HLT

Welcome to the Hilton Q1 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Our participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance please press star then zero. After today's prepared remarks there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question you may press star then one. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Charlie Ruehr, Vice President, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, Chuck. Welcome to Hilton's first quarter 2026 earnings call. Before we begin, we'd like to remind you that our discussion 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. 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 and the company's outlook. Kevin Jacobs, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, will then review our first quarter results and discuss our expectations for the year. Following the remarks, we'll be happy to take your questions. With that, I'm pleased to turn the call over to Chris.

Thanks, Charlie. Good morning, everyone. We certainly appreciate you joining us today. Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge all those impacted by the Middle East conflict. I'd like to thank our team members who adapted very quickly and continue to provide extraordinary hospitality during this difficult time. We remain hopeful for a swift resolution. Turning to results, we're pleased to report a great first quarter, during which strong RevPAR and net unit growth drove top and bottom line results above the high end of our guidance. Performance was driven by strengthening underlying demand trends, along with ongoing system-wide share gains. Our industry-leading brands, strong commercial engines, and powerful partnerships continue to differentiate us from the competition, while a culture of innovation fuels additional growth opportunities.

All of this, coupled with our asset light, fee-based business model, positions us to continue producing significant free cash flow and driving meaningful shareholder returns. In the quarter, we returned more than $860 million to shareholders, and we remain on track to return approximately $3.5 billion for the full year. For the first quarter, system-wide RevPAR increased 3.6% year-over-year, driven by broad growth across all chain scales, brands, and segments, as well as sequential monthly improvement throughout the quarter in the U.S. In the quarter, business transient RevPAR was up 2.7%, representing a 4-point step up in demand from the fourth quarter when adjusting for day of week and holiday shifts, driven by improving midweek demand across all chain scales.

Leisure transient RevPAR was up 3.5%, driven by concentrated spring break demand that enabled strong rate growth. Group RevPAR was up 4.3%, driven by growth in company meeting and convention demand. We continue to see healthy underlying momentum for group, supported by strong growth in corporate lead volumes. As we look ahead to the second quarter, we remain encouraged by a continuation of demand trends that we've been observing since late 2025 and now through April, but we do expect some headwinds related to the Middle East. For the full year, we expect improving performance in the lower and mid-chain scales, with RevPAR strength continuing to move downstream from luxury and upper upscale toward a more balanced convergence demand shape, or what I have been calling a C-shaped economy.

This trend should be most evident in the U.S., where supportive tax and regulatory policy, expected lower interest rates, increased private sector investment in AI and the AI complex, and ongoing public infrastructure spending are benefiting the middle and lower income consumer and driving broader demand growth. As a result, for the full year, our system-wide RevPAR growth expectations are now 2%-3%, factoring in a range of scenarios for the Middle East conflict and recovery. For the year, we continue to expect group to lead, followed by business and leisure transient. Turning to development, during the first quarter, we opened 131 hotels, totaling over 16,000 rooms, representing our second strongest first quarter for hotel openings in our history. Our luxury and lifestyle brands continued to expand around the world, comprising 20% of total openings in the quarter.

Earlier this month in Morocco, we proudly opened the Waldorf Astoria Rabat Salé, kicking off 2026 with another key addition to the Waldorf Astoria portfolio, which now includes 40 trading hotels worldwide with more than 30 in the pipeline. Additional marquee Waldorf openings in 2026 will include the Waldorf Astoria London – Admiralty Arch in London, and the Waldorf Astoria Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. Within lifestyle, our Curio Collection recently surpassed 200 trading hotels with notable openings in the quarter, including the newly built Monarch San Antonio and the converted Hotel Heron Alexandria, Old Town, Virginia. We also expanded our lifestyle footprint globally with the debut of Motto in Brazil.

In Europe, this week, we will open a Home2 Suites in Dublin, Ireland, which marks the European debut of our Home2 Suites brand, one of our strongest performing brands in the portfolio, with more than 800 hotels open and over 750 in development. This positions this brand for extended rapid growth and allows us to capture even more demand from this important region. Conversions represented 36% of openings for the quarter across 10 brands in dozens of countries, ranging from flagship Hilton openings in Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand to Spark openings in France, Canada, and the U.S. Following our Apartment Collection by Hilton brand announcement earlier this year, we now have our first two converted properties in Atlanta and Salt Lake City, accepting bookings for this summer.

Conversions overall are expected to be up on a nominal basis in 2026 across every region, demonstrating the performance our system delivers to owners. Despite the current macro uncertainty, signings and starts continue to have momentum. During the quarter, we announced multiple new signings across geographies, including four new brand signings in Turkey, two LXR signings in Japan, the debut of Motto in Australia and France, and the debut of Tapestry in Germany. In India, we signed a strategic agreement with Royal Orchid Hotels to open 125 Hampton hotels in the market, which puts us on track to exceed 400 hotels in the market in the coming years and reaffirms our commitment to expanding in this key emerging economy.

