Lucky Strike Entertainment Corp (LUCK) Q4 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to the Lucky Strike Entertainment Q4 2026 earnings conference call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. I will now hand the conference over to Bobby Lavin, Chief Financial Officer. Bobby, please go ahead.

Good morning to everyone on the call. This is Bobby Lavin, Lucky Strikes President and Chief Financial Officer. Welcome to our conference call to discuss Lucky Strikes' fourth quarter 2026 earnings. Today, we issued a press release announcing our financial results for the period ending June 29th, 2026. A copy of the press release is available in the Investor Relations section of our website. joining me on the call today thomas shannon our founder and chief executive i would like to remind you that during today's conference call we may make certain forward looking statements about the company's performance such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and therefore one should not place undue reliance on them forward-looking statements are also subject to inherent risks and uncertainties it could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed additional information concerning factors could cause actual results to differ from those discussed in our forward-looking statements, you should refer to the cautionary statements contained in our press release, as well as the risk factors contained in the company's filings with the SEC. Lucky Strike Entertainment undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur after today's call. Also during today's call, the company may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined by SEC Regulation G. The GAAP financial measure is most directly comparable to each non-GAAP financial measure discussed in the reconciliation of the differences between each non-GAAP financial measure and the comparable GAAP financial measure can be found on the company's website. I will now turn the call over to Tom.

Thanks, everyone, for joining today's call. Despite a weak consumer at the lower end of the K and general macro uncertainty, we finished fiscal 2026 with a same-store sales comp of minus 0.2%, a three-and-a-half-point improvement over the prior year, and our best comp performance since fiscal 2023. Total revenue grew 4% to $1.245 billion, and adjusted EBITDA was $333 million, reflecting a year of deliberate investment in marketing, in our water park platform, and in the technology and leadership that position us for fiscal 2027. Had it not been for the World Cup and its record-breaking viewership and the conflict in the Middle East that drove consumer confidence to its lowest level in 70 years, our full-year comp would almost certainly have been positive. There are green shoots across the business, and they are broadening. Ex-California, the company comped up plus 0.9% for the year. Retail bowling and shoe revenue comped plus 2.9%. Leagues grew plus 3.6% and accelerated in each of the last four months. Food comped plus 8%. And events, one of our most important product lines, turned positive in May and June for the first time since 2024 and remained positive in July and August, its best stretch in years. The fourth quarter started well. April was roughly flat, May swung to plus 2%, and we entered June with strong momentum. That momentum was disrupted by an extraordinary stretch of at-home sports viewership. On June 11th, the most-watched World Cup in American television history kicked off on home soil for the first time in a generation. The July 19 World Cup final drew roughly 66 million viewers across platforms, the largest American television audience since the Super Bowl. Layered on top of that, the Knicks won their first NBA title in 53 years in the most watched finals in 28 years, averaging more than 20 million viewers a night in our largest market, with 33 million people watching the final game. For five straight weeks, millions of consumers who would ordinarily be bowling on a Friday or Saturday night were watching sports from home. June comped minus 7% and pulled an otherwise positive quarter and year slightly into the negative. I want to be precise about what that was and what it was not. It was not a weakening consumer. As we have seen through every exogenous the shock since I started this company, the consumer has a short memory and adjusts to new realities quickly. And that is exactly what happened here. Our trends inflected the week after the final and August is rebounding. It was a one-time five-week programming event on home soil and it does not repeat next summer. California remains our weakest market, but it is trending better. We made meaningful upgrades to the operating team there, including replacing leadership, and we are overhauling our corporate sales organization in the state. As I outlined on our last call, the full earnings benefit of the cost actions we took beginning in mid-January would land in the fourth quarter, and that is exactly what happened. The second quarter's $6 million payroll overrun became a payroll tailwind in the fourth quarter and remained one in July. We made significant advancements this year in analytics, pricing, leagues, and capital efficiency. And with AI, our data and insights into the business are accelerating and our ability to optimize key functions like labor management. We reduced capital expenditures by 19% to $114 million from $141 million last year and $194 million two years ago. This is a reduction of $80 million in two years. On marketing, not all of our spending delivered the ROI we expected. We doubled working media and gained significant awareness that the creative did not generate enough intent. Going forward, our investments will be more targeted, more measurable, and held to a higher return threshold. In fiscal 2027, every marketing dollar needs to generate a return. Otherwise, we will consider reducing marketing as a percentage of revenue. Water parks represented the largest operational change of our summer. A year ago, we directly managed two water parks. This summer, we directly managed five, including Raging Waters Los Angeles, which we closed on in January for $45 million. We are in five really good markets with very strong positions, the largest water parks in North Carolina, Illinois, and California, and two very good parks in the Florida Panhandle. That is a step change in operating complexity, and the organization rose to it. Strategically, the season was about striking the right balance between price, attendance, and labor. Across the water park portfolio, per capita spending is up double digits, and payroll is down mid-single digits as we staff to demand. Price and cost discipline held what weather took, and it is the same pattern the large regional park operators described in their calls this month. Attendance pressured by weather, per capita spending up, and the economics protected through revenue management. The weather impact was real and concentrated. Raging waves, our 54-acre water park outside Chicago, saw attendance fall significantly against a June that ran cooler than normal, with rainfall well above normal. As I've said before, in this business, pricing has a lot less to do with demand than weather, and a water park cannot comp through a cold, wet summer month. We remain very bullish here. I describe the water parks as a coiled spring. On a trailing 12-month basis through July, the water parks produced $56 million of revenue and $22 million of EBITDA, up from $23 million of revenue and $11 million of EBITDA in fiscal 2025. Roughly 80% of summer water park earnings land in our September quarter, which is in fiscal 2027, the business is highly counter-cyclical and will only get better as we become more experienced operators in this business. The fixes for next season are simple. Sell season passes earlier to hedge out weather and further optimize price and admissions. We are very happy with our boomers parks, which are counter-seasonal, high margin, and EBITDA positive in every period, delivering $11 million of EBITDA this year, nearly double the prior year. Turning to guidance. For fiscal 2027, we expect adjusted EBITDA of $340 to $360 million. We run a short cycle business, and we do not give guidance blindly or optimistically, so we are deliberately guiding conservatively as we work through the year. Importantly, this range reflects prudence around the environment, not the trajectory of our plan. The consumer has already told us in August that they want what we sell, and the keys to this year will be events booking for December and a clean second half after more disturbances than we have ever seen historically. Thank you. With that, let's turn it over to Q&A.

