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Text: They will be joined by Scott Oaksmith, Senior Vice President, Real Estate & Finance.
As you'll hear today, we believe that the deliberate set of strategic decisions we've made in recent years and our targeted actions during the pandemic, along with the dedication and hard work of our franchise owners to navigate the impact of the pandemic, drove impressive results that position us well to further capitalize on growth opportunities in 2021 and beyond.
Throughout my remarks today, I'll provide comparisons not only to prior year, but also to 2019, which we believe are more meaningful in analyzing performance trends as the prior year's quarter results were impacted by the pandemic.
In the first quarter of 2021, we once again delivered results that significantly outperformed the industry, our chain scale segments and local competition, and we expanded our adjusted EBITDA margins to 69%.
Our domestic systemwide year-over-year RevPAR change surpassed the industry by 23 percentage points, declining 4.4% and 18.7% as compared to the same quarters of both 2020 and 2019 respectively.
And we continued to achieve sequential quarter-over-quarter improvement.
In addition, we generated steady month-over-month growth in our choicehotels.com and other proprietary digital channels revenue contribution mix throughout the quarter.
We also benefited from our most loyal customers, Choice Privileges Diamond Elite members, who contributed an even higher percentage of overall revenue for the quarter as compared to 2020 and 2019.
These results have helped us increase RevPAR index versus our local competitors by over 6 percentage points in the first quarter as compared to 2019.
We achieved that through notable lifts in both weekday and weekend RevPAR index and up significantly across all location types as reported by STR.
For over a year, we've observed significant RevPAR share gains against the competition as compared to 2019 giving us further optimism about our future revenue trajectory.
However, our April RevPAR results are truly remarkable, marking near returns to 2019 levels.
Aided by our strong value proposition and continued outperformance, demand for new franchise contracts grew significantly in the first quarter.
Likewise, our franchise owners are remaining with Choice as seen in our industry-leading voluntary franchisee retention rate and owners who choose to build and develop hotels in the current environment increasingly seek our brands.
For the first quarter we awarded nearly 90 new domestic franchise agreements and over 50% increase over the same period of 2020.
Of the total new domestic agreements, over 80% were for conversion hotels.
These hotels historically open about three to five months after contract execution.
Throughout the first quarter, we also continued to grow our effective royalty rate, a reflection of the continued strengthening of the value proposition we provide to our franchise owners.
These results and our optimism for the future led us to reinstate the dividend at the pre-pandemic level and resume our share repurchase program.
Underpinning our first quarter success are the deliberate decisions and strategic investments that we've made in our product portfolio, our value proposition, our platform capabilities and other franchisee facing tools.
These investments allowed us to not only capitalize on demand that historically has driven our core business, but also enabled us to attract new travel demand to new market locations and our key segments such as extended stay and upscale.
In fact, we believe we are now better positioned to increase our share of travel demand in the years to come than we were prior to the onset of the pandemic.
We pride ourselves on investing in our high-quality well segmented portfolio of brands and this sets us apart with our franchise owners.
We constantly monitor changing consumer preferences and strategically manage our portfolio to ensure we are building the brands of tomorrow in key strategic segments that provide a compelling return on investment.
Last year we launched our newest mid-scale extended stay brand Everhome Suites to provide franchisees with another opportunity to capitalize on this fast-growing segment in the hotel industry and help drive returns in practically any economic environment.
As hotel financing starts to rebound, we anticipate developers increased demand for this new product.
In fact, in April, we met with over 25 developers and toward the new model room for this exciting brand and interest is very high.
We also proactively reinvested into the future of our product portfolio with Comfort's Move to Modern refresh program, which has been recently completed and the launch of the new Comfort prototype this quarter to help the brand family maintain its leadership position in the upper mid-scale segment for years to come.
And we remain focused on growing our strategic conversion brands specifically, Clarion Pointe, a relatively new brand extension to the Clarion brand has experienced a five-fold increase of its portfolio and the Ascend Hotel Collection has increased the number of its domestic rooms by over 25% since the end of 2019.
Based on our strong track record of organic growth, we believe these internal investments will continue to drive attractive returns for years to come.
At the same time, we continue to invest in our value proposition capabilities.
We enhanced our pricing and merchandizing tools to further enable our franchise owners to reach their target customers and effectively drive top line revenue to their hotels while reducing their total cost of ownership.
These tools are contributing to the outperformance our brands are experiencing.
We also provided our guests with additional travel options by signing strategic agreements with new travel partners such as Penn National Gaming.
