improve our tour outcomes in VPGs. So we have a lot of levers to pull in this business to support our margins and ultimately our free cash flow generation. Our confidence in our business model is reflected in our 'twenty four guidance we issued today, which shows growth in our EBITDA supporting even faster growth in our cash flow per share.

Speaker 2

While our current expectations is that the consumer softness will persist through the first half of the year, our costs and our tour efficiency initiatives will still enable us to grow our EBITDA. In addition, we're also expecting EBITDA growth at Bluegreen this coming year along with the recognition of some initial cost synergies. Regarding the acquisition of Bluegreen, after smooth review process and great execution on our financing, I'm happy to announce we officially closed the transaction on January 17, much earlier than our initial expectations. We're really excited about this transaction and we think Bluegreen will be a great complement to HEV enabling us to reinforce our position as the premier vacation ownership and experience company. We're adding scale and diversity to our existing offerings through Grille Greens' member base and additional geographies.

Speaker 2

We're also expanding and diversifying our lead flow with the addition of new world class strategic partners in lead flow channels and we'll also explore new avenues for growth through our joint venture relationship with one of those partners Bass Pro Shops. In addition, we'll de risk the integration process by leveraging the infrastructure and experience we developed with the Diamond acquisition. Will realize material synergies and importantly will further strengthen the resiliency of our business with additional recurring EBITDA and free cash flow. Along with today's release, we've provided some additional financial details for Bluegreen on our Investor Relations website, but I'm happy to say they finished up 23 with solid momentum, growing contract sales 4% in the quarter to 193,000,000 dollars and generating EBITDA of $46,000,000 with margins of 17%, improving nearly 500 basis points year over year. Our teams have already begun the integration process and we formed working groups throughout the organization to collaborate with our new Bluegreen team members as well as our new strategic partners.

Speaker 2

We intend to support Bluegreen's momentum during the integration by operating their sales organization in parallel with HGV over the course of the coming months. At the same time, we'll also be working closely with Bass Pro and our other strategic partners to develop a roadmap for successful integration and expansion of our marketing efforts. So we're hitting the ground running with our integration efforts. On the heels of the Diamond integration, our teams are well versed in the processes and procedures that we need to ensure a smooth transition. And we're excited to share our progress with you over the coming quarters.

Speaker 2

Now let's take a look at our operational performance. Remember that these 4th quarter results refer to a standalone HEV. We just closed the Bluegreen acquisition here in the Q1 and we'll report operations as a combined entity beginning in Q1 'twenty four results. As has been the case throughout the year, contract sales in the quarter were driven by growth in tours, offset by a decline in VPG. 152,000 tours generated in Q4 were up 7% and maintained the trend of tour growth with new buyer tours growing slightly faster than our owner channel.

Speaker 2

PPG for the quarter was $3,730 continuing the pace of normalization we've seen through the year. Those rates also remained ahead of 20 nineteen's levels led by the strength of owner channel, which are still above 2019 by several 100 basis points. And as we've now lapped the tough VPG comparisons from last year, our expectations is to return to a more normal pace of VPG growth in 'twenty four. Turning to our demand indicators, our package pipeline remains robust at well over 500,000 packages and we've entered 24 with a record number of those packages dated for travel, which should support additional tour flow growth this year. 4th quarter occupancy of 82% was 300 basis points ahead of last year with strong improvements in November December.

Speaker 2

And we continue to see arrivals this year trending ahead of last year's pointing to additional gains in 2024. We also capped off a strong year for our experiential platform HGV Ultimate Access. We hosted over 3,600 events during the year for more than 120,000 members and guests and we're already off to a strong start in 24. Our marquee ultimate access event, the Hilton Grand Vacation Tournament of Champions built upon last year's strength and with attendance and media exposure setting new records. And our teams have put together a rich list of programming for the year ahead that will surpass last year's performance.

Speaker 2

We believe that differentiated offers like Ultimate Access drive increased owner engagement and loyalty, strengthening the value proposition of HGV's ownership. Moving to our non real estate segments, transient travel demand remained strong in the quarter, leading to gains in both occupancy and rate and driving growth in our rental business despite having more room nights allocated toward owner stage and fewer available nights in Maui. In our recurring club and finance business, DOG grew 2% and capped off another year of member growth. We ended the year with nearly 529,000 members, including more than 144,000 MAX members. That means we added 70,000 MAX members this year, both through new member additions and upgrades from existing owners, which nearly equaled the number of MAX members we added during last year's strong launch period.

