MakeMyTrip Limited

and Group Chief Executive Officer, and Mohit Kabra, our Group Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, this live event is being recorded by the company and will be made available for replay on our IR website shortly after the conclusion of today's event. At the end of these prepared remarks, we will also be hosting a Q&A session. Furthermore, certain statements made during today's event may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of safe harbor provision of US Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, are subject to inherent uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. Any forward-looking information relayed during this event speaks only as of this date, and the company undertakes no obligation to update the information to reflect changed circumstances. Additional information concerning these statements is contained in the risk factors forward-looking statements section of the company's annual report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC on June 16, 2025. Copies of these filings are available from the SEC or from the company's investor relations department. I would like to now turn over the call to Rajesh. Over to you, Rajesh.

Thank you, Vipul. Welcome, everyone, to our first quarter call of fiscal 2026. The first quarter of the fiscal year is typically a high season for leisure travel, and this quarter also started on a similar note, with strong demand momentum and booking growth in mid-20s in the month of April. However, domestic demand was impacted due to the unfortunate incident in Palgaon, leading to geographical escalations in the month of May and the tragic crash of a passenger airplane in June. While domestic demand for leisure travel was particularly weak for domestic leisure destinations for air travel and holiday packages, being a one-stop shop on travel allowed us to drive growth from other travel services, other modes of transport, as well as ancillary travel services catering to non-leisure travel use cases. We also continued to drive growth in international travel, where online booking behavior is growing and the overall demand was relatively less impacted. And last but not the least, we managed to continue the growth momentum in our corporate offerings. As a result, despite the exceptional macro headwinds during the reported quarter, I'm pleased to report that we delivered very good top-line growth on our hotels and packages, bus and ancillary business segments, and also managed to grow market share in domestic air segment marginally from 30.6% to 30.8%. Our adjusted operating profit for the quarter was also at $47.3 million, witnessing growth of 21% year on year. We believe this impact is short-term in nature and doesn't materially alter our view of the travel sector's long-term growth prospects of the Indian travel and tourism market. India's travel sector is poised for strong long-term growth driven by rising disposable income, infrastructure upgrades, and fundamental shift in consumer behavior to spend more on travel. Indian consumers are increasingly prioritizing experiential travel activities and experiences. There's a clear shift toward taking multiple holidays and short breaks throughout the year, signaling a structural change in travel consumption patterns which bode well for us. International outbound travel from India presents a significant growth opportunity as well. With more Indians eager to explore global destinations, short-haul markets are gaining traction driven by better air connectivity, simplified visa processes, and rising preferences for quick getaways. For Q1 fiscal year 26, our international air ticketing revenue grew by over 27% year-on-year, far outpacing industry growth. Similarly, our international hotels revenue grew by over 45% year-on-year. Our international business now contributes about 27% to the overall revenue, up from 24% during the same period last year. Let me now turn to the business segment starting with the ticketing business. As mentioned before, this quarter was impacted by operational disruptions, particularly for domestic market due to uncontrollable factors. However, we delivered above market growth and gained share in our air business. As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance customer experience, we have launched a new version of our zero cancellation product for domestic flights designed to boost user confidence and repeat usage for frequent domestic flyers. We've also further streamlined the airport transfer booking process for domestic flights. Travelers can now conveniently reserve a cab of their choice from a wide range of options while booking their flight. For our international travelers, we also expanded our lounge offerings to include debauchers from 131 international airports. Customers can now conveniently purchase airport lounge access while booking their international flights, enhancing their pre-flight experience. Our accommodation business, which includes hotels, homestays, and packages, delivered healthy growth despite a lower share of leisure bookings this quarter due to macro disruptions, particularly for our 100% leisure focused packages business. Jammu and Kashmir, a key summer travel destination, saw a dip in tourist inflow this quarter due to the unfortunate incident in Balgaon that's affecting our growth. Gross booking value of hotel and packages business grew by 15.3% year-on-year in constant currency for Q1 fiscal year 26. Gross bookings for standalone hotels business, however, grew by 19.4% year-on-year on constant currency basis. While domestic leisure travel faced a win this quarter, other segments including corporate travel and international outbound delivered strong growth. As we deepen our reach across the country, we see good traction from tier three cities reflecting rising travel adoption in smaller cities. In line with this trend, we continue to expand our supply base in the domestic market. We now have 91,000 plus accommodation options available on the platform covering 2,000 plus cities in the country. For international market on the other hand, we have been expanding our international hotel supply through a direct contracting strategy focused on high-demand outbound destinations. In the past year, we have added over 2,000 directly contracted hotels across 50 cities in 20 countries. These 50 cities collectively account for more than half of India's outbound travel. During the quarter, we partnered with Premier Inn, the UK's largest hotel chain. This addition further strengthens our international hotel portfolio with a brand known for its scale, reliability, and value, offering Indian travelers more relevant choices across key cities in the United Kingdom. Our product strategy is built on deep consumer insights and leveraging GenAI. This is helping us transform hotel booking experience on our brands through a robust and comprehensive knowledge graph that integrates hotel data, reviews, images, location insights, and user intent. This enables natural language search and context-aware recommendations as well. As the graph evolves, it will unlock more personalized and relevant results for our customers. Recognizing the influence of food and hotel selection by Indian travelers, we have made dining-related content a key product priority on MakeMyTrip. From showcasing on-property dining options like rooftop lounges and specialty cuisines, for premium travelers to highlighting availability of vegetarian and Jain meals in religious destinations. We have scaled food-related data coverage to over 21,000 properties across India. This allows us to deliver more context-aware hotel recommendations based on travelers' culinary preferences. Another emerging trend among Indian travelers is wildlife tourism. We have prioritized this insight by enriching our content and discovery signals. With increasing interest in Nature-based experiences among families and small groups, the proximity of a hotel to a national park, safari gate or forest buffer zone has become a key factor in trip planning. For over 2,000 properties, especially near wildlife hotspots, we now surface these details prominently driving higher engagement and conversion. In our holiday packages business, international outbound packages continue to scale well with Japan leading the growth followed by Africa. For international, we continue to add destinations and options for travelers. We launched packages for Jordan with the start of direct flights from Mumbai on Royal Jordanian Airlines. We also launched packages for Tashkent. Our homestay business continues to scale. We continue to build the category and expand our homestay supply. We added more supply in our top 18 pilgrimage cities led by Varanasi, Ayodhya and Tirupati, which witnessed a 103% increase in new rooms on the platform versus same quarter last year. The supply in business cities grew 46% year-on-year, with notable growth in new rooms in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Gurgaon. Among international travelers, particularly solo travelers, families and groups, have observed a rising preference for alternative accommodations such as hostels and apartments. To cater to this shift, we implemented targeted interventions to surface these property types to relevant customer cohorts in Europe and other key destinations. As a result, we saw an improvement in the share of alternative accommodation with our international business. In our bus business, growth further improved in Q1 fiscal year 26 with all regions growing in double digits. Our growth continues to be broad-based with all regions growing in double digits with north and east outpacing traditional bus markets like south and west during the quarter. We are also noticing significantly higher growth from pilgrimage and tier 3 destinations. Inventory addition remained buoyant throughout Q1 fiscal year 26 with private inventory crossing 44,000 daily schedules by the end of the quarter. This was driven by new bus addition by existing operators, which are predominantly sleeper buses in long routes, including the addition of 90 plus premium Volvo buses in the quarter. This trend of investment in new buses is likely to continue in the coming quarters. For RTCs, government buses too, we saw significant increase in inventory with the acquisition of GSRTC Gujarat, State Roadways Transport Corporation, and an almost 4x increase in digitized inventory from UPS RTC. This has resulted in RTC inventory crossing 40,000 daily schedules as of June. Our international bus business continues to be promising. In Malaysia, which is a big market and where we are the market leader, with a healthy market share in online bus booking, we are adding more adjacent products such as ferries and activities. In other countries, we are in the market-making mode and seeing steady progress. We continue to strengthen the customer proposition within our trains business. This quarter, we launched an industry-first seat availability prediction feature powered by a machine learning-based forecasting model. By integrating real-time seat availability signals within the booking funnel and deploying targeted notifications, we have enabled more confident and timely booking decisions. For our cabs business, we continue to scale both airport transfer and intercity cabs. During the quarter, we launched flight track cabs to ensure seamless airport to city rides for our customers. By using real-time flight data, we dynamically adjust cab pickup times, guaranteeing timely service whether a flight is delayed or arrives early. This initiative has improved our service reliability and has led to higher NPS. We plan to enhance accuracy using data science, increase supply participation, and scale this across all our platforms. Our corporate travel business via both our platforms, that is MyBiz and Quest2Travel, is witnessing strong growth. Our active corporate customer count on MyBiz is now over 66,500 plus, compared to 59,700 customers during the same quarter last year. And for Quest2Travel, the active customer count has reached 515 large corporates, compared to 458 customers in the same quarter last year. Looking ahead, we remain optimistic about the long-term growth prospects of the Indian travel sector and are firmly committed to delivering sustained value to our customers, partners, and stakeholders. Before I conclude, I want to extend my sincere thanks to all our existing and new shareholders and investors for their trust and support in our recent capital raise, which contributed to making it a very successful offering. With this, let me now hand over the call to Mohit for the financial highlights of the quarter.