We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit your question. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, please press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. And if you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Stephen Wachinski from Stifel. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Good morning. So, Tom or Bobby, I mean, if we think about your guidance for this year, if we kind of, you know, look at where, you know, the assumptions around margins, and you guys are kind of forecasting margins somewhere. I think it's a 20, 27% number versus the 30% long-term target you laid out in the presentation. So, you know, as we think about fiscal year 27, wondering what might be weighing a little bit there on that margin versus your long-term goal. And I know you kind of called out maybe some marketing initiatives and some other things in there as well, but any kind of color around, you know, the margin target for this year versus the long-term target would be helpful.

Yes. So we we've spent a lot of time on this topic and we added a slide to our investor deck that will show you that your 900 million of revenue of the portfolio runs at a 42 percent for wall EBITDA margin. And all that's the pre 2022 properties. And then there is 300 million that runs at 30 percent. And that's everything that we've invested in, built or acquired over post-COVID. And when you look at the math there, when we get that $300 million up, you get back to the 30%. I think the 32% is a little bit harder to achieve in a world where we've taken marketing from 1% to 2.5% to 3% of revenue. I mean, that's just an automatic reduction in margin. but we're still very confident in the long-term 30 to 32. We just want to be prudent with our guide this year as we invest in marketing, as we invest in systems, as we continue to ramp the water parks, making sure that the organizational structure is there. But ultimately, this continues to be an investment year. We're pretty happy with the trajectory we're on.

