Good morning, and welcome to the Hilton third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jill Slattery, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Development. You may begin.
Thank you, Chad. Welcome to Hilton's third quarter 2021 earnings call. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that our discussions this morning will include forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements, and forward-looking statements made today speak only to our expectations as of today. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise these statements. For a discussion of some of the factors that could cause actual results to differ, please see the Risk Factors section of our most recently filed Form 10-K. In addition, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures on this call. You can find reconciliations of non-GAAP to GAAP financial measures discussed in today's call in our earnings press release and on our website at ir.hilton.com.
This morning, Chris Nassetta, our President and Chief Executive Officer, will provide an overview of the current operating environment. Kevin Jacobs, our Chief Financial Officer and President, Global Development, will then review our third quarter results. Following their remarks, we'll be happy to take your questions. With that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Chris.
Thank you, Jill. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. We are pleased to report another quarter of very solid results that demonstrate continued recovery and the resiliency of our business model. Increases in vaccination rates and consumer spending, coupled with improving business activity, continue to drive solid travel demand throughout the summer and into the fall. As global borders reopen and the travel environment recovers, we remain extremely encouraged by people's desire to travel and connect more than ever before. In the third quarter, system-wide RevPAR grew 99% year-over-year. Compared to 2019, RevPAR was down roughly 19%, improving 17 percentage points versus the second quarter, with system-wide rates down just 2.5% versus 2019.
Adjusted EBITDA totaled approximately $519 million, up 132% year-over-year and down 14% versus 2019. Performance was primarily driven by strong leisure trends, with leisure room nights roughly in line with 2019 levels, with leisure rates exceeding 2019 levels. Business travel continued to gain momentum, with midweek occupancy and rates improving meaningfully versus the second quarter. In the quarter, business transient room nights were roughly 75% of prior peak levels. Group continued to lag but showed significant sequential improvement versus the second quarter, boosted by strength in social events. For the quarter, group RevPAR was approximately 60% of 2019 levels, improving 21 percentage points from the second quarter.
Overall, system-wide RevPAR versus 2019 peaked in July at 85%, with rates just shy of prior peaks. As expected, recovery slowed modestly later in the quarter due to typical seasonality and customer mix shift, but overall trends remained solid. Both August and September RevPAR achieved roughly 80% of 2019 levels, driven by continued strength in leisure and upticks in business travel post-Labor Day as offices and schools reopened. These trends improved modestly into October, with month-to-date RevPAR at approximately 84% of 2019 levels and rates in the U.S. nearly back to prior peaks. Roughly 40% of system-wide hotels have exceeded 2019 RevPAR levels in October month to date. Additionally, bookings for all future periods are just 8% below 2019.
With loosening travel restrictions and strong non-residential fixed investment forecasts, we remain optimistic for future travel demand. TSA reported third quarter travel numbers were nearly 80% of 2019, with demand picking up further following the announcements of the U.S. border reopening and the lift of the international travel ban for vaccinated travelers. Additionally, studies show that nearly 70% of U.S. businesses are back on the road, up 28 points from the end of the second quarter. With roughly 80% of our typical corporate mix coming from small and medium-sized businesses, and with the lagging recovery of larger corporate travel, we've taken the opportunity to continue our work from before COVID to further increase our focus on this segment of demand.
This demand is higher rated and more resilient, which has helped us recover more quickly in business transient and should drive rate compression in the future as larger corporate travel picks up. On the group side, our position for the rest of the year remains fairly steady, with forward booking sentiment improving as variant concerns taper. Additionally, the recent reopenings of some of our large urban properties like the New York Hilton Midtown increase our confidence in our positioning as group recovers. Turning to development, we added nearly 100 hotels and 15,000 rooms across all major regions and delivered strong net unit growth of 6.6% in the third quarter. Conversions represented roughly a third of openings. Year to date, we've added more than 42,000 net rooms globally, higher than all our major branded competitors.
Our performance reflects the success of our disciplined growth strategy, the strength of our brands, network effect, and commercial engines across the world. It also illustrates our increasing confidence in a strong recovery in global tourism in the months and years to come. During the quarter, we launched our large-scale franchise model in China, enabling independent owners to explore franchising opportunities with our Hilton Garden Inn brand, with a prototype developed specifically for the Chinese market. To date, we have signed more than 100 deals to develop Hilton Garden Inn properties in China, strengthening our confidence in the long-term growth of our focus service brands and our ability to cater to a growing middle class. Following our recently announced exclusive license agreement with Country Garden, we were thrilled to open our first Home2 Suites in China.
With plans to grow to more than 1,000 properties, we look forward to leveraging our partnership to capture the rapidly growing demand for mid-scale hotels in China. We also celebrated the opening of our 500th Home2 Suites following the brand's launch just 10 years ago, making it one of the fastest-growing brands in industry history and boasting the industry's largest pipeline in North America with more than 400 hotels in development. Our luxury and lifestyle footprints also continued to expand globally with the debut of the Canopy by Hilton in Spain and the highly anticipated opening of the Mango House Seychelles, LXR Hotels & Resorts in the Seychelles. Marking another important milestone in its global expansion, LXR Hotels & Resorts celebrated its debut in Asia Pacific with the opening of the ROKU KYOTO.
