We'll kick this off. The clock told me I need to start. Afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Very happy to have MGM Resorts and an old friend, Jonathan Halkyard, Chief Financial Officer of MGM. Thank you, Jonathan, for coming. Really appreciate your participation. So maybe I think probably the most topical and recent sort of big event in Vegas, obviously, the first F1 race wrapped up, I guess, right the weekend before Thanksgiving, right? There was a lot of coverage, a lot of hype going into it. Some people trying to talk it down beforehand.
Maybe you can just give us your quick two cents on sort of like the success of the race and the impact on the market, and maybe just more generally, sort of how Vegas is changing around the sporting events and these sort of you know mega visitation events.
Sure. Well, thank you, James, for having me. Thanks, everybody, for coming this afternoon. First of all, did anybody, anybody here at the F1 race in Las Vegas? You know, we had very high expectations for what this event would be in Las Vegas, in particular, because it was during what is normally one of the slowest, if not the slowest weekends in Las Vegas. And because of our highest expectations, we invested pretty heavily into it, in particular, creating an experience for our casino customers and some retail customers in front of the Bellagio, among other things. Anyway, the race met every one of our expectations. It was the highest grossing weekend for us in hotel revenue in the company's history. The second highest was CES during in 2019.
And so when you think about other events that have happened in Las Vegas over the years and the scale of our company, that's quite something to have a record weekend on what was otherwise the slowest weekend of the year. It met our expectations in terms of casino volume, food and beverage, and most importantly, the guests and our employees, I think, had a very good experience during the long weekend. You know, this was an event that certainly had a lot of friction in the months leading up to it, a lot of construction in Las Vegas. Some of that will certainly be recurring.
A lot of it will not be as dramatic in coming years, because over the course of about a year, we, F1 and the city got the city ready to race for this event. F1 invested $100 million of capital in their paddock facility, and that, along with money that we invested to build this hospitality experience I described, we'll reuse that year after year. So I'm very optimistic that this is going to be gonna be a fantastic event in the years to come. And finally, this event, as a tentpole in the month of November also, we expect will enable us to post November as the record month in hotel revenue in the history of the company.
I mean, more broadly, you, you've been in Vegas for a long time, I guess, with a stint away. But I mean, the market's really transformed when you think about, you know, the idea of professional sports when I started covering the industry 20 years ago, was sort of like, it was not anyone's sort of expectation set. How have, like, whether it's F1 now, the NFL, MLB, like, Major League Baseball, potentially, how is that sort of changing the market in Vegas?
Yeah, I, I've been living in Las Vegas on and off, mostly on, for about 25 years. It's certainly true that Las Vegas has always had a, a symbiotic relationship with sports, but has never been itself a home of sports, beyond college basketball and a few other things. I, I did leave Las Vegas in 2014, and I came back, about 2.5-3 years ago. That is singly the, the biggest change I've seen in the market, is not only the, the investment, but the embrace of not only the locals, but also the, the professional sports leagues themselves. In Las Vegas, you know, of course, we have a championship hockey team, championship women's basketball team, the Raiders, who are still searching for their first championship in the market, and then the A's coming.
You have the F1, which we talked about. In our particular campus at MGM Resorts, we have within a mile or so, Allegiant Stadium, T-Mobile Arena, the F1 Paddock, and then eventually the A's stadium at the corner of Tropicana and Las Vegas Boulevard. And this is a vicinity in which we have, you know, 30,000 hotel rooms. So the market has changed dramatically with the introduction of this, but we've also had other things like the Pro Bowl, the NHL All-Star Game. And I think our company is uniquely situated to capitalize on this new interest. And the only other thing I'd point out is that ours is a different market when it comes to these events.
As an example, when the Raiders play at home, so eight or nine home games per year, you'll see 50% or better of the fans will be from the visiting team, making not only the game, but the entire weekend part of their experience. So these, you know, these events for us turn what our CEO has called turning a 3-hour game into a 3-day weekend, and that happens routinely, and with a company like ours that has database in these cities like Denver and Baltimore, New York, et cetera, it can be a very attractive proposition for us to have those kinds of fans travel.
For sure. Jim, while we're on the topic of sports, you mentioned the A's. You know, the proposed stadium site, literally, you control the three other corners. How have you started to think about assuming that is moving forward, which, I mean, seems to be the case? Like, how do you think about a capital investment in that neighborhood and in your three assets there?
So I'm sure, I'm sure you're all familiar with this geography, but this corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue, which the A's stadium is going to go on the southeast corner of that, and we have MGM Grand, New York-New York, and Excalibur on the other three corners of this important intersection, of course, right next to the airport as well. And we are looking at how we can invest against this development, which I think is going to come around the 2026, 2027 season. And the first thing we're looking at is circulation amongst the different properties, because in a market like Las Vegas, we know that all of our guests really do make several stops. They'll stay at one place, but they'll go to several other properties.
