1/1/1970

speaker
Maxine
Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, hello and welcome to the eDreams Q1 fiscal year 2022 results presentation. My name is Maxine and I'll be coordinating the call today. If you would like to ask a question, you can type your questions via the webcast. I will now hand you over to your host, David Delarose, Director of Investor Relations to begin. David, please go ahead when you're ready.

speaker
David Leroy
Director of Investor Relations

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today for our first quarter year-end fiscal year 2022 results presentation for the three months ending 30th of June 2021. I'm David Leroy, the Director of Investor Relations at the DreamSolidio. As always, you can find the results materials, including the presentation and our results report on the Investor Relations section of our website. I will now pass you over to Dana Dunn, our CEO, who will take you through the first part of the presentation. Thank you.

speaker
Dana Dunn
CEO

Thank you, David, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm pleased to share with you today our excellent results and our strong prospects for the future. When the pandemic hit, it was a once-in-a-lifetime event. As a company, it's a point of inflection. And as I said to you back then, we will use this moment to make us better, stronger, and emerge a clear winner. We have been seeing the fruits of these efforts and our latest set of results continue to highlight this. For the past few months, we have actually been performing above pre-COVID-19 levels for bookings and outperforming our peers. In addition, our unique subscription proposition has been going from strength to strength and bodes very well for our future growth prospects. Our subscription product, Prime, has grown 50% over the last three months to 1.5 million members now. And we've returned to positive cash EBITDA of 3.1 million, including the full contribution of Prime. In total, we are confident that as a global travel market opens more fully in the future and gets to a more post-COVID world, we will be a clear winner and we have a bright future. I'll now take you in more detail through some of the key points of our most recent results and then hand over to David Garcielos. who will discuss in more detail the performance of our consolidated financial statements. I will then finish with some closing remarks. So, please turn now to slide four, in which I give a summary of our performance to date. Overall, bookings are ahead of pre-COVID-19 levels since the month of June, and Prime has added another half a million members And we've returned to EBITDA positive, including prime fees. Some of the key highlights for today's presentation are, one, bookings are well ahead of pre-COVID levels. June bookings surpassed pre-COVID levels, and July and August accelerated and strengthened further on 2019. August bookings were 27% ahead of 2019 levels. Results are encouraging. Despite COVID-19 impact, the first quarter of this new financial year has shown encouraging signs of market recovery, particularly in leisure travel, where we, as Adrian Zedigio, had the leading market position. Revenue margin in the first quarter increased 313% versus the same period last year. This is due to bookings being up 491% and reduction in revenue margin per booking driven by lower average basket value of bookings due to the COVID-19 effect on travel. The effect of COVID-19 induced restrictions resulted in revenue margin being 48% below pre-COVID-19 levels, including the full contribution from Prime. Cash EBITDA. was 3.1 million positive, which is the first time positive since the beginning of the pandemic back in March 2020. Marginal profit stood at 13.4 million euros positive, which is 11 times the amount of the first quarter of the last financial year, FY21. And our strong liquidity position was maintained at 136 million euros at the end of July. And as I have stressed previously, our liquidity was never at list, and we were an exception in the industry. The third highlight of today is that Prime. Prime continues to reinvent travel and travel provision. And let me tell you why. First, we're the leader and inventor. of Prime, and it's a highly successful subscription-based model that is now in travel. We grew our Prime members by 116% in the 12 months through June 2021, and that would bring us to about 1.2 million subscribers. And we've now reached over 1.5 million Prime members in August. This means we added 500,000 or a half a million members in just three months, whereas the addition of the previous 500,000 members took 15 months to achieve. We will continue to grow Prime through product innovation, through geographic expansion, and we expect to achieve our target of 2 million Prime members over one year ahead of schedule. The already revised target was newly set for before the end of summer 2022, but very likely we will move forward yet again this self-imposed target that we set last May by yet another three to six months. Fourth highlight, we strongly believe we will be a clear winner in the post-COVID world because we have a unique relationship model with customers. We have an unrivaled scale advantage and now number two in the world in retailing flights. Our market share, in fact, grew in Europe by 6 percentage points to 37% last year. And we have a balanced business with diversification revenues of 63%, which is up 10 percentage points year on year, and booking through mobile devices, remain market leading in excess of 50%, while the industry average is still around 37%. Now I will go through the points I've just mentioned in more detail in the following slides. Please turn to slide five, in which I will update you on current trading. Our current trading demonstrates our strong performance and rapid turnaround experience. during the summer period due to the strong desire for our customers to travel, with bookings surpassing pre-COVID levels, even when the market has not fully recovered. As we have repeatedly said, consumers want to travel. The pandemic has not affected this, but instead only reconfirmed this. As and when restrictions are lifted, uncertainty eased, consumers return with confidence and that we want to be ready for them and take market share through superior strategy, business model, and consumer proposition. We have seen exactly this in our numbers. The company's booking levels over the past quarter have shown continuous improvement. Bookings in April were minus 51% compared to the same period of 2019. May showed strong improvement with bookings going to minus 22%. In June, bookings improved further to, in fact, surpass pre-COVID-19 levels with positive single-digit average growth rate of 2%. And in July and August, trading has accelerated further with the company now seeing strong growth levels, plus 27% in August versus pre-COVID levels. I do want to point out that I do believe that the 27% growth