Colin Reed
Analyst · Bank of America
Thank you, Carter. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I will begin with some highlights from our first quarter performance and then offer some thoughts on how we are thinking about our business for the remainder of this year. Then our President, Dave Kloeppel, will offer some color on our sales and marketing activities; and Mark Fioravanti, our CFO, will conclude our prepared remarks by providing detail on our financial results for the quarter. Then we'll of course open up the call for questions.
Last week, we provided the preliminary preview of some of our quarterly results, so you should already have a decent understanding for how we performed. Let me begin by saying that we were very pleased with our performance this quarter, as revenue across our hotels grew by 8%. This is especially good in light of the challenging comparable Gaylord Texan created by the 2011 Super Bowl in Dallas. While the quarter started slow, group performance momentum began to build in February and drove very strong results in March. While 2 months does not make a predictable trend, we did witness some encouraging group trends in the first quarter. Many groups delivered more room nights than we initially expected, and even more groups increased their spending behavior while on property.
However, before I go into more detail on the highlights at our properties, I want to discuss what we believe to be the true story of the quarter: our profitability and margin performance. This quarter, we posted a Gaylord Hotels brand CCF of over $70 million, the highest in the history of our brand and representing growth of 24.3% compared to the same quarter last year. This translated into a CCF margin just over 31%, a 410 basis point improvement over the first quarter of last year. Now we've told you for some time that as local markets and overall group sector conditions improve, the efforts we had undertaken during the last few years to fine tune operations and drive cost efficiencies would allow us to deliver very strong profitability. This is exactly what we saw this quarter, and we believe that this will be a significant advantage for our business as we emerge from this prolonged economic slump.
It is also important to keep in mind that, by its nature, momentum in the group business can ebb and flow somewhat based on larger economic or even local market trends that are outside of our control. So while there will certainly always be some quarters that are better than others, particularly from a top line perspective, we are confident in our ability to drive our margin performance as we demonstrated in this first quarter.
Now this is particularly apparent in March, as we had our most profitable month on record. We were able to translate our second-highest brand revenue month in history into a record monthly CCF performance of $37.1 million and a record brand CCF margin of 41%. This exceptional March was spearheaded by the results at Gaylord Palms and Gaylord Opryland, which had one of their most profitable months on record. We were especially pleased by the performance of the Palms, which saw growth in ADR, occupancy and outside-of-the-room spending. The result was a 15.3% increase in RevPAR, and a 12.3% increase in total RevPAR. We're also optimistic for the Palms' prospects for the rest of the year, given that our new sports bar and pool complexes are now fully operational. With the completion of the remaining 20% of the room renovations this summer, the property will enjoy a much-enhanced competitive position in the Orlando market.
Gaylord Opryland had another outstanding quarter, with double-digit revenue and ADR increases driving RevPAR and total RevPAR growth of 11% and 15.8%, respectively. The strong performance of several groups, especially in March, drove our revenue growth both in and outside of the room. Solid group spending behavior while on property drove the outside-of-the-room revenue growth of 19%, aided by the operational and technological improvements we put in place following the great flood of 2010. The property drove a CCF margin for the quarter of over 32%, a 920 basis point increase compared to the same quarter last year.
Now turning to Gaylord National, we saw a modest improvement across all metrics. Despite the fact that the first quarter remained challenging for many operators in the D.C. market, our business showed signs of strengthening. Government business increased over the same quarter last year, and nongovernment groups performed better than expectations. We also were able to drive solid margins at the property through our ongoing focus on cost management and operational efficiencies, which will allow us to maximize profitability as the D.C. market begins to recover.
At Gaylord Texan, the property continued to perform nicely, but faced a challenging one-time comparable created by the Super Bowl that I mentioned a couple of minutes ago. However, despite the challenging revenue comparable, the property delivered a solid CCF margin of 34%.
Now, Dave will provide a little more color on bookings, but I want to focus on group sales briefly. In the first quarter, we booked over 306,000 net room nights, an increase of just over 11% from the same period last year. As we mentioned in our preliminary preview last week, our April sales results indicate these positive trends continue. We booked over 120,000 future group room nights in April, a 69,000 room night increase over April of last year. We're encouraged by these results and believe that the pricing strategy that we have employed over the past 18 months has properly positioned us to take advantage of the momentum that appears to be building in group demand.
