Good afternoon, everyone. I want to thank everyone for joining us. I'm Sharon Zackfia with William Blair. Really happy to have the team from OneSpaWorld with us. So we have Leonard Fluxman and Stephen Lazarus. You know, I think we'll just start off. The company has some pretty good news this morning in terms of fourth quarter results, their 2024 outlook. I was going to start off with a question on how you view the state of your consumer. So maybe if we could kick off there with what you're seeing in trends and how you're looking at the state of 2024.
Sure. Thanks for having us. So, 2023 really has been an incredible year for us. I mean, it was the first normalized year of operation since the pandemic. We really didn't know exactly when the ships were coming in, what the load factors would be. I think the cruise lines did an incredible job of getting there much faster than we thought. Obviously, that certainly helped us produce some of the better results that we did. But the load factors have come back to what I would call historical levels. Some cruise lines are not quite there yet, but they will get there, I believe, this year. Demand for cruising continues to be strong, and quite frankly, the caliber of passenger and guests that we've seen in our spas has been incredibly good.
So when the industry outlook has been and continues to be as positive as it looks in 2023, it looks certainly 2024, booking window is solid. They're still gonna get into the Wave Season right now. It's still early, but it's tight, and ticket prices are holding, if not slightly up, versus 2019, if that's a comparable normal year. And so for us, when we hear that kind of news, new ships coming out, which we're gonna have quite a few of, as well as ships that we got that weren't in service for a full year in 2023, will impact us in 2024. So we feel very strong about the trends. We haven't seen any impact on pricing.
We have done less discounting in 2023 than we've ever done historically, which tends to suggest that the industry is providing us with an incredible guest, and the guest certainly has had no problem paying up, and we're at much higher prices than we were in 2019. So the cadence has been wonderful through 2023. The spa guest has been spending like there's no tomorrow, and we've seen the retail attachment continue to hold steady, which is a good sign, and so we're confident thus far. We've seen no pushback on any of our pricing or even, even our hallmark pricing on certain modalities, and we expect 2024 similarly to continue because the industry's showing a lot of strong demand.
I know, obviously, 2020 and 2021 were tough years, and the industry-
Yeah
... was shut down for quite a while. But, I mean, it was notable that you guys just didn't sit around and do nothing, right? There were refinements you made during that period that I think have now solidified the results that you're seeing in 2023 and into 2024. One of those has been the simplification of some of the spa menus, and then I want to get into pre-booking and other things. But can you talk about-
Mm-hmm
... like, what the simplification has done for you, and maybe how you direct that consumer into services that are more value-added for you as a company or more profitable for you?
Yeah. So we really, we didn't sit around during the pandemic. We did go down to a much smaller focused team. What we were really focused on was: how do we look at the right services, the right value proposition? We really didn't know the strength of the consumer coming out of the pandemic, but clearly, it's been way better than anybody could have expected. In fact, we curated an entire menu where it was touchless coming out of the pandemic, and none of those services were ever utilized. Everybody went back to traditional, historical massage. Facial even came back into vogue. So as we've looked at all of the different modalities, and we do a bunch of them, we've tried to take a look at how do we simplify the choices across a broad offering of, say, facials, or a broad offering of, say, body services?
And rather than finesse it into, say, two or three different choices that optimize price, and we're steering them always to the highest price. There's the low, which is no-frills kind of facial, even though it's got some of the new technology in it. When we give you the alternatives to move up in price, as well as choices and offerings, we find that with these three different types of facials, people are gonna spend less time at the front desk. They're gonna make the right choice. We'll push them into the highest priced service, which is gonna then attract the highest amount of retail attachment.
This is just the start, Sharon, of looking at how do we change some of the architecture, and we will continue to navigate through all of our offerings and see how we can bring incremental value, not only to the guests, but also to our shareholders at OneSpaWorld.
Then, you know, on a similar, yet different note, I mean, pre-booking has been a really powerful tool for you. Can you talk about where pre-booking is now as a percent of services, what kind of ticket lift you see there, and really, where you think the runway is for pre-booking from here?
