Whitbread plc

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's Whitbread Q126 Trading Update call. My name is Seb, and I'll be the operator for your call today. If you'd like to ask a question during the Q&A session, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star 2. I will now hand over to Dominic Ball to begin. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Seb. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining the call for our 421 Trading Update this morning. I'm joined by Emma Patel, our Group CFO, and we look forward to answering your questions shortly. Hopefully you've had a chance to review the Course 1 release this morning. I'm going to start with a brief overview for those who haven't seen it, and then we'll open up the call for Q&A. Before I touch on the first quarter's performance, I wanted to just say a few words on the excellent progress we're making on our key strategic initiatives that underpin our five-year plan, that are set to deliver incremental profit of at least £300 million by full year 30 and generate more than £2 billion for shareholders. In the UK, we're extending our market leading position through a combination of network expansion, our accelerating growth plan and our ongoing programme of commercial initiatives that mean we are performing ahead of the market. We are on track to deliver the £60 million of cost savings that we have guided for this year as part of our ongoing efficiency programme. And in Germany, the scale, quality and value of our offer is raising our brand awareness at the same time as our hotels and brands are continuing to mature. As a result, we remain on course to hit profitability this year. Now let me turn now to our quarter one performance. As you have all seen from the market data, trading in the first quarter, which ran to the 29th of May, was against a softer demand backdrop, and this meant that UK accommodation sales and REF PARC were both back 2% versus last year. However, thanks to the positive impact of our commercial programmes, this represented a meaningful outperformance versus the mid-scale and economy sector on both accommodation sales and REF PARC. and our REVPAR premium increased to £5.63. Our outperformance was across both London and the regions, and our particularly strong outperformance in London was down to our higher weighting in central London, where demand has remained relatively robust and where we have been adding more rooms. In Germany, our business is continuing to perform strongly. Total accommodation sales grew by 16% in constant currency, with our commercial initiatives and the increasing maturity of our estate underpinning strong reptile growth. Whilst the whole estate outperformed the market in Q1, we are particularly pleased with our cohort of more established hotels, which again delivered strong reptile growth, up 17%, reaching €72 in the period. While our normal booking patterns mean that forward visibility is somewhat limited, our forward books position is still ahead of last year, and with more of our commercial initiatives in train, we remain confident in being able to stay ahead of the market. I'll now hand back to Seb to host the Q&A. As you know, we have our AGM today, and we only have half an hour this morning for questions. Given it's only a few weeks since our last update, could I please ask you to limit your questions to two per person? Thank you very much. Thanks, Seb.

Thank you. First question comes from Vicky Stern at Barclays. Please go ahead.