Speaker 2

Our financing business also continued to perform well even after controlling for a one time expense adjustment made in the Q4 of last year. During the quarter, we repurchased 2,600,000 shares of stock bringing the total to 8,700,000 shares for the year. And since we spun out as an independent public company in 2017, we've repurchased over $1,000,000,000 of stock or 30,000,000 shares. We remain committed to returning capital to enhance our total shareholder returns. And with the addition of Bluegreen, we're on a path to enhance that commitment as we further improve our cash flow generation.

Speaker 2

Looking back to 2023, I'm proud of the progress we made and I'm excited about the year ahead. As we continue our integration of Diamond Assets and turn our attention toward Bluegreen this year, our goal is to solidify our position as a premier vacation ownership and experienced company. We have the widest offering of products and price points in the industry, the most accessible and featured PAC member club with HEV Max and the largest experience platform with HGV Ultimate Access. With the addition of Bluegreen and our new partners, we'll also be able to reach a wider audience than we've ever had before. Our goal this year will be to ensure a smooth integration of Bluegreen and engagement with our new club members, team members and partners.

Speaker 2

And we'll maintain our focus on driving long term value creation and free cash flow generation along with capital returns. With that, I'll turn it over to Dan to talk you through the numbers. Dan?

Speaker 3

Thank you, Mark, and good morning, everyone. Before we start, note that our reported results for this quarter included $21,000,000 of sales deferrals, which reduced reported GAAP revenues and were related to presales of the latest phases of our Ocean Tower and Sissoko projects. We also recorded $9,000,000 of associated direct expense deferrals. Adjusting for these two items would increase the EBITDA reported in our press release by $12,000,000 to $282,000,000 In my prepared remarks, I'll only refer to metrics excluding net deferrals, which more accurately reflects the cash flow dynamics of our financial performance during the period. To begin, our team did a great job this year adapting to a number of headwinds, including the normalization of VPGs from the all time highs of 2022, elevated interest rates, a more tenuous macroeconomic environment and the devastating wildfires in Maui.

Speaker 3

Despite that, we produced results that were near the record levels of last year with contract sales of $2,300,000,000 and adjusted EBITDA of 1.26 dollars Importantly, we converted 52 percent of the EBITDA into over $530,000,000 of cash flow. We use that cash flow effectively to support shareholder returns by repurchasing over $365,000,000 of shares this year. In addition, when combined with our balance sheet discipline and low leverage, that cash flow helped put us in a position to capitalize on the opportunity to acquire Bluegreen Resorts and provide us with another avenue to add long term value to the business. As Mark mentioned, our integration process with Bluegreen is underway and we have a robust plan in place that we will be executing against over the coming months. Moving to our results for the quarter.

Speaker 3

Total revenue excluding cost reimbursements for the quarter grew 3% to 943,000,000 dollars Growth was led by our financing resort and club and rental and ancillary businesses more than offsetting a decline in the real estate revenue. Q4 reported adjusted EBITDA was $282,000,000 with a margin of 30% excluding cost reimbursements. Our margins in the quarter improved over 200 basis points versus the prior year. And compared to the first half of twenty twenty three, margins in the back half improved by 300 basis points to 30% as we improved efficiency and lapped some of investment spending from the second half of last year. For the full year of 2023, we generated EBITDA of $1,026,000,000 versus our guidance of $1,000,000,000 to $1,20,000,000 with margins of 28% excluding reimbursements.

Speaker 3

As Mark mentioned, our sales this quarter were impacted by the ongoing effects of the Maui wildfires combined with a temporary outage at 1 of our 3rd party data center providers that impacted our sales systems over a number of days early in the quarter. We believe that the combination of these two items was an impact of roughly $40,000,000 of contract sales, $21,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA during the quarter. Turning to our segments. Within real estate, total contract sales of $572,000,000 were down 10% versus the prior year with new buyers comprising 26% of contract sales in the quarter. Tours grew by 7% in the quarter to 152,000 tours with both our owner and new buyer channels showing similar levels of growth.