rate in August is an extraordinary result since we experienced pent-up demand for last-minute bookings due to the increasing in restrictions, sorry, due to the easing in restrictions in some countries, which in a normalized year, many of those bookings would have taken place in the fourth quarter or the first quarter of the new fiscal year instead of happening in August. Nonetheless, all indicators we have is that we outperform the market, which is a good indicator of our future growth prospects. Please turn to slide six, where, as evidenced by IATA's public data, you can see that we do continue to outperform the market. Our trading suggested an overperformance against the airline industry, both regular and low-cost carriers, and growth of market share versus supplier direct due to better quality, more comprehensive content and flexibility, and a focus on leisure travel. This slide shows EDU's overall performance versus IATA in Europe. where on average during fiscal year 2021, EDU has been 13 percentage points ahead of supplier direct in Europe. The most recent IATA numbers from Q1 FY22 suggest that our overperformance has extended to 52 percentage points. While there may be some seasonality and time differences between booking date and departure date, The message is clear. We do outperform the market. If you please turn to slide five, I believe it's important to highlight that the market is still recovering. And we still have some effects of COVID-19 affecting the market and our performance as we journey towards a post COVID-19 world. These COVID-19 effects are, firstly, restrictions. There are still significant restrictions from free travel, including bans, forms filling, tests, uncertainty of rules, and disparate vaccination levels. This leads to an influence on demand, meaning consumers are choosing to stay closer to home. such as taking shorter haul flights with shorter lead times to booking. And this, in turn, has an impact on revenue margin per booking. It leads to lower average basket value, which is 35% below 2019 levels. All in all, what is clear is that despite all of the above impacts, EDU results demonstrate a very strong performance in the current market and show how EDU will continue to prosper as the market transitions to a post-COVID-19 market. Please turn to slide eight. In this slide, I'm pleased to share with you the very positive results we've achieved in our subscription program, PRIME. If you remember in late May, I shared with you an important milestone. EDU has surpassed the 1 million mile mark. In less than three months from then, EDU has surpassed 1.5 million members, which means that we added over 500,000 members in less than three months. As you know, eDreams of Digital is the leader and the inventor of the first subscription-based model and travel. Over the past four years, we have invested a lot of time and resources in developing and testing our unique subscription offering into the successful product that it is today. During the pandemic, while others were cutting back, we have continued to invest and develop Prime and have seen remarkable results. In total, you can see the customer take-up is very strong, and it has large future potential. And we transition our business from a more risky transaction-based business to a much more appealing relationship subscription-based business that has strong growth prospects. In the past 12 months, our membership grew by 116%. to 1.2 million at the end of the first quarter of this financial year. Thirty-nine percent of our flight bookings are now from Prime members, indicating the benefit that members accrue from the program. And we are ahead of schedule to hit our 2 million subscriber target. This target was initially set to be achieved in 2023. As you know, we revised the target to be a full year ahead of schedule before the end of summer 2022. It is most likely that we will hit this self-imposed target yet another three to six months in advance. Let me put in context the achievement of the additional 500,000 members we just realized. Prior to this, it took us 15 months to achieve the last 500,000 members, while we now achieved it in just three months. As I said, the future is bright, and when the market returns, we have a strong proposition for customers. Please turn to slide nine. The group continues to have a strong balance sheet with a strong liquidity position of $136 million at the end of July. We are the only global OTA that did not require a capital or debt raise to navigate through the pandemic. So, the liquidity of eDreams was never at risk, which is amply demonstrated by the, again, unanimously approved covenant waiver extension on the 30th of April until the 30th of June 2022. This liquidity position is a solid starting point for the low seasonality period in the coming months, as naturally the level of bookings decreases from September to December. Please turn to slide 10, in which we cover our diversification revenue KPIs. Overall, diversification revenue continued to improve, and this is the largest contributor to revenues. Product diversification ratio and revenue diversification ratio have both improved. The product diversification ratio increased from 76% in the first quarter of 2020 to 89% in the first quarter of 2022 financial year. That's a 13 percentage point improvement in two years. Similarly, the revenue diversification ratio increased from 46% to 63% in the first quarter FY22, a 17 percentage point improvement again in two years. We continue to believe that Prime is a key consumer offering in which we continue to evolve to a full-service, one-stop shop, towards the consumer, and this allows us to further grow our share of wallet in the future. Please turn to slide 11, which demonstrates the progress made against our two other KPIs that we disclosed. We continue to lead the travel industry in mobile innovation and have again stood out in mobile, which serves us well for the future. In the last two years, booking through mobile, a top priority for us, a major focus, has risen exponentially from 40% of our total bookings to 52%. The shift to online and specific to mobile, accelerated by the pandemic, leaves us in an optimal position to take advantage of future demand as the leader in mobile for travel. Let's now look at the changes to the acquisition cost per booking index. which deteriorated by 22 percentage points year-on-year. This is due to the adaptability and flexibility of our business. As guided, the very low level we had in the past 12 months was not sustainable for the long term. As travel restrictions ease and consumer demand increases, we expected to spend more on online marketing, and therefore this ratio would trend back to a more normalized level. However, if we compare the first quarter of FY22 with the first quarter of FY20, we still show an improvement of 11 percentage points. Now I'll pass you to David, who will discuss in more detail our financial results.

