Okay, great. Welcome back, everybody. Brandt Montour from Barclays, here with Marriott Vacations Worldwide. We have John Geller, President and Chief Executive Officer, as well as Jason Marino.
Marino.
Marino.
Okay. Chief Financial Officer was not here last year. He has moved into the seat. Welcome and congratulations, Jason. So happy to have you guys. Thanks for coming.
Thank you.
Well, so we're gonna start off really broad. Before we get into specifics on timeshare, maybe you could just give us a sort of two-minute overview of the company, the different business lines, and then we'll get into some of the trends.
Yeah. So big picture, we've got two segments, if you will. Vacation ownership, which is the sale, the financing, management, as well as rental business of our 120 vacation ownership resorts. That's about 85% of our EBITDA on a normalized basis. And then our exchange and third-party, which is Interval International, and then we also own a hotel management business out in Hawaii called Aqua-Aston. So those two components came over in the ILG acquisition. I would say on the vacation ownership side, we've got seven brands with two licensors, Marriott being six of the seven brands we leverage, and then Hyatt Hotels, we have a separate licensing agreement.
Right now, the size of the portfolios, 90%+ of the resorts are Marriott branded, Ritz-Carlton, Marriott, Westin, Sheraton brands, on the VO side, and Hyatt's call it 22, 23 branded resorts after the rebranding of the Welk acquisition.
Okay, that's helpful. And then and so before we get into timeshare-specific trends, I wanna start out high level with consumer travel behavior, and sort of what you're seeing. Again, not specifically timeshare trends, but just, you know, we were coming off of a huge post-COVID revenge travel boom. This year was a year of some slight leisure travel normalization, but, you know, we're getting into next year's, you know, prime booking season. And so what are you seeing in terms of the health of the consumer? How would you describe that travel world?
Yeah, it's still super strong. You know, Brandt, as you were pointing out, we didn't realize how good 2022 was, right, until we got into 2023, in terms of some of that, you know, revenge travel, pent-up demand, people coming out of COVID. And, you know, what you saw at a much higher level, and we're no different than others, I think, in with leisure properties, right? Because remember, we don't have group or business traveler really. It's all in, you know, for the most part, higher-end leisure travel markets. What you saw in 2023 was especially, you know, the U.S. traveler traveling abroad to Europe. I'm sure everybody in here either went to Europe or knows three people that went to Europe this summer, but that was what you really saw, right?
You saw a lot of that higher-end traveler. And so on the margin, in some of our higher-end markets, like Hawaii or Florida beach resorts, things like that, you did see slightly softer demand. Still way better than what we were doing in 2019, and rates are still higher, but versus 2022, you saw some softening there. And then the other thing you didn't see was, and I think I just saw something that said international travel back into the U.S. is about 83% or something of pre-COVID levels. So you haven't seen because of, you know, how long it takes for certain countries, for travelers to get visas and the lead time. So that'll continue to build back up. And while we do have international operations, and they've really performed well, that's not a big part of our business.
We are more U.S. focused. So, but if you, if you look at what happened internationally, our contract sales in our, you know, Europe and Asia Pacific resorts, up about 40% year-over-year, right? So you're seeing, you know, no different than the broader, recovery of, of travel. International has lagged, right? U.S. kind of went through an adjustment on the leisure travel stuff this year. But as we look out, you know, when we look at owners and, and what's on the books for the first half of the year, we're, we're ahead of where we were last year, right? So there's still the, the demand, right? I, I do think higher level, and I'm sure we'll get to this, we've seen it a little bit on our loan portfolio.
I do think the consumer, you know, on the margin, some of them are more stressed since the higher inflation, higher interest rates, you know, some of that stuff is weighing a bit. But from a leisure travel perspective, people still wanna travel, and they're finding... They're reallocating budgets or figuring out how they spend on experiences and get on vacation.
Okay, that's helpful. Can you bridge those comments with just your second half guidance down?
Yes.
You went through... And before, we're gonna talk about consumer finance piece separate, but everything but the consumer finance charge, if we could just sort of bridge what you saw softening and where, where were the, where were there bright spots offsetting?