In the quarter, we signed nearly 24,000 rooms, up approximately 40% year-over-year, driven by strength in the Americas and Asia Pacific regions. Driving our positive momentum in luxury, we announced the signing of the Conrad Los Angeles, the brand's first property in California. The 300-room hotel is expected to open in 2022 as part of the Grand L.A. mixed-use development. With approximately 404,000 rooms in development, more than half of which are under construction, we expect positive development trends to continue, driven by both new development and conversion opportunities. For the full year, we expect net new unit growth in the 5%-5.5% range, and we continue to expect mid-single-digit growth for the next several years. For our guests, flexibility has always been important, but the pandemic has made choice and control even more critical.
We were excited to launch several new commercial programs and loyalty extensions, including the launch of Digital Key Share, a first for a major hospitality company. This feature allows more than one guest to have access to their room's digital key. Additional technology enhancements have enabled our elite Honors members to begin enjoying automatic room upgrades. Gold and Diamond members may be notified of a complimentary upgrade prior to arrival, enabling guests to choose their upgraded room directly by using the Hilton Honors app. We continue to focus on new opportunities to further engage our 123 million Honors members and are thrilled to see engagement is nearly back to 2019 levels. In the quarter, membership grew 11% year-over-year. Honors members accounted for 59% of occupancy, with the U.S. at 66%, just 2 points below 2019 levels.
During the pandemic, approximately 23 million U.S. households brought home a new pet, including my own. Like so many others, my family loves traveling with our new dog, Miller. In the coming months, Homewood Suites will join Home2 in becoming 100% pet-friendly in the U.S., with plans for all limited service brands to be pet-friendly by the first quarter of next year. Thanks to our exciting partnership with Mars Petcare, we're offering new pet-focused programming and benefits. Our guests are eager to travel with their furry little friends, and by making that simpler, we're able to capture demand and bring new business into the system. As the global travel environment improves, I continue to be impressed by our team members' dedication to providing exceptional experiences to our guests.
That's why I'm particularly proud that last week, we were named the number 3 World's Best Workplace by Fortune and Great Place to Work. After 6 consecutive years of being ranked, Hilton was the only hospitality company on the list. We truly believe that Hilton continues to be an engine of opportunity for all of our stakeholders around the world and are very optimistic for the future. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kevin for a few more details on our results in the quarter.
Thanks, Chris, and good morning, everyone. During the quarter, system-wide RevPAR grew 98.7% versus the prior year on a comparable and currency-neutral basis as the recovery continued to accelerate, driven by strong leisure demand particularly in the U.S. and across Europe. Performance was driven by both occupancy and rate growth. As Chris mentioned, system-wide RevPAR was down 18.8% compared to 2019. Adjusted EBITDA was $519 million in the third quarter, up 132% year-over-year. Results reflect the broader recovery in travel demand. Management and franchise fees grew 93%, driven by strong RevPAR improvement and owner's license fees. Additionally, results were helped by continued cost control at both the corporate and property levels.
Our ownership portfolio performed better than expected in the third quarter, driven by the accelerating recovery in Europe, the Tokyo Olympics, and ongoing cost controls. For the quarter, diluted earnings per share, adjusted for special items, was $0.78. Turning to our regional performance, third quarter comparable U.S. RevPAR grew 105% year-over-year and was down 14% versus 2019. Robust leisure demand and improving business transient trends drove strong performance in July. Trends modestly slowed later in the quarter due to seasonality. U.S. occupancy averaged nearly 70% for the quarter, with overall rate largely in line with 2019 levels. In the Americas outside the U.S., third quarter RevPAR increased 168% year-over-year and was down 30% versus 2019. The region benefited from easing travel restrictions and strong leisure demand over the summer period.
Canada also saw a noticeable step up in demand in August after reopening their borders to vaccinated Americans. In Europe, RevPAR grew 142% year-over-year and was down 35% versus 2019. Travel demand accelerated across the region in the third quarter as vaccination rates increased and international travel restrictions loosened. In the Middle East and Africa region, RevPAR increased 110% year-over-year and was down 29% versus 2019. Performance benefited from strong domestic leisure demand and international inbound travel from Europe. In the Asia Pacific region, third quarter RevPAR grew 5% year-over-year and was down 41% versus 2019. RevPAR in China was down 25% as compared to 2019 as a rise in COVID cases led to reimposed restrictions and lockdowns across the country.
China has recovered steadily into October, with occupancy nearing 60% for the month. In the rest of the Asia Pacific region, prolonged lockdowns in Australia and New Zealand offset upside from the Tokyo Olympics. Turning to development, as Chris mentioned, in the third quarter, we grew net units 6.6%. Our pipeline grew sequentially, totaling 404,000 rooms at the end of the quarter, with 62% of pipeline rooms located outside the U.S. Development activity continues to gain momentum across the globe as the recovery progresses, a testament to the confidence owners and developers have in our strong commercial engines and industry-leading brands. For the full year, we now expect signings to increase in the mid- to high-teens range year-over-year and expect net unit growth of 5%-5.5%.
Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $8.9 billion of long-term debt and $1.4 billion in total cash and cash equivalents. We're proud of the financial flexibility we demonstrated over the past 18 months, and looking ahead, we remain confident in our balance sheet management as we continue to progress through the recovery and move closer towards our target leverage. Further details on our third quarter can be found in the earnings release we issued earlier this morning. This completes our prepared remarks. We would now like to open the line for any questions you may have. We would like to speak with all of you this morning, so we ask that you limit yourself to one question. Chad, can we have our first question, please?
