PLNT - Planet Fitness Inc. (PLNT) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2024-05-09 13:25:24 ET

Planet Fitness, Inc. (PLNT)

Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call

May 09, 2024, 08:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Stacey Caravella - Vice President-Investor Relations

Craig Benson - Interim Chief Executive Officer

Thomas Fitzgerald - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Simeon Siegel - BMO Capital Markets

Christopher O'Cull - Stifel

John Heinbockel - Guggenheim Partners

Megan Alexander - Morgan Stanley

Rahul Krotthapalli - JPMorgan

Sharon Zackfia - William Blair

Joseph Altobello - Raymond James

Maksim Rakhlenko - TD Cowen

Korinne Wolfmeyer - Piper Sandler

Presentation

Operator

Thank you for standing by. My name is Krista, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Planet Fitness First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the conference over to Stacey Caravella, Vice President of Investor Relations. Stacey, you may begin your conference.

Stacey Caravella

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Speaking on today's call will be interim Planet Fitness Chief Executive Officer, Craig Benson; and Chief Financial Officer, Tom Fitzgerald.

Both will be available for questions during the Q&A session following the prepared remarks. Today's call is being webcast live and recorded for replay. Before I turn the call over to Craig, I'd like to remind everyone that the language on forward-looking statements included in our earnings release also applies to our comments made during this call. Our release can be found on our investor website along with any reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures mentioned on the call with their corresponding GAAP measures.

Now I will turn the call over to Craig.

Craig Benson

Thank you, Stacey, and thank you, everyone, for joining us for the Planet Fitness Q1 earnings call. We ended the first quarter of 2024 with approximately 19.6 million members; same-store sales growth of 6.2%, primarily driven by new member growth; and nearly 18% adjusted EBITDA growth. Our system opened 25 new units and ended the quarter 2,599 Planet Fitness locations globally.

Today, I'm going to address three topics, first, the headwinds that we faced in the first quarter that impacted our results; second, our decision to raise the Classic Card price; and third, the exciting announcement about our new CEO, Colleen Keating, who joins us on June 10.

The increase of approximately 900,000 net new members in the first quarter was below our expectations for what has historically been our highest net growth quarter pre-pandemic. The year began with national media headlines about the rising cases of COVID as well as RSV and other respiratory infections that may have made people hesitant to go to public places, including gyms, especially in the first half of January.

In typical January, fitness or gyms are among the top search Internet items. This year, while they are still a among the top search items, both flu and savings related items were even higher. Additionally, an industry source noted that many brands in the fitness industry experienced a similar soft beginning of the year. We also had double-digit decreases in our website traffic....

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