Saga plc

and welcome to Saga's results for the six months ended 31st of July 2025. My name is Mike Hazel and I'm the Group CEO and I'm joined today by our Group CFO, Mark Watkins. I'll kick off with an overview of our first half performance and then Mark will take you through the financials in detail. Finally, I'll provide a brief update on our strategy before we open for questions at the end. I'm pleased to report we've had a strong first half with a performance ahead of our expectations. We've seen first half revenues increase, profits perform ahead of our expectations, and a significant reduction in net debt. Underpinning this performance was the continued momentum we are seeing in travel. Alongside a strong trading performance, We've also continued to deliver the strategic actions that we previously laid out. We completed our refinancing in February, putting in place a new 2031 corporate debt facility and repaying our 2026 bond maturity and the Roger de Haan loan facility. To support the delivery of our next phase of our strategy, we have reorganised our management team. the new leadership team in place across insurance and travel now in place. In July, we successfully completed the sale of our underwriting business with cash proceeds £17 million ahead of our forecasts. And we're making good progress on preparations for the launches of both our Aegeus and NatWest box partnerships later this year. In doing so, we are making rapid progress towards a less complex, lower risk business model with more predictable earnings that will allow us to focus on our core strengths of customer insight, marketing and data in support of our medium term growth plans, particularly in travel. To that end, we were delighted to launch the latest addition to our river fleet earlier this year, responding to the demand we are seeing for our boutique cruising offer. I was on board the Spirit of the Moselle last month and she's an amazing ship. Taken together, as we go through this morning, you will see clear progress being made on both underlying trading performance and our strategic execution plans. This gives me even greater confidence with regard to the 100 million profit target we laid out in April. On this slide, I've highlighted some of our key trading metrics. I'm not going to speak to every line, but you can see even at a glance the strength of our trading performance across travel and insurance and the foundations we have put in place for money, all of which set us up well for future growth. I'll now hand to Mark to go through our financial results in more detail.

Thanks Mike. Good morning everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today. I'll spend the next few minutes covering the detail of the financial results before covering the outlook for the remainder of the year. Saga had a really good start to the year, delivering a strong financial performance in the first half, largely driven by our travel businesses and insurance broking. Underlying revenue, which excludes some accounting adjustments and one-off items, increased by 7% on the prior period. Underlying PBT from continuing operations of £23.5 million is marginally behind the prior period, but importantly is ahead of our expectations. This was largely driven by the continued growth in our travel businesses and an improved performance in insurance broking, offset by higher finance costs. This was expected due to the successful refinancing at the beginning of the year. The group continued to be highly cash generative in the first half, with available operating cash flow of £89.4 million in the period, a 64% increase. This does reflect some seasonal strength, which I'll touch on again in a moment. Net debt reduction continued, and the position at the 31st of July was £515.1 million, £102.1 million lower than the 31st of July 24, and £77.7 million lower than at the year end. Alongside strong trading EBITDA growth, which grew 8%, This supported further deleveraging, with the total leverage ratio now at 4.3 times, compared with 4.8 times at the same point in the prior year. I'll now focus on the headline underlying profit contribution from each of our business units. Our travel businesses continued to generate strong customer demand, delivering £41.6 million of underlying PBT in the first half, a 33% increase on the year before. Our insurance-broking business performed well in the first half, despite the anticipated decline in earnings. Performance was ahead of our expectations. The standout performance of this business is that after a number of years of decline, policy volumes for motor, travel and our private medical insurance have returned to growth. Other businesses and central costs marginally increased due to lower investment income as the group now holds a lower level of cash than it previously did. The result of this is that underlying profit before tax increased from £27.2 million in the prior year to £38.7 million. Insurance underwriting is now classified as discontinued but the strong performance in the first half supported our ability to capture an additional £17 million of cash from the sale. which completed on the 1st of July. I'll now spend some time covering each of our core businesses in a bit more detail, and I'll start with Ocean Cruise. Our Ocean Cruise business had an exceptional start to the year, growing underlying PBT by 23%, and continuing to show extremely strong forward bookings. Revenue grew 8%, supported by an increased load factor and per diems. The load factor in the first six months of the year was 94%, which compares with 90% last year. And the per diems worth £391, 8% higher than the year before. Underlying PBT of £34.5 million was 23% higher than the prior period, supported by cost discipline and lower finance costs. The lower finance costs reflect the continued repayment of the cruise facilities. This has now reduced to £55.6 million per year due to the repayment of the first COVID deferral