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.

Yeah, morning. Especially coming on the continued outperformance in the UK, so obviously quite a turnaround from last year. I think you were underperforming slightly last year in the market. Now it's sort of well over a percent in terms of outperformance. Just what sort of changed last year to this year in terms of those commercial leavers? What in particular is driving the outperformance and obviously your level of confidence that that can sustain? And then second one on Germany, obviously you're sort of ramping up nicely, reiterating the targets for the year in terms of profit. I think we've seen a bit of a softening in the market data recently. Just curious, just a context around what's going on in the market, your level of confidence in sort of being able to still get to those levels of profit if the market backdrop is just slightly against you.

Yeah, thanks, Vicky. Yeah, I mean, we're really pleased about the commercial performance in the UK as an outperformance. And, you know, I'm sure we'll get questions today about the rest of our outlook. And as I just said, the market has been slightly softer. Obviously, that's stayed data that we're looking at. I think the really encouraging thing is when RevPAR turns positive, which it will at some point, you can never predict exactly when, but when market RevPAR turns positive, I think we're setting ourselves up really well to take advantage of that. And it's not by chance. It's because we've got a really, really clear set of commercial initiatives in place. We've made a lot of changes to how we're running and operating our business commercially. We think of it in kind of really broad buckets with a clear underpin of a really strong brand, which we continue to strengthen. In the UK, our brand awareness and preference is super high, well over 90%, but also a really consistent quality guest delivery in our hotels. That, for us, is the underpin. And then there are kind of three rule of ways I think about the business. The first way is we've really sharpened up our approach to CRM, customer relationship management, and using the data that we've got. And we've got pretty much all of the data from all of our guests. And that is a big advantage. So I'll give you an example. We've done a lot of work on communication to our customers about nudging customers to rebook. So to increase frequency from customers, but also to reduce churn. And that's a really important area. We've up-weighted our team there. We've got a really clear plan that sits behind there. And I think it's really taking advantage of the data that we've got as a business. The second area of opportunity is getting more revenue from customers than staying with us. And that's all about effectively driving ancillary revenue and upselling and cross-selling to our guests, generally offering things to guests that actually they want. So if I give you a few examples, upgrading our Wi-Fi and then charging five quid for ultimate Wi-Fi, but fast, good quality ultimate Wi-Fi. Rooms with a view, which we've rolled out to significantly more rooms over the last 12 months. Early check-in and late check-out. We tried offering that in hotel. It's now digitally enabled, so effectively on the app and online you'll be offered that in a large selection of our hotels. Premier Plus, it's doing really well, 15 or 20 quid upgrade, so it's a really manageable upgrade amount. The new hotels we're now building are actually generally increasing the indexation of Premier Plus because it's performing super well. So a whole set of initiatives that sit behind a plan with more to come in the future about getting more revenue from our existing guests. And then there's a third bucket, which is, How do we get access to groups of customers that we're not currently getting access to? An example would be deepening our relationship with business travel agents, for example, which historically we've done very little with. So we've upgraded our business-to-business team. We've extended our business-to-business team. We've signed multiple new contracts. Really good opportunity for us. Every company at the moment is, of course, looking at their bottom line and efficiencies. As a strong value brand, we're incredibly well-placed. take advantage of that and we're making sure we harvest it. We talked last time at the year end a few weeks ago about an inbound trial, which we really think is a big opportunity for us to increase our indexation of inbound customers. We think that's going to be a creative revenue for us overall. And really sharpening up our digital marketing and search engine marketing as well, which we've made materials drive that. Fundamentally, we are a digital business. And I think we've really set the business up to think much more like a digital business and take advantage of the data that we've got. So I'd say those things underpinned by the product and the brand is driving that market outperformance and we're very focused on ensuring that we continue to do that. Vicky, the second part of your question was about Germany. And you'll see kind of from the numbers and how I covered the introduction, we're feeling really good about progress in Germany. Again, I know I'm a big track record, but it's important. The undertaking in Germany is the guest proposition that we've got. We're scoring super high on guest proposition. The reason I keep coming back to that is that that is going to make the brand and product super sustainable in the market. And I think create this really interesting platform for growth for us as we hit profitability and go beyond that. The German market, I would expect the next few months in the German market overall, there'll be less than euros and things like that. So there'll probably be a little bit of choppiness, but we're not seeing anything fundamental at all in the German market in terms of softness. And actually, you know, you've heard us talk about this before. Our estate is still maturing. And that means that the overall market backdrop is slightly less important for us in Germany because the estate is maturing and the brand is maturing. But like any year in Germany, there is a really kind of rich series of events. There's quite a rich set of events planned for the year. They don't always line up perfectly week by week or month by month. So you'll always see a little bit of choppiness in the numbers. The German market overall is performing well, and within the German market, as you've seen, we're performing particularly well without performing, and the estate brand continues to mature. So we're feeling good about hitting profitability, but frankly, most importantly, we're feeling good about that 70 million PBT target that we've laid out for the year 30. That's an 80 million improvement in PVT and getting to 20,000 rooms, which will make us the fastest growing hotel chain in Germany. There has to be material value attached to that before it's like a mountain.