Thanks Rajesh and hello everyone. We started the quarter with strong gross booking growth of 25.3% during April, which tapered off during May and June due to multiple macro challenges that Rajesh has already spoken about. What stands out during the quarter is that within the Indian travel market, we were able to leverage our diversified mix to grow faster in other segments when domestic air ticketing and holiday packages demand was muted. Secondly, dial up our corporate platforms when leisure demand was impacted. Also, push international offerings when domestic demand was subdued. And lastly, drive operating leverage by impacting cost leavers when growth seemed to have muted despite peak travel seasonality. This performance underscores the importance of our diversified business portfolio, disciplined financial management, and operational agility. For the reported quarter, revenue as per IFRS grew by 7.8% year-on-year in constant currency to $268.8 million from $254.5 million in the same quarter last year. The growth was impacted due to a series of external events. Profit for the quarter was 25.8 million compared to 21 million during the same quarter last year, registering 22.6% year-on-year growth. Registered operating profit reached a growth of 21% year-on-year and reached $47.3 million compared to $39.1 million in Q1 of last year. Moving on to our segment results, our A-ticketing adjusted margin stood at $97 million, raising a growth of 11.5% year-on-year in cost and currency. Take rates for the A-ticketing business were in line at 6.8%. In the domestic air market, we maintained our market share despite the macro challenges at over 30%. Our international A-ticketing business continues to grow faster than the market with increasing market share. Volumes in this segment grew by over 21% year-on-year, which was almost three times the market growth of 7% during the quarter. The mix of international air ticketing business revenue has now reached an all-time high of 42% compared to 37% during the same quarter last year. In the hotels and packages segment, adjusted margin growth was 16.3% year-on-year in constant currency, resulting in adjusted margin of $121.9 billion during the quarter. The growth was lower than expected as the holidays packages business was largely flat year-on-year because of domestic leisure travel being impacted, despite the accessibility. Acreates for the quarter were in line at 17.7% in this segment, As Rajesh has already explained, we have also been increasing directly contracted international accommodation options, particularly in destinations where direct flight connectivity has been established and select long-haul destinations which are of great interest to Indians. As a result, the mix of international hotels and packages revenue reached an all-time high of 25.2% during this quarter, up from 21% during the same quarter last year. In a bus ticketing business, the adjusted margin stood at $42.6 million, registering a strong year-on-year growth of over 34.1% in constant currency terms. Take rates for the business were in line at 10.3%. A ground transport business, which includes rail and intercity cabs, and is reported under the Others category, witnessed strong growth. Gross booking for the quarter stood at $71.8 million, witnessing a growth of 31.6% year-on-year, in constant currency for the ground transport businesses. Most of the ancillary services reported in the Others category, such as travel insurance, Forex, et cetera, also grew very well during the quarter. As a result, adjusted margin from Others category came in at $21.5 million, witnessing a strong growth of 47.4% year-on-year in constant currency. We remain focused on building operating cost efficiencies and driving operating leverage in our fixed costs including personal, selling, and general administrative expenses. Similarly, our customer acquisition costs, that is our marketing and sales promotion expenses, continue to remain efficient. Quarter one and quarter three are generally higher brand marketing expense quarters in line with the seasonality. In this quarter, we were able to partially roll this back through the tepid months of May and June. As a result, our customer acquisition costs came in at 5.1% of gross booking value. All other expenses were in line and helped us expand the overall adjusted operating margin from 1.64% of gross booking value during Q1 of last year to 1.8% of gross booking value during the current reported quarter. We ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $804 million and will continue to look for inorganic investment opportunities during the year. During the quarter, we were also able to significantly dial up on our share repurchase initiatives. We raised additional capital of approximately $3.1 billion through primary offering of ordinary shares and zero coupon convertible serial notes. The entire net proceeds from the offerings were used for repurchase of Class B shares. After the completion of the reported quarter on 2nd July 2025, we have completed the repurchase and cancellation of 34.3 million Class B shares. As a result of the repurchase, we have a total of 95.4 million shares outstanding compared to 111.3 million shares outstanding as on 31st March, 2025. Trip.com is now the largest minority shareholder with approximately 16.9% voting shares in the company. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our existing and new incoming investors who have participated in the aforesaid primary offerings. With that, I'd like to turn the call back to Vipul for Q&A.

