Earnings Call Transcript - RHP Q2 2020

Operator, Operator

Welcome to Ryman Hospitality Properties Second Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. Hosting the call today from Ryman Hospitality Properties are Mr. Colin Reed, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Mark Fioravanti, President and Chief Financial Officer; Mr. Patrick Chaffin, Chief Operating Officer; and Mr. Scott Bailey, President Opry Entertainment Group. This call will be available for digital replay. The number is 800-585-8367, and the conference ID number is 4586285. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Mr. Mark Fioravanti. Sir, you may begin.

Mark Fioravanti, CFO

Thank you, Maria. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. This call may contain forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements about the company's expected financial performance. Any statements we make today that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Words such as 'believes' or 'expects' are intended to identify these statements, which may be affected by many factors, including those listed in the company's SEC filings and in today's release. The company's actual results may differ materially from the results we discuss or project today. We will not update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, further events or any other reason. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures today. We reconcile each non-GAAP financial measure to the most comparable GAAP measure in the exhibit to today's release. I'll now turn the call over to Colin.

Colin Reed, CEO

Thank you, Mark, and good morning everyone. When we last spoke on our first quarter call in May, our Gaylord Hotels and the majority of our entertainment venues were closed as the nation grappled with flattening the curve during the initial outbreak of COVID-19. I'm happy that as we meet today, some three months later, four of our five Gaylord Hotels are again open and we've been able to resume some reduced capacity operations across several of our entertainment assets as well. Of course, we still have a ways to go to return to pre-pandemic business levels as the challenges our economy and our country faces are far from over. And frankly, no one knows how long this recovery will take. However, based on the initial success that some of the early virus epicenters around the country have had in battling back the pandemic, and the rapid progress we're seeing on the therapeutic and vaccine front, in my view, despite some recent case increases in some states, the overall outlook for an eventual resolution has meaningfully improved over the past three months. As a consequence, I am firmly of the belief that we will be in a recovery in the foreseeable future. So rather than throw up our hands and feel sorry for ourselves over the last three months, our company has been diligently focused on two key areas to ensure we are in the best possible position to benefit from that recovery. These are minimizing our expenses and cash burn and positioning our assets and our business not only to participate in the recovery when it does come but, more importantly, to capitalize on this opportunity. This has us asking questions like how can we grow our market share in the large group meetings business? Remember, all group business in this nation has been canceled over the last four months and quite probably over the next few months. Every single meeting's business is stressing. This is, in fact, a time of opportunity. How can we deliver better customer service and do so in a more cost-effective way? In that vein, how do we at Ryman help Marriott become a better manager of our assets? From an entertainment perspective, no one in this country is sitting in theaters, concert halls or the like. They're sitting at home watching Netflix, Amazon Prime, or streaming their favorite content. So how do we take advantage of this? In short, we do not just want to be resilient and come through this situation bruised but kicking. Rather, we want our businesses to come out stronger than before. We have used this same approach in the past, whether it was the great financial crisis, the flood in Nashville in 2010, or our reconversion in '13. Through each of these difficult situations, we as a company became better, more focused, and stronger. I am confident that you will see the same outcome in the months and years ahead. But before I get into those questions, first, a brief comment on what is going on in our business today and more importantly, our cash burn. In the second quarter, during the majority of which essentially all of our businesses were shut down, our monthly cash burn rate was approximately $31.7 million per month. This is simply our consolidated adjusted EBITDAre plus our cash interest expense and debt service, excluding the discretionary capital investment we continue to put to work at the Gaylord