Speaker 3

VPG of $3,730 in the quarter was 5% ahead 2019 levels. Excluding those two one time items, we believe we would have achieved the low end of our expectations to be 10% to 15% ahead of 2019. For the full year, our reported VPG was 11% ahead of 2019. And looking out to 2024, we believe that the VPG growth will return to more normal level of a low single digit annual growth. Cost of product was 15% of net VOI sales for the quarter.

Speaker 3

Real estate as an M expense was $248,000,000 for the quarter or 43% of contract sales, improving nearly 200 basis points sequentially as we improved efficiency and lapped some of the marketing investments made beginning in the back half of last year. Real estate profit for the quarter was $158,000,000 with margins at 34%, improving 70 basis points from the Q4 of last year. In our financing business, 4th quarter revenue was 82,000,000 dollars and segment profit was 56,000,000 with margins of 68% versus margins of 48% in the prior year or 61% if you exclude the one time expense true up that we made during Q4 of last year. Combined gross receivables for the quarter were $2,900,000,000 or $2,100,000,000 net of allowance and our interest income was $74,000,000 Our originated portfolio weighted average interest rate was 14.85 percent while our acquired portfolio had a weighted average interest rate of 14.66 percent and includes a $3,400,000 contra revenue the amortization of a non cash premium associated with the portfolio of receivables that we acquired from Diamond during the acquisition. Our allowance for bad debt was $779,000,000 on that $2,900,000,000 receivables balance.

Speaker 3

Of these amounts, the acquired portfolio, which was which used Diamond's underwriting standards was $249,000,000 on a portfolio balance of 499,000,000 dollars Our annualized default rate for our consolidated portfolios, including the diamond acquired and underwritten portfolios was 8.56%. Our provision for bad debt was $54,000,000 or 12 percent of owned contract sales. Previously discussed, we continue to see normalizing credit trends within with the termination of certain government stimulus plans, but we believe our current loan loss provision is adequate. Going forward, we expect our provision to migrate towards the low to mid teens percentage of contract sales on a normalized basis, not accounting for the Bluegreen acquisition. We continue to evaluate Bluegreen's provision and allowance through our opening balance sheet and purchase accounting work streams.

Speaker 3

We will share more on the portfolio during our Q1 results. In our resort and club business, our consolidated member count was 529,000 and our consolidated NOG was 2% at the end of the 4th quarter. Revenue of $167,000,000 was up 8% for the quarter and segment profit was $119,000,000 driven by the typical seasonal uptick in revenues and expenses in our club business with margins of 71%. Rental and ancillary revenues grew 2% to $164,000,000 in the quarter with segment profit of $12,000,000 and margins of 7% versus 4% last year. Revenue growth was driven by ADR gains in most markets, partially offset by lower available rental room night inventory owned to increase member stays along with fewer available room nights from the affected properties in Maui.

Speaker 3

During the Q4, the timing shifts from adjusted Diamond member benefit recognition resulted in a $3,000,000 year over year benefit to Q4 expenses, which was in line with our expectations. With those timing adjustments made this year, they won't create issues with comparability in 2024 or beyond. Bridging the gap between segment adjusted EBITDA and total adjusted EBITDA, corporate G and A was $36,000,000 license fees were $37,000,000 and JV adjusted EBITDA was $6,000,000 Our adjusted free cash flow in the quarter was $255,000,000 which included inventory spending of $88,000,000 The adjusted free cash flow conversion rate for the quarter was 88%. And for the year, we had a conversion ratio of 52%, which was nicely inside our 50% to 60% target range. During the quarter, the company repurchased 2,700,000 shares of common stock for $99,000,000 and through February 23, we repurchased an additional 1,700,000 shares for $71,000,000 leaving us with $289,000,000 of remaining availability under the 2023 repurchase plan.

Speaker 3

In 2023, we repurchased an average of $92,000,000 per quarter, which is in line with our goal of roughly $100,000,000 per quarter. Turning to our outlook, we expect adjusted EBITDA in the coming year of $1,200,000,000 to 1,260,000,000 dollars I'd note that our guidance includes the assumption that bad debt and COP will approach their long term run rate levels of mid and high teens respectively, which collectively would represent a headwind to EBITDA of roughly $100,000,000 It also includes an estimated $150,000,000 to $160,000,000 of pre synergized EBITDA contributed from our acquisition of Bluegreen, which was completed in mid January. In addition, we're also expecting to achieve actual cost synergies for the year of $50,000,000 which puts us nicely down the path of achieving $100,000,000 of run rate cost synergies within 24 months of acquisition close. As of December 31, our liquidity position consisted of $589,000,000 of unrestricted cash and $553,000,000 of availability under our revolving credit facility. Our debt balance at the quarter end was comprised of corporate debt of 3,000,000,000 and a non recourse debt balance of approximately $1,500,000,000 At quarter end, we had $351,000,000 of remaining capacity in our warehouse facility, of which we had $155,000,000 of notes available to securitize and another $317,000,000 of mortgage notes we anticipate being eligible following certain customary milestones such as first payment, dating and recording.