loan. Looking ahead to the full year, the booked load factor and per diems are very strong, currently two percentage points and 10% ahead of the same time in the prior year, respectively. For the 26-27 season, the booked load factor is three percentage points ahead with the same time last year, with the per diems continuing to increase at 13% ahead. Now turning to our river cruise. In the first half, we successfully launched the Spirit of the Moselle, our third Spirit-class river ship. The timing of this launch meant we operated with marginally lower capacity in the period, driving revenue to be flat against the prior period. The 93% load factor in the first half was 7 percentage points higher than the last year, and the per diem of £364 was 7% higher, reflecting the strong demand for our river cruisers. This supported growth in underlying PBT of 34%, from £2.9 million in the prior year to £3.9 million. Bookings for the full year are strong and currently reflect a load factor of 87%. The per diems of 351 is ahead of the same time last year, albeit lower than H1, reflecting expected seasonality. Bookings for next year are also in a good position, with strong load factors maintained alongside growing per diems. Turning now to our holidays business. Revenue grew 14% against the prior year, supported by a 13% increase in the number of passengers travelling with us. Underlying profitability was also strongly ahead at £3.2 million against only £0.3 million in the prior period. This serves to validate our step up in the level of marketing to support bookings. As you'll see from this slide, revenue growth is set to continue into the second half of the year, with current full-year booked revenue 14% ahead of the prior year, with passengers 12% ahead. the team are now focusing their attention on driving demand for next year's bookings. Insurance broking also showed an improved performance in the first half, generating underlying PBT of £8.9 million. This performance supported an increased investment in policy growth ahead of the AGEAS partnership, with three of our four main products, after many years of decline, returning to growth. Motor grew by 26,000 policies, and the combination of PMI and travel grew by 5,000. This investment is expected to continue into the second half, further driving policy volumes ahead of the go-live date with Aegeus. The graph on the left-hand side shows the material drivers of the movements in underlying PBT. The motor contribution before overheads decreased by 0.6 million. driven by higher renewal margins, particularly for three-year fixed price policies, as market-wide net rates reduced, offset by higher investment into volumes. Home was the most significant driver of the overall decline, with a £6.2 million lower contribution, as net rate inflation, which was more pronounced within our panel, led to a reduced competitiveness and 19% fewer policy sales. Private medical insurance benefited from lower net rate inflation, together with a £2.6 million profit share from the Bupa partnership. Travel insurance remained broadly flat, with policy volumes growing in the period. Our insurance underwriting business, Acol, was sold to Aegis on the 1st of July, and therefore is treated as being discontinued throughout these results. As you can see, ACOL performed strongly prior to the disposal, generating an underlying PBT of £15.6 million. This supported our ability to generate an additional £17 million of net cash from the disposal, with ACOL paying a £10 million pre-completion dividend and there being a £7 million positive adjustment through the completion mechanism. We received £57.9 million on the completion date, representing 90% of the proceeds, with the remaining 10% due in October. There remains a further £2.5 million payable on the go-live of the partnership. Debt reduction is a clear strategic priority for Saga and I'm pleased with the progress made in the period. During the first half of the year, net debt reduced by £77.7 million to £515.1, with a leverage ratio of 4.3 times, also below the year-end level of 4.4 times. Available operating cash flow for the first six months was £89.4 million, 64.3% higher than the last year. This was driven by a step forward in cash generation from all of our businesses. together with the £10 million dividend paid by underwriting. Debt service costs have increased due to the HBS refinancing, which was drawn in February this year, and restructuring costs have increased due to the Acre disposal and the Aegeus partnership. While the cash generation is strong in the first half, it does include some positive seen value from both the ocean cruise and insurance broking business. These are benefiting from positive working capital positions, with Ocean holding a high level of customer advance receipts, and policy growth in insurance broking also benefiting cash. So let's now turn our attention to the full year. Bookings for the full year in cruise are strong. We do, however, expect profitability in the second half to be marginally lower than the first, purely due to the normal seasonality within that business. The peak trading months for our holidays business are typically August to October. As a result, we expect that underlying profitability will be materially higher in H2 as we benefit from economies of scale and operational leverage. In insurance broking, we expect the trends that we saw towards the end of the first half of the year to continue for the second half, but a step up in investment in the second half means that profitability will be lower than the first. What this all means for the group is that the momentum we have seen in the first half gives us confidence to move our guidance for the full year. We now expect the full year underlying PBT to be in line with the prior year, and importantly, our net debt leverage ratio to be below that of the prior year. And with that, I'll hand back to Mike for an update on strategic progress.

