Arne M. Sorenson - Marriott International, Inc.
Management
Yeah, and we've talked about this in the last few quarters, and I wish we could be more definitive than we really can be, but I think when you listen to the stories out there you see a broad range of individual stories where you've got, obviously good average corporate profit growth, better corporate profit growth than revenue growth, but some companies are absolutely punting it, and generally we see from them the kind of behavior in travel that you would expect from those companies. In other words, that they are investing not just in capital items, but they are investing in operating costs and spending time with customers and coming together and using our hotels, whether it be for individual travel or for group travel. I think, there are also a number of companies where they are struggling to find revenue growth, and they are getting – putting pressure on themselves and maybe, to some extent, getting pressure from the investment community to squeeze out profit growth in a relatively anemic revenue growth picture. And that's causing them to be a bit cautious on their spending on all things, including, sadly, travel. And when you roll all those averages together, I think, we are seeing a bit more cautious behavior, on average, from companies today than we would have expected, given GDP growth. And, obviously, one of the questions we get often today, given the GDP numbers of the last two quarters, the optimism in the market, people ask, are you seeing more healthy demand today from your corporate customers than a year ago for example, and I think, generally, we would say no, it's about the same. It feels to us like the economy is growing at more or less the same pace it was before. Now, we don't have any reason to question the GDP – reported GDP numbers which do appear to be a bit better, so the only explanation we can come up with is that there is just a bit more caution on the corporate side because of the stickiness of revenue growth on average. And, again, if we see better GDP growth on a sustained basis, I think that's a positive thing. And we may see some better performance come from that, but a little bit of it will depend on corporate behavior and whether it gets a little bit more bullish in our space.