Thank you. To ask a question today, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. The first question will come from Carlo Santarelli with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Hey, Chris, Kevin, everybody. Thanks for taking my question.
Hey. Good morning, Carlo.
Good morning. Chris gave a lot of color, as did you, Kevin, in your prepared remarks. One thing I just wanted to kind of ask around was how you guys are seeing or believe the cadence of business transient travel will play out here in the fourth quarter, and how kind of or how you're thinking about the sequencing through 2022?
Yeah. I mean, great question, Carlo, and obviously one everybody is interested in. Maybe I'll talk about all the segments a little bit because it's hard to do one without the other.
Sure.
... you know, to grossly oversimplify, which you know I like to do occasionally, the way I would see it is, as we have been seeing through the third quarter and what I think we'll see in the fourth quarter is a continued uptick in business transient travel. I think that will come from all segments of business transient, but again, probably continue to be led this year in the fourth quarter by small and medium SME, small and medium enterprises. I don't think you'll see a huge pickup, but I think you'll see a modest pickup.
At the same time, just because people are, you know, increasingly back in offices and kids are definitely, mostly, if not entirely back in school, I think you'll see a little bit of a tick down in leisure business. Now, the weekends will continue to rage, I think. The weekends have been extraordinary, but, you know, the midweek leisure travel will continue to tick down. I think, you know, those two will largely offset each other in the fourth quarter. I think group will remain pretty consistent. Obviously, you know, we had a big uptick in the summer, and then Delta variant sort of slid out the
You know, the momentum a little bit on group. People think, you know, there's advanced planning, people have to spend money. While there's plenty of group occurring, it's really largely sports and social. At this point, I think that continues about like what we've seen in the third quarter into the fourth, because you know, all the pent-up demand is there, but people are sort of advanced planning more into next year just to sort of finally get through Delta and hopefully to the endemic stage of COVID, which sort of feels like is we're in the process of doing as we speak. As we think about 2022 with all those segments, you know, what I would say is, I think leisure will remain at, you know, elevated relative to historical standards.
Obviously, my belief is kids will still be back in school, more offices are gonna open, so midweek we'll get back to more normalized levels. I think the weekends, people wanna be out. You know, that turns out they didn't like being locked in their closets and basements and attics, and so they're gonna wanna get out. We've seen this pattern of very high demand on weekends. I think that will continue. I think on the margin, you know, leisure will continue to be stronger than we've historically seen, sort of in pre-COVID times. I think business transient will continue to move up. You'll continue to see great strength in small and medium enterprises which aren't fully back to pre-COVID, but getting pretty close.
My own belief is you'll start to see the large corporate step into the game. I mean, they're already in the game, but, you know, they're still sort of like 40% off of 2019 levels. I think you'll see a step change in the large corporates, which will contribute along with SMEs to continue upticks in business transient. I think group is clearly gonna be better next year than this year. I think reality is the first quarter probably, you know, is typically a slow group quarter. I don't think it'll be different in that way. I think people are gonna wanna sort of clear the mechanism of getting past the winter, you know, just 'cause concerns of flu seasons and all that, given what we've all been through.
I think as you get into Q2, Q3, and Q4, both this booked business and realized business on the group side are gonna be better. You know, I think 2022 is sizing up to be. I think the fourth quarter is sizing up to be fairly similar to the third quarter, and I think 2022 is sizing up to be another big step forward on recovery to more normalized times.
Thank you, Chris. That's helpful. That's it for me.
Thanks, Carlo.
The next question comes from Joe Greff from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Morning, Chris, Kevin, and Jill. You guys had some interesting comments on the development side and obviously positive there. Chris, when do you think hotel construction starts trough? When do you think new signings peak or have they?
We've spent a lot of time looking at that through the last couple of quarters and very recently. You know, here's what I'd say. I gave you a sense, so I won't repeat what both Kevin and I said about NUG. Kevin, we both talked about it this year. I gave you a sense in our prepared comments that we think we'll be in the mid-single digits for the next couple of years. Obviously, that requires a lot of work. It requires signing deals, starting construction that then ultimately, you know, lands in our NUG numbers.
I think when you look back, you know, two years, you know, from now at this period of time, I am of the mind and reasonably confident that what you'll see is the trough in deal signings was last year. As Kevin mentioned, we're gonna be up in the mid to high single digits in signings this year, we think. I mean, we're pretty damn confident we're gonna be up nicely.
I don't see why next year, given what's going on in the environment in terms of particularly, you know, operating recovery, pricing power, which I'm sure we'll come to, we'll do it maybe in another question, that we're gonna see more deals signed next year. I think last year was probably, in my mind, the trough for signings. I think this year, for those same exact reasons, will be the trough in construction starts. Starts always will lag the signings a little bit. We're definitely gonna be a little bit, you know, modestly down in signings this year after being down last year.
Our expectation is that we'll turn around next year, and that's why we think we'll be sort of in the mid-single digits for a couple of years and then, you know, back on track being in the 6%-7% range just because starting this year, we're signing more. Starting next year, we're starting more. We're obviously filling in a lot. You saw in the second quarter, a third of our NUG was conversion, so we're filling in. You know, between all of those factors, we think, you know, ultimately, when we get out past a couple of years, we're back. The goal is to be back in the 6%-7%, and I think given what I see in the environment, that we feel pretty good about that.