Palms. This figure is well below our initial estimates in May of around $42 million and better than the updated estimate of $35.2 million that we communicated in our investor update on June 1. So we're pleased with our success in reining in our cash expenses quickly and effectively during the second quarter. Now that four of our five Gaylord hotels as well as several of our entertainment venues are reopened and operating at levels that weren't remaining open, we expect this cash burn during the third quarter should continue to improve to approximately $28 million to $30 million per month. Mark will elaborate in a moment on some of the details of our cash uses, as well as our current liquidity and how that translates into substantial runway to weather out this pandemic. Suffice to say, we feel very good about our ability to weather these low levels of occupancy or shutdowns for quite some time. Now, let me talk about what we're doing to reposition our business to maximize the opportunity before us; both near term during this pause in group travel and long-term for the eventual recovery. As some of you know, we reopened the Gaylord Texan on June 8, and Gaylord Palms, Opryland, and Rockies on June 25. The Gaylord National remains closed but we continue to monitor this market closely. It will reopen when we believe it is warranted. Naturally, with group business essentially suspended, our focus on these re-openings has been on the drive to leisure market and generating at least enough revenue and EBITDA from the hotels to justify remaining open and waiting for the return of the group customer. We know families and individuals may be reluctant to take international and long-distance flights, but still have a strong urge to take summer or fall breaks as many states loosen their stay-at-home restrictions. This represents an opportunity for our hotels, each of which are an easy drivable reach to literally millions of families. Thus, we have very carefully targeted these markets and results to date have been pretty good in our view, certainly given the circumstances. In fact, this has been a revealing experiment in some ways. We're used to hearing the description particularly from some members of the sell side that Ryman's Hotels are purely group focused and not really leisure destinations. Of course, the reason we don't do as much leisure business, apart from our usual summer and holiday periods, is that these assets are very attractive to the group customer. This naturally stifles the space available for the leisure customer. Pandemics notwithstanding, we love the group business. It is predictable, repeatable, and highly profitable from an outside of the room perspective. However, that should not be taken to mean that Gaylord results and convention centers are not an attractive year-round destination for leisure guests. Quite the contrary, some of you may overlook the first part of that label, Resort, and focus on the second part, Convention Center. Those who have followed us over the years know that we have proactively invested substantial capital to add and upgrade our resort amenities. These include spas, pools, water parks, multiple F&B concepts, expansive atriums, retail shops, and customized programming that offers unique leisure demand generators. Combined with our proximity to downtown tourist markets, the truth is, we can drive significant leisure volume if we truly want to. This unique window in time serves as a demonstration of that. It is also to our advantage that the expansive all-under-one-roof nature of our hotels gives us the square footage to accommodate increased social distancing pretty easily. For example, many of our F&B outlets are configured out in the open under the cover of our tall, beautiful atriums with lots of airflow, and our public areas and corridors are designed to be wide and spacious to accommodate the movement of large groups. This allows our guests to feel quite comfortable visiting us on top of the hospital-grade cleaning and disinfecting processes that we have rigorously put in place. So when group business was suddenly taken out of the equation and we instead executed our leisure marketing strategy post-reopening, our hotels were able to capture more than their fair share of the limited amount of leisure travel that has taken place in our markets. For example, in the full week ending on the holiday Saturday of the 4th of July, just after we had reopened the four hotels, the Gaylords ran transient RevPar indices from a 159% at the Rockies to a 194% at Opryland, and up to 210% at both Texan and the Palms. These are strong percentages of competitive hotels in those markets. Now, while this reflected occupancy levels of only 14% to 24%, for hotels of our size, this translates to more than a few leisure guests, on top of which we're able to achieve good daily rates ranging from $187 to $214 per night. Now, just so you don't think I've