Okay, gotcha. And then But, you know, Bobby, probably one for you as well, wondering, you know, maybe how we should think about cadence, you know, same store sales cadence for the, you know, for fiscal year 27, you know, your commentary, I think Tom's commentary around July and August were positive. that sounds good. So it sounds like the first quarter should be, you know, positive just based on maybe how September ends up, but any color around the last three quarters of the year in terms of how you guys are maybe, I know it's tough to kind of forecast that, but you know, what you guys are kind of thinking from the same store sales perspective, and then maybe anything from a headwind or tailwind for the last three quarters of the year as well that we should be thinking about?

Yeah, so moving backwards, you know, June was the worst month I've ever seen here. And so that is going to be a tailwind next year. We're not going to have the world cup and, you know, hopefully the weather in Chicago is better. Um, so June has some tailwinds last year, you know, we had about 10 million of revenue hit from two different distinct snow storms in the March quarter. Uh, and you know, the weather is the weather. Um, but ultimately those were very unique. The quarter that I'm most focused on is our December quarter. We have completely restructured our events platform. Events, as we talked about a lot, has been this 40 million top line drawdown over the past three years. And that business has been positive for the past four months, but most importantly, going into the end of September last year, the December backlog was tracking down 30. This year it's tracking up 10. So we feel, you know, and it's still early and that's on like a lower base of events, but we're pretty happy with where events is going. And if the trajectory stays, you know, the December quarter is going to be a proof of concept that we can execute on the initiatives we lay out.

Okay. Gotcha. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Handler from Roth Capital. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yes. Good morning. Thanks for the question. I wonder if we could dig in a little deeper on events. A while back, you talked about how you were moving salespeople back into the facilities and there were various initiatives to get the local community to come in and have pasting programs and everything. What's been going on there and how are you seeing the results from that?

Yeah, so we are moving the business forward every day. On July 1, we announced a full restructure, we went to a hybrid model where we have a split of our inbound business between huge companies and localized companies. And then we have our call center, which used to be unique to individual centers is now covering, you know, parties sub 12. So it's a very rebalanced structure where the team can focus on outbound. And it's still early, but we're seeing the fruits of the labor there where we're developing clients. We had a client this week who was going to have a party in New York and their other offices grabbed on and had parties as well. So it's sort of everybody in the company was doing the same thing and really building that outbound structure and so again you know this 40 million that we lost over the past three years i think is very achievable to rebuild over the next few years great that's helpful um and then you know digging a little bit more on sgna was up a good amount year over year and sequentially how much of that was due to promotion of the water parks how much you know where where what were initiatives that didn't play out as expected and you know what are some of the shifts that you're planning here yeah i mean the biggest thing is is we are releasing a new crm in october and so those investments are have been very heavy in the june and september and they'll be heavy in the september quarter it's it's the largest it initiative the company's ever had so those those just flow through SG&A. You know, SG&A sequentially is flat to them.

Thank you for your question. Your next question comes from the line of Randy Koenig from Jefferies. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks a lot and good morning, guys. I guess, Tom, in the presser and in your remarks on the quarter, you talked about, and the year, you talked about, you know, the capitalist expenditures coming down fairly dramatically from peak levels. And I think there was a point made that those will continue to be kind of, I guess, restrained going forward. Can you kind of elaborate on that? Let's dig into that a little bit more and think about, you know, on a multi-year basis, how do you think through what you believe is appropriate levels of capital expenditures in the business uh and then as you kind of look to generate accelerate more free cash flow you know how are you thinking about deploying that um where are we with share the purchase uh activity and so on and so forth that'd be really helpful thank you well our capex budget for fiscal 2027 is 90 million so it continues to trend meaningfully lower um in that number we are finishing the remaining Lucky Strike rebrands, and we are doing the AMF rebrands, most of which are already AMF, but not

all. Some are transitioning from Bolero brand or an independent brand to AMF. So by the end of this fiscal year, I think we will have finished the rebrandings and we will only have two brands, which will make the marketing message much more focused and efficient, Lucky Strike and AMF. There's been, in the last two years, a significant amount of CapEx spent to sort of catch up deferred maintenance in the water parks and the boomers that we acquired. And that wasn't a surprise. That was part of the investment thesis. And we bought these assets at very attractive prices. But there was a reason. And they needed to be refreshed. so we're you know meaningfully through that cycle we're also just much more efficient so we've really become very very good at doing large capex projects like a roof replacement or parking lot replacement or hvac upgrade for you know close to half or even less than we were paying historically by using national vendors with national contracts and all that so i think I think ultimately CapEx, once we get through this rebranding cycle, will probably move into the 70 to 80 million dollar range. You know, again, we we peaked it. It was 194 two years ago, down to 114 in the last year and 90 budgeted for this year. So a pretty good trajectory.