Really helpful. Thank you very much.

Next question is from Jamie Roller at Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Morning, everyone. First question is just on the sort of forward-looking commentary. You said at the failure results that your book's position was up, queue and occupancy is down 4%. So maybe you can just discuss sort of forward-looking figures in that context. Is there anything at all to give you sort of confidence that London, that weakness can abate? And then the other question, just on the openings, I know you don't always give your openings in the call to the updates, but please give us your confidence level here for the full year targets for the UK and Germany for this year, and maybe quantify how much is under construction currently. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Jamie. So let me take the first part of the question, and then I'll hand over to Hemant to talk about the openings. I mean, you're right. The occupancy was down in quarter one. Actually, I think we got that right overall. The price elasticity was slightly lower and therefore holding rate overall was definitely the right thing to do. I think that contributed to our market outperformance. And I think it proves the agility of our model as well, which is, remember, what we're doing is aiming to maximize revenue in every hotel in every night. of every day of the week. So it is a complex set of algorithms and we need to be agile by price, by hotel, by market, by catchment area. And I think the indications are we're getting that right. Yes, we are booked ahead of where we were last year. Obviously, the kind of peak summer period is a really big period for our business. Bookings into the peak summer period, as we said before, are looking good. You know, we're really focused on that and doing well in the peak summer period. more than makes up for not, you know, the market being slightly softer in, let's say, Q1. So I think our focus is very clearly on driving that performance during that peak period. The overall of the market, as we've said before, it's impossible to say the point at which the rep car will reflect, inflect positively. It will inflect positively at some point. Obviously, as the months go on, we're lacking relatively weak numbers as an industry. And the run rate average is about 2% growth per year. So it will turn positive at some point, impossible to say exactly when, but that's why we remain resolutely focused on outperforming the market and setting the business up so that when the market does inflate, we're in a super strong place to take full advantage of that.

And then in terms of the openings, we're not changing guidance at all. We're still very happy that we're going to be able to get to guidance of about 400 rooms or so in Germany this year and about 1,000 to 1,200 rooms in the UK, exceeding 500 to 700 extensive growth plan rooms as well. You'll know that over the next five years, again, we're very confident we'll get to 98,000 rooms in the UK and 20,000 rooms in Germany by FY30. The run rate this year is lower than the run rate we'll see over the next few years, but as you'll remember, that is entirely due to the fact that three or four years ago, COVID, when we were signing contracts, the level of contracts we signed to access our pipeline was muted because of COVID and the restrictions that we had at that point. Since then, we've been adding rooms to the pipeline. Yeah, it takes a few years for those rooms to mature from, sorry, to build those rooms from the pipeline. We're just in this period at the point in time where we'll now see an acceleration over the next couple of years in terms of the rooms. So very confident we'll get to the 98,000 rooms in the UK, 20,000 in Germany by FY13, and very confident with the guidance we get at the beginning of the year for this year's crew Olympics.