Thanks Mark. Now I'm going to take you through more detail on the delivery of our strategic priorities and our growing confidence that we're paving the way for long term sustainable growth. Underpinning everything we do is our brand and customer insight. So it's worth a moment to remind you how that makes us different. Saga is one of the best known and most trusted brands in the UK. This is built on our deep understanding of our target customer and our extensive customer database which together provide us with a competitive advantage that sets us apart from our competitors. Nobody understands older people better than us and we have more than 70 years of experience designing products and services exclusively for them. We know who they are, we know what they like, and we know how best to communicate directly with them. This means that in the growing, attractive and affluent market for people aged over 50, we are ideally placed to succeed. Our businesses leverage these advantages through a series of consistent principles that I have shown on the screen. With the customer at the heart of our strategy we will deliver quality and value through a suite of differentiated unique products uniquely tailored for our customer group using the insight we have developed over decades of experience. All supported by our powerful marketing and publishing channels that drive deep customer engagement. Since joining Saga, I've redoubled our focus on these principles, all of which are now central to our growth. In April, we laid out our medium-term profit target of £100 million and a leverage ratio of less than two times by January 2030. A strong first half performance gives us even greater confidence in these targets and our timeline to achieve them. Our four strategic priorities laid out the routes by which we would deliver these targets. And we continue to make good progress on each of them. Progress that will be obvious as I now touch on each business. Travel is now the largest contributor to Saga's profits. In March, we announced that we had combined the leadership and operations of our previously separate cruise and holidays businesses under the leadership of Nigel Blanks, previously CEO of our cruise division. No longer operating in silos, a single management team ensures consistent, excellent customer experience and a coherent marketing strategy across both crews and all of our holidays. Best practice is shared across the different product lines and customers are more easily introduced to a wider range of holiday options for their next experience. Saga has been taking older people on holiday since 1951 and we are the experts in catering for their needs. Our customers are time rich and have money to spend. They like to travel outside of peak season, enjoying quieter destinations, sometimes though quite adventurous ones. What unites them all is that they know Saga can offer, when needed, a little more support than our peers, to ensure they can really make the most of their holiday. We take our customers to places they might not otherwise go, tailoring the experience to meet their needs. We open the world to them and allow them to enjoy travelling for longer. By understanding these needs, we create holidays exclusively designed for this age group, catering for them in a way that the mass market can't. By playing to our strengths we separate ourselves from our competitors and all of our travel businesses are now growing as a result. Ocean Cruise remains at the heart of Saga's travel offer with its enduring popularity only getting stronger. Forward bookings remain strong and repeat bookings are consistently high. This performance is down to the quality of our product and our relentless focus on our guests. Tailor-made for our customers, built on decades of cruising experience, our customer satisfaction and TMPS schools are market leading. Our two ships provide a tailored luxury experience within a boutique cruise environment, setting us apart from the mainstream providers or the mega-ships which constitute the wider market. Smaller and easier to navigate, our specially designed ships provide a tailored experience for our customers' holiday. From our nationwide chauffeur car pickup service at the start of their holiday, to the number of single cabins we have catering for solo travellers, to the quality of service and hospitality on board. We continually look to improve and refresh our proposition across dining, trips and entertainment. You can see on the screen a picture of our newly launched French restaurant aboard the Spirit of Discovery. Refined but contemporary, it offers a fantastic dining experience and is proving extremely popular with our guests. We aim to do things differently catering for our distinct customer base and in doing so we generate strong demand for our product and loyalty to our brand that demand is driving high load factors more early bookings and increased per diems the amount customers pay per day as our need to discount reduces but importantly our customers still recognize the great value for money they are getting This is a trend we are confident will continue as