Pre-booking has become a big focus, not only for us, but I think if you listen to every single cruise line CEO today, I think Jason Liberty, who's recently called it out on one of his earnings calls. The focus on pre-booked amenities, pre-booked excursions, pre-booked dinners, pre-booked spa, is a huge focus of the industry, and some are calling it out in a much higher fashion than others. So what does that mean for us? It means, A, we got their attention. We've been talking about pre-booking for a long time. It's been difficult to have them focus on it, but now, where clearly the opportunity to move the needle materially on ticket pricing is not as much as the alpha of onboard revenue spend.
The focus, the resources, the collaboration that we're receiving with pre-booking has helped us move pre-booking from nice double digits, you know, teens into 23%, and we still see a lot of runway for improvement as we get more and more of the cruise lines to focus on the journey, how do people make selection, how do we get them into the dynamic pricing part of the pre-book, et cetera, et cetera. And there are a lot of cruise lines that are not quite perhaps in the top three, and so where the top three are, we play them all off against each other. Not in a bad way, just saying, "Here's the opportunity." And so as we show them different nuances that exist in their competitive set, we find the collaboration's even stronger, and that's how we're starting to get more buy-in, more resources, more attention.
We believe, ultimately, pre-booking, where they spend on average 30% more, the pre-booked guest than the average guest who hasn't pre-booked, the spend, the frequency is so much higher. So clearly, the opportunity and the focus that the cruise lines have on any of the pre-booked opportunities, not only spa, is showing to pay off in dividends. So I think we're going to continue to see more investment from them, more focus. We're going to have much more time at the table to educate them how to improve the journey and the engagement and the attachment of their pre-book.
One question I get asked a lot is about dynamic pricing. I think many of us are only familiar with dynamic pricing through Uber. So if you can talk about how dynamic pricing works in your business, and I know the bandwidth of how it works is probably a little bit wider than you would like among your cruise line partners. Maybe talk about the opportunity to improve the dynamic pricing from here.
So dynamic pricing is on about 73% of our platform, of, say, 190 ships, right? There's still some cruise lines who don't have the dynamic pricing on board, but the big ones do. And so the dynamic pricing dovetails into the pre-book. They kind of work together. People who've cruised before or have flown, obviously, Uber, which is real dynamic pricing, and we don't play with it as much as they do. It's not as close in, so we can't manage price, you know, within the five minutes. We manage it for the week, and so the different time slots, it's kind of like looking at an airline for a week, an airline booking, say, American Airlines. You go on, you see Monday, Tuesday through Saturday, you can see at different times of the day, different flights, nonstop, two stops, they're all priced differently.
Well, ours is similarly architected. So if you're booking on a port day at, say, 3:00 P.M., you're probably going to get not as good a price as if it's a port day at, say, 11:00 A.M., when everybody's off the ship. So, you know, we look at it and say: Where's the traffic? How much is going to be there? When are they going to be there? And so by geography, the dynamic pricing model is variable. And it's helped tremendously, and we continue to finesse it. We'd like to see higher participation in it, but it is a good dovetail with the pre-booking initiatives that we have.
I think, one of the unique aspects, and, and actually one of the moats around your business, is how you source your labor. So I'd love to get into—I don't want to get into all the weeds on it, but get into that a little bit. And, you know, what the benefits are, as you have seen that tenure come up amongst your shipboard staff, and whether or not... I mean, in the U.S., we're just so used to hearing about difficulty sourcing talent-
Right.
whether you had that same trouble as you were sourcing for your staffing.
So we were worried coming out of the pandemic, or during the pandemic, what would our ability be like to go and get as much staff? Because we had about 4,200 at the top when we took everybody back to their different countries. So the concern was: How fast can we get them, repatriate them? You know, what's airlift going to be like, or the visas going to be like? And we went through all those problems, where certain countries were ready, you know, ready before, and U.S. embassies were clogged, and we couldn't get visas through, and so we went country by country. Look, we recruit from 87 different countries around the world. That's a lot, and we have training facilities in nine different locations around the world.
While the pandemic was going, we have two departments, one in Miami and one in London, and all they do is reach out to people who are either on ships, leaving a ship, or coming back. Now, obviously, everybody was off, and so as they left and when they had, like, say, 30, 60 days at home, because we didn't know when they were coming back into service, we reached out first to the most experienced staff, the managers, because we'd have to do the least amount of training with the experienced staff. So we focused on getting the most experienced staff back first, and then we broadened the aperture to go after new staff, because all of our training had to be done virtually.