I mean, I'll probably stop there with the only comment being that, you know, things are gonna come back faster than prior recoveries here, and that's because the thing that's very different than every other cycle I've seen in my 40 years, and I'll leave it at this, and somebody, I'm sure, will have a question, is just pricing power. I mean, the reality is, you know, typically it's like a grind to build back occupancy and rate lags significantly. Rate is leading the charge, and that obviously flows really nicely. We've done a bunch of things, as you know, and we've talked about a lot to create higher margin businesses out of all of these brands. When you flush all that through, even with labor costs up and all of those fun things, these are higher margin businesses, you know.
Part of this is just we're in an inflationary environment and, you know, guess what? We can reprice our product every second of every day. We're a very good hedge in that way to inflation, and we're being very thoughtful about how we're pricing our product. I think when we all look back on it, this will be a faster recovery on the development side than we've seen in prior cycles. You know, so I think we're gonna be back on a very nice trajectory next year.
Thank you.
The next question will be from Shaun Kelley from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning, everyone.
Hey, Shaun.
Hey, Chris. I think there were a couple of fat pitches there on the pricing environment, so maybe I'll bite. If you could, but I guess my twist would be, could you give us a little color specifically on the business pricing side? I think we all see that the leisure rates are exceptional. Maybe your thoughts on how long leisure can continue, you know, pricing like it is, your thoughts on the recovery of business pricing, and then any headwind from large corporates. You've done a great job of delineating small and large. You know, how much of a headwind is large corporate, you know, is that price any differently? Is that a factor at all?
Yeah, a great question. Yes, I did sort of serve that up, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised I'm getting asked. Listen, you embedded in the question as part of the answer, but obviously we feel, you know. First of all, let me not be pedantic, but, you know, say what I say a lot when I'm asked this question, the laws of economics are alive and well, right? That's what's going on. You know, why is leisure so strong in rate? Why are we able to price above historically high levels? 'Cause there are crazy amounts of demand. Like, our weekend demand is off the charts. We're running 85%-90% system-wide in the U.S. on the weekends, and we're pricing over $190, obviously, because, you know, we have a lot of demand.
I do think that will, you know, that leisure pricing power will continue because what I said before, I believe that leisure demand is gonna remain at elevated levels, particularly on the weekends, and that that's gonna give us nice pricing power. Even though, obviously the recovery in business transient has lagged, as I said in the quarter, we were 75%, but it's sort of a tale of two cities, which is, I implied it a little bit. You have the big corporates, which are still 40% off, but then you have small and medium, which are only maybe 10%. You could even argue maybe 5% or 10% off. We have a fair amount of pricing power in the biggest piece, in the biggest segments, and they are less price sensitive.
You know, broadly, your biggest, you know, it's not everybody, your biggest corporate customers can end up with sort of off by 10% or 20%. Small and medium might end up at 5% or 7%. That's why we were working so hard on accessing more of that demand base pre-COVID, and it has helped us during COVID. When you put it all together, and you look at like even in the quarter, we're at 90% of 2019. In business transient combined, we're already at 90% of 2019 levels, even though we still have a ways to go to build back demand. You know, I feel it's a long way to go. I feel pretty good about where that's going because we're gonna keep pushing on small and medium, that's almost back.
My guess is that will exceed prior levels. Then the corporates are gonna come in, and that's gonna allow us to put more in the top of the funnel to price, you know, have more demand, allows us to price more aggressively. I think when it's all said and done, if we were 80-20 before, and I don't know exactly where it'll be, but I suspect we will probably never go back to 80-20 if, you know, in reality because, you know, we have been, you know, successful at finding other segments that we think are gonna be there, they're gonna be more resilient, and they're gonna be higher priced. My guess is we will be managing, you know, to probably a 90-10 world or something, you know, something like that.
We do think, you know, pricing power is not in business transient what it is in leisure, but it's not far off. Then group, you know, group is sort of in the year for the year similar to business transient. As you look forward, because there's so much pent-up demand, and as I've talked about, you know, at least on the last call, we're actually pricing already over 2019 levels. There's pricing power, and you'd say, "Well, wow, if group is still, you know, way off, you know, from a consumed revenue point of view, what's going on?" What's going on is group is, you know, very the one segment that books way in advance, and there's a limited amount of meeting space in the world and in the United States.
We happen to have a lot of it, you know. I mean, there are a few of us that are, you know, that are very big players in that space. A lot of people want it. The reality is, again, laws of economics are alive and well. People want it. There's not enough of it. You have huge pent-up demand you know, events that didn't happen that need to happen, new events, and that's pushing into next year. Even though in the moment group revenues aren't what they were. On a forward-looking basis, there is a good amount of pricing power, which is why. All of our advanced bookings in the next year are pricing over 19 levels at this point.
Again, back to the debate I put out there, I guess, you know, it's unusual. Like, you know, I hate to admit how long I've been doing this, but a long time. I guess I said it before, but, you know, it just hasn't really happened this way. Now, there are a lot of reasons we're better, right? We got much more sophisticated revenue management systems. We're much more on top of it, I think, than we've ever been. Obviously, we're in a more inflationary environment broadly. Thank you, Federal Reserve, and, you know, the U.S. Congress for fiscal and monetary stimulus. We could debate transitory or otherwise, but, you know, those things are translating into broadly a more highly inflationary environment.
that applies to us too, and that obviously is helping from a pricing power point of view.
