Inspirato Incorporated (ISPO) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Inspirato Incorporated (NASDAQ:ISPO) Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call May 8, 2024 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Kyle Sourk – Investor Relations
Eric Grosse – Chief Executive Officer
Robert Kaiden – Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Brett Knoblauch – Cantor Fitzgerald & Co.

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Inspirato First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Mr. Kyle Sourk, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Kyle Sourk

Thank you, and good morning. On today’s call, we have CEO, Eric Grosse; and CFO, Robert Kaiden. Yesterday afternoon, we issued our press release announcing our first quarter 2024 results, which is available on the Investor Relations page of our website at investor.inspirato.com.

Before we begin, we remind everyone that some of today’s comments are forward-looking statements, including but not limited to our expectations of future operating results and financial position, guidance and growth prospects, business strategy and plans and market position and potential market opportunities. These statements are based on assumptions and we assume no obligation to update them. Actual results could differ materially. We refer you to our SEC filings for a more detailed discussion of additional risks.

In addition, during the call, management will discuss non-GAAP measures, which are useful in evaluating the company’s operating performance. These measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for our financial results prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings release.

With that, I’ll turn the call over to our CEO, Eric Grosse.

Eric Grosse

Thanks, Kyle and good morning, everyone. On today’s call, I’m excited to discuss our first quarter results and our strong start to 2024. As you can read in our press release, Q1 marks the period in which we generated profits on both an EBITDA and net income basis. This is the first time we’ve delivered profitability against either metric in more than three years.

Our Q1 results are a testament to the hard work throughout the organization and represent the third consecutive quarter of delivering results in line with our plan.

As I mentioned in my remarks last quarter, just as our members trust us to deliver memorable experiences for their families and loved ones, we’re also committed to building trust and credibility with our shareholders and broader investment community. We believe our Q1 results demonstrate that commitment.

While we spent several quarters articulating our heightened focus on execution and driving operating efficiencies, these efforts do take time and our Q1 results reflect a meaningful step towards sustained profitability. In Q1, we also began to reap the benefits of our work centered around our core products. When reimagining our portfolio, we asked ourselves questions like; are our products functioning well on a standalone basis in conjunction with one another? And do they align with our membership satisfaction and profitability goals?

Some actions were more straightforward like lowering our ADRs to give more value to our members. In Q1, our residents ADR was down on a year-over-year basis and one of the drivers of paid residence nights increasing per member over the same timeframe.

In fact, our paid nights delivered as a percentage total nights delivered marked the highest level since the first quarter of 2022, a time when leisure travel was at absolute peak. Other actions like reimagining Inspirato Pass took a lot of work. So far, results have lived up to expectations. We set out with the goal of positioning Pass for the frequent and flexible traveler.

One key change we made to make Pass more appealing for the last-minute traveler was the introduction of Flex Trips. Flex Trips serve as a way to improve members’ ability to book more close-in trips with significant value. Since its launch in mid-February, more than 800 reservations and more than 25% of all Pass trips books has been Flex Trips.

Even more impressive, approximately, 80% of Flex Trip reservations have been first stays beginning within 60 days. In some cases, this is inventory that otherwise would have spoiled. While these changes have been welcomed by many of our Pass members, as we expected, they haven’t been for everyone.

At the end of the quarter we had approximately 2,100 Pass subscriptions, down approximately 350, compared to year end 2023 and in line with our expectations. Importantly, Pass nights delivered per Pass member and Pass reservations per Pass member has held steady, which means we’re offering great value. Pass is also more profitable now and fits in better with our portfolio overall.

Pass nights represented 30% of total nights delivered, down from the 40% levels we alluded to in our last call. All in all, we are approaching a much more sustainable, healthy and profitable travel mix in our portfolio.

With respect to Club membership, we continue to focus on selling longer term contracts to stickier prospects. We’re focusing these efforts not only on new member sales, but also with multiyear extensions for current members. Our goal is to identify and solidify our core, which are members that love to travel and appreciate the unique elements of the Inspirato community.

We view longer-term members and initiatives that further refine our offerings as important to important building blocks to grow our member base over the long run. That said, in the short term, it’s apparent that we must double down our efforts to reinvigorate our member base and product offerings, while we’ve put into work from a cost structure standpoint and have achieved our near term profitability goal, I am a firm believer that our path to lasting success lies in driving sustainable, profitable growth.