Thanks, Mohit. Anyone wishing to ask a question can click on the raise hand options on their computer screen, and we will take the questions one by one. The first question is from the line of Sachin Salgaonkar of Bank of America. Sachin, you may please ask your question now.

Thanks, Vipul. Hi, management. Congrats on a good set of numbers in what was looking as a very difficult quarter. I have a few questions. First question, I know you as a company were targeting revenue and GMV growth of 20% odd every year. Given the fact that 1Q is at a 16% growth on revenue, how should we think about the upcoming quarters in the sense that for full year, are we still aiming at a 20% growth or we might see growth lower than 20 odd percent? So that's question number one, but let me pause here.

Yes, Sachin, maybe I can just take that. So if you really look at it across lines of businesses, you know, if I look at across all lines of businesses, the adjusted margin growth overall stands at close to about 18.8%. So we're kind of pretty close to the, you know, the 20% mark that we were kind of wanting to achieve. This is coming despite all the, you know, the micro events that we've already talked about during the quarter. I think that kind of really gives us comfort that we are still on target to be in the high teens to 20s in terms of overall growth for the year as well.

So Mohit, in a way, what you're saying is the next three quarters, the growth could be better than 1Q to achieve your full year target of 20%, right?

Yes, we do expect that we should be able to dial back growth because like we said, you know, April started off with much better growth, but it's the events of

may and june which have kind of you know brought down the overall number for the quarter got it um second question sorry sachin sorry sachin if i may just add one important data point here You know, while what Moit said about the rest of the segments in our commentary, we covered that only domestic market was, you know, more impacted. I think we should look at constant currency growth number and the gap on constant currency, you know, from growth perspective is just 1.2%. So 18.8% is actually growth for constant currency overall.

Fair point, Rajesh. Thank you for that. Second question, just wanted to gauge the consumer sentiment out here. I know because of the three one-off issues, be it India-Pakistan conflict, Iran-Israel or to that matter even an Air India plane going down. Clearly, the near-term consumer sentiment was negative. So just wanted to understand, you know, as we head out of 1Q, are you seeing an improvement in the sentiment? I do understand, you know, from a seasonality perspective, 1Q, 3Q are strong. But keeping aside seasonality, do we see the consumer sentiment improving? And a related question perhaps is, you know, obviously for last couple of years, we are seeing a bit of an air supply issue. If anything, that supply issue has again increased. So we would love to get your thoughts in terms of how we should see that also.