Thank you very much.
The next question will be from Thomas Allen from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Good morning. A strategic question. You talked in your prepared remarks about starting open franchising for Hilton Garden Inn in China. I thought that was an interesting change because with Hampton Inn, you did a master franchise agreement. Can you just talk about, you know, the rationale? Thank you.
Yeah. It's very straightforward. We've done 2, the one you mentioned, with Plateno, with Hampton Inn, and then more recently, I mentioned in my comments, we just actually opened our first Home2 Suites by Hilton in China on the road to doing 1,000 of them with Country Garden, one of the largest players in China, which is another master license agreement. We've done those 2. Never say never. I'm not saying we would, but the idea was to really help, you know, get help from very large local players that knew how to garner scale very quickly to help build our network effect in China. Then ultimately come back in with our other brands and do it ourselves. That's exactly what we're doing with Hilton Garden Inn.
We obviously have a massive franchise system here in the United States and frankly in you know in Europe now, where you know the bulk of the business here is franchised. Increasingly, I think we're now the majority of the business in Europe is franchised. It's been a much smaller you know part of the business in China and in Asia-Pacific. So we historically haven't had the same level of resources. What we've done during COVID is made some strategic investments to build out more infrastructure so that we can take other brands of our 18 brand you know family of brands and do it ourselves. You know, we're trying to be very you know sort of balanced and balance all the risks associated with our expansion around the world.
We think it's great to work with third parties. We love the Country Garden folks and Plateno. They've been incredibly important partners, will continue to be for a long, long time. It's also important that we have that skill set ourselves. Franchising is it, you know. While it's similar in China, it's not exactly the same. You know, we've learned a lot and I think built a, you know, we're building a good infrastructure and a, you know, good muscle set to be able to take a bunch of other brands and do just what we've done here in the U.S., Europe, and other places.
Sorry, just a follow-up to this question. Any updates based on the potential TAM for these focused service brands in China?
I didn't hear the question.
How many of these hotels do you think you can open in China? What's the addressable market?
Oh, oh. TAM. Okay, you're going tech on me. I love that. We do look at TAM. I mean, I'm not gonna give you the. It's thousands, right? Think of it in the following way. We have limited service hotels in the U.S., probably 4,500. We have a population of 320 million people. You have 1.3 billion people there. So there's no limit in my lifetime, at least. Probably not. You're younger than me, but I'm not that old, so probably not in your lifetime either. You know, thousands and thousands. You could easily have 10,000 or 20,000 or more. I think there's growth opportunities in the mid-market as far as the eye can see in China. So our, you know.
While we have done some TAM work in China, every time we come back, you know, and look at the numbers, they're just off the charts. You know, there are no rational limitations given what our footprint is, what the population is, and the growth in their middle class.
Helpful. Thank you.
Yeah.
The next question will be from Smedes Rose from Citi. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks. Chris, I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about what your owners are telling you about labor costs in the U.S. and kind of how they're handling restaffing, and maybe just the sort of idea of slimmed down operating models versus trying to get back to, you know, the education
Yeah. I had a hard time hearing some of that, but I think I captured it. It's the labor costs and what owners are telling us. It's obviously been a big issue and one that we spent a lot of time on. It's a complex issue in terms of what's sort of underneath the problem. What I would say is obviously there is no one owner group. The different owners in different parts of the country and the world, for that matter, have different views, but if I sort of homogenize it all, which is hard to do, but if I do it in my head, I would say while it's still a very difficult issue, we've started to see easing in terms of access to labor. I think we have a ways to go.
You know, there are a bunch of things we're doing to help from a technology, you know, point of view to access pools of labor that maybe we hadn't accessed historically. But broadly, more labor is coming back in, and some of those pressures are easing. Obviously, labor is more expensive pretty much everywhere. I think, you know, that is, that's a reality. You know, where it settles out, I think it's a little early to know, but I think it is sort of settling down as people are gradually coming back into the workforce. I think the end of the question, which is a really important one, which I sort of touched on earlier in one of my other filibusters, was, you know, how is it gonna look for owners on the other side?
It's hard, you know. Some owners, you know, depends on location, product, you know, a thousand factors. Broadly, we're already seeing it. I think I said this. Broadly, I think when we get to the other side of this, across the system, margins are gonna be higher. You know why. You know, with input costs going up, labor costs going up, and all of those fun things, margins are gonna be higher because rates are gonna be a lot higher ultimately when we get past this for all the reasons I talked about in terms of the pricing power that we have and the broader inflationary environment. That's very helpful to the business.
At the same time, particularly in the mega categories, which is where the bulk of the hotels are with our ownership community, we did a bunch of really important work and did a lot of testing and learning and made a bunch of changes in the hotels in the end, we think to create a better experience for our customers, but to do it in a more efficient way to drive higher margins. We're pretty confident, and we have pretty good evidence, which I'll talk about, that even with the you know, when labor comes back and you have to pay labor more, given where rate structures are gonna be in most places, and given the efficiencies that we've been able to garner, that these are you know, our owners are gonna end up with higher margin businesses.