Great, that's super helpful. I guess for Bobby, when you look at the guidance, I think it's slightly up on EBITDA at the midpoint. When you think about, I guess, no, it's higher, excuse me, I was looking at different guidance, but when you look at the the different holdbacks you talked about, let's say this year in the World Cup, investment in marketing, the difficult weather impacting the water parks, the California business being subdued or down. Maybe could you kind of dimensionalize for us how impactful those items have been on the P&L, whether from a revenue perspective or an EBITDA perspective, to get some perspective on how potentially conservative this fiscal year guy could be for 2027?

Yeah, so weather in the third quarter was 10 million. um the world cup was at least seven million in june if not 10 to 12 um you know we were tracking in may very like i was super happy uh in may you know may we ended plus two and the momentum out of that was great and then june 3rd happened and on june 3rd was the first uh night of the knicks championship and we looked at the numbers the next day and we're like wow this does not bode well for the world cup so it's at least seven if not 12 because the world cup did go until july 19th so you have you know frankly high single digit low double digit comps the first few weeks of july and then you had the water parks are about three to five million of incremental weather like there's always some weather so you know all of those are there you know that's what gives us confidence in a one to three percent comp this year um but you know if things go our way you know it could be better you know if but weather is something that you know we've we've found is is more volatile lately so we're trying to not say okay everything's gonna be perfect so those numbers are partially de-risked in the one to three but not fully de-risk and maybe just final finally can you just give us a little bit more uh color on california in terms of just reminding us how big of a contribution it is to the business, how difficult it's been over the last year or a few.

You talked about changing leadership. Sounds like things are getting sequentially better, i.e. less negative. So just kind of unpack that a little bit more. And do you think California can turn positive this next fiscal year?

And if so, you know, what order would that be most slightly to a permit thanks guys yeah so so california comped minus four last year versus the rest of the company was plus one um so you know it's about 20 percent of the business um california is going to be driven by two things retail which you know we keep talking about marketing marketing continues to get better but i'm not going to say that that's you know going to be a key driver this year. Marketing, or California goes the way events go. So if events is, you know, continues momentum, I would expect California to turn, but we're not factoring that into our forecast this year.

Super helpful. Thanks, guys.

Your next question comes from the line of Eric Wold from Texas Capital Securities. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Thank you, guys. So two questions, I guess. First off, you mentioned, Bobby, a little bit on the parks in terms of trailing 12 months and the plan to sell season passes earlier to maybe hedge out the weather a little bit.

Can you update us on the larger projects that are still at hand for the parks that you planned in the off season to kind of what we could see next year from kind of capital improvements and new offerings that weren't there this year? way you think they could do hi this is tom shannon i'll take this one um so you know we didn't close on raging waters los angeles which is our biggest park until january and we inherited a deficit a significant deficit in season passes as a result no season passes were only sold in the fall as the seller got ready to transact. The transaction was delayed because it required approval by LA County, which is the landlord for the park. And so the water parks were suboptimal, right? But we just acquired them and we just acquired the two biggest in the portfolio. So there's a lot of things that will be done better and certainly with more runway, one of which is, you know, having more of a runway to sell season passes, at least in our two biggest water parks. But also there were some decisions made last year to open the panhandle parks later in the year and to keep them open later, which is happening. And so some of the revenue deficit in Q4 of fiscal 2026 is a result of not having the two parks in the Panhandle open earlier, but they are going to go later. So let me just give you an interesting data point. Big Kahuna in Destin, Florida, has had a positive attendance comp in 25 out of the last 30 days. and shipwreck island in panama city beach has had a positive attendance comp in 19 out of the last 30 days so it's a it's a long summer season and uh there were some pretty meaningful headwinds in the quarter that are not necessarily representative of number one the business as a whole water park business but even of the summer because there's a lot of this revenue that we can make up and will and probably have made up already in the first quarter of fiscal 27. So it's hard to look at this business sort of on a snapshot basis. But that I think that explains a little bit about what happened and a little bit about what's happened since the fiscal year ended. With regard to CapEx, there are some semi-large projects that we like to do. I say semi-large on order of $5 million each in Shipwreck Island and in Big Kahuna. I doubt if either of those will be approved in time to do in fiscal 27. so the capex in aggregate in the water parks will will be pretty minimal i would say this in all likelihood this fiscal year and then in the following year we'd like to do these two large slide towers that would be would have a lot of presence from the street and drive traffic also increase you know the nature of the parks broaden the audience a little bit um and so that 10 10 million give or take is likely to happen in fiscal 28 got it um and then secondly maybe i'll see this