We continue to build out our presence in the fast-growing and expansive region of APAC ex-China, where approvals, openings, and new development construction starts were all up double-digits in the first quarter. Globally, we now expect new development construction starts to be up over 20% for the year, with the strongest growth in the U.S. and EMEA, signaling continued developer confidence and a strong desire to have hotels open in conjunction with a rebounding RevPAR environment. Our pipeline now stands at a record 527,000 rooms. It includes brand debuts in more than 25 new countries, with Hilton representing only 5.5% of global hotel supply and over 20% of rooms under construction, we have tremendous opportunity to grow our market share from here.

As we look ahead, we expect that our robust global pipeline, strength in conversions, construction start momentum, and industry-leading brand premiums will support sustained net unit growth of between 6% to 7% for the full year, even with the current geopolitical uncertainty. Innovation across our entire business is a core competency, and when deploying new technology, we're focused on broad, impactful use cases to enhance the guest experience, deliver value to owners, and empower team members. As we advance our strategy, we're leveraging AI to embrace the new ways customers are discovering and engaging with our brands, working with leading partners, including Google, ChatGPT, and Anthropic, all while remaining focused on strengthening direct loyalty-driven relationships and maintaining discipline in how we manage distribution. Building on this, earlier this quarter, we deployed an Anthropic-powered platform for customers to dream and shop, called the Hilton AI Planner.

This LLM-powered tool combines our incredibly rich property content with vast information about local venues and activities to allow customers to search for and tailor an experience that is unique to their interests. The AI Planner enables guests to spend more time dreaming within our native environment, which should drive incremental demand across our portfolio as customers book with us more often and more quickly. We're just getting started on how technology can customize the customer experience, and the Hilton AI Planner is one great example of how we're delivering our signature Hilton hospitality and enhancing the dream shop, book, and stay guest journey. During the quarter, we were proud to once again be recognized as the top-rated hospitality company by...

On the Fortune and Great Place to Work list of the 100 best companies to work for in the U.S., marking our 11th consecutive year earning this distinction. We also continue to be recognized for our world-class culture globally, receiving Great Place to Work honors in 17 countries, including seven number one rankings. Overall, we are very encouraged by the strength of the demand environment across all our brands. We remain confident that our powerful network effect, industry-leading RevPAR premiums, and fee-based capital-light business model will continue to drive strong operating performance, net unit growth, and meaningful cash flow, enabling us to return an increasing amount of capital to shareholders. Now I'll turn the call over to Kevin to give you a few more details on the quarter and expectations for the full year.

Thanks, Chris, and good morning, everyone. During the quarter, system-wide RevPAR increased 3.6% versus the prior year on a comparable and currency-neutral basis. Growth was driven by broad growth across all chain scales, brands, and segments, as well as sequential improvement throughout the quarter in the U.S. adjusted EBITDA was $901 million in the first quarter, up 13% year-over-year and exceeding the high end of our guidance range. Outperformance was predominantly driven by better-than-expected system-wide RevPAR growth. Management franchise fees grew 10.4% year-over-year. For the quarter, diluted earnings per share, adjusted for special items, was $2.01.

Turning to our regional performance, first quarter comparable U.S. RevPAR increased 3.4%, driven by group growth trends continuing from the prior quarter, broad business travel strength, and leisure demand from a concentrated spring break. For full year 2026, we expect U.S. RevPAR growth to be at the high end or above system-wide guidance. The Americas outside the U.S. first quarter RevPAR increased 4.4% year-over-year, driven by strong demand across all segments and continued strength across the Caribbean and South America. For full year 2026, we expect RevPAR growth to be in the low to mid-single digits. Europe RevPAR grew 6.9% year-over-year, led by growth across all segments. Continental Europe strength related to the Winter Olympics and other regional event-driven demand.

For full year 2026, we expect RevPAR growth to be in the low to mid-single digits. In the Middle East and Africa region, RevPAR decreased 1.7% year-over-year, as strong early quarter performance was offset by weakness following travel disruptions from the conflict across the Middle East. For full year 2026, we expect RevPAR to be down in the mid to high teens as a result of the ongoing conflict in the region, and we expect the biggest impact to be on second quarter performance. The Asia Pacific region, first quarter RevPAR was up 9.1% in APAC ex China, led by Australasia RevPAR growth and extended Chinese New Year and other regional events.

RevPAR in China increased 1.3% in the quarter, driven by business segment recovery, offset by continued pressure in group from softer convention and company meetings activity and leisure due to weaker inbound travel. For full year 2026, we expect RevPAR growth in Asia Pacific to be low single digits, with RevPAR flat in China. Turning to development, as Chris mentioned, for the quarter, we grew net units 6.3% and now have more than 527,000 rooms in our pipeline. We continue to have more rooms under construction than any other hotel company, with approximately one in every five hotel rooms under construction globally slated to join the Hilton portfolio. We expect to deliver between 6% to 7% net unit growth for the full year.