Yeah, maybe I can take that, Sachin. So we've started seeing the sentiment improving, Sachin. In fact, if you look at the, you know, the overall daily flown data, first in the domestic market and then look at the international flown data, you would see the trends. You know, April the daily flow numbers were actually pretty close to the average of the previous quarter. And the impact was May and June. But if you really break that into literally day on day trend, you would see that the June numbers have started to come back. So we do see the overall sort of sentiment improving. We obviously see data on our platform in terms of booking trends for even leisure destination slowly and gradually coming back as well. So I do think, like I was just saying it as part of the commentary as well, that this is not, this is like a temporary disruption. I don't think it's going to sort of change the structural shift that was happening on consumer behavior on spending more as part of their discretionary income on travel or on any other experience. I don't think so. And we've seen that sort of recovery already happening. Slowly and gradually, obviously, it'll pick up. This running quarter is non-season travel quarter as well. But keeping that in mind, keeping seasonality in mind, we do see the sentiment coming back. We also keep doing our own sort of consumer sentiment survey. And there also, we've started to see the recovery trend week on week. And on the supply side, yes, there was a temporary disruption. And this was completely this time around for a different reason, right? This was just more for the safety check for various planes and all the partners just being absolutely making sure that they had to double down on safety checks, etc. And because of which some temporary announcements were made. But there also, we have started to see planes coming back, the overall sort of daily departures coming back to track. And as far as travel or daily flown traffic is concerned, that in any case, relatively was less impacted. And we see that sort of coming back as well. So I don't think on the supply side, anything, you know, changes from what our narrative was, let's say, beginning of the the fiscal when we had reported our last year results, you know, last quarter results of last fiscal and full year, it remains the same. Seems like this impact was in the quarter and we see the recovery happening and it should go back to the sort of same levels of April in terms of just the supply that was already there in the market. So I don't really see any further situation deteriorating from what it was at the beginning of the fiscal year.

Thank you, Rajesh. And my last question is on a potential IPO in India. And as you know, after Ctrip selling down stake and becoming below 20%, few investors do have some expectations about a potential IPO in India. I know management in the past had reiterated listing in India as a medium-term aspiration, but would love to get an incremental update from you guys. Anything we as analysts and investors need to watch out for us to get a sense that if indeed there is a thought process and there is a clarity about a potential IPO and what are some of the events to watch out from that perspective.

Maybe I can take that. You're right and I think I just reiterate that it continues to be a midterm opportunity for us to look at. Like we have been calling out in the past, you know, the India capital markets is something that we'll definitely look at. And we'll have the next opportunity to kind of, you know, response. The current exercise that we did was largely, you know, more repurchase program. And like we have always said, you know, the current shareholding pattern that we had even pre the repurchases wasn't really a deterrent to any kind of capital market activity globally or within India. So I think the eventual listing in India is going to be more linked to fundraise plans as they materialize. And right now, like I've called out, we've only added further to the balance sheet through the quarter. And we're currently sitting at about $800 million of cash and cash equivalent. So unless we find a significant reason to deploy a large amount of funds, I think the India plans will be more of a mid-term opportunity than a short-term opportunity.

Got it. Thanks, guys, and all the best.

Thank you, Sachin. Thanks, Sachin. The next question is from the line of Manisha Dukia from Goldman Sachs. Manisha, may I please ask you a question now?

Hi, good evening. Thank you for taking my questions. My first question is on again, demands. When I think about your international segment, which again has done like a really good quarter, you mentioned 27% and hotel 45%. And now the overall international segment is more than a quarter of your revenue. So one, just want to get a sense of, do you think this runway of 30% plus growth on a blended basis is still like a long way to go and you can continue to deliver on this number for some more time. And is it largely a function of you adding more supply or is it also a function of continued shift to online on the international side? And a related question there is, you gave the monthly booking data for April, May and June for your overall segments, air, hotel and bus. Was the trend similar for international as well, where April was very strong and then May and June worsened? Or was the trend in international different? That was my first set of questions.

Okay, maybe I can just start with that and then Mohit, you please add. So Manish, you're absolutely right. Two reasons you've already actually called out. And it's a combination of the two. I'll give you one more reason. on the international trend. One tool that you called out is under-penetrated online market, which is absolutely true. Behavior is going more and more towards online booking. And the second is we are doing a lot of effort on adding supply on both the segments directly contracted. Of course, just working really hard to also picking up consumer insights to improve the product experience as well. But I'll tell you one more macro reason for this. And that is about the overall sort of country growth, you know, consistently GDP growing, rising income, disposable income growing. Also is sort of leading to, you know, sort of international travel, the overall international travel growth as well. So that is the third macro reason. And it's likely to be there for the foreseeable future, all these macro drivers, because there is headroom everywhere. So if the country continues to keep growing and the incomes continue to keep rising, you will see more and more urban population, tier one, tier two cities, especially, and look to sort of leverage and cash on um the air connectivity improving the direct flights can air connectivity improving and also the uh the ease of travel thanks to the you know short all destinations the the visa is becoming very very sort of easy um uh you know easily available for people and smooth experience for getting those visas without any hassles um all of these trends if you really bring them together would help the international, you know, travel segment to definitely grow. And, you know, from our strategic sort of direction standpoint, we're clearly doubling down on that.