And winning that second, third, or fourth stop is really critical to winning in market share, spend among our guests. So with customers who will come for an A's game, or one of our other properties, improving circulation among those four corners, I think will be an important part of our investment, because that will, among other things, increase our ability to get that second and third stop.
Very good. Beyond just the event growth of sports, I mean, the market has just been. Vegas has just been booming post-COVID. Whether it's on the hotel side, with rates, I mean, the gaming productivity has been, like, truly off the charts. Do you, do you worry at all that, like, there's some reversion to the mean over time? Like, as there's some of this pent-up demand or pent-up savings that people have, or do you think that, do you think that this is a more, sort of, sustainable shift in your business?
Well, even though we've been talking a lot about Las Vegas so far this afternoon, it's really important to note that there are many segments within that market. And while, of course, the performance of our company in Las Vegas has been very strong, pretty consistently now for two or two and a half years, since the pandemic, the nature of that performance has really changed. For example, in the summer of 2021, we had almost zero group business. The business mix was exclusively casino and transient business. That really began to change in the late 2021 and early 2022, when groups started coming back. We dialed back some of the casino marketing. Transient continued to grow.
Within the performance, at least in our company, you actually see a lot going on under the surface in terms of the different segments. Yeah, I certainly am concerned about the general macroeconomic environment and overall demand perhaps being impacted, but I also think this market has... It's changed quite a lot, and I'd say permanently. We've talked about sports and events. You know, Allegiant Stadium, for example, does eight or nine Raiders game, but it'll do 45 or 50 events over the course of the year, concerts and things like that. The group business in Las Vegas continues to get stronger and stronger as we and others are able to win business from other cities.
And then transient business enabled by airlift into the market, which stands at about 120% of where it was back in 2019, has also really helped the ability of the market to continue to sustain and grow visitation. And finally, there's not really much supply growth. I mean, I think over the past 10 or 12 years, James, I'm sure you have this data, but the supply growth has been less than 1% compound annual growth in supply of hotel rooms over the past 10 or 15 years. So you have all of these attractive demand dynamics which drive demand from multiple segments, and yet against a limited supply, and I think they all really augur well for just the continued performance of the market.
Just on that supply point, there is a new property opening that's been in the works for a decade plus. But you know, Fontainebleau is open before the end of the year. It you know, it's sort of at the opposite end of the Strip from where your center of gravity is. I guess, do you anticipate any sort of meaningful impact on your business? Did you like, do you have like, any color on sort of what Resorts World did when it opened? And if like, if it moved business around at all, or if it was more just like a blip.
Yeah, Resorts World, you know, opened into a kind of a difficult time of if memory serves, it was the fall of 2021. But I think as they've kind of found their groove in Las Vegas, we haven't really noticed any impact to our business from Resorts World entry. Fontainebleau is opening in mid-December. I know some of the members of the management team. It's an excellent management team, but they are so they'll, I think, be attractive for folks who are going to the convention, the new expanded Las Vegas convention hall on the north side.
I suspect they're probably also targeting some of the customers that we serve at the Cosmopolitan, but I do think the location is a bit difficult given its distance from some of the center of activity on the Strip. But I wouldn't write it off at all. It's gonna be a new large resort, but I would not expect it's gonna have much of an impact on our business, kind of like Resorts World didn't. I mean, it's a huge market, and there's. Again, there hasn't been much supply entry.
Very good. I forget. I think it was maybe 3-6 months ago, you guys announced a strategic partnership with Marriott. I know that the launch maybe was delayed slightly, but maybe you could just talk. I think it's gonna launch early 2024 now?
Yes.
Maybe you could just talk a little bit about sort of, like, the scope of that. There have been some sort of smaller deals in Vegas, but this kind of was of a larger scale and, sort of a first of a kind in Vegas from, like, my recollection.
Yeah, I think this is one of the most exciting parts of our company's prospects in 2024 and 2025. So when we looked at the Cosmopolitan, almost two years ago to acquire it, we knew they had had a long-standing distribution partnership with Marriott, and we're very interested in this. And as we did our diligence on that property and ultimately acquired it, 15%-20% of the rooms from the Cosmopolitan were delivered through the Marriott distribution channel, both cash paying as well as reward Bonvoy redemption room nights. So that's a meaningful part of their room base, for sure. So we looked at this, and after acquiring the Cosmopolitan, we started discussing with Marriott the prospects of having a partnership that looked like that, but for all of MGM Resorts.