Moving to guidance for the second quarter, including the impact from the Middle East conflict, we expect system-wide RevPAR growth to be between 2% and 3%. We expect Adjusted EBITDA to be between $1.015 billion and $1.035 billion, and diluted EPS adjusted for special items to be between $2.18 and $2.24, both impacted by the significant Middle East RevPAR decline and several one-time and timing items that are unique to the second quarter year-over-year comparison. For the full year, we expect RevPAR growth of 2%-3%, driven by strengthening underlying fundamentals across chain scales and segments and factoring for a range of scenarios for the Middle East.

As a result, we expect adjusted EBITDA of between $4.02 billion and $4.06 billion, and diluted EPS adjusted for special items of between $8.79 and $8.91. Please note that our guidance ranges do not incorporate future share repurchases. Moving on to capital return, we paid a cash dividend of $0.15 per share during the first quarter for a total of $35 million. Our board also authorized a quarterly dividend of $0.15 per share for the second quarter. For 2026, we expect to return approximately $3.5 billion to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Further details on our first quarter results 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 as many of you as possible, so we ask that you limit yourself to one question. Chuck, can we have our first question, please?

Thank you. Our first question will come from Shaun Kelley with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my question. Chris, obviously a big notable change in the U.S. demand dynamics, hoping you could just unpack that a little bit for us. Our math gets us to, you know, probably nearly a 200 basis point increase in your outlook from where you were, you know, at the beginning of the year. Could you just walk us through that and maybe elaborate a little bit on your comment around the C-shaped economy? Are you actually seeing some evidence of that convergence as we get here into April, or what gives you that confidence to kinda make that statement, and what are you seeing that's getting you excited about the business? Thanks.

Thanks, Shaun. I think that's a great way to start with the Q and A 'cause it's the biggest, you know, biggest question out there. I, you know, I think if you go back, I can have the team fact check me, but if you go back to, like, midyear last year, I was very much of the mind that I saw, you know, if you lift up, Lift it up above a lot of noise, that there were some really good fundamental things happening from a macro point of view in the U.S. economy that, to my mind, sort of had to eventually translate into higher growth rates. Now, I will admit that certainly in the third quarter, you know, as we reported, while I said that, I also said we're not seeing the green shoots or, you know, a whole lot of evidence of that yet.

You know, then and again, if nothing, I've been consistent. You know, in the fourth quarter, I repeated my view that we were, you know, that we had to start to see what I sort of made up on my own, that instead of a K, a C economy, where you see convergence of the lower end, you know, the middle, the mid-middle class, mid, you know, mid-price segments in our industry moving up. In the fourth quarter, we started to see a little bit of evidence of that. I would say, as we're in the first quarter and looking into Q2, where we have, you know, part of the quarter behind us, obviously, in the sense of April, we have very good sight lines into May. You know, we're seeing it, right?

We're seeing what, to me, was inevitably on its way. You know, it takes time for these things to sort of seep into the economy. You know, I said it in my prepared comments and at the risk of, you know, taking too much time here, but I do think it's the most important question and answer. You know, what's driving it? Well, I think what's driving it is, you know, a number of very big picture things that are going on. One, forget for the moment the spike in, you know, energy prices and oil because of the war in Iran. I mean, broadly, structurally, particularly in housing, you have inflation coming down. As a result, broadly, again, not, you know, in this exact amount, broadly, rates have come down. I think they're, you know.

You can debate how fast, when, second half of this year, first half of next year. I think there's a broad understanding that particularly if we get the Middle East stuff sort of settled down, you're gonna be in a, you know, a lower inflationary environment, and it will allow the Fed to continue to bring rates down to stimulate the real economy, which is what they're trying to do. You're in obviously one of the most deregulatory environments in what I can remember in modern history, and that means financial services, energy, you know, you name it across the spectrum, you know, that you have a broad deregulatory regime.

That, you know, in addition to that, in the backdrop, you know, because of the bill that was passed last year, you are in a multi-year position where you have very, very business-friendly tax attributes, right? That's, you know, very hard to get done. You know, it's certainly not gonna get undone during this administration. Let's be honest, when you look at it historically, it takes a lot, even with change of administration, to get that kind of sweeping tax policy change. I think you have a number of, you know, of years and running room and favorable tax policy. Then, like, I'll state the obvious, you have a lot of investing going on in, you know, in America. Where is that investing?