been selective in sharing data on one holiday week, let me give you the star RevPar indices for the latest available week ending the 25th of July. During this period, total occupancies at our four open Gaylord Hotels range from 14% at the Palms to 26% of the Texan, that's for the full week. And by the way, in case you think these occupancies sound low, 26% of the Texan is the equivalent of 95% occupancy at a 500-room hotel. For the same week, transient ADR range from $159 at the Rockies to $194 at the Texan, resulting in transient RevPar indices of over a 160% for the Rockies and Opryland, 175% for the Palms, and 217% for the Texan. Now, one last stat regarding occupancy, three of the four hotels experienced their highest transient occupancy this last weekend since opening, and we're very pleased with this trajectory. Finally, we've seen better than anticipated performance from our F&B outlets since opening. We've even had a few groups travel, including one large group a couple of weeks ago of over 2000 room nights. This is how our hotels are performing right now, which frankly, we are pretty pleased with given the circumstances. The important question, I suppose, is when does the group segment really recover, and has this segment suffered any long-term permanent damage? If you think about the segment from a macro perspective, COVID-19 has decimated it over the last few months. As I said earlier, almost all group business in this nation has been canceled. Tens of billions of dollars of lost revenue and every meeting planning company in the country has been massively disrupted. The interesting thing is that, when you talk to the planners—and by the way, we do—they inform us that they and their clients want and intend to meet when they're able to and when it is safe. In our opinion, this segment will recover to previous levels. The question is when? I believe the answer is at the time the nation feels it's safe to travel and congregate indoors in numbers. In short, when there is a vaccine available. With that as a backdrop, let me talk about how the future is stacking up from a demand perspective. Let's start with canceled room nights and, more importantly, the re-bookings. In our formal press release, we talked about cancellations and rebooks as of the end of June. As of Friday, July 31, total lost room nights in our company for backwards and all forwards was 1,579,000 room nights, which translates to about $737 million of lost revenue. We're finding that the average cancellation window has been running at about 100 days out as groups make their decisions. Around 93% of these cancellations have fallen into 2020 and the other 7% into early 2021. More importantly, we've successfully rebooked now 684,000 room nights, representing just over $300 million of revenue into future periods for about a 43% rebookings rate thus far. The pace of rebooking has accelerated in the month of July. Our strategy from the beginning of this pandemic has been to emphasize rebookings with our valued customers. Where appropriate and warranted, we've also been able to collect some attrition and cancellation fees, which have also contributed to the improved monthly burn rate versus expectations. As regards cancellations and attrition fees, let me be clear on how we're dealing with these fees as a company with Marriott; through the end of the third quarter is one way, but if groups want to cancel in the fourth quarter and into 2021, we're taking the position that attrition and cancellation fees are due. On the sales side, you'll see that we booked 655,000 room nights in the second quarter, which is a really good number of which 516,000 were from those rebookings I mentioned. But more notably, we booked 139,000 new room nights for future travel beyond 2020. Out of the press are the preliminary group sales numbers for July. In July of 2019, we booked 131,000 room nights. This July, we booked 196,000 room nights of which 131,000 were rebookings and approximately 65,000 were new bookings in the month of July. Not only are the meeting planners still active beyond 2020, but we as a company continue to have a sizable book of business for 2021 and 2022 already contracted. To be precise, as of June 30, we had 1.64 million net room nights on the books for 2021 or 43.4 points of net occupancy; that is down only one point compared to where we stood in June 30 of 2019. For 2022, we have 1.46 million room nights on the books or 38.4 points of net occupancy on the books as of the 30th of June. That is, in fact, up 1.6 points compared to the same time last year in 2019. In addition, for both years, about 56% of our booked room nights are in the first half of the year and the balance is for the second half. This volume of business on the books and the sentiment from the meeting planners is extremely important, because it speaks to how rapid a recovery may look for our segment of the industry once the