Ryman Hospitality Properties, Inc. (RHP) stock intrinsic value fair value estimate & owner earnings analysis

Ryman Hospitality Properties owns a small collection of very large, purpose-built group and convention hotels -- including the Gaylord-branded resorts in Nashville, Orlando, Dallas, National Harbor (MD) and suburban Denver, plus two JW Marriott resorts acquired in San Antonio (2023) and Phoenix (2025) -- along with a smaller, growing entertainment business built around the Grand Ole Opry, Ryman Auditorium, Ole Red venues and other Nashville-adjacent brands. The hotels are leased to a taxable subsidiary and run by Marriott, so the company earns real operating cash flow from rooms, food and beverage, and meeting space, not just rent. We measure the value of the business using owner earnings: the cash a shareholder could actually take out of the company each year after the reinvestment needed to keep the existing hotels competitive, before any spending aimed at growing the portfolio. Because the company just closed two large hotel acquisitions (2023 and 2025) and is partway through a multi-year renovation and expansion program at several of its largest properties, recent reported cash flow bounces around: some years understate normal earning power because heavy, disclosed renovation spending is conservatively treated as upkeep rather than growth investment, and the most recent year (2025) includes only about seven of twelve months of the newly acquired Phoenix resort. We anchor our estimate on the middle of the last four normal (non-pandemic) years, which averages out these swings, and then build the growth path forward using facts the company has already disclosed rather than a flat growth assumption. The single biggest known, dated fact shaping the next year is that the Phoenix resort (JW Marriott Desert Ridge), bought in June 2025, will contribute a full twelve months for the first time in 2026 -- it added about $92 million of revenue in its first partial year of ownership. Set against that tailwind, the company's own disclosures show group meeting planners pulling back: bookings for future group business fell about 10% in 2025 and cancellations rose, which management attributes to economic and policy uncertainty. We take both of these as real and current, not as forecasts of a market recovery, and use them to shape the cases below. Our base case assumes the Phoenix resort's first full year lifts 2026 results, that the ongoing renovations at the Nashville and Dallas-area resorts wrap up over the next two years and repay themselves the way a similar completed renovation did at the Denver resort in 2024 (which drove an 8% revenue increase the following year), and that group booking softness gradually eases rather than deepens. Beyond the ten-year forecast, we value the hotels as assets that renew themselves indefinitely through the reinvestment already built into our owner earnings figure -- convention hotels of this scale are essentially irreplaceable and rarely built new -- capped at a modest, inflation-like growth rate; this long-run tail is a meaningful share of the total value, reflecting how much of what these properties are worth depends on decades of a durable, hard-to-replicate franchise rather than the next ten years alone. Our bear case takes the current group-booking softness as the start of a longer, harder cycle: bookings keep slipping, the Phoenix and San Antonio acquisitions take longer to pay off than planned, and the company's roughly $4 billion of debt -- recently added to at over 6% interest rates -- becomes a real constraint, limiting the ability to keep reinvesting or maintaining the dividend without raising additional, dilutive capital. Our bull case assumes the opposite: booking momentum turns positive, the ongoing renovations pay off across multiple hotels at once the way the Denver project did, the entertainment business scales faster, and the heavy capital-spending cycle tapers, freeing up more cash for shareholders. On this basis we estimate the shares are worth roughly $125 in our base case, with a bear case near $52 and a bull case near $158. Given the size of the gap between the bear and base cases -- appropriate for a business this dependent on group travel demand and carrying meaningful debt -- the margin-of-safety price sits meaningfully below our estimate of fair value, at around $74 a share, to allow for the downside case. The estimate would be revisited upward once 2026 results confirm the renovation programs are substantially finished and booking trends have stabilized, and downward if group cancellations continue to rise or the acquisitions underperform their initial run rate. We could not find anything in the filings that we were unable to reconcile.