Thanks, Danny. Okay, thank you very much. The next question is from Jared Castle at UBS. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you very much. I know a very, very small part of your business, an associate part of it, but any comments on kind of recent events in the Middle East and how it's impacting your JV there at the moment? And then any updates that you can give in terms of how the property valuation exercise is coming along, please? Thanks.

Let me take the kind of second part of the question first and I'll briefly cover the JV point and then Hemant can build on that if necessary. So I think in terms of property valuation, we articulated a few weeks ago our plan was to do the property valuation and communicate that at the half year. So at our intrams, which is at the end of October, we're on track to do that. We've been good at that market overall. You know, you've seen that one of the aspects of our five-year plan is that we're going to recycle approximately a billion pounds worth of property by full year 30, an important part of our growth programs. And overall, you know, we're making good progress on that. The market is opening up quite nicely. So, you know, our confidence is good in that area. And then from a property valuation point of view, we'll talk about that at half a year. In terms of the JV, the short answer is no. I mean, to your point, it's a very small part of our business. We haven't seen any particular impacts on that. and wouldn't particularly expect to, but each is a very small part of our plan. I suppose one other point just to kind of reiterate on our business with a big and successful business in the UK, this growing business in Germany, we are very insulated from things like the tariffs situation and actually generally more so from the global events. Although we are now getting a slightly higher proportion of the inbound market, we don't particularly focus on the inbound market. We're more of a domestic business, actually, in both the UK and Germany. And so if there are travel swings globally, I think we are relatively insulated from that. We've got a very, very kind of sustainable, strong business model that is somewhat less impacted by these events than a lot of our competitors can say.

Yeah, and just to add to that, I mean, the list is obviously a big place. We've got hotels in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, a good amount of hotels there with a joint venture. I probably haven't seen any real impact yet. We don't know if that will happen over time, but in terms of booking levels and travelling levels, we'll watch that over time. But, you know, I mean, it is fairly upset from what is going on at the moment, but clearly we'll watch that and we won't be complacent about it.

Thanks very much. Thanks, Emma.

Next question is from Richard Clark at Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Two for me, please. Just a question maybe on the Fitch report from a couple of weeks ago where they took you down to negative watch. I think on their assumptions, you're run quite close to your three-and-a-half-time leverage, sort of target your leverage target. maximum level of leverage. Do you kind of agree with that, Mats? Would you allow the business to be downgraded to BBB minus in the short term? Or if you were getting close to that, would you slow down buyback, slow down capex? Just what would be your reaction if you felt you were, you know, going to get close to that three and a half? And then secondly, I guess if I look at your release, quite small part of the business again, but big inflection on German S&B. Last year it was growing slower than accommodation S&B. This year it's growing 7% faster than accommodation. So what's the F&B strategy? Why is that now outpacing the accommodation sales?

Yeah, thanks, Richard. So let me – I'll start with the second question first. I'll touch on the answer to the first and then hand over to Hemant. So in terms of Germany F&B, I mean, Overall, if we step back from it, I think we're really benefiting from this very specific market focus that we've got in Germany. So we now have a leadership team in Germany. Eric Freemus is our leader in Germany with a dedicated team in Germany. And we really think benefits from that. You know, we've got a group of people who wake up every morning and they just think about how are we going to become number one in Germany, hit profitability and become number one in Germany. And I think that's a sign of us really growing up and maturing as a business. And SMB is a micro example of that. So they've done a number of really good initiatives in the hotels, whether that is things like cocktail hour in the hotels to get guests into the bar, for example, where margins are high. We've updated the menu in the restaurant. It's a really... It's a nicely simple offering. It's a relatively small menu. It's good quality perfume, but a relatively small menu. And, you know, we're doing well from repositioning that menu. And then, of course, the kind of happy hour focus encourages people to stay and eat something. And then our breakfast ratios have improved. We've improved the breakfast overall. We've made it more continental as well. What German guests like, we've improved point of sale. And we've done good old-fashioned things like have incentives and focus from the front desk about upselling breakfast, et cetera. And we've improved the digital journey where you can make it even easier to add breakfast, for example, as you book through it. So utilising our digital platform, utilising our people in the hotel, and then simplifying and improving the product to get more people to spend more money in that hotel. We've also got some really cool things out. We've got the spending machine proposition, which is like a mini shop in a number of our hotels, which is performing well, which gets some incremental revenue from guests for me. for example, or want something for their journey. So I would describe it as a really entrepreneurial approach and it gives us the whole performance and journey. I think it's giving us real confidence in what we're building there and the progress that we're making. In terms of the investment grade, the pitch point, I guess I'd just step back from it It's important that we remain investment grade to our business model. We have plenty of room to still remain investment grade but maybe haven't yet.