customer gets comfortable about traveling. In a sense, our group business is like a loaded spring, which upon the successful launch of a vaccine or effective therapeutics, or simply a control of the pandemic to manageable levels, has the potential to experience a more rapid rebound. Just due to the business on the books that I believe some investors and sell-side analysts are giving us credit for. Some analysts are looking back at 2009 when bookings in that year were materially impacted due to the financial challenges corporations and associations were having all over the board. Today, what is stopping companies and associations is more out of fear and government mandates. When these have lifted, I believe the sector of the industry will recover pretty quickly. This is the situation we are nurturing and preparing our hotels for. We believe our hospitality segment is still well positioned for a decent 2021 and even a better 2022 once any of these factors manifest. Now turning to the entertainment segment, like our hotels, we reopened our Nashville and Gatlinburg Ole Red locations in the second quarter, as well as hosted the grand opening of our Ole Red Orlando location. All three venues have been performing well, despite their respective social distancing rules and other measures, with both Nashville and Gatlinburg delivering positive adjusted EBITDA in the month of June. I would note that on July 3rd, the City of Nashville did roll back its modified reopening plan to a modified Phase 2, which limits restaurants to 50% capacity, down from 75%. The other bright spot for our entertainment business in the quarter has been the success we've had in the digital part of this business. We're using this opportunity when people are spending more time at home to deliver more of our content digitally and continue to build our brand, deepen relationships with our customers, and form new ones. For example, our weekly Saturday Night Opry Live shows are now averaging well over 2 million viewerships each week across all distribution points, which includes our Circle TV joint venture, U.S. Affiliate TV stations, Dish Network, Sling TV, and social streaming platforms. That's based on a growing average of 1.3 million digital streams of the show each week. Our U.S. Affiliate market is adding another 588,000 average weekly views and Dish and Sling adding another 150,000. Circle TV is not yet rated, so its viewership is not even yet calculated into the estimates, but it is expected to be additive. Circle is expected to begin rating in late fall this year, and our decision to offer Opry Live as a digital live stream has proven very powerful. Keep in mind that 1.3 million digital streams of this show is just the average over many weeks. For Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, we saw nearly 4 million digital streams that evening. In July, Vince and Reba delivered 2.4 million streams. All-in, Opry Live is just shy of 25 million digital streams over 21 weeks we've been live streaming. We plan to continue to offer free live stream options through the duration of this pandemic, leading to a launch of Circle's subscription video on demand or SVOD product in early 2021. Meanwhile, Circle's advertising-supported video on demand or AVOD product is scheduled to launch in Q3 this year. With distribution partners, we expect to reach an additional 60 million plus consumers. Digging into the numbers, Circle is doing a fantastic job finding a younger generation of consumers for our content. For example, 39% of the viewers are aged 18 to 34, 31% of the viewers are aged 25 to 44, and 42% of 35 to 44. Circle TV viewers also report watching frequently—29% say they watch several times a day, while 56% are watching at least weekly. We are really excited about this data and believe these consumers are on course to become the next generation of fans and guests across our entertainment platform, both physical and digital. While the pandemic has certainly taken a toll on our physical businesses, the timing of our push into digital for our entertainment business was really good. We likely look back at this period as one that only accelerated the growth of the content and distribution side of our business. In summary, while this pandemic has been devastating for our country, our economy, and our business particularly, I do believe we're seeing green shoots that give us cause for optimism that we will manage through this in the not too distant future. In the meantime, everything that we can control and optimize as a company in this period, we are doing aggressively. This has the dual benefit of maximizing our time horizon and liquidity during the pandemic, while also transforming and positioning our business to thrive even better than before when all our business is absolutely better when we get out of this dark tunnel. With that, let me hand over to Mark to give you some color on the financials.