we carry on giving customers what only Saga knows how to do. River cruise holidays are perfect for our customers. Sitting between our active land-based touring options and our no-fly, hassle-free ocean cruise experiences, river cruising offers a gentle river-based touring option without the need for lengthy coach journeys and multiple changes in hotel. Customers wake up each day in an exciting new destination. We moved our river cruise business under the leadership of the Ocean Cruise team several years ago and have been aligning the service experience across the two propositions. As you can see from the page, the results have been very successful. with load factors, per diems and customer satisfaction all performing very well. Building on this success we're adding more ships and this summer launched our newest vessel the Spirit of the Moselle. This is an outstanding contemporary ship specially designed by us for our customers. Its sleek exteriors and modern interior design is already proving incredibly popular with our customers demonstrating the opportunity we have to scale up our river cruise business our next river ship is already in development and due to launch in summer 2027 as part of our ongoing growth ambition for this part of our business our cruise performance has somewhat outshone our holidays business in recent years but we've been making great progress there too, and there are clear opportunities to build on this under our new leadership structure. At Saga, we offer holiday options that meet customers' needs, whatever their age. We tend to find a younger, more active customer attracted to our land-based touring holidays, often as a gateway to a more relaxed river cruise in the future. Other customers look to enjoy a hotel stay at an interesting destination through one of our specially selected hotel stays, complete with Saga hosts on site to make sure they get the most out of their holiday. Whatever their choice, we understand that older customers are drawn to different aspects of travel to those generally catered for by the mass market. With more time available to them, older customers will typically choose to stay a little longer to more deeply experience the destination they are visiting. They are interested in understanding the language, enjoying local cuisine and visiting culturally significant sites. Beaches and swimming pools are nice, but our customers would typically prefer a nice meal overlooking amazing scenery, without the sound of children splashing around behind them. our holidays offer had over time become a little too generic, missing this opportunity to fully play to the differing demands of our customers, something that our cruise businesses have been doing brilliantly. Now under the leadership of Nigel Blanks, previously CEO of our cruise division, we are bringing the focus more squarely back on our customers and differentiated experiences, tailored for them. Recognising the type of holidays our customers want, we're expanding our range of special interest holidays. Think birdwatching, food and wine, history, archaeology and so on. It's early days, but as you can see, this refocus, which will take a while to fully flow through to our programme, has already started to work. Revenues and profits are continuing to grow from an already strong performance last year and satisfaction levels have materially improved. Customers tell us they love our nationwide chauffeur car service and so from April our chauffeur service will be included in all Saga holidays as standard. Meaning that whatever their holiday choice, the Saga experience starts from the moment they leave their house. Our insurance business is in a transitional year as we prepare for our Aegeus partnership. Nonetheless, we've made significant steps forward towards our new, simplified, lower risk operating model and traded well in the meantime. Under the new leadership team we put in place earlier this year, led by Lloyd East, we've been investing in price and marketing to support long-term growth. and prepare us for the Aegeus partnership. And the results have been strong. Three out of our four policy lines are now growing after several years of decline, and our customer satisfaction scores reflect the refocus on customer that Lloyd and his team are bringing. Much credit goes to our insurance colleagues for Saga's insurance business being ranked in the top 50 organisations for customer satisfaction by the Institute of Customer Service. Only one of two insurers to be named in that group. Preparations for our AGEAS partnership have continued at pace as we work towards a significantly simplified, lower risk insurance business model. We completed the sale of our underwriting business in July, meaning that Saga is no longer exposed to underwriting risk, and we will transition a large part of our broking operations to Aegeus later this year as we go live with that home and motor partnership. I'm particularly excited about how new products and services can drive future growth. In particular, we are focused on creating more ways to engage on a deeper level with our customers more frequently. Take