Now from a transient perspective, we believe our expanded leisure offerings will provide a lift to our transient bookings throughout this year, especially this summer. Our DreamWorks Experience is in its first full year of operation and will ramp up as we enter the summer. And we are confident that we will be able to apply everything we learned last year to improve how we market and execute these unique attractions in order to drive both additional room nights and profitability.
Additionally, we expect our resort pool attractions at Gaylord Texan and Gaylord Palms to drive transient growth as well. And some of you may recall that while it did not open until May 27 of last year, our resort pool complex at the Gaylord Texan drove over 22,000 incremental transient room nights for the property during last summer. We're looking forward to another successful summer for this complex and believe that we will be able to replicate its success with -- also with our new pools at the Gaylord Palms.
As we look forward to the remainder of 2012, we're cautiously optimistic of the positive group demand trends we witnessed in the first quarter will continue for the rest of the year. Given the strengthening that we have seen in group spending behavior in outside-of-the-room spending, and in light of our improving margin performance, we're raising our total RevPAR and CCF performance guidance for 2012. And Mark will go into this in a little bit in detail in a second.
Now turning to growth for a moment, we continue to make progress with our project in Aurora, Colorado. As we shared with you during our last earnings call, we have secured our incentive package with the City of Aurora and are awaiting a final decision on the incentive package we have submitted to the state. At this point in the process, we have presented to the Colorado Regional Tourism Act Commission and expect a final decision on whether we will receive the remaining part of the incentive package by the end of May. As this process continues to unfold, we will, of course, keep you updated.
Many of you may be aware that we recently filed a suit against both the National Weather Service and the Army Corps of Engineers for their actions that resulted in the flooding of the Greater National Area, and particularly, Opryland Hotel and the Grand Ole Opry House in May of 2010. We believe the extent of the flooding damage could've been prevented, and that the Corps and the National Weather Service were negligent in their actions. Now there's still quite a bit of research to be done on this filing, but there is already significant evidence within the Corps' own admissions that support our case. The goal is to recoup the losses due to the property damage that occurred, and as a result, we are seeking approximately $250 million in settlement. The legal process and proceedings may take a few years to complete, but very importantly, the legal fees are capped and with the majority contingent on a favorable result.
Now let me take a few moments to address the commentary that we included in our preliminary Q1 results last week. As we discussed on our last earnings call, in December of 2011, GAMCO Asset Management submitted a shareholder proposal requesting that we allow shareholders to vote on whether or not to extend our shareholder's rights plan that is currently in place and set to expire on August 12, 2012. GAMCO is a large and longtime and respected shareholder of our company, and our board agreed to put forth this resolution for a vote and to be bound by the results of the vote. Furthermore, on January 13, we entered into agreement -- an agreement with TRT Holdings, our largest shareholder and owner of approximately 22% of our company. And this agreement, among other things, stipulated that we would indeed allow our shareholders to vote on the extension of the shareholders' rights -- of the shareholder rights plan.
Now with this rights plan as a backdrop, it would be our board and management's view that over the last 12 months, our stock price has traded substantially below its true value. It's also our view that our hotel business, for many reasons, has substantial growth potential. And as you'll have seen from our first quarter's results and full year's guidance, this business is really performing pretty well right now, even in an economically challenging time. As the economy recovers and our business practices and capabilities further take hold, our one-of-a-kind hotels should produce substantial growth and cash flow. So the question for us, management and board, given the economic environment and the underlying strength of our business, what could and should we do to ensure our equity trades more in line with the underlying value of our business?
So over the last 6 months, we've been looking at all options available to the company to "unlock" value. Now this has been a very thorough, productive and reassuring process that is nearing completion. Now as anticlimactic as this may sound, our plans still need a little more work, and therefore, you'll have to be patient with us for a little longer as to the details of what we have in mind.
In closing, our record profitability performance this quarter, solid advanced group bookings production and leads, as well as a strong balance sheet, reinforces our belief that our company is well positioned for the economic recovery that appears to be developing. And with that, let me turn over to Dave to talk about sales and marketing.