on where you are with the the labor efficiency moves and you talked a little bit about towards the end of the year to the savings kind of maybe baseball analogy because you know how far along are you kind of what's been saved so far how much more do you think you can can pull out of um the bowling centers and how far have you taken those initiatives you know at you know the water parks and fecs yeah uh so let's separate water parks and fecs and bowling um because water parks and fecs we're still figuring out what's the optimal labor model on bowling we're running uh down a million year over year right now so a million

of savings a month. Our model assumes that that flattens out and that there's actually a inflationary adjustment on payroll as we invest in people, invest in sort of bonuses deeper in the system that ultimately drive KPIs that drive revenue. But it's a tailwind today, but I would assume it is moderates to flat to some investments that drive revenue throughout the rest of the year.

Got it. Thank you both.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeremy Hamblin from Craig Hallam Capital. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking the question. So you guys are reducing your CapEx spend, you know, as you absorb some of these initiatives in the parks. I wanted to just understand in terms of thinking about the go forward, you've done several acquisitions here over the last few years. And in terms of thinking about the go-forward strategy, there's been a lot to absorb, including the FECs, which have probably a slightly different business model and certainly investment needs. But, you know, just thinking about, you know, should we expect here over the next, you know, year or two as you absorb these that there may be a kind of reduced, you know, kind of acquisition strategy in total as you work on kind of fine tuning, you know, the operations for the water parks or, you know, as you kind of get through, you know, finishing the lucky strike. conversions?

Yeah, that is accurate to say. We're still in the M&A game, but only opportunistically. We're not actively looking for deals because there is so much opportunity to optimize the existing portfolio. But I want to be very clear that we view the water park and FEC acquisitions is extremely good even when the year is not ideal. We're still in these for probably six and a half to seven X. They are counter seasonal. So we generated a lot of cash this summer that we wouldn't have otherwise. There were nearly every other than the last week of the month or first week of the month when rent is paid or interest is paid every week was cash flow positive on an operating basis which we've never seen before because things slow down on the bowling side in the summer but with the addition of these assets we generate a lot of cash and so we feel really really good about them but we are focused on two things operational improvements organic EBITDA growth and effective de-levering.

Got it. And then, Tom, you noted that you're going to very carefully look at marketing investments that are being made and looking for high ROI on those investments. I think, Bobby, you said you've gone from 1% marketing budget to 2% or 2.5%. In terms of thinking about making those incremental investments. How are you viewing the channel of where you're spending on that? Do you feel like there's fine tuning? And then how quickly do you get feedback on whether or not a particular marketing strategy has been effective or hitting the ROI that you're looking for?

So, you know, we raised spend from, you know, 17 million to 30 million. Our impressions went from about 75 million a quarter to 350 million a quarter, but our engagement rate is not good enough. And so we're super focused on not taking the person who has intent to bowl and showing them our website more. We're focused on the people who don't necessarily have intent to bowl and getting them to want to bowl. And that is what we need to push this year. The feedback loop is instantaneous at this point. We have a lot of data that's just driving the engagement with our content. We continue to invest in content. And so ultimately, we need to convert the people who don't have intent to intent, and that's where the growth will come from. We are seeing very significant growth in our lane reservations platform, which is the tip of the spear and the bottom of the funnel. And we need to continue to bring people in there that have more intent, and that's how we're looking at it.