Maybe I can just add, Manish, I can quote two questions that you had. Yes, while Rajesh has already covered the depth of supply, both for domestic and international, I would also say the overall width of supply, because we keep on adding new Ancillary services on the platform as well. So that's another one of the other kind of in a source of incremental growth that we want to keep dialing upon. And of course, the continued shift from offline to online will be a driver as well. So just on the on the first question that you had, this would be the kind of drivers for growth and On the second one, on international, you know, while domestic was very, very different growth in May and June, international wasn't as impacted even through May and June. And therefore we were able to drive much better growth through the international offerings that we have on the platform.

Thank you. My second set of question was on competition. So one, if you can just maybe highlight the general competition landscape, particularly from airline direct, has there been any change? And second, from one of the other listed OTAs, which reported results, I think, last week, their growth, at least on headline, looked stronger than your reported growth. Anything that you can talk about in the competition dynamics that may have changed in the market where any of the OTAs may have become slightly more aggressive than they were in the past. Would you love to get your thoughts?

I can take the second one probably. So in terms of if you look at the overall competitive dynamics and shares of various OTAs or intermediaries in the segment, we've generally seen the number three, four, five kind of changing places often. And this could be for multiple reasons. What we are kind of seeing largely across what we kind of, you know, actually more targeting across various segments is if you really look at it on domestic air, we've got a very strong leading market share of close to over 30%. And therefore, and that kind of, you know, sizable share of the market we kind of are pretty realistic that we would tend to grow in line with the market and it's not going to be disproportionate to the market any longer. Whereas for some of the OTAs with kind of marginal shares in the segment, you could see a little bit of a kind of trend changing depending upon seasonality, depending upon cooperative dynamics. But we are more focused on ensuring longer term growth and longer term market share remaining holding you know, at the 30% plus level. So that's more on the overall, you know, change in kind of, you know, market participants and the reporters there from. Coming to overall competitive dynamics, no significant change as such, you know, largely in line with what it has been for the last few quarters or for the last couple of years. including on the direct side. I think the dialing up of supply and direct is something which we have always said, all suppliers will be kind of, of course, looking at maintaining or kind of increasing their share of direct share of the overall demand size. But we want to kind of make sure that, you know, we continue to, you know, gain a meaningful share of most of our suppliers. We are not looking at kind of, you know, doing 100% of any supplier, but we would want to have a rightful share and also provide distribution at the most efficient level and in the most effective kind of cost of distribution. And that's what makes sure that a longer term kind of growth with each of the suppliers remains consistent.

Thank you, Mike. My last question, Mike, to you is on just capital allocation. In the March quarter, we saw some buyback from public shareholders in June. Of course, you had that large share repurchase from trip.com, but outside of that, I don't think we saw any buyback. You obviously have 800 million of cash in the books and you're needing significant cash. Is there like a... formal buyback policy that you're looking at beyond what you've put in the you know letter that there's a maximum amount that you will allocate towards buyback and from a buyback strategy perspective is there like a certain share price number that you have in mind that if it goes below that you look to intervene and buy back or are you thinking about that some color that would be helpful

No, sure. Happy to share some color. And, you know, if you really look at it, during the primary offerings also, we had called out that we were looking to deploy up to about $200 million from the balance sheet, you know, to kind of achieve the objectives of the overall, you know, repurchase program of Class B shares, right? It so happened that we were able to kind of, you know, upsize the offerings and therefore we didn't have to deploy from the balance sheet. Otherwise, the intent during this quarter was to largely deploy in terms of, you know, repurchase of class B versus class A because that kind of, you know, works even better from a company's standpoint and even from the point of view of the minority shareholders. So that's been the objective. That said, I think if you really look at it in terms of, you know, the overall size of the repurchase program, we've been able to significantly dip into it for the quarter, which is a transaction that we've already reported, but we remain open to kind of, you know, dipping into further buyback even in the in the rest of the year, because we haven't really deployed directly from the balance sheet through the quarter. Now, in terms of a program, whether we want to get into a steady program, like we have said, at least at this stage, we want to kind of keep it more like an opportunistic program, and therefore we'll deploy it as we believe there's a right opportunity to do so. But in the future years, we'll remain open to kind of looking at a steady program as well.

Thank you for taking my questions. All the best.

Thank you, Manish.

Thanks, Manish. The next question is from the line of Aditya Suresh of Macquarie. Aditya, you may please ask your question now.

Thank you, Apple. Thank you, Rajesh. Most taking my question as well. The first one is on hotels. I had two questions within hotels. So one is, I mean, so your standalone kind of room nice book was up about 18%. I'm just curious to understand, was there any kind of down trading which you all witnessed in your platform through the quarter?

Sorry, what? Say that again, Aditya?

Was there any kind of drop in the average room nights, the rate for the room night booked in the quarter?

Yeah, no, I got it. I got it. A very interesting question. And very interesting sort of trend also that we noticed in the quarter. See, this is, you know, as we mentioned, this is supposed to be a, you know, high travel season quarter for leisure travel for sure. And that was muted. You know, just because overall sort of sentiment was down, General expectation was that there will be impact on ADRs or the prices might go down significantly and all. The reality was that that did not happen. It was like small, literally one or two percentage point in certain segments drop, but nothing significant, nothing material.

That's really interesting. Thank you for clarifying that, Rajesh. And then within hotels, again, can you clarify what proportion of activity is MICE related? And was that a bit of a growth tailwind here for you this quarter?