Yeah. So yeah, two things, the consumer financing and then the impact of the Maui wildfire. So if you know that will come back, and we're already seeing Maui start to come back in terms of resort occupancies and all that. But you take those off the table, I think our guidance was about $30-$40 million below for the second half of the year on EBITDA. About half of that is really development profit. What we've seen and what you saw sequentially even is our volume per guest, our VPGs from the second to third quarter actually came up a little bit, right? So you're finally seeing that stabilization, that question of coming out of COVID, your VPGs are so high, where do they stabilize?
We're starting right now to kind of see that with that sequential improvement. However, versus our expectations, for the second half of the year, they were a couple points softer, right? Not as strong. And then the other is tour flow. While tour flow was up year-over-year in the third quarter, it was a couple points below growth than we were expecting. So the combination of those two is what impacted the other sales centers, right? So versus our expectations. And then rentals was really, you know, the other piece on the vacation ownership side, where we continue to see relative to last year, you know, some of that ADR and occupancy softness. And so those are really the two components for that kind of guide down, [Uncertain].
All right, so then if we just dig into both of those components-
Yeah.
Start with the timeshare side, and correct me if I butcher this, but I consider the timeshare sort of consumer value chain or whatever you want to call it. So they purchase a package, they book a package. This is new tours, right?
Yeah.
Then there's they come tour, and then you close them, and there's a pricing component, whether or not you get a really good price on that close or whether or not you give some promos or whatever for that. You just, I guess you kind of answered this, but where along that consumer path is sort of things softer, and where are things strong, I guess? Because I'm trying to figure out how this could go into next year, obviously.
Sure. So what you described, which is primarily more of our first-time buyers-
Yes
... that's about, call it 30% of our tour flow, give or take. The bulk of our tour flow is coming in-house, right? People that are on vacation, renters, maybe we rented, maybe an owner rented to them, exchangers, things like that. So that's that in-house tour flow, right? And so that continues to be very strong, right?
On the owner side.
On the owner side, the capture rates, though, I would say when we're missing tour growth by a point or two of growth, you know, versus our expectations, you know, some of it is a little bit on the capture rate, right? It's the owners, you know, that are arriving, the length of their stay, some of that, you know, falls into the mix and to whether we're able to get somebody on a tour or not. So, so that part's strong. You know, the package, you know, pipeline and what you described in terms of that timeline, you know, our package pipeline is as strong as ever, right? And I mean, we've got, I think, 200 and-
230,000 packages.
thousand packages. So these are people that have bought a, you know, we call it like a mini vacation, typically, you know, three, four nights. When they go, they'll take a tour. And yeah. So both of those, you know. And sometimes the limitation on selling more packages is just we run a system-wide occupancy of, you know, 90%+. So as the package pipeline gets bigger, we got to figure out, you know, where—what resorts can hold people, where we can sell packages and, and to continue to drive that. So that's, at times, a bit of the limiting factor on selling more packages is because we don't want people to have to wait too long to get on vacation, right? And so we're, we're always managing our way through that, and we've got different opportunities to continue to grow, that package pipeline.
Okay. And so if it's a little bit on tours and it's a little bit on close rate-
Yep
... you know, we could argue that both of those factors are really a function of the macro consumers feeling like they don't have as much money to spend, or again, that revenge travel just not quite as, you know, exuberant about making big purchases. Would you say it's a little bit of both, or how do you kind of break that apart?
Probably a little bit of both. I mean, it's hard to know why somebody doesn't purchase or why they purchase a lot of times. But yeah, I think the, you know, and like I said, from a macro perspective, you know, the consumer is, you know. Now, the nice thing is, you know, we have—we target a higher-end consumer generally, but I think the, you know, the consumer, in general, is probably, you know, on the margin, depending on, you know, your facts and circumstances, is feeling some of that, so that's got to be hurting. But yeah, you go back to 2019, and we're still, you know, from a VPG perspective, we're probably back to if we were increasing VPGs by, you know, 3% since 2019, we'd be, you know, kind of where we're at today.
So on a relative basis, notwithstanding, you know, some of those headwinds, the impact of COVID and, you know, the revenge travel, I think, you know, we're probably still, you know, I hate to say this, like, it feels like probably from a VPG, we're probably still, you know, just as good as or, or better if we didn't have all the COVID stuff, right? In just terms of getting back to that.