Speaker 3

Turning to our credit metrics, at the end of Q4, the company's total net leverage on a TTM basis was 2.44 times. Again, these liquidity and leverage calculations reflect HEV legacy operations and do not contemplate the Bluegreen acquisition. We did have a very successful permanent debt financing for the Bluegreen transaction in early January, successfully placing $900,000,000 of secured debt at 6 and 5.8 and an incremental term loan fee of $900,000,000 at SOFR plus 2.75. We're also recommitting to our long term leverage target of 2x to 3x total net leverage. On a pro form a basis, not taking into consideration account any purchase accounting adjustments, we were just above 3 times levered at twelvethirty one on a pro form a basis.

Speaker 3

Coupled with our cloud oil available to securitize and expectations to realize approximately $100,000,000 of synergies, we are very confident in returning to our target leverage ratio without negatively impacting our expectations for approximately $100,000,000 of share repurchases per quarter in 2024. Before we turn to Q and A, I'd like to note one additional item that will appear in our 10 ks. First, I'm happy to say that we fully remediated the material weakness at Diamond that was detailed in our annual filing last year and referenced in our quarterly filings during 2023. Separately and unrelated to the system outage that we previously talked about, during the course of our audit this year, we identified an issue with an IT application having to do with user access that was classified as a material weakness. Just like the diamond related material weakness from last year, this item did not impact our current or historical financial results or create the need for a restatement of historical results nor did it impact our business operations in any way.

Speaker 3

We've already begun our remediation plan and we'll provide updates on the process, but we expect that we'll be able to remediate this new item during 2024. We will now turn the call over to the operator and look forward to your questions. Operator?

Operator

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. Our first question is from Patrick Scholes with Credit Suisse Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 4

Great. Thank you. A couple of questions here for you. With the full year guidance, how should we think about and I apologize, hopefully you didn't mention this in the remarks. How should we think about the contribution from the legacy company and then the contribution from newly acquired Bluegreen?

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Speaker 3

Hey, Patrick, it's Dan here. So we gave a little bit of color on the prepared remarks, but just to repeat that, when we think about Bluegreen, we're looking at EBITDA guidance of roughly $150,000,000 to 160,000,000 Cost synergies, we're not moving as quickly as we did with Diamond. We're operating as separate operations for a little while, but we're still making some sizable traction on that front. We've already gone through track 1, if you will, from a cost synergy base, which is mostly on the G and A side. And we expect to realize $50,000,000 in the current year.

Speaker 3

So that would put if you do the math, that would put the range for legacy HTV guidance of between $1,000,000,000 $1,025,000,000 just given those dynamics. So relatively flat from a HCV perspective, up low single digits on the Bluegreen business and then the benefit of cost synergies. That all gives you a midpoint of the guidance of just under 5%, a range being between 2% and 7% growth on EBITDA.

Speaker 4

Okay. Thank you. And a follow-up question here. In the about a year or so ago, you had talked about this is pre Bluegreen, a CapEx of around $300,000,000 run rate for 2024 going forward. How should we think about the CapEx at this moment?

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Speaker 3

Yes. No, that's a great question. So when it comes to capital allocation with regards to inventory in particular, we talked about a long term run rate of between $250,000,000 $350,000,000 that being the order of magnitude that you needed to support $2,500,000,000 in contract sales. Now what I'd remind everyone and I think we talked about this on our last earnings call with the announcement of Bluegreen. Unlike Diamond, Bluegreen was not an inventory play.