speaker
David Garcielos
CFO

Thank you, Dana, and good afternoon, everyone. If you could all please turn to the slide. of the presentation, I will take you through the financial results in more detail. Despite the COVID-19 impact, the first quarter of fiscal 22 has shown encouraging signs of market recovery. In the first quarter, we experienced a sharp increase in demand despite uncertainty and some travel restrictions remaining. Revenue margin increased by 313% year-on-year to 68.4 million euros. due to the 491% increase in bookings following the progress of vaccination rollout and increase in leisure travel demand. This was partly upset by a 36% reduction in revenue margin per booking, driven by a lower average basket value of bookings. When travel patterns return to normal, we expect revenue margin per booking to increase from its current level. I remind you that COVID-19 induced restrictions still resulted in revenue margin being 52% below pre-COVID levels due to disproportionate demand in short-distance flights. In fiscal 22 and fiscal 21, our focus has been on what we can control to continually build and further enhance a high-quality and adaptable business model. This is demonstrated by our marginal profit in fiscal 22. Remember, marginal profit is revenue margin minus the variable costs. being 13.4 million positive. That's 11 times the amount of the same quarter of last year, despite the investment in our call center to help our customers. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of 1.9 million in our last quarter, but improved every month during the quarter and was positive for the month of June. Cash EBITDA, which is the EBITDA with the full prime contribution, was 3.1 million euros positive once we add the impact of 5.1 million euros due to the increase in prime deferred revenue in the quarter. But I will talk more in detail on this on the next slide. Please turn to slide 14 of the presentation. With prime subscription growing so strongly, we feel it is important and timely to increase disclosure of the accounting impact which is caused by the prime subscription program. For clarity, The annual subscription fee for prime services is charged in one lump sum at the point of making the first booking and subscribing to the program. A full cash impact for the company at the time of the subscription or at the time of the annual renewal. This revenue is accounted for once the customer starts to make bookings and accrues the revenue with the corresponding discount applied to being a prime customer. The portion of the subscription fee in excess of the discounts received is booked in the balance sheet as deferred revenue. Additional revenue margin will be accrued as the customer makes additional bookings in the amount of the discounts applied as a prior customer. Any unconsumed portion of the subscription fee at the end of the 12 months will be accrued as revenue margin and becomes a bid for the seminar. In fiscal 21, the increase in deferred revenue driven by prime amounted to 10.7 million euros, and that was a 91% increase year on year. And in the first quarter of fiscal 22, it has continued to grow, amounting to 5.1 million in the quarter, and that is up 120% year on year. This amount is expected to continue increasing in time as we continue to see a rise in prime members. This results in an amount of cash revenue margin and cash EBITDA not recorded in our PNF. Thus, we feel it is important to disclose going forward our cash revenue margin and cash EBITDA with the full-time contribution to show the full impact of the year of value created in the form of the prime fees collected and not accrued from new customers during the year. As a result of the positive contribution for prime, we are very pleased to say that cash EBITDA with the full prime contribution was 3.1 million euros positive. The first time we have recorded a positive EBITDA in a quarter since March of 2020. Turning now to slide 15, I will take you through the cash flow statement. In fiscal 22, despite continued travel restrictions, net cash from operating activities improved by 45.8 million euros, and we ended the quarter with positive cash flow from operations of 37.9 million, mainly due to a working capital inflow of 35.4. The improvement versus the same quarter of last fiscal year was driven by the better EBITDA performance, the variation in provisions, and working capital inflows from stronger volume in the last two weeks of June 21 than we had in March 21. The group continues to have a strong balance sheet, maintaining a robust liquidity position of $136 million at the end of July, including $98 million undrawn from a super senior revolving credit facility. This undoubtedly places us in a position of strength for the low seasonality period until December. We have used cash for investments of $5.7 million in this first quarter of the fiscal year. That's an increase of $1.2 million in fiscal 2021 As last year, we implemented cost-saving measures to minimize the temporary impact of COVID-19. Cash used in financing amounted to 17.4 million euros of cash inflow, compared to an outflow of 1.7 from financing activities in the same period of last year. The variation by 19.1 million in financing activities mainly relates to the drawdown of 19 million under the Super Senior Revolving Credit Facility. I will now turn the presentation back to Dana to do the closing remarks.