Actually, overall corporate. Overall corporate, you know, because it was non-leisure travel use case, right? So it was non-discretionary, if you will. Overall corporate and MICE is part of that corporate. um you know actually has been growing very very well for us and continue to keep sort of uh growing even in the in the quarter that we are reporting out and my first no real exception uh but uh pretty healthy growth there as well okay and then with ancillary services and and bus uh you clearly demonstrated really strong growth

uh in this quarter but just on ancillary services and kind of what you all speak about outside of ground transportation because there i guess your margin is a full drop down uh growth here is strong um what sort of headroom do you all think about in terms of growth and the growth potential could we kind of think about this 30 kind of pace and growth sustaining safe next three four five years or how do you all think about that opportunity so yeah i think we're kind of actually

rolling out, like I said, we're kind of increasing the number of ancillary services that we are putting on the platform. And that is also another kind of driver for growth, particularly in the other segment, because all of these kind of largely get clubbed under others. And therefore, not just the depth of supply, but the width of supply in terms of new services that we are putting on the platform will continue to be a big opportunity. In fact, we have called out that this year, we also want to kind of dial up activities and experiences, which again will be reported as part of, you know, others to the extent that they get booked on a standard basis. So we kind of feel confident that with all the initiatives that we have kind of taken in the last few years and are continuing to take, this will be a segment which will continue to grow faster and possibly in the 30s, even in the years to come.

Thanks, Mohit. And if I may, Rajesh, if you can just clarify, so there have been changes in the board with kind of Tripp's shareholding coming down. Could you call out any key changes which have happened from a board composition perspective?

Yeah, I'll let Mohit take that.

Yeah, sure. So, you know, essentially, you know, the number of nominees from Tripp.com has gone down, you know, by three. So they now have only two nominees on the board. And therefore, we've kind of, you know, brought in know independence on the on the on the board apart from myself so you've got two independents on the board uh and i have also kind of joined the board uh once again so this has been the broad chain nothing nothing exceptional to call out thank you and all the best By the way, the other two changes that we have kind of, you know, made is, you know, we've also, just as part of the board management, we've also kind of now constituted a nomination committee. We didn't have that earlier, but now that we have, you know, quite a few independent directors on the board, we thought it would be appropriate to set up a nomination committee as well. And we're also increasing the size of the auditor.

Thanks, Aditya. The next question is from the line of Vijit Jain of Citi. Vijit, you may please ask your question now.

Thanks, Vipul. Hi, everyone. So congratulations on the successful transaction last month. And also, I guess, in a challenging quarter, I see that your adjusted EBIT margins are now at the lower end of your guidance. uh despite you know the growth headwinds you saw in the quarter so my first question is you know how should one look at uh you know your margins guidance from here you know growth in the subsequent quarters as you mentioned earlier is going to pick up uh to achieve greater than 20 percent and you have all these cost measures that you've implemented. So that's my first question. How should one look at that guidance in that context? And then I'll come back for other questions, please.

You see, the overall guidance kind of remains of wanting to get into that 1.8 to 2% range as a percentage of gross bookings on the adjusted operating margin. Now, of course, within quarters, we'll kind of remain tactical. Like I said earlier, know while operating was a good growth but therefore you know you know you were going the normal course but during may and june we realized that you know growth was being tipped and therefore we've kind of dialed up on on better kind of you know operating margins at the net level so i think we continue to keep doing tactical moves in line with how the market is behaving or how the Very broadly, I think we kind of want to settle down in that range of 1.8 to 2% on a full year basis before we kind of revisit the longer term outlook.

Got it. My second question is just on the ANP spends, right? I know you've spoken about how you calibrated them. But when I look at the split of it, I would have normally thought that, you know, the customer incentive bucket is where you would have more immediate flexibility. And I do see that air ticketing, customer inducements kind of went up in the quarter, right? So I'm just trying to understand, you know, is that more to do with closer to the end of the quarter where you were looking to, you know, also support growth or, you know, if I'm looking at it a bit differently.

So that's the second question. No, probably not in those lines. Actually, like I've always said, you know, a large part of the sales promotion numbers which are put out on the bridge, you know, between the gap revenue and the existing margin that we report is based on, you know, last distribution, right? And therefore, probably may not be most kind of, you know, representative, particularly if you look at it in a snapshot basis, right? If you look at it only for one quarter over a longer period of time, it is still more reflective, you know, and therefore it is much better to look at the overall customer efficient cost, you know, therefore marketing and sales promotion put together. I believe we've kind of come in at about 5.1 and like I've been saying, we'll be fine anywhere being closer to the 5% range. We have generally been kind of, you know, below the 5% mark, this quarter being an exceptional one in terms of what has played out in May and June, we have been slightly higher. It has also got to the fact that it's also linked into our adjusted margin also kind of blended basis coming in very strong, you know, up at the earlier quarters and years. And therefore, to that extent, it comes in, you know, with a improvement in the blend of business and in the improvement in the blended adjusted margin, it is a good expense to kind of incur. So this is largely going in tandem with that. So largely in line with, you know, how we wanted to kind of play out from a longer term perspective. But yes, tactically, we'll kind of, you know, keep, you know, revisiting the overall customer acquisition expense, particularly the longer term impacting brand marketing expense, based on any, you know, specific one off, you know, macro situation that may that may play out for certain weeks or months.