Yes, as Dominic said, there is no accident at all, being very deliberate, the very first thing we say when we talk about capital allocation is that we want to remain investment grade. You're right that we are triple B flat at the moment, and Fisher put us on a negative outlook on being triple B flat from a stable outlook, but they're still happy to keep us triple B flat. They recognize that we are going through a high level of investment note, you know, for a temporary period of time through the exciting growth program. but that we've had very strong historic capital discipline, the fact that we do talk about remaining investment grades part of our capital allocation framework by commitment to being so and that we're limiting our net capital spent to £500 million a year over the five-year plan. The five-year plan itself assumes that we remain roughly the same leverage ratio that we have at this stage and that will allow us to fully invest in the business and achieve the room growth and profit growth that we've talked about. The fact that we're triple B flat, to your question about would we, you know, would we be okay being triple B minus, like I said, we may invest in grey. We've, you know, we're happy, you know, to stay triple B flat. We would still be okay being triple B minus as well as long as we stay within those investment thresholds and give ourselves some headroom against that, which is to say it's three and a half times the leverage ratio.

Thank you, Richard.

Our next question is from Jennifer. Sorry, that's Jeffrey. Please go ahead.

Oh, hi. Can you hear me?

Yeah, we can, Jane. Hi, how are you doing?

Hello, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got two as well. One bigger picture question. Your answer around the commercial levers earlier was really, really helpful. Am I right in thinking that your commercial levers are far superior to your peers right now. And how easy would it be for your peers to replicate the abilities that you have today? And then second question is around your shorter-term REF PAR premium. When you reported four-year results in your seven-week kind of current trading update, your UK REF PAR premium was £6.79. For the whole quarter, it's £5.63 today. So just wondering has anything changed in the competitive environment that's driving the narrowing somewhat in the premium through the quarter? Thank you.

Okay. Let me answer the first part of the question and then I'll hand over to Henry to talk about the rest of our premium kind of phasing in the quarter. We always assume that our competitors are going to catch up with what we're doing. I mean, we're number one in the market. As you said, our outperformance has improved and increased versus our competitors overall. But we always assume that competitors are going to see what we're doing and learn from it. It's why it's really important to us that we have an ongoing set of initiatives and we keep doubling down on the success that we're seeing. You know, we have a really strong commercial focus as a business. We haven't shot all of our bullets in terms of potential, far from it. We will continue to execute extremely well, but also improve what our offering is. And we can see real opportunity in that as we project forward over the next few years. We can see real opportunity. I mean, fundamentally, we are advantaged. We've got a super strong brand and we've got scale. What that means is We can invest money in things like marketing because of our scale that helps drive customer acquisition and customer retention. We have the vast majority of the data from our customers. We're thinking much more like a tech business. That enables us to harvest that data. Again, not all of our competitors have the data from their customers. And we have this incredibly strong It's an incredibly strong network of hotels, 850 across the UK and of course growing in Germany. That means that locally we can build our awareness as well. So I think we're hard to compete against for those reasons. That scale and the vertical integration we've got gives us real advantages. It means we can execute at real pace. If we make a decision, for example, We'll try a happy hour in a hotel. If we see success in that, we can roll those kind of things out very quickly. Room with a view, we trialed it in a subset of hotels. We rolled it out rapidly, and we can do that because of diversity of operations. So the kind of privilege we've got is our core model. gives us an advantage in terms of executing our pace. But to do that, you need a really clear plan, and you need very strong execution. And we've got a very clear plan, and I think what we're showing is we are resolutely focused on very strong execution.