Yeah.
And that's where we're seeing, you know, our VPGs kind of stabilize, right? That sequential stabilization. But yeah, the macro will hold a little bit on that as we go forward.
So we can really think about it as sort of close rates being maybe coming down to a similar rate of 19, and then you just CAGR the pricing. VPG is just close rate times pricing.
Yeah.
Right? And so that's why you're at where you're at.
Yeah.
Yeah, that way.
Yeah. I mean, I haven't looked at the close rates relative to 2019, but that's, you know, there could be the mix of the size of the purchase and all that. But generally, yeah, you've seen that, you know, the normalization, I'd say, of VPGs is coming-
Yeah
... you know, a little bit from that lower close rate. You know, to your point, what's driving that? You know, some of it obviously is that pent-up revenge travel. People came out, you know, had money saved, wanted to, you know, get out and vacation, and that's worn off a bit, right?
Yeah. Let's dig into your consumer because you have the best—one of the best, portfolios of consumers that we track, in terms of the household income and net worth, $1.5 million average net worth, I believe. Correct me if I'm wrong. And so, you know, what drives their decision making? Is it, is it the housing—is it the housing market? Is it the prices of their housing, their equity in their houses? Is the stock market a big factor? Is it all of it together in terms of how wealthy they feel? But what do you track when you think about forecasting out how your consumers will behave?
Yeah. You know, there's a couple things that where we see it. It's the, there's no direct correlation, I would say, with things like consumer confidence, but there is a loose correlation, right? If the consumer... 'Cause you are talking about, you know, generally a larger dollar purchase, whether you finance it or not, right? You know, $25,000-$30,000. So how the consumer is feeling, right, about, you know, their lot and where things are going, is gonna weigh on, on people over the longer term. So that's where the macro comes into play, consumer confidence. But yeah, given our owners typically have, you know, as you said, $1.5 million self-reported net worth, they're probably invested in the stock market.
You know, any given week, with depending on what the market's doing and things like that, that could impact somebody's at-the-table decision, right? You know, stock market's down or stock market's up, right? You know, I feel good about where I'm at. So, a lot of those things, you know, we look at, you know, over time, but there isn't anything we can point to, to say, Well, if this goes down, then, you know, because it is a sold product. Our guys are out there every day selling the product and the benefits. People are on vacation. We've got great resorts and great locations around the world, and when people are there with their families, making memories and creating great experiences, you know, that goes a long way to people investing in their vacations, right?
Yeah.
Putting that money aside to say, I want to vacation with my family and create these memories for the long term.
Okay, this is a good segue maybe into the consumer financing piece. You guys took a charge in the third quarter. I think it surprised a lot of us. Maybe talk about that charge, why you had to take a charge with... We would have assumed that your customer, your portfolio was in the last portfolio out of the three companies to take a charge as sort of the consumer finance world got a little bit tighter for, for your customers. So maybe just talk about, were you under-reserved, or, or how do you, how should we think about the, what was happening with delinquencies into the midyear and why your competitors didn't have the same sort of dynamic in the third quarter?
Yeah. I mean, to answer your question, with hindsight, yeah, we were- we weren't reserving enough given the level of defaults. I mean, we've been... You know, we started talking about this, I think, in the first quarter, and we took some higher reserves in the first and second quarter because we were seeing, versus our 10-year static pool models, we were seeing higher delinquencies, which were creating higher defaults. Now, you know, a couple points on the margin, if you will, on a $2.6 billion portfolio, that's what was causing it, right? And so, as we got into the third quarter and the trends were getting better, right, but are still delinquencies, defaults, still running above what the static pool would say. So if that's the case, every quarter, you're taking some additional charges.
We took a step back and we said, Based on where the trends are at today, let's try and get the balance sheet right here, and rather than, you know, having these additional reserves, you know, continue to come in. You know, it happened for a quarter, fine. Two quarters, okay. Now we're at a third quarter, and things aren't back to where they needed to be, so we estimated out, you know, given where we're at in the trends, what we thought that additional reserve should be. So hopefully, you know, we got the balance sheet right based on what we could see as of the end of the third quarter. But I don't think we're different. I mean, yeah, we've got a great consumer. I mean, our loan loss reserve, even after this, is probably 50% below our competitors, if not more, right?