By the way, many, many of them, not all of them, so for those that haven't gotten there that are listening, you know, keep the faith, but many, many owners are already there. Some of it is unsustainable, meaning part of it is they can't get enough labor, and so they don't have enough people, so, you know, their labor costs are unusually low. Even, even in places where they are able to get the labor back for the reasons I described, meaning more efficiencies on our standards and, pricing power on the top line, they're driving very good margins. You know, we've had, you know, owners have been in pain. I don't wanna minimize it.
There's still many of them in a lot of pain, but we're doing our level best to get them the other side and make sure their businesses are stronger, both because that's what we should do as a fiduciary to them, but also, you know, ultimately, if we wanna continue to be able to grow, we have to give them an investment alternative that continues to make sense from a return point of view. We're hyper-focused on it, and I would say I feel really good. As I said, I think the development cycle will flip faster than we've seen in prior cycles for these reasons. I just think that, you know, the economics, you know, the laws of economics are alive and well.
said it now twice or three times, you know, that if people can get great returns because of the conditions, macro and micro, macro of world going on, micro the things we're doing, then they're gonna wanna build us more hotels. Obviously, with the signings being up in the mid double, you know, mid-teens to, you know, plus, we think that's pretty good prima facie evidence that that's what's going on.
Great. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Yep.
The next question will be from Stephen Grambling with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Thanks. This is a bit of a multi-parter, but you mentioned that the majority of the pipeline is outside the U.S. Can you just remind us of what that split maybe looks like within some of the major markets, how the contribution from international room growth could compare or contrast to the U.S. as we translate NUG to fees? And then if you could just talk to any kind of incremental signing opportunities that you're seeing that surfaced in new markets as a result of, you know, the pandemic that could be longer lasting. Thanks.
Yeah, Stephen, it's Kevin. I'll sort of try to take those in order. I think that, you know, the mix of rooms under construction is just over some kind of between 60%-65% outside the U.S. versus inside the U.S. I think in terms of. Look, we're always trying to enter new markets. I think we have 20-something, 25-30 new countries embedded in the pipeline, you know, that we don't have today, right? We're always trying to enter new markets. I'm not sure really anything of that, any of that, has been opened up by the pandemic. I think it's just sort of the course of the growth of our business over time.
Trajectory really has a lot to do with how places are coming out of the pandemic, meaning even though there's been spikes up and down in RevPAR in China, for instance, as they go into lockdowns, the development trajectory there has actually continued to be pretty solid and continued to improve. In places like Europe, where traditionally it's more of a face-to-face development environment, the less people have been able, you know, the less our teams and the owners have been able to get on planes and move around country to country, those signings have lagged a little bit. I actually see that as a tailwind coming out of the pandemic, whereas
There's a lot of pent-up demand for development in EMEA broadly, and I think that it's just gonna require a little bit more mobility to surface that. The rest of it is, you know, just over time, as you know, Chris has talked about this, as you have a rapidly developing middle class, you know, with, you know, more demand for mid-market products, you're gonna see a little bit more of that demand over time. I mean, the full service business is not dead by any means, but you're just gonna see on the margin, the capital flows more to the limited service hotels. We're gonna do more deals where the capital flows. Then as we bring franchising, which has been very successful for us, you know, Chris went through it, so I won't go through it again.
As we bring franchising to different parts of the world, particularly Asia-Pacific, you know, we're just gonna do more franchise deals over time. You're not gonna see, I don't think, big step changes. You're just gonna see a gradual growth over time in more limited service mix and more franchise mix. Did that cover all the parts?
One very quick follow-up. From a net unit growth standpoint then, I guess the fees that you're getting from the international market maybe ends up being a little bit lower because of the RevPAR. On the flip side, it sounds like you're doing more direct, so there's a potential for that to actually improve within that mix. Is that fair?
Well, yeah, mathematically, right, the lower price points, it will blend in over time. Again, it will not change dramatically. We've modeled it every which way, and it's really hard to make that fee per room number move. Mathematically, it has to move over time. The reality is, look, it's very high margin. You know, it's a 100% margin. You know, once we have scale in these parts of the world, it's a 100% margin and infinite yield. You know, we'll take it.
Awesome. Thank you so much.
Sure.
The next question will be from Robin Farley with UBS. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks. A lot of my questions have been asked already. One, just to circle back, and I hope I didn't miss this in the opening comment. The operator pulled me out of the call for a minute. When you talked about group, and the expectation that, you know, there'll be a lot of pent-up volume for 2022, can you give us a sense of, you know, where. I think that is a reasonable expectation, but kind of where group on the books for next year is versus 2019. Like, in other words, you know, it's likely to be higher, or maybe not in Q1, but kind of how that's pacing with what you have on the books for group for 2022.
I don't know if you have by quarter or first half, second half, anything.
Yeah. I mean, it would be weighted to Q2 through Q4, first of all, for the reasons I covered in a prior answer, just meaning people wanna get through the winter, one. Two, the first quarter is never a big group quarter. You put those two things together, and it trends heavily to Q2, Q3 and Q4. We're in 75%-80% on the books for, which is about consistent with where we were in the last quarter. And what happened is, I think if you hadn't had the Delta variant spike, we'd probably be somewhat further along. You had the Delta variant sort of slowed. It cooled off the advanced bookings on the group side, which have now picked back up.
