Buy Wyndham, hold onto Tempur-Pedic

Article Excerpt

WYNDHAM WORLDWIDE CORP. $34.10 (New York symbol WYN; TSINetwork Rating: Extra Risk) (973-753-6000; www.wyndhamworldwide.com; Shares outstanding: 162.0 million; Market cap: $5.5 billion; Dividend yield: 1.8%) is one of the world’s largest hospitality companies, with 7,190 franchised hotels worldwide. Aside from Wyndham and Ramada, it owns a variety of other brands, including Days Inn, Super 8, Wingate, Baymont Inn & Suites, Microtel Inns & Suites, Hawthorn Suites, Howard Johnson, Travelodge and AmeriHost Inn. In addition to hotels, Wyndham manages a number of vacation resorts, rental properties, luxury clubs and time-shares. Wyndham now has 97,000 vacation rental properties worldwide. This wide range of operations gives the company more consistent cash flow than most of its competitors, which mainly focus on hotels. In the three months ended September 30, 2011, Wyndham’s revenue rose 13.8%, to $1.2 billion from $1.1 billion a year earlier. The company gets most of its revenue from vacation rather than business travel, and vacation bookings rose in the latest quarter. That…