AI, all the AI companies, the whole AI complex around it, data centers, energy. It's like, you know, it's like the great race. People are spending money, you know, like crazy in and around that. You have infrastructure, which I've talked about for a number of quarters. You know, the Biden-era infrastructure bill, $1.6 trillion, very little of which percentage-wise has been spent. The CHIPS Act to reshore, you know, critical manufacturing. Again, $800 billion, very little of that is spent. Why? Because it takes time to get these things like land, permits, build. These things, you know, they take a number of years to sort of seep into the system, but I think you're starting, you're starting to see it.

The best evidence of that, if you know, if you go back and there's the correlation sort of got obtuse or broken apart during COVID, like a lot of things. You know, over long spans of time, the highest correlation, 95%+ over a very long span of time, the correlation in demand growth for hotel rooms has been growth in NRFI, nonresidential fixed investment. Sort of like we've lived in crazyville post-COVID, where you have all this swirling stuff going on, hard to understand. To me, you know, over the long term, that is exactly what is gonna drive the business, and that's exactly what's gonna drive the mid-market of the business.

All that investing in nonresidential fixed investment that takes the middle class getting in the game, and if you look at those numbers, they've been moving up, and they're, you know, perennially bad at forecasting NRFI from my experience. The actual numbers being reported are moving up, and my guess is the next several years they're gonna keep moving up, and as they do, you're gonna see this convergence. With all of those things going on, you're gonna see this convergence. By the way, if that's not enough, I mean, I know it's a whole different topic of displacement and everything that goes with AI is also gonna provide one of the greatest productivity booms. I mean, it's gonna be equal to or bigger than the internet productivity boom.

Yes, there are people, there's winners, there's losers, there's need to retrain and, you know, shift and re-skill people, all of that stuff we won't get into today with the limits of time. There is no world where economically it's not advantageous to have productivity gains. Like, there is no world, there is no time in American history where big productivity gains weren't matched with big economic growth. I sort of put all that together and I, you know, I feel like, okay, it's happening. Like, I want it to keep happening. You know, I wanna be, you know, thoughtful about, like, we're talking about, you know, a little bit of fourth quarter and the first quarter and now looking into the second quarter.

I don't wanna overcook it, but, you know, all of those things I've been thinking, I think are happening, and I think it's now showing up in our business. It makes, it makes me feel good that we, you know, that we could be in a timeframe, honestly, where, you know, like, I love it when we're sitting around at this very table every week talking about performance, and every time we talk, it's getting better, right? That's what's been happening for a while. You know, for weeks and weeks, it's getting better. You know, and as we look further out in the year with the visibility we have, you know, here in the U.S., it feels better. You know, reality is, you know, we gave guidance to Middle East.

I'll leave that to somebody else to ask. Creates some uncertainty, but, you know, I think you could make an argument that we are being reasonably conservative with our full year guidance.

Thank you so much.

The next question will come from Daniel Politzer with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, everyone, and thanks for the question. I suppose I'll take the bait on the Middle East there. Can you just remind us what the, the exposure in terms of EBITDA fees across your business is there? I guess, how do you think about the Middle East dynamic and disruption there flowing through to the other regions of your business, you know, throughout the, throughout the course of the year, and, you know, impacts the U.S. outbound travel?

Sure. Middle East, about 3% of the business. You'd say, "All right, well, it's not that big a part of the business." You know, like Q2, you see that, you know, it's impacted by a few things, some one-time stuff that Kevin mentioned from last year, but it's also impacted by the Middle East. I mean, the Middle East, you know, for Q2, which is when we think it'll probably be, you know, most dramatically impacted. You know, if it's 3%, it could be down 50% or something like that. You know, you guys could do the math. That could be 1.5% points on system wide.

Whatever guidance we gave you, if the Middle East were doing what it normally does, it wouldn't be, you know, which had been running in the high single digits, low double digits now, you know, for a quarter -50%, you know, you flip that around and in Q2 you would be above where you were in Q1. Even though it is a small percentage of 3%, when you get in very large numbers, small percentage of a large number becomes a decent sized number. Having said that, we are already... I mean, I don't know where this is all gonna play out. I'm looking down, out my window to Washington. We'll see. I don't, you know, I don't know.

I suspect there will be an off-ramp eventually, just given a lot of things, you know, politically and otherwise, in the not-too-distant future. Things have already settled down a bit. I mean, we are already starting to see, again, in my weekly around this table when I'm getting reports, you know, certain markets, you know, within the Middle East that are some of our bigger markets are starting to sort of stabilize and move up. They're still quite impacted, but they're getting better. What we tried to do in our guidance was, again, on the margin, be a bit conservative and thinking about a range. Like in the first quarter, we think it was probably 30 or 40 bps, something like that. In Q2, I just gave you the metric. It's probably 1.5%.