speaker
Dana Dunn
CEO

Thank you, David. Please turn to slide 17. Let me conclude here by giving you a quick recap of what we see in the market and why we believe eDreams will be a winner post-COVID. Leisure consumers want to travel. That is certain. And COVID has done nothing to soften this desire. As more people are vaccinated, travel activity picks up. While we still are in a transition phase from full COVID to post-COVID, there may be some ebbs and flows, such as with the Delta variant. However, it is certain that leisure consumers want to travel and that EDU is their provider of choice. So there are clear reasons why EDU will be a winner post-COVID. One, we're structurally well-positioned in the leisure segment, leaders in mobile, geographically diversified, and with a product portfolio that suits consumers' needs and, in fact, is superior to other competitors. Two, we have unrivaled scale, have increased our market share in Europe by six percentage points in just one year, and reach the number two position worldwide as a flight retailer. Three, Prime is a resounding success in the market. We have surpassed 1.5 million members already and will reach the 2 million member milestone more than a year earlier than originally expected. And most likely we'll move forward our self-imposed targets set last May by yet another three to six months. Four, We are reinventing travel and travel position. We are leading the way with a proven model and transforming the industry. With that, I'd now like to take your questions.

speaker
David Garcielos
CFO

Before we do, let me point out that we will answer the questions sent to us in writing in the webcast. We will take questions on a first-come, first-served basis. but we would also try to group questions of similar nature. Should we not have time to respond to all the questions from the webcast, the investor relations team will make sure those are answered afterwards. And the first set of questions that we have are from Francisco Rui of XMDNP. First question is, why are mobile reservations falling compared to fiscal 21? Is it a seasonal thing? Dana, I believe you would answer this one.

speaker
Dana Dunn
CEO

Yes. Sorry, David. I'm having trouble with my connection. Can you repeat the question?

speaker
David Garcielos
CFO

The question is why are mobile reservations falling compared to fiscal 21? Is it a seasonal thing?

speaker
Dana Dunn
CEO

Okay, yeah, thanks. So really what's happening behind here is much more about change in the composition of the type of customers coming to market. If I look back first a couple of years ago, we were at around 40% in terms of mobile bookings. A year ago, we were around 50%. So we have continued to grow year on year, the mobile bookings. But just over the past quarter, we've seen a shift where we have less right now in this quarter versus the previous quarter, less one-passenger bookings and less mobile, you know, very short-to-departure mobile type of bookings. And so it's really just driven by the consumer and the markets. And so, therefore, what we want to do is make sure we're there for the consumer, and there will be different types of consumers coming to the market, both in terms of seasonality, pandemic type of thing, work from home, work from office, et cetera. And that can slightly affect in any one period of time. But it's clear overall we are absolutely leading the market because the market is still sitting in the high 30%, whereas we're in the 50%.