Finally, the decisions we've made to better align our cost structure in the post-pandemic environment that are here to stay, position us well to capitalize on opportunities as travel demand recovers, while allowing us to continue to invest for the long-term.
We have maintained competitive share gains since the onset of the pandemic and we expect our momentum to continue, while uncertainty remains we are observing positive signs of recovery that give us confidence for 2021 and beyond.
With the vaccine rollout pace accelerating and consumer confidence at its highest level since the pandemic began, Americans are feeling more optimistic about the prospect of traveling again.
Indeed recent studies point to a significant uptick in consumers intent to travel in the next six months.
We've observed that throughout the first quarter and particularly in the month of April, our customers are planning their travel further in advance as witnessed by the lengthening of average booking windows.
We are also pleased to see that our first quarter experienced over 400 basis points weekday occupancy index share gains as compared to 2019.
As discussed on our prior calls, we believe the share gains are partially driven by long-term consumer trends, such as remote work, virtual learning and early retirements which afford more Americans flexibility in where and when they travel for leisure.
Additionally, we are seeing sequential quarter-over-quarter improvements in our business travel booking trends.
As a matter of fact, even our group travel is showing signs of recovery with the sports segment bookings expectations for this year already exceeding 2019 levels.
We continue to observe positive trends and rising outlooks across most key domestic economic indicators.
Additionally stimulus checks from the recent financial relief package, high household savings and business reopenings all point to a continued recovery for our small business franchise owners and middle class consumers, our core customers.
I'll now provide a brief update on our key segments where are all of our brands achieved RevPAR index gains as compared to 2019 versus their local competitors through the first quarter.
Our Extended Stay segment is a significant growth engine for the company.
The acquisition of the WoodSpring Suites brand in 2018 and our strategic investments in the Extended Stay segment, allowed us to nearly quadruple the size of the portfolio over the past five years, with the segment now representing 10% of our total domestic rooms.
In the first quarter the Extended Stay segment rapidly expanded by 44 units year-over-year from the first quarter of 2020 and now stands at nearly 455 domestic hotels with a domestic pipeline of 310 hotels.
We expect this Extended Stay unit growth rate to further accelerate in the future.
Once again, our purpose-built brand tailored for long-term guests outperformed the competition in this cycle resilient segment.
The WoodSpring Suites brand is our first brand to experience RevPAR levels that exceeded our 2019 results.
For the first quarter as compared to 2019, WoodSpring reported over 3% RevPAR growth, driven by a more than 4% increase in average daily rate and an average occupancy rate of 74%, a truly remarkable achievement.
The brand's pipeline continues to expand year-over-year and reached nearly 150 domestic hotels at the end of March 2021.
Our Suburban Extended Stay brand experienced 10% year-over-year domestic unit and pipeline growth.
At the same time our MainStay Suites mid-scale extended stay brand captured over 13 percentage points in RevPAR index gains versus its local competitors as compared to 2019.
The brand's portfolio expanded to over 90 domestic hotels open a 26% increase year-over-year.
The increased developer interest we are seeing reaffirms that our strategic commitment and continued investments in this highly cycle-resistant segment are driving a competitive advantage.
Given these results, we remain optimistic about the growth potential of our Extended Stay portfolio.
Our mid-scale brands represent over two-thirds of our total domestic portfolio and over half of the total domestic pipeline.
As we celebrate Comfort's 40th anniversary this year, the brand's continued growth and performance success is proved positive that we invest for the long-term.
Our efforts to transform the brand are paying off, specifically the Comfort Family achieved RevPAR index gains versus its local competitors of nearly 10 percentage points and a RevPAR change that was nearly 11 percentage points more favorable than the upper mid-scale chain scale in the first quarter as compared to 2019.
In March, we officially launched the much anticipated rise and shine prototype which maintains Comfort's low cost to build advantage over its competition and is designed to meet guest expectations for an elevated experience.
The Comfort brand family reached over 260 hotels in its domestic pipeline, over one quarter of which are hotels awaiting conversions, which we believe will fuel the brand's growth in the near term.
And finally, Clarion Pointe, ended the first quarter by achieving a milestone of the 30th hotel opened in the United States and more than 20 additional hotels awaiting conversion in the near term.
Our upscale portfolio achieved impressive year-over-year growth in the first quarter, where we increased our domestic upscale room count by 22% and marked the highest number of openings in a given quarter, matching the company's all-time record.