As I’ve outlined on previous calls, our first objective is to reengage our members to drive increased travel and further entrench them as true members of the Inspirato community. While these efforts have led to churn of more idle members, which is apparent in our subscription count, we’ve also been successful in increasing the amount of travel revenue per member, which is a sign of a more active and engaged community.

Next, we can turn our attention to continuing to refine our offerings, which we expect will further improve retention over the long run. I believe that the combination of a more engaged member base and a more aligned and profitable product portfolio will position us well to increase growth investments in 2025 and beyond.

And with that, I’d like to turn the call over to Robert to discuss our results in more detail.

Robert?

Robert Kaiden

Thanks, Eric. As you mentioned, I’m pleased to report our first quarter results highlighted by profitability, expanded gross margins and solid travel behavior. As such, we are reaffirming our 2024 guidance range of $275 million to $305 million of total revenue, adjusted EBITDA between a gain of $5 million and a loss of $15 million and a cash operating expenses between $115 million and $125 million.

In the first quarter, we generated total revenue of $80 million, a 12% decrease year-over-year. Importantly, Q1 total revenue was once again largely in line with our internal expectations. Subscription revenue decreased 23% year-over-year due to the decrease in Pass subscriptions that Eric referenced, as well as an 11% decrease in Club subscriptions. In total, we exited the quarter with 12,300 members and 13,000 active subscriptions.

Travel revenue decreased 10% year-over-year, largely due to the decrease in members, as opposed to travel behavior. In fact, there are several data points related to travel that I would like to highlight. First, due to our decision to proactively lower ADRs, launch Inspirato rewards and stand up our members’ success team, as well as improved Pass functionality, our paid nights delivered as a percent of total night delivered has returned to levels we haven’t seen in two years, 63% in Q1.

Second, we have been successful in our members traveling to our residence inventory. Compared to last year, we have a nearly identical number of paid nights in our residences, despite having fewer members while there is an uplift in each of these figures due to the nights associated with Inspirato for Good and Inspirato for Business, we’re still encouraged by these early trends.

Third, our Inspirato-only experiences and bespoke custom travel continue to be member favorites. For example, just last month, we launched six safaris and our two Golf excursions, all planned for 2025 that nearly all sold out within days.

Finally, while travel in Q1 delivered upon many of the metrics we track, we are continuing to see some softness in bookings impacting Q2 travel. As such, we have our eye on how our calendar fills in for the remainder of the year as we continue building upon some of the positive trends of Q1.

Rounding out the travel discussion, we had 80% total residence occupancy, compared to 77% a year ago, with ADR down nearly 10%. Occupancy in our leased hotel rooms also improved to 73%, compared to 71% a year ago, while maintaining flat ADRs.

Moving to cost of revenue, Q1 marks the first quarter where we realized significant lease expense savings associated with our portfolio optimization efforts. Year-over-year, total available nights at our leased properties decreased by approximately 20% to better align with our member base and portfolio realignment, whereas our lease expenses and fixed costs were down approximately 25%.

This is an indication of not only our flexibility in terminating expense of lease agreements, but also our effectiveness in renegotiating terms along the way. While we expect further improvement in the coming quarters, the vast majority of savings were captured in Q1 and played a large part in expanding the gross margin as a percent of revenue to 40% in the first quarter from 35% in Q1 last year.

In terms of cash operating expenses, which is a combination of G&A, sales and marketing, operations and tech and development, excluding stock-based compensation, depreciation, total expenses in Q1 were approximately $29 million or 36% of revenue. This compares favorably to expenses of $36 million or 39% of revenue last year.

In total, and as mentioned previously, we generated positive adjusted EBITDA of $4.1 million, compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $3.1 million a year ago, an improvement of more than $7 million.

While this is a nice milestone for the company, it is merely the beginning of what we hope to accomplish in the long run. It is also important to remember that our business is subject to seasonality from a revenue, adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow perspective. In Q1, we experienced solid levels of revenue and EBITDA due to the amount of travel delivered relative to other quarters.