speaker
David Garcielos
CFO

Okay, the second question from Francisco Ruiz is variable for booking costs, are they sustainable at these levels? I'll take that one. Yes, we expect roughly the same variable cost of booking for the second quarter. We're seeing a stability there. The third question is how do you foresee the recovery of the average basket value? And I would say, sorry, you want to take that question, Daniel? Okay, so I'll take it. About the recovery of the average basket value, I would say that it's highly dependent on the amount of restrictions that exist in the market from the governments to mobility of the customers. been very, very clear to us over the last few months is that there is an incredible amount of leisure demand from customers. We see it on the searches. And there is also enough budget from the customers. I'm probably sure you're familiar with the unprecedented levels of savings that there are for European consumers right now in the market. The only remaining, let's say, factor is where is people allowed to travel and the amount of uncertainty about changes in those restrictions. And that is what is driving the basket value. What we would expect is that this thing over the, you know, the next few months continues to relax as the vaccination rate increases and presuming that there are no new variants that changes the class. The fourth question says, don't you think the scenarios that you have in your impairment test on immunity are too cautious since today you have been three months above 2019 levels without immunity yet? Do you feel you could get back to pre-COVID levels in fiscal 22 instead of fiscal 23? So, your assessment is correct in that we have been three months of 2019 levels, and we've been also for a bit more than three months above the scenario three, which is the one on immunity. And the scenarios, remember that they're set for industry expectations, right? And we have also said that all of our data points indicate then we are performing much better than the industry. So I would say that we are trading well and we're trading above the scenario three. Probably the industry is trading less well than we are. As to if we will have pre-COVID levels in fiscal 22 instead of fiscal 23, if we're talking about bookings, year-to-date, we are about 6% below. and that's five months out of the 12. If bookings continue to perform more in line with the last three months than in line with the first two months of the year, yes, it is highly likely that in terms of bookings, we would recover pre-COVID levels in fiscal 22 for the aggregate of the year. That was the last question coming from Exxon D&T, Francisco Ruiz. We have a set of questions now. from Juan Pena of GBC Gaesco. The first question, it says, I have seen that the percentage of bookings through Prime remains at 39% despite the strong growth of Prime customers. Why is this happening? And shouldn't this ratio increase in line with subscriber growth? It gives the impression of something inactive for customers. You may want to take this one, Pena.

speaker
Dana Dunn
CEO

Yeah, absolutely, David. So let me make a couple of comments about Prime and about our overall business and the model that we're engaging in. We don't look at the 39%, and I would encourage all investors to not. But 39% is phenomenal, amazing, right? You know, and you're saying that, look, almost 40% of a business is a transaction – sorry, is a relationship business that is much lower risk, has a recurring revenue stream, et cetera. But it's not about the percentage, and I'll explain why. We are – we want to make certain that we please the customer, right, that we delight customers. And absolutely, we've proven that a subscription-based model does do that. As you see, adding 500,000 members in three months really does. But there are a set of customers out there that want to have a transaction relationship. And remember, until we came along, no one in the travel industry did a subscription-based model. So a customer, even though they may be used to a subscription-based model in other industries, They're thinking travel, they come to us, and they're not necessarily expecting a subscription. And there's a lot of customers that want a transaction instead. And so we continue to offer that. And what we want to make certain is that we offer those customers a transaction-based model and a transaction-based offering, as well as then using some of that to convert some of those to subscribers, but equally capturing a whole new set of customers that may not have come to us originally as a subscription as well. So we look at this in terms of, first of all, total numbers of subscribers, not the percentage of our business, and we look at it in terms of total LTV that we generate, right, for the business. And that's how we really manage this. I don't know, Debbie, do you want to add anything?

speaker
David Garcielos
CFO

No, that's absolutely fine. There is a second question from Juan Pena, which has already been answered because it's about the percentage of reservations through mobile, which was already answered. Then I'm going to move then to the next group of questions that are from Guillermo Macedo Santayo from CaixaBank BPI. The first question is how sustainable do you see the bookings growth seen in August over the coming months in a scenario of progressive normalization of the pandemic situation? Well, I think in a scenario of progressive normalization of the pandemic situation, you will continue to see a positive performance. I don't think that you will see a performance as positive as the one in August, like Dana said during our prepared remarks. August had a component of last-minute bookings that we would normally have seen of customers booking in anywhere from January to June, and they happen on the month of August. Most people have uncertainty, and many people have waited until the last minute. But I would expect a positive scenario of the bookings in that normalization of the pandemic situation that you're describing. The second question from Guillermes, could you provide more color on the effects that drove this bookings growth acceleration? I think it's relatively similar to what we've been seeing, which is one, that there is leisure travel demand, very, very clear leisure travel demand from the customers. The second is that there is a move of customers from offline to online. And the third, I would say that it's been very clearly demonstrated that our product is significantly better than the alternatives offered by our competitors. First and foremost by Prime, but not only by Prime, because we also have a lot of bookings coming from transaction customers that find our product better suited to their needs than others. And that would explain the very big difference between us and other competitors that also operate in leisure travel online. The third question is how was the average basket value evolution in July and August compared to the first fiscal quarter trend? Well, what I can say about that is that the improvement in the bookings that we have seen through July and August has not happened average basket value. So the average basket value continues to be in a depressed value compared to what we had prior to the pandemic. And the last one is about variable cost of booking which I have already answered in the first block of questions. Then we have group of questions from Carlos Treviño of Banco Santander. The first one is already answered. It's about changing the average basket value in July and August. The second one is about the percentage of prime bookings of 39%, and I think Dana gave an extensive answer already. And the third one is, do you have any reference on your market share in Europe in the first half of 21 versus the 37% in 2020. Well, we don't have it with the exact metrics used for the aggregate of 2020, which come from the Focusrite survey. What we do have is the indications that we look at when IATA publishes its monthly numbers, and they are published up until the month of June. And up until then, our gap versus the market is maintained or increased. So I would say it's a very positive evolution. We're really looking forward for the date of July and August. What we see, not from IATA, but what we see, for instance, on passenger traffic in the airports seems to indicate that we continue to increase market share during the summer. The next question comes from Chad Garcia of Schwartz Investments. It says, it's exciting to see Prime grow so rapidly. At 1.5 million subscribers, I calculate that the Prime program alone is worth 10 to 20 euros per share. Your share price is well below that. What steps can you take to close this gap? Danny, you want to take it?

