The Continued Recovery of the Hotel Industry Will Drive High Growth for Park Hotels

Business Strategy & Outlook

Park Hotels & Resorts is the second largest U.S. lodging REIT, focusing on the upper-upscale hotel segment. The company was spun out of narrow-moat Hilton Worldwide Holdings at the start of 2017. Since the spinoff, the company has sold all the international hotels and 15 lower-quality U.S. hotels to focus on high-quality assets in domestic, gateway markets. Park completed the acquisition of Chesapeake Lodging Trust in September 2019, a complimentary portfolio of 18 high-quality, upper upscale hotels that should help to diversify Park’s hotel brands to include Marriott, Hyatt, and IHG hotels. In the short term, the coronavirus significantly impacted the operating results for Park’s hotels with high-double-digit RevPAR declines and negative hotel EBITDA in 2020. However, the rapid rollout of vaccinations across the country allowed leisure travel to quickly recover, leading to significant growth in 2021 and 2022. The company should continue to see strong growth as business and group travel also recover to Prepandemic levels with Park eventually returning to 2019 levels by 2024. However, the hotel industry will continue to face several long-term headwinds. Supply has been elevated in many of the biggest markets, and that is likely to continue for a few more years. Online travel agencies and online hotel reviews create immediate price discovery for consumers, preventing Park from pushing rate increases. Finally, while the shadow supply created by Airbnb doesn’t directly compete with Park on most nights, it does limit Park’s ability to push rates on nights where it would have typically generated its highest profits. Still, the Park does have some opportunities to create value. Management has only had control of the portfolio for three years, and there is some additional growth that can be squeezed out of current renovation projects. The Chesapeake acquisition should provide an additional source of growth as the company drives higher operating efficiencies across this new portfolio. The pandemic could create additional opportunistic ways for Park to grow the portfolio.

Financial Strengths

Park is in solid financial shape from a liquidity and a solvency perspective. The company seeks to maintain a solid but flexible balance sheet, which will serve stakeholders well. Park does not currently have an unsecured debt rating. Instead, Park utilizes secured debt on its high-quality portfolio. Currently, the majority of Park’s debt is secured by five of its largest hotels, leaving Park with 39 consolidated hotels that are free of debt encumbrance. Even if Park is unable to pay its debt obligations, the company can return the collateral secured by its debt to the lenders and proceed with its unencumbered business essentially debt free. That said, debt maturities in the near term should be manageable through a combination of refinancing, the company’s free cash flow, and the large cash position Park currently has on their balance sheet. Additionally, the company should be able to access the capital markets when acquisition opportunities arise. In 2024, which is the year hotel operations should return to normal, net debt/EBITDA and EBITDA/interest will be roughly 4.1 and 4.2 times, respectively, both of which suggest that the company should weather any future economic downturn and that it would be able to selectively acquire assets as the market recovers. As a REIT, Park is required to pay out 90% of its income as dividends to shareholders, which limits its ability to retain its cash flow. However, the company’s current run-rate dividend is easily covered by the company’s cashflow from operating activities, providing Park plenty of flexibility to make capital allocation and investment decisions. The Park will continue to be able to access the capital markets given its current solid balance sheet and its large, higher-quality, unencumbered asset base.

Bulls Say

Potentially accelerating economic growth may prolong a robust hotel cycle and benefit Park’s portfolio and performance.
Low leverage gives Park greater financial flexibility to be opportunistic with new investments or return more capital to shareholders through dividend growth or share buybacks.
Park’s management identified several enhancement initiatives that it can execute to drive EBITDA higher on the newly acquired Chesapeake portfolio.

Company Description

Park Hotels & Resorts owns upper-upscale and luxury hotels with 27,224 rooms across 45 hotels in the United States. Park also has interests through joint ventures in another 4,297 rooms in seven U.S. hotels. Park was spun out of narrow-moat Hilton Worldwide Holdings at the start of 2017, so most of the company’s hotels are still under Hilton brands. The company has sold all its international hotels and 15 lower-quality U.S. hotels to focus on high-quality assets in domestic, gateway markets.

(Source: Morningstar)

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