And, Jenna, just in terms of the Red Park premium, yes, you're right, our Red Park premium extended across the quarter this last year to £5.63, as our market performance has got stronger. The phasing across the quarter, actually, and it's really very much about Easter. When we announced the first seven weeks, we weren't the full way through all of the Easter phasing, as you might remember. Now, normally, that just means it's a shift of Easter. So, you know, across the quarter, it wouldn't make a difference. But the difference in phasing is actually because the week before going into Easter was a much stronger business week in terms of After Easter was a much weaker business week relatively. We did particularly well in midweek in terms of our rent-file premium extends. So, therefore, it really is just a phasing thing between a business week and a leisure week, year-on-year, switching from before and after Easter. If you look at the overall quarter and take out the Easter phasing, it's been fairly consistent in terms of the rent-file premium and the market outperformance.

Super clear. Thank you.

Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Brendan.

Our next question is from Alex Brignall at Rothschild & Co. Redburn. Please go ahead.

Morning. Thank you for taking the questions. One quickly on the trading commentary and then one on just all the expectations. On the trading commentary, could you just talk through a little bit of how your kind of yield management systems are working?

Obviously, for several quarters now, your trading has been up. year on year when you've given your update. And then obviously when it comes to it, it's ended up negative. So I suspect it's to do with how far in advance you're selling your rooms. So if you could give us a little bit of news on how that actually works, that would be incredibly helpful because it's just hard to know whether that, you know, whether the forward bookings being up suggests that, you know, it's actually going to end up up or whether it's to do with the way you manage your room sales. And then just in terms of folder expectations, obviously you're running a little below in terms of rev par for the quarter you've had so far, and the sum has been strong in previous years. So is it probably right to think that PBT will need to come down a little bit versus where consensus is about 474? Thank you very much.

Thanks, Alex. Let me just start the first part of your question and I'm going to hand over to Hemant who can build on it and then cover the second part of the question. I mean, so I think you know we've got what we call our automated trading engine. We believe it's best in class. Our vertical integration, i.e. that we run the pricing and deal management for every single hotel centrally, gives us an advantage. The system has access to all of the data, all of the booking patterns, and automatically adjusts, I mean obviously there is a centralised pricing team who work with the system, but the algorithms will automatically adjust the pricing to optimise the revenue that's accommodating the price and the opportunity to buy a hotel, which is complicated. I guess if we step back from it, the fact that we're consistently outperforming the market is a real kind of proof point that actually we are optimising revenue successfully. I'll give you a little example. A bit earlier in the calendar year, we dropped some of the prices in some of the hotels. The trading engine actually didn't necessarily call for that, but we could see that actually that potentially could work to just drop pricing a little bit. We didn't see the elasticity was particularly strong in those off-peak periods. So we very quickly reverted to the pricing structure that the system by hotel was calling for. That was the right decision. And you can see that from the red part outperformance point of view. The elasticity was relatively low. And in that situation, by dropping the price, you also lose optimally but you also lose price. But that will change by day, by week, by month and by season. So you'll see a higher, you know, in the summer, for example, you'll definitely see it will be less elastic and therefore you will want to keep the prices relatively higher. But it's changing constantly. Our kind of superpower is the automated trading engine and critically, our implementation of that automated trading engine, we won't have individual hotel managers overriding it, for example. It is done centrally. Does it get absolutely perfectly right in every hotel room? Of course not. There's always learnings from it, and we have a training team that meets daily and weekly on the outcomes. And I think this centralised approach is clearly a superpower for our business. But we're not complacent, and we continue to learn from it and continue to improve.

