Smedes Rose
Analyst · Citi. Please proceed
Yes. Smedes, it's a great question. I'd make a couple of observations because sometimes the perception of Park is that we're all of these sort of big group houses We do have nine hotels obviously that are greater than 125,000 square feet of meeting space. Our top 10 assets obviously, account for about 60%, 65% of our EBITDA pre-merger with Chesapeake, but we do have a number of other hotels with 20,000, 25,000, 30,000, 40,000 square feet of meeting space. We would -- we think by bolting on this portfolio at Chesapeake that there is an opportunity to group up that portfolio as well. The work that Rob and his team have done and our feasibility team have done so far, we think incrementally 150 basis points there at about 20%, 20.5%. So moving that from that to 22% to 22.5% we think is very achievable. And again, with the great success that we've shown with Park, by anchoring your business with group, layering in contract business and then it allows you to more efficiently yield your transient. And every time that we've done that you've seen the benefit of that in our first quarter. Again, sector-leading performance again of 4.5% of RevPAR. As we look out to third quarter, we're looking for our group pace to be up 35%. So we really think in this climate, group has a real competitive advantage and we've had stripped partly with our management partner, in this case Hilton, we look forward to doing with that with our expanded partners to making sure that we can, as Rob likes to say, remix the mix, so I’ll steal his phrase for a second, which I think has been really beneficial for us.