Viad Corp. (NYSE:VVI) Q2 2022 Earnings Conference Call August 4, 2022 5:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Carrie Long – Investor Relations

Steve Moster – President and Chief Executive Officer and President-GES

Ellen Ingersoll – Chief Financial Officer

David Barry – President-Pursuit

Conference Call Participants

Tyler Batory – Oppenheimer

Kartik Mehta – Northcoast Research

Bryan Maher – B. Riley Securities

Barry Haimes – Sage Asset Management

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Colby and I’ll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Viad Corp.’s 2022 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Carrie Long, you may begin your conference.

Carrie Long

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Viad’s 2022 second quarter earnings conference call. During the call, you’ll hear from Steve Moster, our President and CEO and President of GES; David Barry, our President of Pursuit; and Ellen Ingersoll, our Chief Financial Officer.

We issued our earnings press release after the market closed today, along with an earnings presentation, which are both available on our website at viad.com. We will be referencing specific pages from the presentation during the call as we discuss our business performance and outlook.

During the call, we’ll also be referring to non-GAAP measures, including adjusted EBITDA. Important disclosures regarding non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations to net income or loss attributable to Viad can be found in Table 2 of our earnings press release and in our earnings presentation.

Additionally, certain statements made during the call, which are not historical facts, may constitute forward-looking statements. Information concerning business and other risk factors that could cause actual results to materially differ from those in the forward-looking statements can be found in our annual, quarterly and other current reports filed with the SEC.

And now I’d like to turn the call over to Steve.

Steve Moster

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining Viad’s second quarter 2022 earnings call. Before Ellen covers our financial results for the quarter in detail, I want to highlight three key points about the quarter and implications for the remainder of 2022, which are covered on Page 5 in the earnings presentation.

First, our consolidated second quarter earnings were significantly better than expectations, and I feel confident in raising our full year consolidated guidance, which Ellen will cover later in the call. The largest driver of our outperformance in the quarter was GES’ accelerated recovery from the pandemic. Our Exhibitions and Spiro team delivered EBITDA of over $35 million, which significantly outperformed our prior guidance range of $8 million to $12 million. Second, I’m pleased to say that the momentum of both the hospitality and live event industries continues to be strong. GES Exhibitions had its fourth straight quarter of improved same-show revenue and Spiro’s corporate clients are spending more than we originally predicted based on a client survey we conducted earlier in the year. Additionally, bookings for Pursuit’s lodging properties continue to pace better than their 2019 pacing at this point in the season. And lastly, I’m encouraged by our forecasted performance for the full year 2022, and the future earnings potential for each of our businesses.