Speaker 3

From the standpoint that Diamond came with 4 years of excess inventory, Bluegreen had a very efficient use of their balance sheet and maintained inventories levels very commensurate where you would expect between 1 2 years. So when we think about 2024, we actually spent a little less in inventory spend in 2023 than we originally anticipated. That's really just a function of the timing of our own construction. Unfortunately, as you can expect, these projects ebb and flow, they're not just straight line. But from an inventory spend in 2024, we would expect a little bit north of 350, call it 370,000,000 from a legacy HCV side and then there would be an incremental 100,000,000 associated with the Bluegreen side.

Speaker 3

So you're talking about $470 ish give or take $1,000,000 in inventory spend for 2024. Now just to break that down a little bit, on the legacy HEV side, that's driven by Maui Bay Villas, which as you recall, is a series of low rise buildings in Maui, conversion of Ocean Tower, and also we've started construction on Kahaku, which is Oahu and that's a vertical build. And then we have one final payment for a just in time project in Okinawa, that's Saseko and that's going to happen in Q1. And that'll take care of all of our contractual payments. That and one other smaller item takes care of all our contractual payments from a just in time perspective.

Speaker 4

Okay. And just one last, if I could sneak it in. Going into the year or no, I guess, as of January 17 prior to this CapEx for this year, how many years of unsold inventory do you have falling roughly?

Speaker 3

With Bluegreen, let me pull that number. It's multiple years. I mean, we could to put things in perspective, when I mentioned Diamond as being an inventory play to a certain degree, since acquisition, we've actually invested with a minor exception of some conversion costs, virtually $0 in any diamond inventory. So Bluegreen brings along with it an incremental year of inventory. So I think when you think about contract sales, we would point you to our results in 2023 add roughly $800,000,000 in contract sales for Bluegreen and that $12,000,000,000 ish in inventory will help you do the math there.

Speaker 4

Okay. I do have my questions, but I'm going to hop back in the queue. Thank you.

Speaker 3

Okay, great.

Operator

Our next question is from Grant Montour with Barclays. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 5

Hey, good morning, everybody. Thanks for taking my questions. So maybe on the first one for VPG, if you're looking for low single digit growth for the year that puts you sort of squarely back in the I'm assuming you're talking about legacy HTV, you're squarely back in that 110% to 115% of 2019 range, which is sort of on top of what you did in the Q3. And so I guess the question is, Mark, you gave some qualitative commentary about the soft consumer. It sounds like things haven't gotten worse from 3 months ago when you first started talking about this in late November.

Speaker 5

Could you just sort of bridge your comments with that guidance and tell me if I'm missing anything there?

Speaker 2

Yes. So, Brad, I'd say, we feel really good about the business right now. I think VPG finished the year still up 11% over 'nineteen. And we talked about the system and Maui issues, so that obviously had an impact there. But just taking a step back, our goal and when we put out that soft guidance probably a couple of years ago, it was really to highlight that we've generated a sustainable upside to the prior peak based on the investments we've made.

Speaker 2

So I did make a comment in my prepared remarks around the consumer. And on the margin, we do see some more hesitancy, particularly with the new buyers. And it's something that we actually started seeing in the third quarter, the second half of the third quarter, and it's persisted through the Q4 and into early this year. Look, at the end of the day, I think from an execution standpoint, there's some areas for us to improve in. But clearly, we are seeing a little bit more hesitancy from a buyer standpoint, again, more on the new buyer side than on the owner side.

Speaker 5

Okay, great. Thanks for that. And then, on the loan loss provisions, Dan, it looks like that $100,000,000 is kind of right in there in that mid teens range, which you've been talking about. I feel like for a year now and you never we never have seen you get that high, but now you're baking it into guidance and being a little bit more, forthright there. So what are you seeing that suggests that you're going to see that step up of sort of several points here from the Q4?

Speaker 3

Well, I mean, I think it's similar to some of Mark's commentary on the macro environment. I mean, obviously, interest rates where they are associated with other avenues for spending are clearly squeezing the consumer to a certain extent. From a delinquency rate, what I say is we did see a little bit of sequential deterioration in our portfolio. Nothing overly material, but 20 basis points between both the legacy Diamond and the legacy HED side is something that we pay attention to. Now, from an annualized default rate, we still are performing from a legacy HEV side consistent with 2019 levels, at the higher end of 2019 levels and the Diamond portfolio continues to outperform significantly where they were in 2019.

Speaker 3

So we're optimistic, but at the same time with normalization of credit trends, we're not being overly optimistic. And that's why we expect the bad debt provisioning to creep up on us in 2024.