Once we got past the inability to do, you know, physical in-person training, we did it all virtually, and it was successful. Clearly, they were not as proficient as the experienced staff, and they weren't as proficient as staff who come out of our training today, which is all in person. We are now at the highest level of staffing we've ever been in the history of my tenure, which is three decades or more, and we have a waitlist, which is incredible. So staffing for us has been a lot of work, but the least amount of pain, and we actually have what I would call a do-not-return list. Meaning, if you're not productive and you haven't had a good contract, we'll take somebody else first before we bring you back.
So the ability to be selective, have choices, have a deep bench, is enabling us, obviously, to staff up all the capacity we've taken on as fast as we did, but at the same time, to produce with more tenured staff, better results. And the whole thing about tenured staff is, once they've got past two contracts, you know, the pitter-patter of what they do, brand alignment, et cetera, they produce more revenue by far. Retail attachment is better by far. So the longer we can keep them past the three-year mark, the better it is for us.
Can you describe your med spa offering, for those who haven't participated in it on board, and, you know, talk about how many ships you have that on at this point, and ultimately, as we think about med spa , like how big could that be as a part of the business?
Yeah, so look, med spa , we started from zero. We're on about 130...
Nine.
39 ships right now. We're gonna add another nine med spa ships. The clear advantage is in our offering, which is not just Botox, fillers. We do skin tightening, we do CoolSculpting, we do IV therapy, we do immunity shots, so we continue to grow the offering. At the same time, our constraint is clearly size of the real estate that we're given to do med spa and the number of doctors or nurses that we can put on board. The focus has been, in the last six months, is: how do we expand that footprint on new builds, and how do we get more staff?
Meaning, I would like to have, you know, two doctors and two nurses, or one doctor and three nurses, because the utilization of the real estate can be much higher, because then we can sort of set people up on immunity, or drips, or CoolSculpting, and you don't have to be there for the entire one hour or 46 minutes that it takes to do a full IV cocktail. So if we can utilize our staff better over more treatments, the opportunity to take med spa, which is still 7% or 8% of the total gross revenue, it's tiny, but it does have the highest price point. So we would love to do much more of it, and our focus is obviously to get more real estate and staff.
Yeah. I know cash flow generation is a big positive with the story, particularly given the asset-light model. Stephen, can you talk about capital allocation priorities and at what point you would start to, or I should say, the board, would start to think about returning cash to shareholders?
Yes, thank you. The conversation about the point in time at which to start returning cash to shareholders is not something the board would start to talk about. They have been talking about it. It's a very frequent topic of conversation with the board and with management. As you mentioned appropriately, we've been fortunate post-pandemic, with the positive cash flow generation, to significantly reduce our debt load. Debt is now on a gross basis at 1.7 x, and on a net basis, it's down to 1.3 x. So it's at a very, very acceptable level and a level that we could easily move forward with other priorities in terms of cash.
However, interest rates are still high, and so at the end of the day, when interest rates are this high or this high, it does make sense to continue to pay down debt. However, we don't expect that interest rates will stay high forever, as is the general perception. And I also think it's worth pointing out that it doesn't have to be a mutually exclusive equation. So, for example, you know, we bought back 800,000 or so shares already in the fourth quarter of last year, despite interest rates being where they were. And as interest rates come down and as the cash flow continues to come in, the conversation will bubble up more and more to the top, and we'll see how things play out. But look, clearly, these are good conversations to have.
Yeah.
It's a good problem to have around, what do you do with the cash and how do you get it back to your shareholders?
Yeah, I think for investors in the room who maybe aren't familiar with your historical leverage, I mean, what is your optimal leverage that you'd like to have on the business?
Well, yeah, optimal leverage is actually not a very big number because of our tax efficiency, and so realistically, there's only about $42 million of debt for which you can get any interest leverage that can be attributable to jurisdictions that have taxable income. Having said that, though, because the visibility to our cash flow is so good, we're not necessarily—I'm not by any means saying we have to get down to a $40 million level before we start returning cash to shareholders. In fact, it would clearly be at a much a point much sooner than that. So let's sort of wait and see. I don't wanna put ourselves in a corner here and say, "When interest rate hit X, we'll do Y," but clearly, the conversation is becoming more and more prevalent.