And that's eventually what we signed up with them. So, you know, to put this in perspective, roughly half of MGM's 12 million room nights a year in Las Vegas are coming through transient customers, so not through the casino, not through groups. And about 2/3 of that half are coming through our proprietary MGM Resorts distribution channels, which is business we love. But about a third of the other third is coming through other OTA channels, where we don't know those customers as well. They don't come in at high rate, as high rates, and they come at a meaningful cost.
So, Marriott and their Bonvoy, 180 million members, we think can really help us remix that business and drive very high-value transient customers, who, from our experience, with Cosmopolitan, we know spend more while on property. These are fantastic customers for MGM Resorts. And so, as we get this introduced, and you'll be able to book into the Bellagio directly through the Bonvoy distribution channel and our other properties, we think it's gonna be a pretty meaningful component of our transient segment. We think that it can increase our EBITDA per room night by about $100 for every room night that we can successfully shift from OTA over to Bonvoy.
Do you anticipate that there's gonna be, like, a pretty immediate effect, or is there gonna be, like, a ramp up to that relationship? I guess-
I mean, I think it's gonna happen pretty quickly. You know, I mean, Marriott did not have terrific distribution within Las Vegas, and yet there's a high degree of interest, as you can imagine, both from their Bonvoy members for regular transient rooms as well as loyalty redemptions in the market. And so we are gonna open up that possibility, the range of options to those customers. And so I expect it to be meaningful in 2024. You know, it's. We'll get it going during the first quarter of 2024, so there's always a little bit of a shakedown period, but this is not something that's gonna take two or three years to develop.
Yeah. Okay. Maybe before moving on to other couple other parts of the business, just have to hit on cybersecurity and the labor negotiations, because they were, like, so heavily covered in the press. Like, the good news is, both are seemingly behind us. But maybe you could talk a little bit about sort of resolution, and if there's anything we need to think about in terms of, like, impact on a run rate basis.
Yeah, we were very busy this fall.
Yeah.
With, you know, with those two, Sorry, September 10th, you know, that first week was pretty difficult as we, you know, we began to deal with this cyber incident, we tried to communicate as best we could to our employees and our guests and our shareholders about what the impact of this was. I would say that, you know, the impact we quoted early was probably $100 million across the system, most of that in September. A little bit of it bled into October in two ways. First, we were unable to get out some direct marketing offers in the last two weeks of September in our regional markets. That hurt us a bit in October.
Our occupancy was lower for the first few days of October, but I can tell you that October came back really quickly in Las Vegas. So, you know, by the middle of October, we felt like it was largely behind us, and the business, you know, across the whole system has been back to normal now for well over a month. There will be some capital cost that's involved next year as we continue to strengthen our operating environment. We will have a business interruption claim from our insurers, which should be resolved sometime during 2024. So when that happens, we'll call that out to our shareholders. But our expectation is all of our costs in this incident will be covered by our cyber insurance carriers.
As it relates to the union, you know, folks know we came to a new contract with the Culinary Union a couple of weeks ago. They ratified it overwhelmingly last week. So this, you know, this is a new five-year contract. We think it's a great contract for the Culinary Union and the over 20,000 of our employees who are covered by this collective bargaining agreement.
But it will, you know, it will introduce increased costs, for us, of course, in, in labor costs, but we also believe that we've got a number of levers, on the top line that can offset those impacts, and that this is, you know, this is really important to continue what's been a, you know, decades of, of labor, peace in, in Las Vegas, so we're just really happy that we got the agreement completed.
Have you, quantified at all, sort of like, how to think about what the cost, sort of, incremental cost headwind might be in 2024? Like, either before or after offsets?
We really haven't quantified it, except to say that the prior contract expired at the end of May, and beginning in June, we began accruing for incremental what we estimated would be the incremental cost associated with the new contract, and we did that, and have done that now for six months. So in 2024, the impact against 2023 will just be an incremental five months or so of that increase. So you know, I think it's been reported, and it's pretty close, that the entire compensation associated with this with this group is about $1 billion a year. So anyway, some observers of the company have done some math around that, and they're not terribly far off, but it'll be about five months of impact in 2024.
All right. Very good. Quickly on regional gaming, this is not a small part of your business. I think that the sort of outlook on regional is probably a little less sort of, clear than in, Vegas. You know, I think after having a huge rebound after COVID, revenues have sort of, in many markets, have sort of, like, stalled out or mild declines, and, you know, obviously there's some cost creep. How are you feeling about the regional businesses, and are there any, like, particular call-outs on. You know, your assets are generally pretty big and in, like, large markets?
That's right. We have seven regional properties, and they're generally market leaders and, and, and closer to integrated resorts than they are, in, in many cases, to what we'd normally think of as regional casinos. So properties like the Borgata, the Beau Rivage, even National Harbor, in and around D.C. You know, these are, these are massive businesses, in many cases, with, with customer segments which come from, you know, beyond what we think of as a typical local catchment area of a regional casino. So, so I would say, by and large, our regional properties are pretty stable right now. They're operating.
