Question-and-Answer Session
Thank you. [Operator Instructions]. And your first question comes from the line of Chris Woronka with Deutsche Bank.
Chris Woronka - Deutsche Bank
Hey good morning guys. Can you just give a little more color on kind of what happened to National during the quarter in terms of your expectations relative to back in July and maybe just kind of frame for us how much of that business is transient. And then on the margins side, if you can maybe delineate a little bit from there as to what comes from transient versus your groups and then, if you still have confidence that you ultimately kind of get that high 20% to 30% stabilized margin there? Thanks.
David C. Kloeppel - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Chris its Dave. When we came into the year and set expectations, we anticipated forward transient occupancy there than we had... then we see in our other three hotels. The summer time is a transient, it's the time when transient is more prominent at all of our hotels and we expected that to occur at the National as well. At that time, the developer was supposed to have completed National Harbor by the beginning of April when we opened, which didn't occur until actually just a couple of weeks ago and we'd also, when we took guidance at the end of last year didn't certainly anticipate the kind of economy we were going into in the summer of this year.
So the midst on the transient side was about 75% or 80% of the mix from our expectations. The group side of the business has continued to be strong. Bookings there year-to-date has continued to be better than bookings that we saw prior year and that really applies to all booking periods in the year, for the year T-plus one and T-plus two, then they continue to book the group business I mean group's there and how it continue to stand as evidenced by the comments that we had in our scripts, that you look outside-the-room spend at the National it was higher than all of the other hotels. And so it really set a standard for outside-the-room spend.
So, from our perspective, the National is on track from a group perspective, we think next year is going to be a good strong year because as we said today, we've got almost 59 points of occupancy on the books versus about 46 that we had this time last year for 2008. So we're running with 13 points of occupancy kind of in our pockets. And it's up to us to begin the market, the destination from a transient perspective more effectively and now that National Harbor is complete and we have a more mature management team and marketing focus there, we think we can achieve those objectives.
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