Mark Fioravanti, CFO

Thanks, Colin. In the second quarter, the company generated total revenue of $14.7 million, as virtually all of our assets in the hospitality and entertainment segments were closed for most of the quarter with some modest reopening revenue late in the quarter. Net loss to common shareholders was $173.5 million, or a loss of $3.16 per diluted share. A couple of one-time items that negatively impacted our second quarter net income include a $15 million write-off of our deposit for the canceled acquisition of Block 21 and a $19 million impairment charge on the Gaylord National bonds related to reduced room revenue projections due to COVID-19. On a non-GAAP basis, the company's consolidated adjusted EBITDAre was a loss of $65.2 million for the quarter and adjusted funds from operations available to common shareholders were a loss of $90.7 million, or $1.65 per fully diluted share. Our cash interest expense for the second quarter was $28.7 million. We amortized $1.25 million of our term loan B. Our cash debt service was $30 million in the quarter or approximately $10 million per month, which is in line with the estimate we provided in our investor update on June 1. To be clear, the actual semi-annual coupons on our senior notes are paid in April and October. However, when I refer to cash interest expense for any quarter or on a monthly basis, we treat the notes interest as a monthly outlay. Together as Colin mentioned, our monthly cash burn in the second quarter on a consolidated basis was therefore about $95.2 million or $31.7 million per month on average. This excludes the discretionary capital investment that we continue to make in completing the Palms expansion, which we believe best positions the hotel for the eventual recovery. As of June 30, we had spent approximately $99 million of our projected $158 million budget, leaving $59 million remaining to be spent on this project. We continue to expect this project to be complete and available to open in April of 2021. All other capital expenditures have been reduced to minimal essential maintenance, except for our planned rooms renovation at the Gaylord National. Using this period of closure to make progress on this project is advantageous, and we expect to renovate approximately 1,000 rooms or one half of the hotel by year-end. This project is being funded separately out of our FF&E reserve balance, which as of June 30 contains approximately $55 million and is not included in our unrestricted liquidity or cash burn rate calculation. Regarding our liquidity, with reopenings underway and the amendments to our corporate credit facility and Gaylord Rockies term loan complete, we thought it was no longer necessary to retain the large cash balance on hand that we drew down from our revolver in March when the pandemic initially came as a shock to the markets. Consequently, to avoid the negative interest carry, in June, we paid down $375 million of that $400 million draw and ended the quarter with a revolver balance of $25 million, leaving $675 million of availability. This $675 million of revolver availability plus our unrestricted cash on hand of $80 million gives us total available liquidity as of June 30 of approximately $757 million. This is down from the $910 million available at the end of the first quarter. The difference between our $31.7 million monthly burn rate in the second quarter, which is based on adjusted EBITDAre plus cash interest and the actual average monthly reduction in our total liquidity of $51 million per month, includes approximately $30 million of capital that we put towards the construction of the column expansion in Ole Red Orlando, the timing of our semiannual notes cash interest payment I referenced earlier and changes in working capital, including $6 million in ticket refunds for Opry and Ryman shows that were carried as deferred revenue. Finally, approximately $1 million of owner-funded maintenance capital items that were deemed critical. We're pleased that we were able to bring our cash burn rate down below the levels we initially communicated under the shutdown scenario. While we currently live in a highly unpredictable environment, at present, with the cost measures we have taken to date, the projected level of operations that our hotels and venues reduced interest expense after paying down the revolver with some modest attrition and cancellation revenue, we project our third quarter monthly cash utilization should be slightly better than in the second quarter, in the range of $28 million to $30 million. Again, that's on a fully consolidated basis, excluding any minority interest in the cash usage at the Gaylord Rockies. Assuming that this burn rate were to persist with no additional assets coming online, no improvements in operations beyond levels projected in the third quarter, or major increases in attrition and cancellation fees, this implies about 24 months of available liquidity after setting aside the remaining capital required to complete the Palms expansion. With no near-term maturities or loan amendments in place and approximately 24 months of liquidity, we're confident that we have the financial strength to weather a prolonged slowdown from this pandemic. With that, I'll turn it back over to Colin for any closing remarks.

Colin Reed, CEO

Thanks, Mark. The only closing comment I'll make before we open up to questions is that we've given you a lot of detail this morning and we've done that on purpose, because we are deeply engaged as a management team in the actual reopening and running of all our businesses. We haven't just handed over the reins to our manager; we've been through crises like this before. Not quite like this pandemic, but we've been through crises before. We wanted to share with you everything we're up to. So, Maria, let's open the lines up for questions, please.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. At this time, the floor is now open for questions. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Smedes Rose of Citi.

Smedes Rose, Analyst

Hi, good morning. You guys provided a lot of encouraging information about the pace of bookings and rebookings. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the rates at which you're able to make these bookings, I guess, relative to where they were on the rebooking side? And then what are the kind of new bookings look like? Is there any particular property that you're seeing more sort of concentration in terms of demand relative to others?

Colin Reed, CEO

Right. Smedes, good morning. This is Colin; let me defer to Patrick to get into the detail.

Patrick Chaffin, COO

Hey, Smedes. Good morning. It's Patrick. Yeah, so we actually, I'll give you July information and I'll move back to Q2. Our July production that Colin referenced a few moments ago came in at very encouraging numbers, and we actually saw a 17% increase in average daily rate booked during the month of July for future periods. As far as were there any specific winners or losers, I mean, it really was a well-balanced rate play across the hotels. There was no specific hotel that did better than others. If you look at the second quarter as a whole, ADR came in essentially slightly up, but basically flat to last year's second quarter of 2019. Again, it was pretty much well balanced across the portfolio of hotels. From a transient perspective, we've seen very encouraging rates. We've been talking about numbers between $160 up to $200 plus. From a group perspective, we've seen recently some nice healthy increases in rates being booked, and from a transient perspective, rates that are more than enough for us to feel very comfortable with having the hotels open.

Smedes Rose, Analyst

Pat, you may want to just talk a little bit about the makeshift while we're up 17% in July. 17% sounds extraordinarily high.