Yeah, and then just to finish Tom's point, I mean, a key point that's made there is that, you know, been consistent and proves that actually we've made right decisions in terms of pricing across the booking window. We don't know exactly what other argumenters booking windows look like and their booking profiles but that would probably indicate that we're getting it right across the full booking window because it would be very difficult to get it wrong in one part and massively get it better in another part. I don't know how it would work. So it would just be a question of behaviour. And that's your second point, regard to consensus this year. I mean, you'll notice we don't guide specifically on PBT expectations, consensus, nor RFR. We know that it's a very transparent RFR performance. in the market because of the weekly data that comes out and, you know, when we talk about what we expect to see in terms of how we'll form this market. So kind of unique specific items. You'll see what, you know, you and your peers are projecting at the moment, you know, you know, as well for Bloomberg. And there haven't been many. And what we'll say is we've had some of these updates. Those that are updated, I'd assume they're going to get to something like, you know, an estimated 0.7 to negative 0.1% red power. So that's just for information. Yeah, clearly that is an increase against the first quarter. So a projection for the full year. As we talked about earlier, there are easier costs, though, still to come. But beyond that, there's no other plans. We'll get more red power overall. Thanks, Alex.

So we've probably got time for one more question.

Thank you. Next question is from Estelle Weingraud at JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Two quick questions, please. The first one on the UK. You recently mentioned some sort of weakness in the short lead and off-peak leisure demand with buckets of strength and stability elsewhere. Have you seen any material changes in recent trends? And the second one on Germany, I mean, back to the point on potential weaker rest of momentum not helped by challenging comps in terms of the busy events calendar last year. Would you be able to provide some sort of TBD sensitivity for Germany? Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, Levi, hi, Estelle. I mean, in terms of, you know, patents, we're seeing no material changes. I mean, obviously, we're going into a busier, more peak time. So one of our messages was that kind of off-peak leisure has been a little bit softer. There's a bit less off-peak leisure in the peak time, by definition. But broadly, I think no material changes overall. I mean, the REF PAR kind of, reductions that we've reported, relatively small swings. So broadly, our occupancy in our hotels is still very high overall, so it's relatively It's rose through the edges, which is why it doesn't take much for the REF part to inflect positive. As I said, we're very focused on that, but critically we're just focused on how do we consistently outperform the market, because when the market does inflect, we will be therefore in a very good place.

The biggest part of what's happening in the German market, obviously for us, is much more about how our sites are maturing over time. You can try and predict from the market what might be happening, but the reality is The market, you know, using market data to, you know, scan a client isn't really going to help you, Estelle. But actually, obviously, to the overall material prediction, we're aware Germany is a very small part of the business still in terms of profit contribution at this stage. The guidance we've given that we're going to get to profitability this year between £5 million and £10 million still stands. We're still happy that we're on track to be able to do that. Clearly, as we go through the year, we feel that's not the case. In a material way, we will update you going forward.

If we just step back from looking at Germany for a moment, you kind of think what we're building in Germany now, I mean, we're really excited about it. You can see the progress we're making in terms of REVPAR and REVPAR growth. Also, in terms of our confidence about hitting those 20,000 rooms in five years' time before year 30. And the outperformance versus our capacity in Germany is super encouraging. I mean, it's across the whole estate, but our new mature hotels are particularly strong. So I think that's giving us overall really strong confidence now as we're looking at the business that we're creating. And across our key competitors in Germany, Motor One, they're performing well. They're very profitable. They've got a model that works. It's a proof point of what we're building in Germany. And if we look at our kind of share price overall for Whitbrown. You could argue there's very little in it for Germany. And I think time is rapidly approaching where, you know, I think we are really displaying that there is value that we're creating. We're on track to become the number one hotel chain in Germany. That is definitely going to have value attached to it. And we think the building is fantastic, the stay hotels, the strong branch. I'm conscious of time. Firstly, we'd like to thank everybody for their time today. I mean, you know, we've covered it briefly, but our five-year plan is transformative. We're making excellent progress overall, and we're really confident in our five-year plan delivered, £300 million for mental PBIT, and at least £2 billion for the shareholder terms. We appreciate your time today and your support. Thank you very much.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.