Operator

Thanks everyone. Our next question is from David Katz with Jefferies. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 6

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. In the release and then, Dan, I think in your comments you mentioned $40,000,000 of revenues and $21,000,000 of EBITDA from Maui and the 3rd party sales center. Wonder if you could sort of maybe break that out for us and the nature of the question is, at least for us, our fee for service sales were lower than what we're looking for, my sense is others too?

Speaker 3

Yes. So just a couple of clarifications point there, David. When we talk about the $40,000,000 that's a combination of the impact from Maui as well as the sales outage from a system issue. Now the system issue with sale outage, it's one of those things that happens, 1 of a 1,000,000 event, I doubt we could even it could repeat itself not only with us or virtually any other organization. It was a human error with a third party vendor that was doing a hardware update at the same time we were doing a software update.

Speaker 3

And what happened was it effectively knocked our deviated sales system offline and to bring those sales back up, it took it was offline for almost a week. So as Mark mentioned, we've done a lot of work to make sure that the backup system replicates on a real time basis and that recovery would no longer take that much time even if this very unusual event were to happen. Now to break that down, just to quantify it for you, out of the $40,000,000 I'd say roughly 2 thirds was associated with the system outage and the balance was with Maui. And from an EBITDA perspective, the sales system outage had a high flow through because tours were still coming to our sales centers, right? We still wanted to get in front of customers, have that interaction.

Speaker 3

So when you look at an EBITDA impact, Maui was roughly caught in the $6,000,000 to $8,000,000 range and the balance was associated with the system outage, so right around $14,000,000

Speaker 2

Right. Yes. David, just to follow-up on that real quick on Maui. So our expected recovery really won't happen until we're able to build back our sales teams. And Maui is kind of a tale of 2 different stories.

Speaker 2

The Southside and Maui, Maui Bay Villas continues to operate as normal. Kaanapali Beach where we have the bulk of our units, we have over 400 units up there on the website, that was near the epicenter of the worst damage. And so we committed to our team members, we had close to 100 team members who lost their homes up there. And so we committed to keep a roof over their head. And happy to say that 60 have found permanent housing.

Speaker 2

We still have 40 that we're housing today. But what happened is we lost a lot of our sales teams who left to other islands or to other locations, a lot of them transferring within our company and it's going to take a while to get them built back up. So this Maui impact is something that's going to continue throughout the rest of this year. It will continue it will get better as we move through the year, but there will be an impact that is much more lasting than the system outage, which Dan alluded to was really just around a week.

Speaker 6

Understood. That's precisely the nature of the question is, one's a moment and one lingers. Thank you very much. Sure.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Chris Woronka with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 7

Hey, guys. Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. Mark or Dan, I guess, you guys mentioned a little bit of you're seeing a little bit of hesitancy on the consumer front. I think you talked about that being a little bit more exogenous to the new owners.

Speaker 7

Is that comment for any specific region? Is that more about Maui or is that more of a general comment geographically?

Speaker 2

Yes. Look, it's when you look at it, it's really pretty much related to the U. S. Mainland is where we're seeing more of the impact. And it's more again with the new buyers.

Speaker 2

Our owners are we're in really good shape with our owner base. We've got a great base of owners. And when you combine now the Bluegreen owners, we've got a strong base of recurring revenue that's coming through that part of the business. We've seen a little bit of pullback that's still above our historical levels. Where we're seeing most of it is around our new buyers.

Speaker 2

And I have to say, I talked about it, I just mentioned that there was, I think, some execution, better execution opportunities on our side. But Dan mentioned the macro, we've got the inflationary pressures out there and rates that have moved. And essentially, that's put some pressure on people's ability to deal with their essential payments. But the other side of it is we grew our tour flow last year, our new buyer tour flow by 22% and that put a lot of pressure on our new agents, right? That's a lot to digest in a short period of time.

Speaker 2

And so what we did is we actually we started dialing back on a few of our lower producing channels starting in the middle of the year and hence we reduced the amount of new buyers coming through that through the system as we as the year went on. Our expectations is now we've dialed some of those back up. We're still seeing a bit of softness there, but long term, we still believe, as Dan alluded to earlier, we're going to grow our contract sales of approximately 6% to 7 percent. We probably weighted heavier toward VPG than it will be to Tourflo this year and a lot of that is due to that we're lapping softer comps.