For the full year, you know, it's probably a 0.5%-1% impact, depending on what you think the trajectory will be. It, you know, at the lower end of that range, and thus at the lower end of our overall guidance range, I think it, you know, what we've assumed is it stays pretty bad, you know, and that there is, in fact, some knock-on impact. To your question, there's some knock-on impact on other markets. We've seen a little bit of that, you know, a little bit in India, particularly Bangalore, a little bit in the Seychelles and Maldives because of transit through Dubai. Not a lot of knock-on impact, but we've assumed if it stays really bad, there'll be a little bit more. Then obviously on the upside that, you know, you continue to things stabilize and you continue to have recovery, but not, you know, not necessarily a super V-shaped recovery, just sort of grinding back up through the rest of the year. Again, my experience, you know, I'm sad to say I've been doing this long enough. I've had to live through stuff like wars and pandemics and, like, whatever else, you know, it feels like. You know, I feel like in this moment, you know, we're trying to be responsible with you all and we're giving you a range of outcomes that, you know, that we think, you know, are rational and if anything, probably on the conservative side as they should be.

In terms of, you know, I mentioned it on the development side, you know, only about 2% of our deliveries for the year are coming out of the Middle East. You know, those are, you know, those are important deliveries. We do think things will slow down a little bit there. It's so early in the year. We don't know. So again, that's why, you know, we, I think, but for that, we probably would've been telling you we're in the upper half of our 6%-7% range. Because of the Middle East and potential for supply chain knock-on in other parts of the world, we feel like, you know, keeping the range where it was more appropriate. Again, I mean, you could say we're being too conservative or whatever, but I mean, you know, war is war.

There's a lot, you know, a lot of possible outcomes. We've tried to frame it around those and be thoughtful about it.

Got it. Thanks so much for all the detail.

Yep.

The next question will come from Stephen Grambling with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Appreciate all the color on the macro. As we look at, some of the actions outside of RevPAR, particularly the launch of this Select brand, can you elaborate on how this compares to a typical brand agreement, and what are some of the guardrails for what brands you'd be willing to include going forward? If I can just sneak one more that's related on, does this launch change the way you think about either the marketing or system funds allocations or even M&A?

No, no to the last part of that. Let me answer that. That doesn't change any of that. I mean, the way to think about Select is like anything we bring into the system, the first step is quality. Does it add to our network effect? Is it a swim lane or, you know, a brand that we think our customers want that has the quality that we have promised to give our customers, and that we think it will create a benefit, a strengthening to our network effect? That's always the first filter. If it doesn't meet the criteria of like, we already have something on top of it or we're, you know, or we don't like the quality, we're not doing it.

By the way, we've had dozens of opportunities in Select that you don't know about because we haven't done them. We've done one. I suspect there will be others. I, you know, I don't know how many there'll be because we're super stringent on what we would do. The way to think about it, and YOTEL is a great example, it's like it's a great smaller brand. They've struggled to really, you know. Customers love it, the quality is good, and they have a real following, but they've had a real, you know, problem without having global scale and all the network effect that we have and the ability to invest in technology and all those things at the level we do to sort of make it work the way they want it to work.

You know, that was a unique opportunity for us to say, we love it. Our customers, we did a lot of work. We think our customers like it. It will resonate well. The quality is good. Importantly, we're entering the agreement that is consistent with the way we would approach, you know, any franchise agreement. This is a franchise relationship with them. If you look at, I know there's been a lot of noise out there, but if you know, there's a ramp involved, like a lot of our larger, you know, multi-unit franchise deals.

If you look at a run rate basis, this is very consistent in how we charge for license fees, system fees, all of that, and it is on a fee per room basis, very consistent with a product with, you know, in that category. The difference is it's just a little unique brand. Like, could we, you know, could you do it somewhere else? Yeah, you could say, like, what's the difference between that and, like, doing it, you know, as a Tap or whatever? Well, YOTEL is a good example. It's unique. It doesn't fit in Tap or Curio. It's its own thing. So we didn't wanna try. Like, we wanna have, you know, we don't wanna have cognitive dissonance with our customers as we bring things in the system, and we liked the brand.

We wanted it to stand on its own, we, you know, we wanna do it the right way. We wanna get paid for the effort, and we wanna, you know, want it to be something our customers really think enhances the broader system. There'll be others, I'm sure. We're working on a bunch of others. I said, like, turndown ratio is very, very high. Obviously, the appetite for folks to, you know, that have small brands, I think is quite high, you know, in an environment where we have this much scale and the ability, you know, to how we work with all the intermediaries, the dollars we can invest in our commercial engines and technology. It's a, you know. I think we have a real competitive advantage.

That's why our average market share of our brands is so high and much higher than our competitors. Increasingly, you know, little micro brands around the world, I think, you know, not all of them, but some are figuring that out, and we've been talking to a bunch of them. I suspect some others, you know, some others will come into the fold over time, but we'll be hyper-disciplined about it. Again, quality, you know, the brand works, fits in our ecosystem, and we get. The fees per room are good. We get paid for the effort.

Thanks. Appreciate all the detail.