So, but, you know, in terms of that, that consumer, I mean, you know, your... So this gets back to side of the broader stress on the consumer. I think auto loans are at the high, you know, most 60 days past due in, like, 15, 18 years. Banks are taking higher loan loss, you know, in credit reserves on, on their, credit receivables, things like that. So I, you know, I can't talk to what our competitors are seeing you know, seeing or not seeing, but I don't think our consumer, at a very broad level, right on the margin, there's-
Mm-hmm
... there's some stress out there, right? We're no different than, you know, some of the other consumer books that are-
Right
... that are out there.
Well, your peers run rate reserve more than you-
Right
... on a run rate basis, right? So you guys are just coming from a lower level, and it shows up in a bigger way.
Right.
Is there mechanisms in the static pool analysis, the way that you do this on a quarter-over-quarter basis, to have then, if you... I guess, I mean, hindsight is 20/20, to have just taken slightly more loan loss provisions in the first quarter, second quarter, to when you saw delinquencies start to tick up, and then that, I guess, then you wouldn't have had to take a charge. Is that kind of the way that you would have done things differently, or is this the right way to do things?
No, I think, you know, static pool, once again, is history of when loans default, right? You know, and then it's projecting your reserves based on that. I mean, the one variable I would say is where you're seeing, you know, the higher defaults, and most defaults that happen even historically in our loan portfolio, typically happen in the first four years, right? And that's where you're seeing, you know, slightly higher defaults... versus the history, right? Now, what you don't know is, would a big portion of those have defaulted anyway? They're just defaulting sooner. The model doesn't necessarily distinguish that, right? So there's probably some of those loans that are defaulting sooner than what the static pool would say.
So you gotta take the reserve in that, you know, like we did for the true up, but ultimately, they might have defaulted anyway, right? You know, so are they all incremental, things like that? It's, you know, it's a way to come up with, like any loan loss reserve, it's an estimate, right? And we're basing it on how loans have performed historically, and then, you know, projecting it out. And, you know, if it's not, you know, we're always gonna have a little bit of a true up, plus or minus, but I think the process worked in that as we continued to look at the trends, we needed to, you know, we realized we needed to take a higher reserve, you know, based on some of the higher delinquencies we were continuing to see.
Okay. Is there a factor within the reasons why your consumer would walk away from their loans? Does product also have a role to play in that? Like, is someone more likely to walk away from a loan if they're not happy with the product? And what I'm getting at is, you're coming off of this massive revenge travel boom. People might have bought stuff that they wouldn't have otherwise bought because they thought they were gonna be able to work remotely for the rest of their lives.
Sure.
Now the world's normalizing. Is there maybe a little bit of a hangover in, in there, do you think, from that?
Yeah. What I can say is, you know, from an owner satisfaction cost, all those stuff, I mean, we're not seeing any drop off, right? So overall, all the ratings we get, you know, from our owners and, you know, still remain very high, right? So now, that being said, sure, yeah. Could there be people that bought it, thought they could travel more and work remote, now they can't, right? And then they're like, Well, this isn't really working for me. And so, yeah, they - that's why they defaulted. It's hard because a lot of it's anecdotal. You know, we do all our own collections, and we try and work with the owners and, you know, I would say more times than not, it is more of that financial situation where, you know, they just had something happen.
Maybe they had an event happen in their life, they can't afford it anymore. A life event, something that, you know, could drive, you know, even how they vacation or you know, that they're not gonna vacation and use the product like they thought they would, right? And so, But yeah, no, I mean, we keep an eye very closely on all our owner and customer satisfaction, and those still remain at very high levels.
Okay. Okay, we're gonna move on to another topic, Abound, a new program that you rolled out this year. That hurt 2Q. It got a little better in the third quarter.
Yeah.
I wanted to talk about maybe what you fixed, what started going better. Just walk us through how, you know, how the improvements happened. But I guess before we even do that, you probably should tell the audience what Abound is.
Yeah.