Patrick Chaffin, COO

Yeah. What Colin is alluding to, the fact that part of what drove the improvement year-over-year was the fact that we booked more room nights into T plus four and beyond. Because that mix is being a little bit more heavily weighted towards periods that are much farther out, T plus four through T plus six, you're obviously going to be capturing higher rates as a result. Even if you look at T plus one, what we booked in July was up about 12% from a rate perspective. So it's not overly bounced to the future periods. We're seeing nice, healthy rate growth, even in the more immediate periods T plus one and T plus two.

Colin Reed, CEO

Yeah. And Smedes, one of the reasons we talk about the situation unfolding in 2020 and COVID is that there have been one or two of your brethren who have tried to connect a parallel to 2009, when the world fell off a cliff. We're not seeing the same pricing pressure in all of the dialogue we're having with our salespeople that we saw in 2009, when markets like Las Vegas literally were dropping pricing dramatically. We're not seeing that, which I think bodes well for the recovery of this sector.

Smedes Rose, Analyst

Great. Thanks. And then, can I just ask you about the Circle TV that you mentioned. Do you have kind of a broad sense of the economies for that when you do start a subscription model? I mean, what are sort of the ranges that you think that could build to over time in terms of revenues?

Colin Reed, CEO

Scott Bailey is with us this morning, President of our Entertainment business. Scott, you want to take that?

Scott Bailey, President Opry Entertainment Group

Yes, good morning, Smedes. The way we've modeled it is relatively modest in terms of uptake on the SVOD. But we will be putting our marquee assets, such as the Live Opry that Colin had referenced before—it has generated about 25 million streams over a 21-week period. We anticipate over a three-year period that we'll achieve breakeven with the subscription video on demand service.

Smedes Rose, Analyst

Great. Thank you for the color.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Chris Woronka of Deutsche Bank.

Chris Woronka, Analyst

Hey, good morning, guys. I wanted to ask—thanks for all the data points, very helpful and certainly appreciate them. As you're looking at the bookings that are starting to come in, whether it's for early next year or 2023, are you seeing any changes in terms of the size of the groups or other composition of the group or the amount of food and beverages they want to guarantee or anything like that? Is there any noticeable change yet in those dynamics?

Colin Reed, CEO

Mr. Chaffin.

Patrick Chaffin, COO

Sure. Hey, Chris, this is Patrick. Good to hear from you. We actually saw growth in the number of bookings in the larger groups. So, when we look at non-COVID related rebookings and just looking at the new room nights that are being booked, we're seeing some healthy growth in some of the larger groups. So, we're not seeing folks pull back and say, 'hey, large groups are not going to be meeting in the future.' Let's just stick to the small groups. I will say though, that we're focused on trying to capture as many small groups in the near term as possible because they're more likely to travel. As we're booking new business for the future, we're not seeing any real shift, but we are seeing healthy growth across including in the large group segment.

Chris Woronka, Analyst

Okay. Thanks, Patrick. And then, wanted to ask if you guys have done any—there's been a lot of talk about hotels closing and maybe that's more in certain markets and might not be a ton of big group boxes that close, but should still theoretically be some kind of a benefit to you guys. How do you maybe, Colin, how do you think about that in the context of there being a benefit down the road and even if it's years out, that maybe more of a market share grab?

Colin Reed, CEO

So, the way to think about this, Chris, is the hotels that are talking about, that we hear a little bit of rhetoric about, well, maybe they won't reopen. These are not hotels that have 200, 300 or 400,000 square feet of meeting space that are focused towards the customer that we tend to go after. The customer that Patrick just referenced. In some of these small union concentrated big cities in America, there will probably be less supply coming out of this because the margin of profitability in these big urban city hotels is somewhat less. They generate decent revenue levels and decent occupancy levels, but the cost structure is very, very high. I will say though on this subject is that, I think I have a thesis today, if you were to ask this question is that we're going to see very little new competitive supply that goes out to our business, capable of doing these 1000, 2000, 3000 room groups. I don't think you're going to see hotels like that built here in the next three to five years. We've got to get through this tunnel. I am optimistic that when we get through this tunnel, the amount of business that we will have on the books because of the things that we are doing is going to be very, very healthy. I am confident that our business will recover sometime in '21 and '22 and '23. We'll get to a point where our businesses will be stronger coming out of this than we were going into it.