The next question will come from Lizzie Dove with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to go back to the AI and kind of technology side of things. Obviously, things are moving very, very quickly. You mentioned you launched the Hilton AI Planner, but I guess just now, you know, another quarter into things, how do you think about what the kind of real opportunity set here is long term? You know, both obviously on the OpEx side of things internally, but then as you think kind of bigger picture externally from, you know, the distribution side of things also.

Yeah. I mean, we talked about this, I think, at fairly good length on the last call, and it's obviously an important question. Given the amount of time we're spending on it and everybody is, it would be fair to say it's worth addressing. I would say, you know, you're right. There's a lot of effort going into it by everybody, certainly by us. Things are moving very quickly. I would say as every day goes by, we're learning and iterating and thinking and doing different things and working with different partners in different ways. I think the opportunity gets more, not less interesting. You know, I know that's what you'd expect me to say, but I believe it to be true. I think, you know, the three buckets of how we think about it haven't really changed.

I think we think about this as a, you know, a means to create, you know, to use our scale as a weapon in creating efficiency, which we think can translate into being more efficient at how we go to market and how we deliver for our owner community and more effective. You know, yes, that could benefit our P&L too, but really the largest part of our system costs really relate to the part of the system we manage on behalf of owners. Every time we can be more effective, more efficient in that world, it can translate into benefits for our owner community who need it and want it and deserve it. You know, our Project Rise, you know, this year was in part enabled by work that we're doing in this bucket, if you will.

I'd say we're early days, and I think you have huge opportunities to think about systems and processes across what is a very big global company to continue to garner efficiencies, but most importantly, to be much more effective, be able to move quicker, you know, add hotels, ramp them quicker, just because, you know, we take great systems but antiquated systems, and we, you know, we hyper modernize those. In the second bucket, you heard me mention we're working with a bunch of the folks out there, Gemini and OpenAI. You know, we're gonna be opening our app within their environment the next couple weeks. Talked about our AI planner in our environment that we did with Anthropic and Claude. We're working with everybody and, you know, while it's moving fast, you know, there's a long way to go.

I do you know, increasingly feel really good about what the opportunities for us are. I mean, if you think about it at a high level, if you look at the quality, using the U.S. market as an example, if you look at the quality, hotel market in the United States, we're over 25% of the market. I think that puts us in a position and we are the only ones with that 25% of the market that control rate, inventory, availability, period, end of story. Nobody can get it unless we give it to them. You know, in a world where you have a more competitive environment, there are a bunch of debates, who's gonna win, who's gonna lose. That's not for us to judge.

I think there's gonna be more than one winner. That's why we're working with everybody. We realize the asset we have in the system and the control of the system, and given our scale, is really valuable, that effectively, people really do need us. If you're gonna have, you know, you can't be missing 25% or 30% of the quality inventory in the U.S. and have something that's a real full offering. You know, I like where we sit. It's complicated. It's fast-moving. There's risks. We're approaching it, you know, very much in the form of a partnership with all of the counterparties that are developing these technologies. We wanna show up with all of them.

In the end, I do believe, as a result of the great work they're doing and a result of discipline on our side, that there's real opportunities to create more efficient, more effective distribution. There sort of just has to be if we're smart about it, and we intend to be. Then the last bucket, you know, AI Planner is in, you know, is in fact part of it. You think about when we have a stay experience, people are with us, your customers, we have all sorts of opportunities to, like, equip our team members now with all the information we have, with technology in the palm of their hands to deal with problems, to customize the experience. We're testing and learning in the stay experience with really cool things that really revolutionize the stay.

We also, you know, a lot of the engagement we have is with our customers is digital. Think about when they're dreaming, booking, planning, post-stay, and so, and they're not with us. You know, that's about trying to make sure that the approach we have digitally with folks is utilizing all the best thinking and technology to create a very engaging experience so that, yes, when they're with us, they have the best stay experience in the business, and that's why they wanna come back. When they're not with us in these other steps of the customer journey, they feel equally good about our ability to give, to satisfy their needs and to customize at mass scale. Again, all this stuff, I mean, we're doing things. We talked about it.

You can go play with the AI, the Hilton AI Planner, stay planner. You know, it's early days, we're doing super important foundational work. The last thing I'd say is, you know, our tech stack, and it's not by happenstance, you know, is very advanced. Many years ago, COVID, like, turned into a time warp. Pre-COVID, probably eight or nine years ago, we made the decision to really completely blow up all of our legacy architecture and make sure that our core systems that otherwise were, you know, cloud-based, open source, microservices driven, which means a totally modern tech stack that has, like, incredible agility, you know, and the ability to have control. It's a system built on, you know, certain elements of table stake sort of technology.