Actually, before the cyber incident, which really didn't affect the regional properties very much, but in July and August of the third quarter, our regional properties as a group had growing trips from our rated customers and slightly growing theoretical win per rated trip, which is a better trend than we had seen back in 2022, where we were seeing trips kind of flat and theo per trip declining slightly because they were coming off of some of the, you know, some of the real strength coming out of the pandemic. But that business has stabilized across the whole regional portfolio, and margins kind of in the low- to mid-30s.
I guess I would call out pockets of strength of the Beau Rivage, for sure, down in Mississippi, a business which draws, you know, 80% of its rated win from a distance greater than a few hundred miles. It's really not a locals casino, so to speak. The Borgata is certainly a market leader in Atlantic City. Springfield, small business, but has pretty strong trends in Western Massachusetts. Detroit is one on the other side, which is, you know, it's a market that's been declining a bit for a couple of years. And then we and the others, of course, have some labor issues in Detroit as well, which we're continuing to kind of work through.
So I would say, Detroit is one, and then National Harbor, a business where we have very high market share, but that market also isn't growing as much. And we have some idiosyncratic issues in the fourth quarter that will likely make that down over, year over year. But otherwise, the regions, I would say, are kind of, as a group, pretty stable for us.
Well, boy, time is going by quickly here. I want to hit on BetMGM. Obviously, you know, digital is sort of one of the, you know, the most interesting growth areas to come around in the industry in years. With ESPN Bet launching, I guess, how do you feel about market share, market positioning? The market seemed to have stabilized, and now Penn is kind of, like, coming back and sort of trying to take a second bite at the apple. How do you feel about sort of that digital market?
We feel good about BetMGM right now, for sure. I mean, this is now really kind of three years into it, since early 2021, when a couple of states came on, and these businesses really started to generate meaningful levels of revenue. The market has shaken out pretty much the way we expected it to, which was that you were gonna have two, three, maybe four big players making up 90% of the market, and then you'd have a smaller group making up the tail of the distribution. I think it's too early to tell with Penn and ESPN Bet if they're gonna change that dynamic at all. But BetMGM is roughly 17% market share nationally across online sports betting and iGaming. You know, we're definitely in that top two or three, depending upon the state and the product.
I would mention that on Monday, December 4th, BetMGM, the investor—the management team, is having an investor update, which I'd invite all of you to call into. And at that point, Adam and Gary and Matt will be giving kind of their outlook and, for 2024, and how the business is doing. But, we'll see with ESPN Bet. But I think BetMGM's in a solid position.
Very good. I have to ask, just given. I think you get this question every, at every event, but given that business as a 50/50 JV, is that the right structure long term for MGM to own half and Entain to own the other half of BetMGM?
Well, it's our structure. You know, it is a 50/50 JV that was built to last. We have, you know, we have three board seats, Entain has three board seats. It certainly is always a good thing when the business is performing well, like BetMGM has. But, you know, our focus at MGM is to make BetMGM as successful as possible, and I think that's, not to speak for them, but I think that's Entain's interest as well.
Very good. I guess, just last, quickly, on the balance sheet, the leverage, you had highlighted on the last call, your leverage is sort of below the target range. You guys have been pretty active buying back stock, but you also have a lot of development opportunities. We didn't have time to talk about Japan and New York, but how are you thinking about sort of balance sheet management? And then also just, you have, you used to be, like, the most regular gaming issuer in high yield, and now you've been a net, a net repairer of high yield bonds.
Yeah.
How should we think about, you know, MGM and high yield at tapping markets and bank loans versus bonds?
Well, we've been. We, of course, have really transitioned the balance sheet from a traditional bank and bond capital structure to the OpCo structure that we have now. And that, that transformation is largely complete, with almost all of our properties having sold the, the real estate. So we have the significant lease payment right now. We have been repaying debt. We've been deploying the capital that we realized from those real estate sales to repurchase shares. We've repurchased over a third of the company's shares in the last 2.5 years. But that, that process is kind of coming to a conclusion. The company is transitioning now in terms of capital deployment, more towards growth. With, you mentioned our. We, we hope to be able to expand our property in New York.
We have a huge integrated resort development project in Japan. And so I think that's where some more of the free cash flow is gonna be going in the future, towards those development opportunities. I wouldn't rule out the company being an issuer of high-yield debt in the future. We certainly have debt capacity right now, but it's more likely that capital will be allocated to growth and then some additional share repurchases.
Very good. Well, we are at the time. Thank you, Jonathan. Really appreciate your participation and support as always. Thank you for coming.
All right. Thank you. Thanks, James. Thanks, everybody.