At the risk of promoting insider trading, at least one major public hotel company is being touted as a top pick.
A JPMorgan analyst said in a client note today that he’s betting on Wyndham Worldwide Corporation in light of its solid balance sheet, free cash flow improvements and stock price, reported Forbes.com.
Analyst Joseph Greff reaffirmed an "Overweight" rating mostly on the strength of its fee-for-service business.
Late last month, Wyndham, the Parsippany, New Jersey-based hotel and vacation-ownership operator, beat analysts’ expectations with a 13.6-percent RevPAR decline—compared with the 19.5-percent drop that stood as the industry average.
This isn’t the only major hotel company that is beating Wall Street prognostications. While poring through earnings releases for a second-quarter wrap up that will appear on our site today, I came across many major chains and owners that came to the mid-year checkup with better-than-expected results—including Choice Hotels International, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Gaylord Hotels and InterContinental Hotels Group, just to name a few.
That doesn’t mean that Wyndham’s 2Q reports or that of the vast majority of hotel companies out there are something you’d want to hang on your refrigerator. Nor does it mean that an upswing is less than a quarter away.
What it does mean is the hotel industry isn’t doing as bad as many cynics (some of our readers included) thought it was. If only we could disappoint the naysayers more often.