It might build off an existing platform, but where we customize and modify it, you know, it's things we own and control. It gives us, we think, a really unique ability to be agile and do things for customers that are gonna be unique, that others, you know, that are gonna be with monolithic providers, can't do. That was a very purposeful decision to my tech team. They're extraordinary, in leading that effort over a bunch of years. I would say it just puts us in a really good position in the world we live in, where AI is coming and you have all this opportunity.

If you don't have the flexibility and agility on a tech stack, it doesn't really matter 'cause, you know, it all, you know, it all sort of like the machine stops. That. I'll leave it at that. We could talk AI all day, we're and we do around here, talk about it a heck of a lot, but that's probably enough for today.

Thank you.

The next question will come from Steve Pizzella with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, and thank you for taking our question. Just wanted to follow up on the expectation for conversions to be up in 2026 across every region. Do you think this is a new normal for conversions moving forward, or will we revert back to a more normalized conversion level versus new construction mix? Is there anything to think about from a fee perspective longer term, if conversions continue to be a greater portion of the fee mix moving forward?

I don't think there's any material impact on the fee side of it, so answering that first. Well, you know, this year we're gonna tick up. As I said, last year we were like 36%. Current forecasts are we're trending a bit above that, probably 38%-40% in the latest numbers. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts for the year, but we think it's gonna be up modestly. I actually, you know, I think the math of it is such that on an absolute basis, I don't think you're gonna see a big drop-off in conversions.

As a percentage of NUG, I do think you will see it moderate over time, that's because you've been in a world where construction starts, you know, haven't really gotten back to pre-COVID levels, and that will happen and is happening. It probably happens this year. As you start to have that happen over the next two or three years, and new construction, you know, grows in an absolute sense, I think the percentage will decline. I don't think it'll ever go back down. I mean, we peaked during the Great Recession in the low 40%s. We're sort of back there now. Went as low as the high teens. I don't think we're gonna be in a world where it's high teens. I mean, when it was in the high teens, let's be honest, we had one brand.

Well, one and a half brands, sort of like Hilton and DoubleTree when it went down. We've got, you know, a dozen or more brands that are really good candidates for conversions. I think you're probably sort of permanently in the 30%-40% range. I'm making that up, but I mean, directionally, if you did the math on new starts, I think you're sort of permanently in that range.

The next question will come from David Katz with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning.

Good morning.

Thanks for taking my question. I know you said you'd like to sort of leave the AI discussion, you know, right where it is. I wanted to ask something just a little more industry level, if that's okay. You know, which is, you know, it's obvious that you're making great progress and working at terrific speed. You know, outside the industry, not talking about, you know, competitors or peers, right? There's sort of an independent, you know, track that's going on, and there's also an OTA environment that's also, I assume, you know, moving as fast as they can. How do you envision those dynamics sort of playing out, do we evolve into kind of a different industry landscape in that regard? You know, are you just running your race and largely, you know, not paying a ton of attention to what they're doing?

Oh, no. We of course, are paying a lot of attention to what everybody's doing. I do think on the margin it'll look a lot like it does, you know, over the next five years from now. It'll look like a lot like it does today or has looked. I think on the margin though, if we do our job, I think AI allows us, as I said, to be more efficient and more effective. That is code for continuing to build more direct lines to our customers. I mean, that's where we have a terrific relationship with the OTAs, and we do a certain segment of our business with them, and I suspect we will for a very, very long time.

I think our ability, you know, our control over our inventory, our ability to customize the experience in unique ways, it being a more competitive environment where there isn't just one winner in search, probably when it's all said and done. I think that puts us in a position where it gives us an advantage relative to what we've had to continuing to build more direct business. 80%+ of our business is already direct, so we've had a fair amount of success in doing that. I think on the margin, it helps in that regard. I go back to where I started. I don't see that the whole system changes in a material way anytime soon.

Okay, that'll do. Thank you very much.

The next question will come from Robin Farley with UBS. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you. My question is not about AI. Just looking at results, you know, fantastic results, and I think that full year RevPAR raise higher than the market was expecting. I am curious, you know, last quarter you had a slide that showed that a 100 basis point raise in RevPAR would be a 100 basis point raise in EBITDA, and it looks like it's maybe sort of more like a 50 basis points raise in EBITDA. Your G&A didn't change. Just anything else you would call out in that, sort of flow through to EBITDA from the raise? Thank you.

No, Robin, I think. Look, I think the rule of thumb we would use and, you know, maybe the 100 basis points was a little bit of rounding, and I think we've actually updated that more recently. The rule of thumb we'd use is about $25 million or $30 million of EBITDA per point. We raised our guidance, our RevPAR guidance by 1 full point. If you think about that as being typically $25 million-$30 million, the things that are going on there is you just have the impact in the Middle East with a little bit of IMF and a little bit of FX, which caused us to raise the midpoint by $20 million instead of call it $25 million at the low end of the range.

That's the way to think about it, and it's not more complicated than that.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Sure.

The next question will come from Brandt Montour with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for taking my question.

Good morning.

