HST
#Yes.
Yes, I would say ---+ I think we were not necessarily expecting that July would be any stronger than what we had seen in Q2 but we do have very strong group bookings in August.
And we have strong group bookings in September.
I think as you were I think alluding to there a part of that is due to the fact that the Jewish holidays have shifted into October.
So we are not necessarily expecting acceleration in July but we do expect a strong August and September.
I don't know that we have necessarily identified a trend.
I mean the two trends that we have seen is that sometimes a market like Washington will end up with a little bit softer business in the fourth quarter because when you are having a nationwide election, most of the elected officials tend to be out of the city.
And since that they draw for business in Washington, we've sometimes seen some softening of business in DC related to that.
We have generally seen that the election week ends up being relatively slow on the group side because at least larger groups are reluctant to schedule an event that would overlap Election Day.
And so that is one of the reasons why we have indicated really for the last couple of quarters now we have highlighted the fact that we were not overly confident about the fourth quarter.
One reason is the holiday shift but the other was the fact that we felt that this Election Day would be one that groups would be reluctant to book in.
So I think what we are going to find when we get to the fourth quarter, not to get too far ahead of ourselves here, is that you are going to see some incredibly strong weeks because group is going to be very compacted into the sort of the open weeks of that quarter and then those weeks that are affected either by the election or by the holiday will probably be fairly weak.
Well, I don't know that that we ---+ we don't have a precise forecast right now.
But you've correctly identified exactly what we are trying to do.
We do have a very good meeting platform there.
We are trying to take full advantage of it to offset the loss of business that we might otherwise have gotten if the convention center had been ---+ not under construction and fully available.
I am not certain that I ---+ I think we are still going to end up finding that we have a weaker year in San Francisco and that group bookings are going to probably ---+ at the Marquis will probably be down for the full year.
I just think that we do enough business that is associated with the convention center that we have ---+ we do have a great meeting platform but I don't know that it is big enough to completely replace all of the citywide business.
The one thing I would say though is that while the convention business will be off in San Francisco, we do think we have a very attractive hotel or hotels that are in great locations in that market.
So we are going to have a ---+ it is going to be a struggle to overcome some of the weakness on the group side but we are in good locations from a transient perspective too.
<UNK>, you really picked the most two extreme markets; DC has a very, very strong group booking pace for next year but then as <UNK> just mentioned, San Francisco is fairly weak for next year.
Yes, we are seeing San Francisco as being ---+.
Or San Diego.
Or San Diego, rather, being quite strong the second half of the year and I think we believe that carries into next year too.
Yes, <UNK>, I mean San Diego should be one of our best markets in the second half of the year.
Yes, I think in general what we are ---+ the pattern that we have seen the last few years is that there is of course estimates from the experts in terms of what is going to happen with supply growth for the beginning of the year.
And then normally what seems to happen is by the time we get to this point in the year or a little bit later, we begin to realize that the supply growth that is actually going to materialize is slightly less just because projects have a tendency to be delayed.
And so this year I think we started off the year thinking that nationwide supply was probably going to be just under 2 and now it feels like it might be more in that 1.6, 1.7 range, which is not a huge difference.
But still on the margin, a little bit better.
So that is sort of 2016.
We are expecting that supply next year will increase somewhat.
I think we see that both across the industry and we also see that in the upper price points in the top 20 markets.
So again I would say we are probably expecting the industry supply to be a little bit over 2 and probably expect that the supply in the top 20 markets is a little bit higher than that.
I would also guess though that at some point we are going to see the same sort of lengthening of the delivery time for that supply which will hopefully maybe pull back down a little bit.
New York continues ---+ New York and Houston and Miami tend to be the markets that continue to see the strongest supply.
Seattle might be one more that falls into that category.
We are seeing while supply for New York will continue to be robust and a lot of it is under construction, my sense in looking at the data was we were seeing fewer projects that were projected to start in the next 12 months and fewer projects in planning.
So we are hoping that that may signal a return to some level of rationality around New York supply.
But we are not going to see the benefits of that in 2017.
I think it was right around that same level, maybe a percent or so higher.
Again as I have said in the past, this is a little bit of an imprecise science.
But I think in looking back at our comments for the prior quarter, we were probably ---+ we might have been just a hair higher in terms of Q1.
And some of that would be reflective of the fact that the relationship between the US dollar in some of those other currencies is you are starting to lap over when we had an impact last year.
Great, well thank you for joining us on the call today.
We appreciated the opportunity to review our second-quarter results and our outlook for the remainder of the year.
We look forward to providing a further update during our third-quarter call in November.
Have a great weekend.
And travel often for the remainder of the summer.
If you haven't looked at our website lately, it has got some great suggestions on places to stay.
Bye.
