WYND
#It's really capturing an opportunity, <UNK>.
It's looking at the opportunity to grow more rapidly our new owners from about 30,000 a year to 35,000 a year and new owners tend to run a slightly lower VPG than upgrade sales.
So it's just ---+ it's almost a mix function, more than anything else.
Not a sign of weakness at all.
In fact, a sign of strength, because we see the opportunity exists to be able to go out and bring in more new owners to our system.
Now, those new owners to our system become upgrade owners in the next year, three years, five years.
Well, we constantly, <UNK>, are looking at our brands and part of the big push that we have going on is to increase the quality of those brands.
So <UNK> referred to the substandard properties that we're kicking out.
The other side of it is that the units that we're adding generally have a higher quality score, Trip Advisor score, our QA scores, than the average.
So the idea is to improve the overall quality.
Do I see us taking Days Inn from being a solid, or Super 8 a solid monster economy brand and moving its up to mid-scale.
No.
But we do see some terrific growth in our mid-scale and upper upscale properties of Wyndhams and Wingates and Wyndham Garden.
We are seeing growth in those areas.
But I don't see us taking one of our economy brands, and trying to reposition it to the select mid-scale.
If that was your question.
Okay, absolutely, sorry, didn't understand the question.
That definitely is happening.
We are working on new prototypes for each one of our brands.
We're working with the franchise advisory councils to get those rolled out.
Yes, I think ---+ but honestly, we're always doing that.
So that's nothing extraordinary.
We're probably going to have in 2016 and 2017 a fairly significant rollout of some of those prototypes.
But I wouldn't consider a repositioning, like Holiday Inn did.
I think they did a terrific job of resetting that brand, one of the best I've seen.
So they did a great job for a very, very large brand, and I applaud them on it.
I don't think we're going to go through that type of a massive change.
We're trying to make more of an evolutionary change, versus a revolutionary change.
<UNK>, we will see an increase in provision, and the reason is that in spite of the fact that our sales levels are growing, the more important factor is that we're financing a higher percentage of those sales.
And so just by the fact that we're extending more loans to people, means that we're going to provide at a higher level, as a percentage of sales.
So it's a mechanical thing.
But as <UNK> said earlier, in an answer to an earlier question, we have no intention to deviate from the credit-worthy standard that we've established over the past few years.
Thanks, <UNK>.
The question about consumer confidence, and I think we've mentioned it before, we don't see a lot of correlation between consumer confidence and the time share business.
The time share business, it's a sold good.
It's not a sought good.
It really depends on how good our marketing and sales efforts are, that's what drives that business.
If you go back to 2007, 2008, and 2009, and you take out the fact that we took our sales down because we didn't know what the ABS market would look like, all of the metrics around our sales effort in time share were terrific.
VPG was up.
We were controlling tours perfectly.
We repositioned that business.
I tell you, it was one of the great repositionings of a business I've seen, and we made the business actually stronger.
So we did not see a lack of people interested in buying.
What we saw was our marketing efforts were bringing in buyers who probably were more prone to buy, because people traveling at that time when travel was down a bit were the more dedicated travelers, more inclined to buy.
So we actually exceeded sales during that time.
And that's true of our rental businesses as well.
We did extremely well.
So we have a model that is extremely resilient.
So do we look at consumer confidence.
Do we look at trends.
Do we look at the fact that gas is down, and whenever gas prices are up, people say oh, my gosh, people won't be going in their cars to go rent hotel rooms now.
Well, that doesn't happen.
And likewise, when prices are down, it doesn't mean they necessarily get in their car more to drive around, but they do have more disposable income in their pocket.
And I've seen several reports that have shown that a large percentage of the additional dollars people have, now that gas prices are down, is going into travel and entertainment.
So we feel we're extremely well positioned, and all of our tracking is looking very positive.
For the full year, <UNK>, Dolce cost us around almost 300 basis points of margin.
So net of the Dolce effect, we were positive.
Now, to be fair, the offset to that is the higher licensing fee that they received from our time share guys.
And so net-net on a full year basis, I would evaluate that their margin was basically flat against 2014.
There was a lot in that last question, which I'll tackle first.
We are not seeing any impact from the Zika virus.
We don't have a huge presence in Latin America.
We have a good presence but not a huge presence, and so we have not seen any change there.
As for travelers coming in to the US, there was a little bit of a downturn in Brazilian travelers to Florida.
They flow into Miami and Orlando in large numbers, and we do a lot of marketing for them.
We have a Portuguese sales line in Orlando.
Again, it wasn't large enough to impact the business at all.
So we don't think that the travel patterns are changing.
As for the oil producing markets, where the fracking has been occurring in the US is definitely down.
As <UNK> said, I think it's down 27% RevPAR in those particular markets, so they have been hit very, very hard.
I never thought I would I say that oil-producing markets in the US would have an impact on our results, but frankly they have.
We highlighted that and pointed that out to you.
As to the ---+ you asked about the age of the buyers of time share.
It has trended down.
It's gotten younger over the last several years.
I think right now, the ARDA report says that the average time share buyer is 51 years old.
That's the owner.
So the buyer is probably younger than that, I think it's in the early 40s.
Actually I'm looking at something here that says 39 years old.
And so they are younger.
The Gen Xers are attracted to time share.
The average household income is up fairly significantly.
I remember when it used to be $80,000, it's up to like $95,000 now.
Yes, there's a younger, more affluent person buying time share, than there was historically.
He asked about leisure trends, as well.
We see good momentum on the leisure side, yes.
We're largely a leisure business, so we're a pretty good barometer of the leisure traveler.
Thank you very much, Lindy, and thank you all for being on the call, and thank you for your support.
We'll look forward to talking to you next quarter.