Back to demand. You sounded really good on group business. That was sort of the downside surprise for the industry last year, obviously with tariffs. Just sort of curious, you know, when you look out and expect group to still to lead, are you actually seeing in the year, for the year group bookings materialize better than plan? Is it really just sort of easy comps that give you that confidence?

No. I mean, we're seeing real lead volumes and bookings, in line with the forecasting we have. Atmospherically, in the discussions that our sales folks are having, you know, broadly about sentiment in that space and the corporate space for that matter, are much better, quite good. I think it's, you know, I think listen, people are feeling better when they're spending more, they need to move more, they need to aggregate people more, and we're seeing it show up. Booking. The booking position supports it. The leads more than support it.

Thanks, everyone.

The next question will come from Trey Bowers with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. Thanks for the question. Just getting back to NUG. To the extent that the disruption in the Middle East might cause some impact on 6%-7% growth this year, is that just some of the either conversions or new builds kind of fall out of the system? Or the expectation if you were not at the high end of that range for this year, would most of that just fall into 2027?

It's just timing. We don't-

Yeah.

We're not concerned that anything's falling out of the pipeline or, you know, conversion opportunities are drying up. It's just like there's a lot going on over there, and some people have slowed construction, they've slowed decision-making on conversion deals that they were working on. I don't think we feel like any of it really ultimately falls away. I think it's a question of when it gets done. It's early to say. My, you know, my team says it's, you know, our team says it's picking up, you know, by the day. You know, like Saudi Arabia, you know, sort of isn't missing a beat. UAE a little bit more disrupted. You know, Kuwait, Qatar, much more so 'cause the issues there have been more dramatic. Really, it's not like one, you know, monolithic area. It's country by country.

We're watching it carefully. I don't think these are things that like disappear. I think it's just a function of, you know, it may push a quarter or two.

Got it. Thanks.

The next question will come from Duane Pfennigwerth with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks. Just to stick on that theme, as you think about your share of rooms versus much larger share of rooms under construction, what markets do you feel like that disconnect opportunity is biggest? Basically what geographies offer the best share gain opportunities you look out maybe over the next five years?

Wow. There are a lot of them. I would say, I mean, where we have what we call inside the company springboard work, which is where we see sort of the disconnect in terms of demand for our products and what is a relatively low existing base of hotels. I would say, you know, India being, you know, first and foremost. I mean, we think easily it's a 10x or 20x sort of opportunity. We have whatever, 40 hotels in India. I mean, with the deals like the one we announced today, we sort of have 400 in and around the pipeline or under development. India is definitely one. Southeast Asia is another where we have a big presence, but we think the opportunity is to be 3x or 4x the size that we have.

CALA, the broader CALA environment, you know, we've got a big presence of 300 hotels, but we think we could be easily 2x or 3x that size. KSA, you know, we have 25, 30 hotels. We think we can easily be 4 to 5 times that, probably even more, as well as other parts of the Middle East. The Middle East we just talked about. There's some challenges, but in part because I'm always an optimist, but I do think one way or another, this will settle down. There's a lot of momentum underlying travel and tourism in the Middle East that I think will pick up pretty quickly when you get to the other side of this conflict. I mean, you know.

I, you know, I shouldn't forget Africa, where, you know, huge population. You know, we've been there for many, many decades, but have a relatively small base, and a huge opportunity. The, you know, the reality is we've got 27 brands, and if you look at the average number of brands that's deployed in any market, I think it's like four brands with 27. Even where we have more density, there's a tremendous amount of network yet to build and thus growth. In the markets I just covered, I would argue in almost all of them, other than maybe CALA, where we have 300 hotels, the others we're in sort of our nascent stages. The brand's well-known. We perform really well. We've had a presence a long time.

Relative to the populations and the demand base, we're just getting started. It's why we get really excited when we think about, you know, I get the question, "Well, how long can you grow 6% or 7%?" You know, my view is a long, long time. You know, simply because, you know, the world's a big place. Populations all over the world need to be served. They're all, you know, in most of the markets I just described, they're way underserved relative to any of the other more mature markets. You know, yet our brands do well there. Customers recognize us, and it's an opportunity to really build a powerful network effect in many of those places.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Chris Nassetta for any additional or closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Thanks, everybody. As always, we appreciate the time. As you can tell, you know, there's a lot going on in the world. There's no question about it. The Middle East is not helpful, but 75% of our business is still driven out of the U.S., and we have seen really nice uptick in performance driven by a really nice uptick in demand across all segments. We think that is sustainable as we look out for the rest of the year and beyond. Notwithstanding everything going on in the world, we feel really good about our ability to drive top line, drive unit growth, obviously the free cash flow that we need to drive and keep returning capital as a serial compounder. Yeah, we feel great about the business.

Look forward to catching up with you after the second quarter to give you the update on everything going on.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.