speaker
Dana Dunn
CEO

Yeah, absolutely, David. So thanks, Chad, for the question. I think it's a very pertinent one. Let me start by saying first and foremost, you know, we need to focus on what we can control, and part of that is about really building a great business that continually improves and grows and beats the competition and, of course, generating value to shareholders. So let me cover these two points. The first one, in practical terms, we're pioneering in the travel industry, and we continue to grow prime through product innovation and through geographic expansion. I believe we have, you know, a really unique relationship-based, subscription-based model with customers, and you've seen that in the results. It's, you know, I don't think anybody would have expected us to deliver a half a million subscribers in just three months. and it shows our overperformance and our continued overperformance in building great business with great growth prospects. We're also now number two in the world in retailing flights, and we have unrivaled scale advantage. And we use that very, I would say, cleverly to our advantage, and we think about that tremendously. And you've seen our market share. Our market share has grown in Europe to 37%. So, again, it continues to show just a business that is really outperforming and that has really good, strong growth prospects and from year to year really goes from strength to strength in terms of its proposition with customers, its insights, and its strength versus competition. Let me talk about the second part, about generating shareholder value. One of the things you can see is that we are the first and we are pioneering in on the subscription-based model. Now, this model is very well bedded down in other industries. Investors in those industries really appreciate and understand them, and you can see the returns given by Netflix, given by Spotify, and many, many other companies that do a subscription-based model. You can see our success, right, in this. And so what we need to do is continue to educate our investors and investor-based within the travel industry where the travel industry is not used to it, was not thinking about an investment plan subscription, but clearly we're bringing something new and different and something that is proven to be superior, and now we're proving that it is superior. And so with that, we continue to spend time dialoguing with people, getting them to understand the value of subscriptions. With that in mind, we also have an investor day coming up in November, which I would encourage anyone and everyone to please come. And it will be yet again to further expose our business to investors and potential investors, and in particular to talk more detail about Prime and what we're doing in Prime to help other people understand it. So I do agree very much with your proposition, and I do summarize to say that we are absolutely building a superior business to our competitors and for shareholders.

speaker
David Garcielos
CFO

Thank you. The next group of questions comes from Deutsche Bank, from Nisla Nasir, and the first one is, Please explain the difference between cash EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA. Okay, so cash EBITDA is adjusted EBITDA plus the variation in the prime deferred rebate. And I think I explained during the call how the deferred rebate, but let me give you a practical example so that everyone understands. Let's say a customer joins Prime today. and they make a booking, and they're in a country in which the subscription fee is 55 euros. And the savings that they make on that first booking is 25 euros. We cash in the 55, and that's the full value added by Prime on a cash basis. The only portion that goes to revenue is the savings that the customer obtained in that first booking. So it would be the 25 euros of savings. And therefore, there would be 30 that would go to the balance sheet as prime deferred revenue, right? And we would not accrue as revenue. Let's say the customer does a second booking six months from now. And in that booking, the customer gets a 20 euro discount. we would, at that moment in time, take 20 euros from the balance sheet, from the prime deferred revenue, and book it as revenue margin. 25 of the first booking plus 20 of the second booking, 45. Let's say the customer doesn't make any more bookings. In the first of September of next year, when the 12 months expires, the remaining 10, at that moment in time, we would book as revenue. That's how the mechanic works. So the actual value created during any period of time by prime numbers is all of the cash that comes into the compound, which would be the one that we recognize plus in the revenue margin plus the delta, the increase in the total balance of prime deferred revenue that has happened during the period. That's what feeds the cash . and what we call also the cash revenue margin, which would be the revenue margin plus the increase in the prime deferred revenue. The second question says, what is driving the increase in prime member numbers? Have you stepped up your customer acquisition efforts? And please remind us again, how profitable is the prime member versus a non-prime member, the order economics? Do you want to take this one, Dana?