We also further improved our cash burn to $9 million, compared to just over $20 million in Q1 of last year. In Q2, a period in which summer had even next winter travel is booked, we expect stronger performance in our free cash flow and less cash burn with lower revenue and EBITDA, compared to the first quarter.

In terms of cash, we exited the quarter with $33 million, compared to $42 million at year end. We have a keen focus on our liquidity and have several operational initiatives underway while we explore potential financing options to bolster our overall liquidity.

Finally, I want to thank our employees for the continued hard work and our members for their continued support. We’ve shown meaningful progress over the past year and I’m excited to continue executing our long-term plan.

With that, I’d like to turn it over to the operator for Q&A.

Question-And-Answer Session

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will come from the line of Brett Knoblauch with Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.

Brett Knoblauch

Hi guys. Thanks for taking my question and congrats on the quarter. Maybe if we could start with this residence occupancy, very good, up year-over-year to levels not seen in quite a while. I guess, what do you think is the upper bound on residence occupancy rates?

Robert Kaiden

Yes. Hey, Brett, it’s Robert here. Thanks for the question. Yes, we’re really pleased with getting to 80% this quarter. There’s obviously a balance we want to achieve. We want to make sure that we’ve got our residence available for all of our members who want to travel. And at the same time, we want to optimize our occupancy rates.

I think there’s – we’ve got probably a few percentage points more that we could go in an ideal world than this. Obviously, there’s always weak sites get broken that you’re never going to be able to fill in. There’s maintenance that we’d like to do to keep our properties in top shape, but there’s probably a few more percentage points in an ideal circumstance.

Brett Knoblauch

Awesome. And then, I guess, residence as a percentage of total nights delivered, it was – I think it was 66%, up from 60% last year’s first quarter. I guess, where do you expect that to go? I would assume that you’re continuing to deemphasize hotels in lieu of rising fees, do you think that’s a percentage that could get to 70%, 75%, 80%?

Robert Kaiden

Yeah, I think we have a fairly good balance. What we’re trying to make sure we accomplish is that for our members, we’re giving them the geographies that they want to travel and the types of accommodations that they want to travel.

Clearly, our luxury residence is at the heart of what we do and what people need. But there are some folks who want to travel to locations where it’s not practical to have a residence in some urban locations or they really need a smaller residence because they’re just traveling with one or two people versus a larger group.

So, that directionally I think the balance is fairly right. I think one of the things that we are trying to accomplish is to get the mix between our paid occupancy and our overall occupancy improving.

And you’ve seen some of that this quarter where we’ve increased the percentage of our paid occupancy and then through a combination of factors, including trying to right-size the Pass portfolio and making sure that Passes is designed for that flexible traveler who wants that off-season of who wants that close in inventory. And so by that, we’ve been able to with this small portfolio, increase the percentage of paid occupancy.

Brett Knoblauch

I think in the past, you guys talked about Pass being unprofitable. How has the introduction of Flex Trips altered the economics on Pass?

Eric Grosse

Sure. Thanks, Brett. This is Eric. And we’re really happy with the changes that we’ve put in place for Pass members and we’re encouraged by how they’re really taking advantage of more last-minute opportunities. So, as an example, 25% of trips booked since we made the changes have been Flex Trips and 80% of those Flex Trips have been for stays within 60 days.

So, we’re basically moving more of our Pass holders more towards flexible spontaneous last-minute trips, which overall sort of helps our helps us manage our portfolio as a whole. So that’s overall encouraging trends, and we’re very pleased with what we’re seeing.

That said, we are seeing some churn. We are seeing a decrease in the number of pass holders. And that was expected. And I think that’s really driven by a couple of factors, but mainly not everyone that was previously and originally had signed up for Pass. It really was expecting and desiring of last-minute trips. So those folks are falling off a little bit. But the – what’s really good to see is that the members that have joined since we launched Flex Trips are really taking advantage of how we’re designing the product.

And again, I can’t emphasize enough how important this is for our overall portfolio health as a whole. Pass is much more of a strong economic product for us and plays a very, very important role in terms of handling excess capacity for our overall residential inventory as a whole across the Inspirato network.

Brett Knoblauch

Awesome. Maybe just on subscribers, I think I talked about, your goal is to return to sustainable and profitable growth. And I think a big part of that equation is getting subscriber churn to plateau and ultimately reverse the growth. It’s now been several quarters of churn in a row. I guess, do you have any visibility into when the end might be in sight for that? And when we could expect growth to return?