Because I think in a very basic way, most people probably don't, unless they're in the weeds. I mean, even I needed a hand holding.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
So.
Yeah. At a very high level, it takes all your legacy Marriott products, so not Hyatt. Hyatt stays out of it, separate, separate portfolio, separate product. But it takes, you know, the legacy Marriott, you know, what we call our Marriott Vacations Destination Club. It takes all the legacy Westin, and which could be a weeks-based product, could be a points-based product, same thing on the Sheraton side. And, you know, think of it as a kind of umbrella that sits on top of that, that creates one point currency. So, you own the Westin Flex product. You don't have to do anything. You can use... We don't change what you bought. You can use that Westin Flex all the ways that you could have used it when you purchased it, right? All it is, is an additional option.
So now you're automatically enrolled in the Abound program. You don't have to buy in or, or anything like that. And there's an annual club dues of, you know, call it $250 a year. But every year, you can make that election to take your Westin ownership and get Abound points, right? Just for that year, right? And that allows you access now directly to the 90+ Marriott Resorts, where before, your direct access was just the properties in the Westin Flex, right? Now, you get a direct access to all the properties. But even more importantly for the Vistana owners, the Westin and Sheraton owners, they didn't have all the exchange options.
Yeah, they could exchange for Bonvoy points, but all the, you know, cruises, African safaris, all the experience, tours and things that we provide, you can, with your Abound points, right, if you, if you want, you can go take all those vacations. So it's really to get everybody to kind of one point currency, right? Because what you can never do with the product is you can't change what you sold people, right? You know, we can enhance it, and that's really what this is. Because if you think about what's the benefits of the Abound program long term, it's so that, you know, people come in, they have more vacation options, right? And, and so that's always the feedback, you know, even more so now. People want experiences, they want more flags on the map, and this creates, right, a lot more optionality.
and this is why we said, you know, foundationally, it's the right change to bring the Marriott brands together and create a broader portfolio. But it's just some of that transition takes some time.
Okay. And how much left is there to go for the Abound rollout? And then can you help us-
Yeah.
Is there a way to quantify eventually the upside that you could get from something like that? It's obviously adds a lot of... It would probably show up in close rates, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Over time. Yeah, so mainly the sales centers that have transitioned have been the ones that were selling the Westin Flex product, right? Because kind of behind the scenes, one of the benefits to the company, I talked about all the benefits to the owners and the flexibility and the optionality they get for being part of Abound. But one of the benefits for us is now we don't have to run, you know, three, four, or five different trusts, right, to feed the individual product. So, you know, we have a couple of years of excess inventory. If we didn't launch the Abound program, we were out of inventory in the Westin Flex, so we would have had to buy more Westin inventory to put into the Westin Flex product.
Now, going forward, all of our inventory on the Marriott side will get sourced into one trust. So whether it's a Westin, Sheraton, or Marriott, right, you're gonna put those into, you know, our Florida-based land trust and create, you know, new points to sell. So that, you know, in and of itself is a bit of the benefit in terms of managing cash flow for us. But the real benefit, like I said, is gonna be the future sales. Yes, I—you know, as we add more flags, we're—we've got, you know, Waikiki coming online here in the third quarter next year. It'll be our first project in Waikiki, so we're excited about that. That'll go into the, you know, the trust. That'll be a Marriott brand. And then we've announced new timeshare.
We're doing new construction in Charleston, and then a new one in Savannah. Those most likely do Westin. But that inventory now just feeds into the one kind of Marriott points trust, right? Because now we're selling the Abound program going forward.
Okay, and what were the fixes that you made, and what can you do on the next set of rollouts?
Yeah.
to make it smoother?
Yeah. So the biggest thing you have to do is educate the owner, right? You know, 70% of your sales are coming from existing owners. They were sold a different product, right? You know, for right or wrong, they were sold the Westin Flex, right, or the Sheraton Flex, and the benefits to that product, right, are gonna be different than the Abound product, right? And so, getting them to actually use the product. So one of our big learnings is we actually launched our Marriott Points product in, you know, June of 2010. We were still part of Marriott, so it was, and it was coming out of financial crisis, so what a great time to do it, 'cause nobody could you know, it was all in flux at the time.