In addition, developer interest in our upscale brands remained high as we more than quadrupled the number of domestic franchise contracts in the first quarter year-over-year.
The Ascend Hotel Collection leads the industry as the first and largest soft brand.
The brand grew its domestic room count by nearly 26% year-over-year and expanded to nearly 380 hotels open around the globe.
Ascend Hotels achieved the following performance in the first quarter as compared to the same period of 2019.
The brand outperformed the upscale segment RevPAR change by 19 percentage points.
It achieved RevPAR index gains of 12 percentage points against its local competitors and it recorded average daily rate index gains of 11 percentage points.
This performance further enhance the brand's attractiveness to developers looking for a smart conversion opportunity which was showcased in the brand's strong franchise agreements activities for the quarter.
Our upscale Cambria Hotels brand continues its positive momentum, growing its portfolio size by 14% to 57 units with 18 projects under active construction at the end of March.
The brand continues to build on its success with four hotels already opened year-to-date and five additional planned to open through the end of the summer.
Consumer confidence in Cambria Hotels drove the brand RevPAR share gains versus its local competitors to 16 percentage points in the first quarter as compared to 2019.
These results are proof of Choice Hotels value proposition in the upscale segment for our current and prospective owners.
We're also committed to enhancing our value proposition by growing our platform business.
In the first quarter, we further expanded our attractive upscale platform and successfully on-boarded 22 Penn National Gaming Casino resort properties, representing nearly 7,000 rooms joining our Ascend Hotel Collection.
This strategic agreement will offer our more than 48 million Choice Privileges members the opportunity to earn and redeem points at these Penn properties by booking their stays directly on choicehotels.com.
We are proud of everything we've accomplished this quarter, but we certainly could not have done it without the dedication of our associates and the strength of our award-winning culture, focused on diversity, equity and belonging.
I'm especially pleased to say that Choice was recently named by Forbes as one of the best employers for diversity and one of America's best mid-size employers, as well as one of the best places to work by comparably.
Our strategic approach, resilient business model, high quality well segmented portfolio brands and strong balance sheet will help us to further capitalize on growth opportunities in 2021 and beyond.
With that, I'll hand it over to our CFO, Dom?
I hope you and your families are all well.
Today, I'd like to provide additional insights around our first quarter results, update you on our liquidity profile and approach to capital allocation and finally share our thoughts on the outlook for the road ahead.
Taking a closer look at our results for the first quarter 2021, total revenues excluding marketing and reservation system fees were $91.4 million.
Adjusted EBITDA totaled $63.1 million driven by improving RevPAR performance and our ability to realize adjusted SG&A savings of 20% and our adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 69%, a 330 basis point increase year-over-year.
As a result, our adjusted earnings per share were $0.57 for the first quarter.
Let's take a closer look at our three key revenue levers, beginning with RevPAR.
Our domestic systemwide RevPAR outperformed the overall industry by 23 percentage points for the first quarter, declining 18.7% from 2019, compared to 2020, our first quarter 2021 RevPAR declined only 4.4%.
At the same time, our first quarter results exceeded the primary chain scale segments in which we compete as reported by STR, by over 8 percentage points versus 2019.
Our domestic systemwide occupancy rate has seen significant improvement since mid-March 2021.
In fact, starting in mid-March, we've experienced our highest occupancy levels since the start of the pandemic, with systemwide occupancy rates exceeding 70% on numerous days.
We are optimistic that these demand trends will remain elevated, especially throughout summer and will further strengthen the financial health of our franchisees.
The trends of improving RevPAR performance have continued into the second quarter.
Our April performance was significantly stronger with a RevPAR decline of approximately 4% and an occupancy rate increase of 80 basis points versus 2019 levels.
These trends give us even greater optimism for our 2021 performance.
We've long focused our brand strategy on driving growth across the higher value and more revenue intense upscale, extended stay and mid-scale segments and the investments we've made are paying off.
In the first quarter, these strategic segments helped us achieve material RevPAR change outperformance against our respective industry chain scales and drove gains versus our local competitors.
Specifically when compared to first quarter 2019, our upscale portfolio increased its RevPAR index relative to its local competitive set by 14 percentage points.
Our extended stay portfolio outperformed the industry's RevPAR change by an impressive 38 percentage points and grew versus its local competitive set by 10 percentage points.
And finally the RevPAR change for our mid-scale and upper mid-scale portfolio exceeded these segments by 9 percentage points.
For the first quarter 2021 versus the same period of 2019, all of our brands achieved RevPAR index gains versus their local competitors.