Chris Woronka, Analyst

Okay, very helpful. Thanks, Colin.

Operator, Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Shaun Kelley of Bank of America.

Shaun Kelley, Analyst

Hi, good morning, everyone. Thank you again for all the extra detail and some of the month-to-date trends. I'd like to go back to the rebooking activity if we could, just it seems like if we go back from where we were in maybe April and May, the overall rebooking pattern has accelerated. I think you highlighted even from the release, you're at 40 versus I think 43 in July. Could you give us a little more color on maybe how that trend did fully across the quarter and second quarter then that built into that 43% number into July? What do you think is driving that activity? Is some of it a little bit of the concern around? If you look at that 100-day window, are we getting close enough on Q4 that people are now incentivized to rebook rather than pay a cancellation fee? Or is it way more positive than that in terms of the dialogue with customers and planners, and exactly what they want to accomplish? Just are they more optimistic about the future effectively?

Colin Reed, CEO

Do you want to take that Patrick or do you want me to?

Patrick Chaffin, COO

I mean not follow you or however you want to do it, so.

Colin Reed, CEO

Go for it.

Patrick Chaffin, COO

Okay. Hey, Shaun, it's Patrick. Let me give you some data points. The 43% is measuring rebooks as a percentage of the total cancellations from when this began to where we stand today. We started our rebooking efforts in late March, retaining our sales team and having them focus on that to preserve relationships. In some cases, to help preserve the organizations, because if we collected a cancellation on some of these organizations, they simply would have gone bankrupt. That 43% has been building as we got to the end of the second quarter. As uncertainty, I think a lot of folks are hopeful that as we get into this fourth quarter, potentially we have a vaccine type event. Cancellations continue, but we are seeing those rebookings. Meeting planners seem to be getting more comfortable that there is going to be a solution to this problem; hence the bookings in July we saw. As we read daily of the vaccine trials in the country, people feel more confidence about traveling. So, I anticipate a slowing here of the cancellation numbers and continued growth in the rebooking numbers. One more thing I’d add to this is just to give you some insight into the process. When a meeting planner calls to cancel, they do not immediately say, 'let's go ahead and rebook'. It is the beginning of a dialogue and a process for rebooking. When a massive number of cancellations occurs, it's going to take time for the pig to move through the python. Now we've gotten through the process and enough time has occurred that we're starting to see rebookings occur. Our sales folks are having time to complete that entire process with each meeting planner.

Shaun Kelley, Analyst

That's a really helpful point, thank you. Just the only other follow-up would be when you think about that 65,000, let's call it net new or sort of non-COVID related room nights. I mean, that's super encouraging that there's almost some level of activity out there for folks. So can you put that in perspective relative to any sort of monthly trough type production numbers we saw back during the global financial crisis? Collin, you made the comment earlier that, it's a difficult period to compare to. And obviously, I think for those of us who have lived both, we agree there's no comparison, but we're all looking for something. So can you help us think about just the level of activity right now and what that can mean relative to, sort of maybe trough production back in March or April?

Colin Reed, CEO

I don't have the month by month breakdown above '09, but we'll go back and dig that information out and get it to you. I can tell you when we were living through it, Mark and I, it was pretty anemic. Our salespeople were having a hard time getting customers to commit. What’s going on here, because there are literally thousands of meeting planning organizations across the nation, and every single one has been disrupted. The meeting planning companies don't deal with just one customer. They have multiple customers and are trying to resolve all these issues. We are seeing new business in good volumes, and that's what's encouraging here. We will get you comparables of '09, but it was pretty anemic.

Shaun Kelley, Analyst

Thank you, everyone.

Colin Reed, CEO

Thank you.

Operator, Operator

At this time, I'm showing no further questions. I'll turn the floor back over to Mr. Reed for any additional or closing remarks.

Colin Reed, CEO

Okay, Maria, thank you very much. To those of you that are available this morning, thank you for taking interest in our company. These are very difficult times. We are doing our level best to navigate through this morass, while keeping all our people in this organization motivated to be ready to take advantage when this COVID-19 is finally put behind us. Thank you, everyone. If you have any other questions, you know how to get hold of Mark or Todd Seaford or me here at the company. Thank you very much.

Operator, Operator

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today's conference call. You may now disconnect.