But, you know, learnings from that were, you know, we launched the points product. Once again, we didn't do anything with the weeks product. What you could do to be part of the points product is, one, buy points, right? And then you could enroll your week and, you know, have more points, or you could pay an enrollment fee, a couple thousand dollars, to get into the points product. And not surprisingly, owners were like, I don't know. It took a longer period of time to get them enrolled and all that, and 70% of your sales are going to your owners, right? So what we did here was we said, Look, everybody, you know, who owns can get into Abound, right? And so, it's just...
You know, if you don't want to be in it, that's fine, but it's $250 a year, that, and that consolidates all your dues and everything like that, and though that annual club dues. But you didn't need to buy anything like additional points to get in. You didn't need to pay an enrollment fee because one of the most, you know, critical factors is educating the owners, getting them to use the product, right? To make it easier for them to use the product, we think that'll benefit in the long term. And, you know, even coming into this year, we, we launched it, you know, call it early 2023. Most people had made, you know, their vacation elections for 2023, so we did see about 10,000 legacy Vistana owners using the Abound program. This year, that's now 35,000, right?
So you're seeing, you know, for 24, I mean, 35,000 owners are electing into Abound. So using the product, and the good news is, as I said, the sales centers that haven't transitioned, those are mostly the Sheraton, 'cause we still have call it about a year's worth of inventory in the Sheraton Flex we wanna sell out, and then we'll switch those. Those owners are enrolled in the Abound program now. So they're part of—you know, some of those owners will be part of the 35,000, right? So by the time we get to the launch of the Abound program at the Sheraton centers, for example, those owners would have had, you know, 2, 3 years to be educated, probably take tours, hopefully use the product because we made it easy for them to use, which should, not saying...
You know, you're still gonna have the other challenge, which is, you know, which we've gotten better at, is training the sales staff, right? And retraining them in 'cause it is, you know, a bit of a different sell when you're selling a Sheraton Flex product that has, you know, four or five properties, Orlando, Myrtle Beach, versus a system sell and all the benefits you get out of it. So, but we learned a lot this time on the training and have updated it and retrained. So I think we'll be, from an owner education, out there in front of that, and then really the training is the second piece.
Got it. Okay, well, that's helpful. Before we move on, any questions from the audience? 2024, maybe you could walk through the puts and takes for next year as they exist today, both in terms of expense pressure, but also where you can see growth, which business lines you can see growth. And the comparisons in Hawaii as well as, I guess, Abound-
Yeah.
Are those the comparisons? Are there tailwinds then, I guess, year-over-year?
They should be. We, you know, just quickly on Maui, we've got about 10% of our contract sales, you know, that happen at our Maui sales centers on the VO side. So it's a significant portion of our contract sales. The good news was, you know, from a physical resort standpoint, there was no damage to the fires, though they got pretty close to our Hyatt resort there in Kaanapali. And the bigger impact has been on our associates, both on the resort op side and the marketing and sales side. We had, I think, 300 of our, you know, 1,800 associates in Maui lost their housing, right? So that needs to be solved in terms of that longer-term solution. And you know, government's working on it, but right now everything's kind of temporary, right?
And so on the resort op side, you know, most of our people have said they wanna come back, back to work, they're back to work. Where we've seen some softness, where people left the island is on the marketing and sales side. Right now, it's fine because our resort occupancies are not back to... You know, we run a 95%-96% year-round occupancy normally in that at our Maui resort. So we're not back to that yet, but as we talked about on our third quarter call, we expect as we get closer to year-end, early next year, the occupancy should be back.
If the occupancies are back, then it's just making sure we've got the right marketing and sales processes in place, whether that's, you know, putting some task force people over there in the interim till we get the, the right staffing, selling remotely like we did during COVID, so people are taking the tour. But, you know, we have people, we have sales people not on Maui. Not as efficient, but, you know, we'll figure out how we kind of work our way through that. So, we'll know more here as we kind of get to year-end and see where occupancies are and, and update you in February on that. But yes, I mean, you know, as I sit here today, I, I gotta believe that, you know, is it the full $50 million impact that we talked about for the impact for this year?