... I think, I mean, it's been amazing how quickly the seas have shifted in favor of the cruise lines and in favor of your business. But there is a dearth of new ship orders for 2026. I guess if somebody went and ran to order today, we could probably squeeze some more in. But, you know, I do have investors ask about kind of the long-term growth of the industry, and to the extent that new builds are an important part of your revenue equation. I mean, do you think 2026 is an anomaly, and do you expect to see ramping development beyond then? Or how do you view the long-term kind of CAGR from here on new ship builds?
So I think 2026 is an anomaly created from the pandemic, where the cruise lines unfortunately had to lever up and dilute their shareholders a lot more. We didn't have to lever up, but we, we did some dilution, but not as much as, you know. Some, some banners diluted more, some did different constructs of debt. I think the industry knows that they can't grow without capacity, so capacity for them is their single best grower. These ships are not inexpensive. They can cost anywhere between $700 million to $1.4 billion, even more, depending, like the Icon is massive. So I think the industry right now is trying to. Look, they've got some optionality, right? The longer they wait, the more leverage they have at the yards. I don't think they're in a rush.
I also don't think they want to spook their shareholders and say: "Hey, we're building 2026 as much as we built before the pandemic," before they delevered enough. So in my mind, and I've heard the whispers, there are new builds out there. But I think what you will see going into 2026 is a lot more refurbishment done in the dry dock. So this year we have about 23% more dry dock days than we had in 2022.
Yeah.
You will see the ships doing a lot more work on their ships to make them better and last more and more appealing to guests, as opposed to necessarily putting a new ship in the water. So if I go back in time in this industry, when they didn't introduce as much capacity, and I can go back to 2001, 2002, it was flatlining. There were two or three ships, but we still grew. And so what happens is when they're not building as many ships as there have been, say, six or seven a year, which is average, we find some of the older ships tend to get a disproportionate better share of good customers. So they perform better when less capacity is being added, because they're just moving the best guests to the newest hardware.
And so we find when, and we have seen historically, less ships coming in doesn't necessarily mean it's negative for us, but 2026 is a bit of an outlier. I think you'll see them start, I think it's going to be, who's first to go? Who's going to announce first? And they will, they have to.
Yeah.
You'll see some of them come out, I think, at some point, the end of 2024, maybe. You know, if they were to actually try and get a ship out, one or two of them, they could still do it by 2026. Because as long as they're building the same construction, the same hull, the steel's there, everything's the same, it's shorter than 2.5 years. They could get a ship in in late 2026.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stephen, not to put you on the spot, but obviously, with the increase in dry dock days, that does have an impact on your revenue because the ships aren't in service. You guided to high single-digit revenue growth, which is great, but do you, off the top of your head, happen to know what the dampening impact is of those dry dock days in 2024?
I don't have the revenue number itself. I mean, it is 23% more in terms of-
Yeah
... days versus last year, so there is an incremental impact. I don't expect that those-
Yeah
... incremental days will occur again in 2025. So it's, it's really a one-time. I can get you the information, but-
Okay. Then, I know we only have one minute left, but in terms of the competitive environment, you're kind of a universe of one at this point, but you do have those contract negotiations that come up. I mean, how would you characterize your relationship with the cruise lines now versus maybe 10 or 15 years ago, and the way that those negotiation renewals occur?
I would say overall better. We've seen less movement on sort of the margin that we pay them, and the focus has really been: How do we grow the pie together versus pick away at the apple and give us a lot less? I mean, I think they're focusing today, we're partners, you're getting—they're getting the lion's share on the rev share. How do we make the pie much bigger? And I think at the table today, when we speak to them, it's more about the opportunity than splitting the apple into smaller pieces. So contract renewals have gone very well and still continue to go well. We've had no hiccups on the way, and I don't foresee anything. The competitive set has become less.
Canyon Ranch has moved out of the business right at the pandemic. And look, there's still one big cruise line we'd love to get, but that's a long, that's a long shot, you know? But outside of that, there's some small market share pickups that we did have in 2023, and maybe we'll have a few in 2024 and 2025.
Great.
Yep.
Perfect. We're right out of time. Thank you, everyone.