Financial Information

NON-GAAP FINANCIAL MEASURES

NON-GAAP FINANCIAL MEASURES

In this annual report, we report certain financial measures that are not required by, or presented in accordance with, United States generally accepted accounting principles (“GAAP”). Although management evaluates and presents these non-GAAP measures for the reasons described below, please be aware that these non-GAAP measures have limitations and should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for operating income, net income, earnings per share or any other comparable operating measure prescribed by GAAP. In addition, we may calculate and/or present these non-GAAP financial measures differently than measures with the same or similar names that other companies report, and as a result, the non-GAAP measures we report may not be comparable to those reported by others.

Adjusted Net Income and Adjusted Diluted EPS. Adjusted net income and Adjusted diluted EPS reflect our net income and diluted earnings per share excluding the impact of cost reimbursement revenue, reimbursed expenses, merger-related costs, charges, and other merger-related adjustments due to purchase accounting, the gain on the sale of our ownership interest in Avendra, and the income tax effect of these adjustments, as well as the impact of the U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. We calculate the income tax effect of the adjustments using an estimated tax rate applicable to each adjustment. We believe that these measures are meaningful indicators of our performance because they allow for period-over-period comparisons of our ongoing operations before these items and for the reasons further described below.

We exclude cost reimbursement revenue and reimbursed expenses, which relate to property-level and centralized programs and services that we operate for the benefit of our hotel owners. We do not operate these programs and services to generate a profit over the contract term, and accordingly, when we recover the costs that we incur for these programs and services from our hotel owners, we do not seek a mark-up. For property-level services, our owners typically reimburse us at the same time that we incur expenses. However, for centralized programs and services, our owners may reimburse us before or after we incur expenses, causing temporary timing differences between the costs we incur and the related reimbursement from hotel owners in our operating and net income. Over the long term, these programs and services are not designed to impact our economics, either positively or negatively. Because we do not retain any such profits or losses over time, we exclude the net impact when evaluating period-over-period changes in our operating results.

The following table presents our reconciliations of Adjusted net income and Adjusted diluted EPS to the most directly comparable GAAP measure.

⁽¹⁾  Merger-related costs, charges, and other includes Starwood merger costs presented in the “Merger-related costs and charges” caption of our Income Statement and net purchase accounting revisions.