Got it. And then just a quick follow-up. In terms of your marketing spend, portion of that spend is on your events business. It seems like that's, you know, quite a bit more volatile in general. But wondering what portion of your total marketing budget goes into the events portion of your business?

Great question. It is none right now. So it is an opportunity.

Got it. Thanks so much. Best wishes.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Kupinski from Noble Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thank you for taking my questions. I just got a little color around the water parks a little bit. I know that you said that you're looking for a higher cap per cap spending and improved labor efficiency. And I was just wondering if you can maybe quantify the expected incremental revenue and EBITDA contribution from the water parks in fiscal 27, particularly in September. If you could just add a little bit more color there.

Yeah, so TTM EBITDA in June was 14. Then it became 22 at the end of July. It'll be, you know, August is still not over. so august can be you know we'll drive that ttm to 26 to 28 and then we'll have an incremental few million dollars more uh from september um you know one of the issues that tom uh discussed is we do staff some of the water parks with uh j1s so these are international students who come in And instead of them coming in in May, they came in for August and September. And so we're testing, pushing the season out. So there is a little bit of volatility in how much earnings we get in August and September. And that will also be dependent on the weather.

And then you're mentioning about the opportunity on events. How significant is events to the overall same-store revenue opportunity?

And if you could just give us some sense of how bookings are going through the fall and to the holiday periods. so events has been the entire comp decline over the past three years um you know we've quantified it it's about 40 million that we had in 23 that we don't have today um you know ultimately you know on top of the quantum there is a element of events corporate events during the week is is very tip of the spear to traffic you know ultimately if you go to a company event you walk in you have the wow factor of the lucky strike and you go i'm bringing my kids this weekend and so we've lost some of that over the past three years and you know ultimately our events business is a tiny percentage of the global or national events business and so we just want to go out and get that business you know from our perspective you know the the december is is our super bowl uh you know events becomes 40 of revenue in december last year you know we were down the first two weeks of december and so the that business right now is tracking up gotcha and if i can squeeze one more and you have in the past discussed rationalizing

the location portfolio as capital intensity comes down i was just wondering how many of your locations where you characterize as underperforming and then should investors expect a meaningful number of closures sales or other portfolio actions in fiscal 27 well in one sense you could say they all underperform their potential um the number of centers that we have that are EBITDA negative is like maybe two or three, one of which is a legacy property we inherited from when we bought Lucky Strike that we sort of knew we were just going to exit at the end of the lease term, which is coming up in the next 15 months or so. um i would i would estimate in the next in this fiscal year we'll probably shed on order of 10 properties and most or all of these are properties that we acquired in the last five years after we went public and we had a flurry of m a activity you know because there was a focus on unit count which in retrospect was a mistake and a mistake that won't be repeated so we're just rationalizing the portfolio there won't be anything that's that i would characterize as seismic it's really just getting rid of centers in markets where they're they're peripheral and they're they're more of a hassle to manage, then they're really additive to the portfolio.

Yeah, and we're very focused on leverage. And so if we have properties that on a four-wall basis, you know, we can sell it in an accretive leverage multiple, and when you blow it down and say, what does it cost to send the field there, what is IT support, what is insurance support, it's very accretive to our leverage position to sort of sell some of these fringe assets. And, you know, we've done a comprehensive review, looked at land values, you know, GoDark values, you know, and ultimately there is an ability to use asset sales to delever business.

Great. Thanks for taking my questions.

Your next question comes from the line of Ian Zafino from Oppenheimer.

Please go ahead. hi great thank you very much um you know starting to kind of key into the the comment about the per caps um water parks um what basically is is driving some of that color pricing power um you know maybe there and then versus like your kind of other concepts what's kind of being the differentiating factor there thanks well the per caps in the water park were up this year on order of 15%, 15 to 20% as a range.