In fact, we were able to increase our overall RevPAR index against local competitors by over 6 percentage points, notably through our franchisees' ability to maintain rate integrity.
More specifically, our average daily rate improved from the prior quarter and our average daily rate index increased 3.7 percentage points as compared to 2019.
We've also observed firsthand that our investments in pricing optimization capabilities for our franchisees are paying off.
At the same time, we continue to grow the overall size of our franchise system and open the highest number of hotels in any first quarter in the past 10 years.
Across our more revenue intense brands in the upscale extended stay and mid-scale segments we observed stronger unit growth, increasing the number of hotels by 2.4% year-over-year and improving the growth from fourth quarter 2020.
For full year 2021, we expect our overall unit growth trend to continue.
Furthermore, we expect the unit growth of the more revenue intense segments to accelerate versus 2021 and range between 2% and 3%.
Aided by our strong value proposition and outperformance, demand for our brands continue to gain momentum since the beginning of the year with over half of the domestic agreements executed in the month of March.
Specifically, we saw an increase in demand for our conversion brands with domestic conversion contracts up 76% year-over-year.
Our royalty rate remains a significant source of our revenue growth, which is driven by the attractive value proposition we provide to our franchisees, their continued desire to be affiliated with our proven brands and our pipeline.
The company's domestic effective royalty rate exceeded 5% for the first time ever in a quarter and increased 7 basis points year-over-year for the first quarter compared to the prior year.
We expect to maintain the historical growth trajectory of this lever in 2021 as owners seek Choice Hotels proven capabilities of delivering strong top line revenues to their hotels, while helping them maximize return on investment.
I'd now like to turn to our liquidity profile and share capital allocation update.
Our strong results have led to an even stronger liquidity position for the company.
At the end of first quarter 2021, the company had approximately $823 million in cash and available borrowing capacity through its revolving credit facility, even though our cash generation tends to be weaker in the first quarter, due to the seasonality of our business and other cash outlays.
Given the continuing improvements in our operations, our strong liquidity and credit profile and our increasing optimism for 2021 and beyond, our Board has approved the reinstatement of our quarterly dividend at the pre-pandemic level beginning in July 2021.
Additionally, the Board has also approved the resumption of the company's share repurchase program.
Both actions highlight the confidence we have in our business to continue generating strong levels of cash and are a testament to our impressive results, while reflecting our continued commitment to driving long-term shareholder value and returning excess capital to our shareholders.
Nevertheless, our capital allocation philosophy remains unchanged.
We will continue to be disciplined stewards of capital and take steps that we believe will maximize shareholder value.
Choice's primary objective in this area has always been to increase organic growth by strategically investing back into the business.
We will continue to monitor the environment for other investment opportunities and evaluate capital returns in the context of our leverage levels, market conditions and our overall capital allocation strategy.
I'd like to offer some thoughts on what lies ahead.
While we are not providing formal guidance today, we currently expect RevPAR change for the remainder of the year to be stronger than first quarter 2021 results versus both 2020 and 2019.
Our view is reinforced by the following: First, we continue to see consumers' desire to travel climbing aided by the vaccine rollout and improving domestic economic environment and higher levels of consumer savings.
Second, we are pleased that our domestic RevPAR change has continued the pattern of sequential improvement with significantly stronger April RevPAR results versus 2019 and trends continuing into May.
We currently expect strong travel demand trends to continue.
Finally, we continue to be optimistic given other positive trends such as demand increases in key urban locations and our share gains in business travel, combined with the continued resilience of leisure demand.
We will continue to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 across the business and we'll provide further updates in August during our next earnings call.
In closing, we remain optimistic that Choice Hotels is well positioned to succeed in 2021 and beyond.
Our resilient, primarily asset light franchise-focused business model which has historically delivered stable returns throughout economic cycles and provided a degree of cushion from market risks will continue to benefit us in the long run.
Our investments for the long-term that propel our future forward coupled with our strategic approach, disciplined capital allocation strategy and strong balance sheet will allow us to continue to capitalize on opportunities during the recovery and drive outsized returns for years to come.
At this time, Pat and I would be happy to answer any questions.

user
compname posts q1 adjusted earnings per share $0.57.
q1 adjusted earnings per share $0.57.
not providing formal guidance for q2 or full year 2021.
choice hotels international - currently expects revpar change for remainder of 2021, as compared to both 2019 and 2020, to outperform q1 2021 results.

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