Got it. And the, you know, ordinarily and when I look at your, you know, the monthly spread you've given and thank you for providing that additional color in the filing. And just also your commentaries around where growth was, you mentioned how international did very well and, you know, kind of offset some of the domestic leisure travel plane. Now, when I look at the hotel business, for example, and I see that the nights booked is pretty healthy, you've said that international has done well, but the realizations or the GBV bookings on the hotel side is lower versus the nights worked so I'm just trying to understand ordinarily I would have thought international hire should mean in terms of tickets or nights would mean GBV would also see that upward pressure so I'm just trying to understand that and related to it I suppose you know with both the May and June events wouldn't international outbound have seen more pressure than the domestic leisure Just, just, yeah.

Great questions, both Vijay and actually, you know, the, the, the softening of the gross booking kind of, you know, growth percentage that you see largely comes in because of, you know, package is not doing well. Like I had called out, if there are two segments, which kind of, you know, didn't do well, it was domestic air and domestic holiday packages. Holiday packages, as you know, from a gross booking point of view are much higher, you know, the average ASP for a, holiday package is much higher than a hotel booking. And therefore, you see that impact playing out on the cross-booking level. But if you really look at it at the revenue or the adjusted margin level, the growth was much stronger because the overall room-night growth has remained reasonably stronger. So this is largely the impact of holiday packages going down in the mix, nothing else. And secondly, on the other question, on outbound, yes, there has been pressure and there have been Raj Nadella, Ph.D.: : A you know kind of also issues around super instance or an area spaces being you know kind of geographically being being closed at certain points in time, but overall sentiment on international. Raj Nadella, Ph.D.: : We somehow kind of seems that that wasn't as big as the as the overall sentiment on the domestic side, so we have seen more. kind of, you know, uh, muted kind of, you know, growth on, on domestic international, we were able to kind of still see a good growth. And like I said, I think it is also a little specific to us as a, uh, as a company, because while the overall growth on Lexie, for instance, on, uh, you know, the international side, like I called out was about 21%, whereas the market grew only about 7%. So it is also specifically because we have been historically also over the last few years.

driving international very strong and that continues to be a thematic and we were able to continue to do that even during this reported quarter got it understood and yes I think those were my questions thanks once again and sorry if I can one last question though just to be in interest of time I would request you to come back in the queue sure sure thank you sorry we'll take it offline

The next question is from the line of Manik Taneja of XS Capital. Manik, you may please ask your question now.

Hi, thank you for the opportunity and I hope I'm audible. So while my question related to the customer acquisition cost has been answered, just a couple of bookkeeping questions with regards to the ESOP charge that we saw this current quarter and also on the ETR, if you could help us understand as to how should we be thinking about both these elements on a go-forward basis.

Yeah, on ESOP course, like we've been saying, our endeavor is to kind of keep this within the $35 to $40 million kind of a bracket for the full fiscal year. Now, depending upon how the kind of your exercises pan out, how the grants are made, there could be kind of tweaks between quarters. And you would have seen that in the previous years as well. I think much more to kind of, you know, read out on the ESOP cost per se. On the ETR side, like you have said, we have another, we have already kind of, you know, recognized the deferred tax asset and therefore there is full reversal of that, which is happening in line with the profitability, you know, for the respective quarters. But going forward in another two years time, I think we'll kind of, you know, get to full taxability as well.

Sure. And Mohit, just with regards to, so while we did see some impact through May and June and you're seeing some recovery on a day-to-day basis, if you were to hazard a guess between our hotels and packages business and the air business, which of the two segments do you essentially expect to essentially recover faster and get back to the normal trajectory?

quarter that has already been reported, we saw a bit of disruption in May, June. You know, hotels has done much better, as you can see from the reported numbers. So I think the trending is there to kind of, you know, look at.

So maybe if I can just add one more point on top of that. I mean, maybe the right way to think about would be mostly the use case, customer use case, rather than just looking at particular travel surveys, whether it is air booking or hotel or any of the other mode of transport, the impacted segment was only leisure. And it was supposed to be a sort of high season quarter. Now this running quarter is not supposed to be a high season quarter because there are no summer vacations, there are no school holidays and no college holidays, etc. So that so leisure, if you keep the seasonality in mind, all of the boards should start rising. And we've seen that rising already, because relatively, in any case, there's non leisure, or travel use case that happens in this quarter.

So money usually, historically, we've seen that, you know, from a Product point of view, if you really look at it, compared to standalone bookings, you know, package bookings generally take a little longer to kind of, you know, come back post any macro disruption. So, won't be surprised if, you know, by the next seasonality, peak seasonality of Q3, packages would come back strongly as well. Sure. Thank you for the response.

Thanks, Manik. The next question is from the line of Aditya Chandrasekhar of UBS. Aditya, you may please ask your question now.

Yeah. Hi, team. Thanks for the opportunity. Just a quick question related to, you know, what was already asked on competition. I think you clearly stated that in air, in fact, you've gained a little bit of market share. But can you just give some color on hotels and especially buses as well? Because Exego has been stating that, you know, Abhi Bus has also gained market share within the online segment itself. So just wanted to understand how we should kind of think about our market share in both hotels as well as buses. Thank you.