The other thing going on, of course, is you know, we wanna you know, we do believe there's gonna be a lot of group potential, particularly in Q2, Q3 and Q4. We don't wanna commit. There's a level of lack of desire on our part to commit too much space when we know that there'll be a lot of pricing power. It's sort of a you know bit of a delicate balancing act.
Okay, great. Thank you.
The next question will be from Richard Clarke from Bernstein. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I just noticed on your cost reimbursement revenue has exceeded the cost reimbursement expense for the first time, really, since the pandemic began. You've lost obviously non-underlying, but you've lost about sort of $500 million through that delta as the pandemic's gone on. Is this the beginning potentially of you being able to claw that back? Could this be a sort of boost to cash flow over the next few quarters?
Yeah, Richard, it's, I wouldn't necessarily describe it as a clawback. I think what happened early in the pandemic is, you know, you had sort of, you know, rough numbers. You had revenue go down kinda 85%-90% overnight, and we did a really good job of taking expenses down, but we could only take expenses down, call it 60% or 65%. We basically were funding, you know, from our balance sheet, all the commercial engines and the websites and all the funded part of the business. Those things really are giant co-ops. They're gonna break even over time. Now what you're seeing is, you know, revenues. By the way, all the fees, all the sources of funds for those programs are funded as a percentage of revenue.
As revenue is climbing, our receipts are going up, and we will ultimately, you know, bring those funds back to break even, and we will recover, you know, those deficits. At the moment, you're seeing it as surpluses. I wouldn't necessarily think of it as clawbacks. Those funds run surpluses and deficits from time to time, so I think you'll see it run a surplus for a little while. Yes, the cash is commingled, but it's our owners' money at the end of the day, and we spend it all on them.
Okay, that makes sense. Thanks.
The next question will be from William Crow from Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning.
Morning, Will.
Chris, hey, I hope you don't mind. I'm gonna challenge you a little bit on the leisure outlook for 2022. I'm just wondering how much risk there really is when we think about the combination of the return to office, the absence of government checks, much higher costs from inflation for the consumer, and probably pretty considerable pent-up outbound international demand. I'm thinking about your comments on rate and leisure and weekday leisure in particular. Are we at risk of kind of setting ourselves up for a disappointment next year?
I don't think so. You heard my view, so you can, we can have a debate about it, but I don't think so. For the following reason, I think the midweek is already being bled out now, so I don't, you know, I think most kids are back in school, which then truncates mobility even if people aren't in the office. While more offices are gonna open through the rest of this year and into next year, you know, what we've seen in the pattern of leisure during the midweek, we've sort of washed out a large part of that already. I may be wrong, but I believe the weekends are gonna remain strong simply because I still think if you look at the $3 trillion of incremental savings during COVID, there's a long way to go to spend it all.
I think people still want the experiences that they were starved for, and now it gets concentrated more on weekends, which is what we're seeing now. I believe that will continue. I don't you know you know so the net of it is my view just to be clear is that relative to a normalized like 2019 level of leisure demand I think we're getting back more towards that with a little bit better because I think the weekends are gonna be a little bit better. I agree with you. I don't think that the midweek leisure is gonna be raging and that's not sort of built into my expectations. In terms of you know outbound yeah the world is opening up but then there's inbound too.
Particularly, you know, for the cities that, the big cities, top 25 markets that historically depend on 20% of their business from inbound international travel. They've had 0. Starting, you know, next week or week after, you know, the floodgates are gonna open on that. So yeah, you're gonna have some people going outbound, but you're gonna have a lot of people that wanna come see America, that is gonna offset that. Particularly with the top 25 markets broadly, but particularly the top 25 markets that are gonna come in. Again, you know, we're still in the middle of budgets, and we're still debating all of this and where it ends up. There's, you know, I'm giving you my opinion and my sense of it.
I think leisure will remain. When we wake up, you know, next year and the following year, and you compare it to just the amount of leisure business that we did, which was probably 25 or 30% of our overall segmentation pre-COVID, I think it'll be higher than that. I think it'll be higher than that because people wanna get out more. There's plenty of incremental savings in the world that has not gotten anywhere close to being spent. The weekend business, while we were doing better on weekends, you know, than we had historically, I think it'll stay even more elevated than that.
Great. Chris, can I give you the opportunity to maybe update us on the timing for potential capital returns and buybacks?
Yeah. We don't have anything new, but to repeat what I said last time, we are very interested in getting back to returning capital. We firmly believed in our capital allocation strategy pre-COVID, which was we were producing a lot of free cash flow that we could continue to grow the business in an industry-leading way without the use of much of it. We wanted, as a result, to give it back to our shareholders because there was no reason for us to hoard it or do, you know, dumb things with it. Disciplined capital allocation, we believe, is a hallmark of long-term, you know, delivering great returns for shareholders. My belief hasn't been changed through COVID.
The only thing that changed is we didn't have a lot of free cash flow, you know, during the heat of the crisis. We are obviously getting past that. We are cash flow positive. We wanna just give it a little bit more time, as I said on the last call, sort of finish out the year. If things go as we expect and consistent with what we have been seeing, we're gonna reinstate, you know, a return of capital program in the first half of next year. My guess is it'll look quite similar. I mean, we're still having that discussion with our board, who obviously has a say in it.