our money business, for example. The partnership we signed with NatWest earlier this year is exciting in its own right, given that we are expanding our suite of differentiated products. But more than this, it's symbolic of how we could pursue additional innovative partnerships across different business lines in the future. Elsewhere, we've already been deepening our customer relationships with lesser-known products within the Saga portfolio. For example, our Saga Wine Club, vintage by Saga, with more than 10,000 customers regularly buying wine from us. Similarly, our Saga Connections introductions service for older people engages with 13,000 subscribers checking their connections on the website multiple times a week, significantly increasing their exposure to Saga and our wider product set. These are great ways for us to remain front of mind with customers beyond their annual holiday or insurance renewal. While our primary focus remains on our core travel and insurance propositions, you can see the obvious crossover from those businesses to these types of additional services. So there are undoubtedly opportunities to cross-pollinate and build on areas like this that amplify our customers' engagement with Saga. our publishing business lies at the heart of our customer engagement strategy celebrating the lifestyles of older people it provides deep and regular engagement with our target customer group and in a digital world is increasingly a powerful source of insight into what is on their minds and what attracts their interest as you can see from this page Comprising our award-winning magazine, newsletters, website and online articles, it's a fantastic aspirational communication channel, positively portraying the lifestyles and interests of older people. This month's magazine encapsulates that perfectly. You will have seen coverage of our interview with Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren, right across the mainstream press and in every instance crediting Saga magazine in the reporting. And we have a real opportunity to build on this amazing content given the early success we are seeing across our digital channels and platforms. Our print magazine is already the largest paid subscription magazine in the UK By surfacing this content on our website and refreshing it regularly, we're now driving highly engaged customers into the heart of our business, where they spend more time and come back again to see what else we've got to say. They sign up for more content, allowing us to then communicate with them more broadly. We're now seeing 1.3 million monthly visits to our magazine website. 37% of which are new to Saga. And these numbers are growing every month. Building on this brilliant content, we're sending around 10 million newsletters each month, covering anything from lifestyle tips to personal finance matters, and seeing opening rates of up to 49%, a clear indication of the quality and relevance of that content. By refreshing our website, both our Saga homepage and the magazine site, we are driving traffic into the Saga environment, exposing customers to individual businesses and the messaging while they browse. You should recognise this slide from April, where Mark and I laid out our medium term targets. So I wanted to update you on our progress. We previously guided that UPBT for 2526 would be lower than that of 2425, largely due to the increase in finance costs. You will have seen from Mark's slide that as a result of our strong first half performance, we now expect UPBT to be in line with 2425. Trading EPD is now expected to be ahead of 2425, demonstrating the strong trading momentum that we've seen. And with leverage falling, we now expect year-end to be below that of 24-25. So while it's too early to update any medium-term projections, we have clearly made a strong start and are ahead of where we expected to be this year, giving us even greater confidence as to the level and timing of those medium-term targets. Finally, to wrap up before we move to questions. We've made significant progress in the first six months of this year. We've delivered a strong financial performance, particularly in travel, and we have significantly reduced our debt. Alongside this, we've achieved some significant strategic milestones toward our more customer-focused, simplified business model going forward. That puts us in a great position as we head towards the full year. Looking ahead, we expect to go live with our AGS partnership in Q4 2025, beckoning the start of a significantly less complex and lower risk insurance model for us next year. We will continue to build on the momentum we are seeing across our travel businesses, leveraging the benefits we are now seeing from the combined operations that we've put in place. And we'll go live with our NatWest Box partnership at the end of this year, which will start us down the path of engaging customers in more differentiated products and services beyond our travel and insurance offerings. In short, we'll keep delivering on what we said we would do. We'll now go to Q&A, taking questions in the room before moving online.