speaker
Dana Dunn
CEO

Yeah, absolutely, David. So, let me provide a little bit of context. This is a very good question about driving the increase of the prime members. We continue to iterate and improve prime, and we've been doing this very much just prior to the pandemic, but then during the pandemic, we said that we were going to dedicate a disproportionate amount of our resources to continue to improve the proposition, and we have. And so, the proposition has materially improved. over the past, let's say, 24 months, 12 months, and even six months. With that in mind, I should also say, though, the market as well has, you know, customers have come back to the market. So when you think about even if we just take IATA's numbers as the market, you know, you would see, you know, IATA being, you know, quite recently at, let's say, minus 80%, then it went to minus 50%. and so clearly there's an improvement in the market. Now, when consumers come back to the market, obviously, you know, our numbers can grow, and we've been taking disproportionate shares, so they're going to grow even more proportionately, and so the combination of the two of those is really what's driving behind, in essence, our growth in the prime numbers. Put another way, let's just say the market was to even further accelerate, so even more customers will come back into the market and want to travel, then Prime will grow even more. If I take the converse, customers pull back, then the Prime numbers will slow down as well coming into the market also. We do have a whole set of improvements, though, that we contemplate and we test and we trial all the time. And so I do expect the prime that you see today versus the prime in 12 months will definitely be different. And we've got a significant amount of improvements on it, both from a product point of view and also from a geographic point of view as well. Now, your question about are we, you know, have we stepped up our customer acquisition efforts? And I think that's a very, very good and valid question. And the answer is no. We haven't. And so I just really want to be clear about what I mean by my answer. When I think about customer acquisition in this context, we don't do any prime specific customer acquisition. So let me just give you some examples. You know, you could see a YouTube ad. that talks about Prime and people click on the ad and they come to us. We don't do that. You could see banners, right, you know, on different websites as you go around or even on mobile as you're reading a news article and you could see embedded in that, you know, an advert about Prime. We don't do that. We do not advertise, you know, Prime per se actively. So therefore, it's not in the numbers. I do think it is an opportunity for us We just haven't, let's say, done this yet. What we will do is during the fall, the autumn, is we'll start to experiment, and I use that word experiment on some little customer acquisition around prime, but it is an experiment to see about it. So it will not be in our numbers. It will not materially affect any of our Q3 numbers whatsoever, but we just want to start moving our way to that one. I hope that provides enough context behind the numbers.

speaker
David Garcielos
CFO

Okay. The next question is, since June, bookings have been above fiscal 19 levels. Does this mean full-year fiscal 22 could be at fiscal 19 levels? I think I have answered this one already. Yes. And the last question from Nizlai, how has the competitive environment changed as a result of the pandemic?

speaker
Dana Dunn
CEO

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's fair to say in the early part of the pandemic, a lot of companies went into, let's say, hibernation, fired staff, et cetera. We do see competitive intensity over the past, let's say, three months, and I would even say even four or five months really stepping up. You know, significantly, travel is a competitive market. It's the largest e-commerce segment in the world. It's larger than any other type of segment, consumer goods, you know, retail, anything. Travel is the largest, and it is a competitive segment. And so there is been a very, you know, it's been competitive past three months. And that's why I take a lot of strength from that encouragement about how well we're doing in a competitive marketplace.

speaker
David Garcielos
CFO

Very well. The next questions come from Gianmarco from Equita. And there are two questions. The first one, can you clarify if the HR cost base is benefiting from government aids? And in this case, how much? Really easy answer. The answer is no. Everyone is working at full and there are no government aides at this point in time. And there are actually no government aides of any sort since November of 2020. So it's been nine months already. And the second question is, can you detail the June result? You mentioned that EBITDA was positive. Well, we don't usually give results on a month-by-month basis. I made that comment during the prepared remarks, and I was referring to the adjusted EBITDA, and that adjusted EBITDA was the first month in which it was positive, and that was with the level of bookings that we had in the month of June. The next question comes from Adi Lazar of RGA. It says, what trends are you seeing in the hotel supply and what portion of bookings are hotels for this quarter? Do you want to take this one, Dana?

speaker
Dana Dunn
CEO

Sure. In terms of trends in hotel supply, it's very similar to what I was just answering in terms of competitiveness. It's, you know, both the flight and the hotel market are very competitive. and players are absolutely ramping up. And, again, that's why I feel very good and comfortable about our overall results on that. It depends upon by geography. You know, different geographies come and go. Obviously, the U.S. was very strong in, let's say, the latter part of last year, whereas Europe has actually taken off more in the early part of this year from a hotel supply perspective. In terms of what portion of our bookings, our hotels, we don't disclose that.