You know, that's what we'll be able to tell you more on that piece. And then obviously, the other headwind this year was just the higher loan loss. We think we've, you know, taken enough reserves there, based on what we can see. So, yeah, I think when you look at both of those, hopefully, those are generally tailwinds, right? When you look at the actual results. So that's $100 million ±, right? Just at, you know, ballpark. And then, you know, like we talked about on the call, I think, you know, we expect to, you know, high level, right, continue to grow contract sales, deliver high development profit with that, resort management, you know, higher management fees, growth there, ancillary business, all that, you know, in terms of higher growth.
But on the headwind side, financing profit, because securitization rates have remained, you know, stubbornly high, right, relative to the deal we just did, which was, you know, a great deal all in all. We upsized it. It was the biggest deal that's been done, I think, post-COVID, in terms of $460 million in notes we securitized, you know, but at a just under 6.5% rate, right? So, you know, those last couple of securitizations will create some headwinds on the financing profit.
And then the other one we talked about is on the rental side of the business, where all these higher costs, inflation, unfortunately for our resorts, we look at where we operate, getting people cost of living, hiring, all that, even in places like Orlando, you know, what you've seen is Disney, you know, they, they're taking their minimum wage up to $20 an hour in their, in their contracts and stuff. So out in California, you have, you know, now this fast food minimum wage, which is $20 an hour, right? So in a lot of the markets, you're just seeing, you know, those higher costs.
You know, we're in Florida, we're in Hawaii, we're in California, and, you know, we've seen higher property insurance, significant, you know, just given all of our resorts are mostly in locations that are, you know, hurricane risk or, you know, fire risk, those types of things. So, those higher costs, right, higher maintenance fees, we pay maintenance fees on inventory we own, right? And so, you know, what we said was those costs are probably the cost to, you know, of our rental inventory, probably gonna go up higher this year than our ability to drive rate and occupancy, right? So rentals will be another headwind here for as we think about 2024.
And then the final piece, which, given how, you know, you know, below expectations we are for the year, just some of the variable compensation in G&A, because we're, you know, have basically very little bonus getting paid out this year. So, you know, as we reset targets, right, some of that, that bonus comes back, so.
Well, we only have time for one more question, so I guess we'll finish it off with a bang. But one of your competitors announced a acquisition of Bluegreen, which I guess would be the fourth largest public company, is being bought by or is potentially being bought by Hilton Grand Vacations competitors. Is that asset something that would ever be strategically interesting for you? You probably can't say if you were involved or not, but then the follow-up question would be: If they do consummate that transaction and, combined, will be the biggest timeshare company by far, is there a competitive anything competitive factors related to that that would change the way that you think about the market?
Yeah. Yeah, we've always said, look, we're, you know, our brands, right, whether they're Marriott or Hyatt, are really focused on that upper upscale luxury. We think there's huge growth opportunity with our brands in terms of building more resorts, adding more flags to the map, whether that's here in the U.S., but even over in Asia Pacific, in our Marriott brands and even the Hyatt platform. We don't have timeshare in Orlando today, right? And so plenty of markets where, you know, we'll get flags, we'll drive sales and grow. And so our focus has always been, you know, and this was the Welk acquisition, you know, finding that upper upscale, unbranded, right, where we can get our synergies and benefits, adding flags, in this case, to the Hyatt portfolio, right?
Bringing that ownership group together from a Welk and Hyatt side, and then growing off of that. So, Bluegreen, obviously not upper upscale, so wouldn't be something that would fit in there. And quite frankly, you know, we wouldn't, you know, be able to get the synergies out of an acquisition like that because we wouldn't be able to leverage our, our brand. So it would be a shift in strategy, right, to go more of a moderate tier, and that hasn't been something that we think, like I said, there's plenty of growth opportunities organically to continue to, to grow our, our, our, our market.
I think if anything, it just pulls us away as kind of that upper upscale, luxury-focused player, because I'm not sure what the mix will be after both Diamond and Bluegreen, but that's gonna be a much bigger ship, probably a bigger competitor for TNL, right, in terms of maybe their customer and resort system and all that.
Gotcha. Sorry, we didn't get any balance sheet questions, Jason.
It's okay.
Anybody from the audience? Okay. Guys, thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate it.
Thank you.