Whitbread plc

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's Whitbread Full Year 26 Interim Results 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. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star 2. I'll now hand the floor to Dominic Poole, Chief Executive, to begin the call. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Seb. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining myself and Hemant Patel, our group CFO for our half-year results call. Hopefully, you've all been through our release and you've had a chance to listen to our results presentation this morning. Before we open up the call for Q&A, I thought I'd just pull out a few key points. Let's start with our first half results. As you probably all know from the published data, the UK market returned to growth in the second quarter. As a result, UK accommodation sales were in line with last year for the first half, And with the benefit of our commercial program, we continue to outperform the mid-scale and economy market on both accommodation sales and REFPA. Now, food and beverage performed in line with our guidance, and we continue to make great progress on our accelerating growth plan to transform our offer at around 200 of our lower-returning branded restaurants and unlock 3,500 higher-returning extension rooms. We've done really well with our cost savings, delivering £43 million and a half, helping to partially mitigate cost inflation that ran slightly ahead of our previous expectations. As a result, UK EBITDA was down just 3% and we're increasing our full year guidance to £65 to £70 million cost efficiencies for this year. In Germany, we delivered a positive revenue performance that was ahead of the market, despite softer than expected market demand in the second quarter, and we significantly reduced our adjusted loss before tax. We continue to make great strategic progress, with a recent agreement to acquire 1,500 rooms in key locations, taking us closer to becoming the number one hotel brand. Turning to current trading, first in the UK, the positive trading momentum has continued during the first six weeks, with both total accommodation sales and rev par up 3%, and our forward-booked position remains ahead of last year. In Germany, after a softer start to September, the market has returned to growth in more recent weeks, and we remain on course to reach profitability this year. Now turning to the five-year plan, it was this time last year that we announced a five-year plan. As summarized in our presentation this morning, we are executing at pace and we remain on track to deliver a step change in our performance and return £2 billion to shareholders by full year 30. In the first half, we completed a number of sale and leasebacks and with a positive updated valuation of our property, we are confident in recycling at least £1 billion worth of property. This will be reinvested into high-returning projects like our Accelerating Growth Plan and further network expansion in the UK and Germany. With significant cash flow, we can deliver a step change in profitability and deliver £2 billion for shareholders through both dividends and share buybacks. Now, we do have a lot of people on the call today. So before we move into Q&A, in the interest of time, could I please ask you to keep to a maximum of two questions each? With that summary, I'll now hand back to Seb to host the Q&A. Thank you.

Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Our first question is from Jamie Rollo at Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.