speaker
David Garcielos
CFO

The second question from this investor says, thanks for the financial disclosure. These are very helpful. Do you expect to gain leverage on the variable costs for Prime, and what would it take for this to happen? There are several things that influence the variable costs because of Prime. The first one would be the marketing costs. The marketing costs for repeat Prime bookings are much lower than the marketing costs for a transactional customer and the marketing costs of a first-time Prime customer because a first-time Prime customer has come to our websites normally to the same proportion of channels, paid and non-paid, then the transaction customer, they make the decision to become a subscription member once they are at the website. But, you know, the cost that we incur before they arrive to the website are the same one for those. Then, what is likely to be different as well is the fraud cost. So the probability that a subscriber will be a fraudster is really very low, right? And then the third important bucket in there is the fraud costs which, I'm sorry, the fraud costs, the customer service costs. And the customer service cost is actually the opposite. One of the benefits of the prime customer is that they get a privileged access to customer service, and we take that very much into account when we size the amount of resources that we need to have for customer service. As the number of prime customers increases, we also increase that portion of the agents which are specifically dedicated to attend our prime customers. That's part of the value proposition to consumers. And the last question of this investor is, how has the spread of Delta impacted bookings in August. Well, it's obvious when you see the plus 27% versus 2019 in August that it has not been impacted by Delta. The next question comes from Karam Samthani of Citi. The first one is, would you comment on what percentage of the bookings in August are for travel in fiscal 21? I guess the infrastructure means fiscal 22, which is the year in which we are. And I would say that the vast majority. The time to departure of the bookings has one of the effects that we've seen during COVID, and we've commented on this in the past, is that we've seen a material shortening of the time to departure of the bookings. So the vast majority of the bookings in August have been for travel in August. The second question is, are these bookings cancelable? And it will depend on the conditions of the fares of the airlines. The airlines are now having more fares which are cancelable to provide an incentive to the customers to book, but not all are cancelable. But what I would like to clarify is that even when a booking is canceled, the fees that we make on the booking, which we make for the intermediation, the fees stay. There is no, let's say, negative revenue, if you will, for the effect of a cancellation. And the third one is, do you require to give bondholders a 30-day call notice before refinancing your bonds? Actually, I have to confess that I don't know that by heart, and I would need to refer to the terms of the indenture, which, in any case, it is a public one, and you can check it in our website. So, sorry that I don't have the answer right now for you. The next set of questions come from Mateo Sanferro of Spread Research. The first one is any update on the timing of potential bond refinancing? I would say no update on this time. Nothing has actually really changed since the last quarter and it's pretty usual that I get this question every quarter. We will continue to monitor opportunities. The bonds are trading more or less apart. If we were to refinance right now, we would be refinancing with two years to maturity at the start, normally at a slightly higher cost on a coupon basis than we are paying right now. So, we will continue to monitor the market status for opportunities. The second one, excluding prime deferred revenues, do you expect to be EBITDA positive on an adjusted basis in the current quarter? I would say yes. I've already said that during the month of June individually, we have been epitopositive. And since then, in July and August, the performance of the business has improved versus the month of June. And let's see what September brings our way. And the third one has already been answered, which is a question about the average basket value in July and August. The next question comes from Dede Mehmet of OdoBHF. And I have a question about the average basket value of bookings. What is the share of long haul bookings out of total bookings? And what was the share of long haul bookings before the pandemic? Well, that exact amount is not one that we disclosed. We didn't disclose it before the pandemic and we haven't changed that policy. I mean, of course, that the long haul has reduced the most. If I was to characterize what has happened is that long haul has reduced, or if you will, to be more precise, what we call intercontinental, we divide between three portions. It is domestic bookings. There are continental bookings, which is the biggest portion. Our main market is all of Europe, if you will. Because once you fly two hours in Europe, you're very likely to be in a different country. So the biggest chunk is the continental bookings. And then there are the intercontinental bookings. The intercontinental bookings was the smaller of the three before. And it's now actually rather small. Because the majority of those are situations in which it's only allowed absolutely essential travel and for citizens to return to other countries. So that has been the one that has reduced the most in exchange for more domestic and more continental than we were seeing before the pandemic. That is the last of the questions that we have for today. Thank you very much for all of your interest. A very good and long list of questions. And before we conclude the call, I would like to inform you that on Wednesday, 17th of November, We will be hosting a conference call for the first half results for fiscal 22, and we will also be hosting an investor day. So please save the dates. We would love to have as many of you as possible, like Dana said during the Q&A session. This will be an opportunity for you to understand in more detail our business, our strategy going forward, meet more of the team, to meet several of us in person, and see our operations and what sets of support from the competitors. In the meantime, we will be very happy to receive your questions via our IR team or the investor email address, which is investors at eventsregio.com. Thank you very much. Thank you.

speaker
Maxine
Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you for joining.

Disclaimer

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