Eric Grosse

Sure, sure. This is Eric again. And in terms of the driver behind some of the trends that we’ve seen around member declines, I alluded to some of some of what we’re seeing with respect to Pass, and with respect to Club, what we’re really doing is focusing on member engagement and really, really long-term retention. So, that means in practice kind of deemphasizing sort of month-to-month memberships and more focused on a multi-year relationships, not only for existing members, but for new members, as well. So that is a change in dynamic and changing on how our members are growing.

We’re also – we’ve also – 2024 has really been and it’s really being a year around operational efficiency solidifying our foundation, leveraging the cost structure improvements that we’ve put in place over the course of the last several quarters. You’ll recall that about $50 million of OpEx efficiencies that we’ve generated, which will really help us in 2024 positioning Inspirato as a whole for not only returning to growth, but to really to return to profitable and sustainable growth.

And we expect that dynamic to really start to switch towards the end of this year going into next year, and we do believe that there’s a lot of platforms for growth in 2025 and beyond that can be really successful for Inspirato. Partnerships have been very healthy for us. Capital One is a great source of mid-to-long-term growth.

And there’s a lot of things that we do more broadly speaking with respect to managing high-end residential inventory to delivering pretty amazing premium experiences for our members that make us confident that once we get the fundamentals right, there’s a long runway of growth ahead of us in 2025 and beyond.

Brett Knoblauch

Thank you. There is a modeling question on gross margin and if you could tie it into controlled accommodations, which were down quite significantly assuming a lot of leases, finally wrote off. I guess, where do you see that trending for the rest of the year on controlled accommodations end likely? And I guess similarly, could you talk about where should we expect gross margin to go from here as well?

Robert Kaiden

Yeah, thanks for the question. It’s Robert again. So, yes, we’re really happy. We’ve been talking about our gross margin pickup with a reduction of controlled accommodations for many quarters now. And as we’ve said in the past, it was going to take some time with terminations between 180 and 365 days generally.

And so, we’re happy with the 40% we got to this quarter. We will continue to see a slight decline in the rest of the year kind of quarter-over-quarter in the overall controlled accommodation’s numbers. And that’s again because they were rolling off between 180 and 365 days and we started this back in the May and June time frame.

So we’ve had some of the long ones that are starting to roll off now. Some of the shorter ones that have also rolled off. But we’ve got a few more to go. So, there’ll be a little bit of improvement, but this was really the big quarter for us. And then in terms of gross margin, as you know, gross margin is really impacted by – with a fairly now fixed cost in terms of the cost of revenue line, with the leases, the biggest impact is going to be around the revenue.

And as we’ve talked about before, we have seasonality in our revenue. Q2 is historically low point, low quarter of the year from a revenue perspective. And so, we would expect to see lower gross margins in Q2. And then we have some improved seasonality rolling into Q3 and we’ll see margins start to pick up there as well.

And then longer term, we hope to keep continuing to be able to drive in 2025 our margins as we start to pick up on our revenue, as well and optimize really the portfolio that we have we will be able to continue to improve our margins.

Brett Knoblauch

Awesome. And then, maybe just one last question for me. Just on Capital One. Can you just give us an update on where we are in that process? Have those members been able to access the inventory yet? And if not, when will they be able to? And maybe can you just talk about if that’s embedded in your guidance for the year at all?

Eric Grosse

Hi, this is Eric. And yeah, we’re pretty excited about Capital One. I think we’ve been consistent about that level of enthusiasm over the last couple of quarters. And they’ve been a terrific partner for us. And what’s happening right now, literally as we speak, is our teams are continuing to work on technical integration, and we’re on track to sort of kick things often to make Inspirato inventory available in the back half of this year.

And that’s consistent with the guidance that we’ve given. And we expect relatively modest volumes as we sort of test and ramp up the relationship in 2024. But we do hope and expect that it can be a very, very big demand driver for us in 2025 and beyond. But it will start, to be clear, we do expect it to begin in the back half of this year.

Brett Knoblauch

And of the inventory that will go in that platform. Sorry, just one more.

Eric Grosse

Yes, sure.