I think, you know, if I had to pick a line, I think it'll look a lot like what we were doing pre-COVID. We're very focused on it and very anxious to get back to it. I would say first half of next year.
Perfect. Thank you.
Yep.
The next question will be from Patrick Scholes with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning.
Morning.
A question on labor costs and specifically Hilton Corporation's labor costs. Any change in your expectations for G&A and trajectory of your G&A versus what you've said in the past? Correct me if I'm wrong, I have in my notes here, you've talked about sensitivity of EBITDA to RevPAR, EBITDA growth about 1.3 times RevPAR growth. Is that still your thoughts on that trajectory?
Yeah. I think what we said, Patrick, is that, you know, in the context of when RevPAR levels are elevated, you know, RevPAR growth is elevated the way it is, it'll be in that zone. I think, you know, it should be, you know, obviously 90% of the business is from fees. That should be about 1 to 1 as things normalize. We think we can do a little bit better, you know, with net unit growth, cost discipline, license fees, things like that, maybe a little bit better than 1 to 1 over time, but I think the 1:3 is more of when RevPAR is elevated. No change, you know, short answer is no change in our views on G&A, right? We've been very disciplined.
What we've said to you guys is that, you know, cash G&A ought to be down, you know, this year in the mid- to high-teens% from 2019 levels. We actually might do a little bit better than that this year 'cause we've had pretty good cost discipline. You know, GAAP is different, but you got a lot of moving pieces, particularly in the third quarter this year. We're lapping over some of the write-downs of stock comp from last year. Going forward, you know, again, no real change.
I think we all understand that with more business activity is gonna come a little bit more expense and, you know, just like we're in an inflationary environment that's gonna help on the revenue side, you know, we're gonna be paying people a little bit more along the way. We do think, you know, we're gonna maintain discipline. The changes that we've made to our structure are gonna hold going forward and, you know, we still feel the same way.
Okay. Thank you, Kevin.
Sure.
The next question will be from Vincent Ciepiel with Cleveland Research Company. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks. Question on distribution. You guys have done a nice job driving direct business with, I think, loyalty contribution around 60%. Pre-COVID, I know OTA contribution fell from high teens to about low doubles while reducing commissions along that path. A lot of exciting things happening on the distribution front. I'm curious on the other side of this, how you're thinking about OTA contribution as well as how high that loyalty contribution can get.
Yeah, really good question. I don't feel really a lot different than I did pre-COVID. I mean, we believe there's an efficient frontier, and we've calculated it as best we can, you know, by individual market property, you know, what, you know, based on, you know, what they can deliver at that price point versus what we can deliver, how do we deliver the highest index or at the highest revenue for the lowest distribution cost. We do believe, and that's why we've had a good relationship with the OTAs, that they play a part in that. You know, it's traditionally been in the, you know, sort of 10%-12% range. That's historically where we've been during COVID.
You know, that went up, but we wanted it to go up. We partnered, I think, quite successfully with our OTA partners, knowing that the biggest segment of demand that was out there for most of COVID was lower rated leisure, which is what they are particularly good at, you know, non-loyalty type customer base. It has crept up a bit, but not too terribly much. We've already seen that sort of peak and start to come down. While we'll look at the efficient frontier as we always do periodically, and maybe if you think leisure is gonna be a little bit higher component overall, maybe it goes up a little, but not much, and it didn't move that much.
The net of all that is, I think when we wake up in a couple years, it'll look an awful lot like it did before. We obviously feel good about the contractual terms that we have with the OTAs now and our ability to continue to have attractive terms going forward. As it relates to Honors, you know, my Honors team is probably listening and they may need a diaper for this. We maxed out, you know, in the 63%-64% system-wide. We're already in the U.S., as I mentioned in my prepared comments, not that far off of that. Globally, we're coming back as more of our number one. We've accessed more travelers that weren't loyal.
Some of these leisure travelers that we didn't have access to, we've now accessed, and more of our core customer is getting back on the road. We're getting back to normal. You know, I'm not gonna put a number out there because my team will have a heart attack, but I believe that there is a lot of room to grow. I think if we're doing our job, the super majority of our customers wanna be Honors members. It's a proposition that they get benefits that you just don't get, and they're meaningful. You can go through them. They get discounts, they get technology, they get experiences money can't buy. They get points that are a currency. They can shop on Amazon and Lyft and buy tickets at Live Nation.
There is no reason, as we continue coming out of this, to actively engage with our customer base, we shouldn't be able to push it meaningfully higher than where we maxed out before. Now, that'll take time. To my Honors team, don't freak out. We're gonna give you the time. Our goals there, which I'm not gonna state publicly, are meaningfully higher than where we were, which, by the way, is meaningfully higher than any of our competitors already.
Thanks.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the call back to Chris Nassetta for any additional or closing remarks.
Thanks, everybody, for the time today. I know it's a busy earnings season. We're obviously quite pleased, given what we've all lived through over the last 20 months, to be able to report the progress that we were able to report for the third quarter. As you could tell from the call, I remain quite optimistic about, you know, where this recovery is going and what the opportunities are in the industry, but particularly for our business and the growth of our business. We'll look forward to reporting fourth quarter and full year after the new year. Look forward to seeing many of you while we're out on the road, and have a terrific day and holiday if I don't see you.
Thank you, sir. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.