And to conclude from Day 2 of this thread:
It will be interesting if it gets a mention in the next quarterly report conference call.
The resorts closures
did get a mention in the next "next quarterly" Q3 earnings call (bolding added for those who just want to skim):
"Stephen Grambling, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Great. Just a quick follow-up question here. I’ve noticed
some online message board discussion about closing a handful of your legacy resorts. If, in fact, that’s true, it’s not something you typically see. If, in fact, that is happening, I’m curious
what the rationale for that may be and what, if any, might be the financial impact to your company from apps. Thank you.
Michael Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer, Travel + Leisure Co.: Patrick, you’re about probably 30 or 30 minutes or an hour ahead of us. You’ll see it as part of our disclosures exactly this today as part of our disclosures and our queue. This is really, I would call it, resort portfolio maintenance. I would describe
what we’re doing as a catch-up to what we probably should have been doing over the last decade and what all hospitality companies do, which is you look at your high and low demand locations, same with satisfaction scores, and add new inventory with better demand, better seasonality, newer construction into your system. We’ve announced a double-digit number of those resorts over the last few years. On an annual basis, look at your portfolio and pull out the ones that no longer have that demand, are primarily renters or low owner occupancy or low satisfaction scores. That’s exactly what we’re doing.
It’s a relatively small amount. I would say it’s maybe 10 or 12 this year, somewhere in that range. I cannot be specific because we haven’t finished the process, and therefore, the number isn’t finalized.
It’s a relatively small amount. It’s a catch-up year. I think the other big implication or awareness that is part of this decision-making is, you know, we’ve been in business a very long time, decades. As resorts move along, your normal room renovation gets into bigger items such as infrastructure, things like rooms and bigger expense items.
What this also greatly helps to do is avoid any significant special assessments, which is to the benefit of the owners and the overall system.
I would say this is a very normal process of bringing new resorts into the systems, all the things we’ve announced in our press releases, and taking out the ones who’ve reached their natural useful life.
We’re providing a lot of optionality for those owners to get back into our system or exit fully. I think this is normal maintenance and a little bit of a catch-up that we probably should have been doing over the last decade and others continue to do.
Stephen Grambling, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Okay. Good color. Is it fair to think that one of the reasons perhaps for closing these down, if you do have on-sold inventory, or which is inventory you own, you would not be on the hook for a special assessment?
It might save you money there by closing these down. Is that one way to think about it?
Michael Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer, Travel + Leisure Co
.:
That’s one way to think about it. I think it’s only the partial answer as well. The answer I originally gave around overall resort portfolio is primary. The second is, yeah,
whether it’s an individual owner or us as a developer, absolutely what you said is accurate. The flip side of that is some of these have sales locations. You might be thinking, "Oh, well, this is just an economic plus. There’s no economic minus." If any of these resorts do have sales locations, that’s the balancing minus.
When you net it all out, the clear benefit is a better, newer, less seasonal, higher demanded, higher occupancy portfolio. There are economic downstream effects, which we don’t, we haven’t estimated or presented the estimation, but there’s one plus and one minus, which is less sales at those locations and less carry cost.
That’s a balancing that we’ll go through should these resorts ultimately end up closed. If they do, then we’ll provide an update on that, I would expect in our Q4 call and as part of any 2026 guidance."
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