Brett Knoblauch

Is that the inventory maybe approaching – or those dates approaching that has been booked yet. That will be going on there, so it will be more for shorter term bookings? Or is it going to be more skewed to residence or hotels?

Eric Grosse

Yeah, it’s really going to be a residence-based and we have fences of designed into the product itself to ensure that we’re not creating any new challenges for – or the experiences of our existing members. And so, we really view this as a great way to give folks that aren’t Inspirato member’s, tasted the Inspirato travel experience, which really is differentiated when people experience the Inspirato travel for the first time.

So, we’re doing that in a way that I think is very responsible with respect to what we’re doing to optimize our overall portfolio from a residence occupancy standpoint and at the same time, making sure that our members are getting a great experience.

Brett Knoblauch

Got it. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate it.

Eric Grosse

Thanks. We appreciate the questions, Brett.

Operator

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Mike Grondahl, with Northland Securities. Your line is open.

Logan Hennen

Hi, this is Logan on for Mike. First off, congrats on the quarter. Could you guys provide some additional commentary about your top two priorities for the rest of the year? And how you’re feeling going forward?

Thank you.

Eric Grosse

I’m sorry. I just didn’t hear the question. Can you just, Logan, do you mind repeating it?

Logan Hennen

Yeah, of course. First up, I said congrats on the quarter. Can you guys provide some additional commentary about your top two priorities for the rest of the year and how you’re feeling?

Eric Grosse

So, if you’re referring to sort of our capital priorities and sort of our and our cash priorities, we’re first and foremost, making the operational, the necessary operational improvements to get us towards breakeven for the year. And that is something that we’re pushing hard for and we view that this quarter as a first step.

I think another component of it is our cash balances as well, and that we’ve made significant improvements on a year-over-year basis with respect to our cash from where our burn for the first quarter was around $10 million. That has significantly improved from where we were a year ago, but we still want to improve that further.

So that is a company and in terms of how we’re attacking that, we’re improving occupancy levels. We’re driving engagement levels and nights per member. We want to continue moving that sort of in a more positive direction and there’s been a lot of activity around our semi-annual sales that we really fully disclose to basically drive more occupancy and drive more travel across our member base.

And then we’re also, as Rob alluded to continuing to really drive more efficiencies across our operating cost infrastructure, in particular with our leases.

So, we believe that these efforts will help position the company for stronger financial outlook. But that said, we do understand that a stronger balance sheet would be a very, very good thing. And we’re actively looking through and across sort of all avenues to see what possibilities may exist that are effective and work for our members, shareholders and our constituencies.

Logan Hennen

Perfect. Thank you. Just one last question. What additional measures have you guys been taking to drive better bookings during this year and will you be doing in the future for that? Thanks.

Eric Grosse

Yeah, so this is Eric again. Thanks, Logan. So we are encouraged one standpoint that we’re seeing revenue per member sort of improve, but that’s a little bit of a backward-looking metric and if we look at sort of bookings per member, that’s been kind of flattish to a little bit down. And there’s been a lot of activity that we’ve taken on to basically to drive that in the direction that we want.

First is by being more aggressive around our overall ADRs and sort of taking those down. And then, second, we are looking at – and we other ways in which we can stimulate demand, particularly through our semi-annual sale that just closed last Friday. And there’s other initiatives too like our rewards program that has been a big push to encouraging our members to travel more frequently.

One thing that’s great to say is that, just since we launched rewards last fall, about 50% of our members already have some status, which is terrific. And then a third of those members – or excuse me, a little bit more than a quarter of those members are already and our highest tier.

So that suggests that they are and they are really getting engaged cohort of travel members or who’s been members of Inspirato that do travel and frequently with us and really value it. Our objective now is to spread that kind of enthusiasm across a wider portion of our member base.

Brett Knoblauch

Thank you. Congrats again on the quarter.

Eric Grosse

Thanks, Logan.

Operator

Thank you. I’m showing no further questions in the queue at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to management for any closing remarks.

Eric Grosse

Terrific. Thanks for bearing with us. We apologize for the delay in the start. We had to some technical and communication issues, but we don’t want that to underlie our enthusiasm for returning to profitability this quarter. So, thank you very much for the questions and for the engagement. And we look forward to staying in touch in the quarters ahead.

Operator

This concludes today’s program. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.