So we decided after last year, which was a pretty good year, that there were a lot of pricing opportunities. The season pass was simply too cheap last year in our view. And we took price. We introduced a super premium tier called Elite. and it surprisingly sold about about 10 of them um of the season passes were the elite so there was there was demand at the high end certainly for that product which was good um we de-emphasized the season pass this year uh and we were successful in driving up per cap it it was partially responsible for decline in attendance. But, you know, our biggest water park in Los Angeles, it didn't reach 80 degrees there for the first month that it was open. And an air temp of 80 degrees is just not sufficient for a water park. The water temperature was frigid. So we We lost, I don't know, I haven't done the math, but, you know, probably 60% of attendance. We were down probably 60% in that month. Now, it has rebounded, but one of the problems with having a slow start to the season is that is when it's most attractive for someone to buy a season pass, right? Because you get to amortize it over the rest of the summer. As you move through the summer, the season pass becomes relatively less attractive. We now view season pass in a completely different way than we did four months ago. Four months ago, we viewed it really as a matter of pricing strategy and mix. We now view it as weather insurance. And so if it had been a good weather season for the water parks, we would look really, really smart for holding on to this premium price model. Problem is, is that you can't predict the weather. And if you have, in the case of Raging Waters Los Angeles, a slow start to the season, or at Raging Waves in Yorkville, Illinois, an abnormally cold, rainy summer, you need that built-in season pass revenue to reduce volatility. So this coming year will strike more of a balance between volume and price. And I think we'll get closer to optimal on that.

Okay, thank you. And then just as a follow-up, Fabio, I know you said the trends were improving since your decline, but what are we kind of looking at now? We back did that 2% we saw in May. Is there any type of acceleration or any type of notable trends that you're seeing, let's just say July and August?

Thanks. yeah so i mean july we're gonna have to carry the first two weeks first two and a half weeks of a world cup um so july you know was down low single digits you know august is flattening out but it's it's not fully there um events is strong leagues is strong um you know the school shift and the labor day shifts a little weird so you know ultimately this weekend will be you know very important whether August flips positive or negative. And so ultimately, you know, we're more focused on the December quarter. But, you know, generally, you know, we are expecting, you know, plus one to plus three throughout the year.

Okay, perfect. Thank you so much.

Your next question comes from the line of David Hargreaves from Barclays Capital. Your line is open, please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. If we look at the 2027 guide, the 340 to 360, can you give us an idea of how much the contribution from the water parks and boomers will be in that number?

Yeah, water parks will be sort of somewhere between 28 and 33, you know that which really comes down to how september plays out and how june may and june next year play out um boomers which boomers excludes big kahuna which came with boomers boomers right now is 11 million of ebitda and with all the capex we put in there that's anywhere between 10 and 15 million in the next 12 months.

Got it. And then if we take the midpoint of the guidance interest, I imagine tax payments will be negligible and 90 million at CapEx. I think free cash flow should probably be around 50 million. I'm just wondering if that's a fair number to assume.

That is a fair number to assume.

That does not include in asset sales. we do so about okay no okay it doesn't include assets about half of that we could assume maybe is a debt repayment uh the goal would be to pay down the revolver by june so yes excellent thank you so much your next question comes from the line of gregory miller from truest securities Your line is open.

Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning, gentlemen. Just one question for me. I'd like to dive more into the performance, if possible, and your engagement with league players. I saw a press release interquarter that spoke about the decision to invest in lane conditioning and oil patterns. And I'm curious if that was driven by customer surveys and just how important that is to their satisfaction as league bowlers. Thanks.

I think machine reliability and lane conditions are critically important to the league bowlers, and we are super focused on that now. We've made some structural changes to be able to ensure better machine reliability. We've upgraded the quality of the oil in league heavy houses, and we're keeping a very close eye on it through feedback that we get both directly and through social media. So it's a big initiative. It coincides with a, I would say reinvigorated league business. The league business is outperforming all of our other business lines right now. And it's an important business unit. It's 110, 120 million before ancillary spend. And so, you know, we view it as a significant growth vector for us going forward, but we have to deliver the product.

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