Speaker 7

Okay. That is helpful. And then as you look out with the package pipeline, you mentioned, I think, over 500,000 tours on the books. Can you give us a sense, the cadence of that? Or is it are we more back end loaded?

Speaker 7

Is it more just trying to get a sense for the level of conviction and kind of what you're expecting this year on tour flow and how that relates to what you've got on the books right now?

Speaker 2

Yes. No, we've got great visibility and that's one of the benefits of our model of having this big pipeline. Of course, on the owner side, arrivals on the books creates a lot of certainty in our expectations. What we see right now is our owners are above the levels we saw last year. The new buyer pipeline is circa over $500,000 then you add Bluegreen into it and they bring another 160,000 packages.

Speaker 2

But as I mentioned, we dialed back activations, the back half of last year and that will have a knock on effect at the early part of this year because as you ramp some of that down, it takes a while to ramp that up. So the cadence of tours will ramp up through the back half of the year. So it's definitely more back half weighted than front half weighted.

Speaker 7

Okay. Very helpful. Thanks guys.

Speaker 1

Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Patrick Scholes with Truist Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Speaker 4

Thank you. Follow-up question here. Mark, I'm kind of surprised you haven't talked about Japanese customer coming back. I was on the Park Hotels conference call and they were and they seem very enthusiastic about the return. I'm wondering your thoughts or what you're seeing or not seeing in that regard?

Speaker 4

Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. So look, I think when you look at our business today, the U. S. Mainland is basically fully recovered from 2019 for new buyers and we're well over our number and for owners on the mainland. Now in Hawaii, we have had a pretty good recovery of our owners coming back.

Speaker 2

In fact, I've used and I've said this data point a number of times, our owners who are very loyal to the brand, who made that commitment to buying in the brand and buying in Hawaii have come back really strong. And so we're basically back to the historical levels we had in 2019. Where we're trailing off is we're really still trailed off on the new buyers coming back to Hawaii. And we're still about 25% to 27% down there. Now that's better than the market.

Speaker 2

When you look at the market, the recovery for the Japanese coming back to Hawaii is around 50% of the 2019 level. And when you look at our new buyer traffic in Japan, it's still down about 25% and that's because we source a lot of tours from the international airports in Japan. And while the Japanese are traveling, they're traveling mainly domestic right now. So, look, we're optimistic that Japan business will be a strong business for us over the long term. Our expectations though is that we won't get back to full recovery until you get the Japanese back into Hawaii.

Speaker 2

And this is less a pandemic issue. I think that is way past us now. It's more about the weakness of the yen. And I think right now, there's just better options for them to travel elsewhere. But they'll be back and our expectations is probably we're probably looking more in toward the latter part of 'twenty five, 'twenty six than we are anytime this year or early next year.

Speaker 4

Okay. Thank you. And then just a related last question here. When we think about sort of pre Diamond acquisition, pre Bluegreen acquisition, Hawaii was 20% or so of your business. What would be sort of that comparable number if you went back to 2018 and had both acquisitions, it certainly sounds like Hawaii is less relevant as far as your overall exposure.

Speaker 4

How should we sort of think about how that percentage has decreased because these acquisitions? I hope that makes sense. Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. No, that makes sense. And actually, it was a bigger percentage pre the 2 M and A deals we did. So today it's when you look at Hawaii, you look at Hawaii and Japan in total, it's still it's right around 20% or just under 20%, but the Japanese part of that is about 10% of that. So the Japan part of it itself is about a 10% part of our business now.

Speaker 2

So it is come down materially.

Operator

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the floor back over to Mark Wong for any closing comments.

Speaker 2

All right. Well, thank you everyone for joining us today. Before I wrap up, I'd like to thank all of our team members for the hard work this year and their continued service and dedication to our owners and guests. When you think about what we've accomplished in the last 30 months acquiring 2 new companies and setting the business at a whole new level with the most offerings, experiences and partners in the industry, I'm really proud of what we've achieved together. I'd also like to offer a special welcome to our new Bluegreen team members.

Speaker 2

Welcome to the HCV family. I'm really optimistic about the future of HCV and look forward to speaking with you again next time. Thank you.

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Earnings Conference Call
Hilton Grand Vacations Q4 2023
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