Maybe take the bus segment first, Aditya. And if you really look at the growth numbers that we've reported out on top of the scale and the size that we already have, I think it's testament of the fact that even at a very high base, we've been able to deliver very robust growth rate, which effectively means that we are getting disproportionate or continue to get disproportionate share of the market. While whether it is Abibus or any other player for that matter, because of the base, there's always a possibility that they may be gaining share. But that share also happens, comes from, you know, essentially two sides. One is, you know, the offline market to online will continue to keep growing. And the second one is that, you know, there's a long tail of players. And if you end up sort of taking an aggressive approach, sometimes maybe with aggressive promotions, etc., you will definitely tend to on a low base get share, right? So I think we need to just look at, uh, this whole comparison, keeping all these factors in mind and try to, to look at it more, like to like more than, and then maybe sort of, uh, you know, conclude one way or the other.

Thank you.

And the hotel side, what we say that hotels also. So, you know, as we have said in the past also that there, I think it'll be fair to say. that the Indian OTA segment, there is no real other OTA player which has any, and then, you know, a lot of them are public and the numbers are out there, any meaningful. And we continue to, on a high base, continue to keep growing. And, you know, our brand for hotel booking also continues to become stronger and stronger by the quarter. So therefore, the competition there for us is international players. you know, whether it is booking or Agoda. Now, given that they have more global, you know, sort of business model or a playbook versus very India and original playbook, if I may call it, because we've also gone to the Middle East now, you know, our strategy to drive hotel business and consumer behavior is on the, you know, sort of promise to the consumer is very, very, different than any of the global player will do. And also the investments on the ground on the supply side are very, very different. So, you know, we built our moat, all aspects of the business are very focused on Indian travelers and Indian market and now Middle East, rather than any of the other global player who would be competing, you know, in 20 other markets and having a global sort of platform. So they would definitely have more strength on, you know, bringing customers from the foreign countries to India, which is like inbound travel. And they're also given a GDPR compliance platform now. at least for people of Indian origin, we've started to get traction because that was going to be our first strategic initiative to attract inbound travel into India. But as far as domestic and international are concerned, we continue to, of course, theoretically compete, but continue to lead the show.

Thank you and all the best.

Thanks. Thanks, Aditya. In the interest of time now, we will take the last question from Gaurav Lotharia of Morgan Stanley. Gaurav, you may please ask your question now.

Hi, congrats on a great execution. I have two questions, one for Rajesh and one for Mohit. So for Rajesh, just want to check on how do you see AI-led search and booking for travel as an opportunity or as a threat? Can you highlight some initiatives which future-proofs our business or even kind of makes it a standout winner given competition may not have the depth and the bandwidth to invest in such kind of offering? And question for Mohit is that if you look at last three years as a trend on 1Q, the advertisement and promotion spend as percentage of gross booking has gone up from 1Q24 to 1Q25 and 1Q25 to 1Q26. So I'm just trying to correlate this to two or three factors. One is competition, which has largely been stable to benign. Second is share of repeat business, which I understand has been going up. And third could be the incremental investments in the new offering. So could you try and help me understand what could be the factor that is driving these up on a three-year basis? Thank you.

Sure, Gaurav. Let me take that AI question. I was smiling because I don't know how, but I anticipated that you're going to ask the AI question. So, compliment to you on that. So, Gaurav, like you rightly called out, right? So, One, of course, and we've also called out for the last several quarters now that our strategy on product and technology has always been revolving around, on one side, deep consumer insights to cutting-edge technology, whichever might be the new technology that might be emerging. And with that same theme, we've seen a lot of promise coming out of Gen AI, and we've been investing significantly behind that, and we will continue to keep investing. And we see it more as sort of leading the innovation through Gen AI, rather than overtly getting paranoid about potential disruption. Now, theoretically, potential disruption can happen But why would we not be in position to, given that we have massive data, you know, over the so many years now we have 83 million consumers who have transacted with us live to date on all our brands. And we have, you know, a huge amount of traffic coming every day on our platform and transaction related data, many other input signals from supply side, etc. all of that repository is only going to add more strength to our initiatives for us to be able to just come up with cutting edge innovation on enhancing the consumer experience, which is one of the main areas where we are sort of investing behind leveraging GenAI. And then the other area is of course the productivity, which is sort of also a consistent theme across the board where people are looking at and seeing where are wherever there are productivity gain opportunities, we should leverage the technology. And we are pretty much every, and I highlighted one sort of one-odd or two-odd features that we released even last quarter. So pretty much every quarter there will be something or the other coming out. sort of following this strategy. And this is an evolving space and we will continue to keep learning because here the models are changing literally by weeks and the space is so evolving and we'll also learn along the way. But we will continue to keep investing behind it and And we do believe we are in a better position, given all the strengths that I called out, for us to be able to just, you know, sort of directionally, strategically innovate better for consumers more than, you know, getting sort of worried about the potential disruption. So that's really our take on Gen AI. And Mohit, do you want to take the second question?

Yeah, surely. This is a good question again, you know, but my, see what happens is, you know, over the years, if you also look at it, our mix of the business has been changing a bit as well, you know, with more and more kind of, you know, increasing share coming in from non-domestic air kind of, you know, businesses. And therefore I would just say that apart from looking at, you know, the customer action costs as a percentage of gross bookings, where you could see, slight kind of changes coming in in line with the change in the blended margin. But if you look at it as a percentage of the adjusted margin that we report, it has largely remained at about 47% across the last three years in Q1. So I would just kind of also urge you to look at this as a percentage of the overall adjusted margin, because based on the mixed improvements, our ability to kind of, you know, spend a little more will be there.

Thank you. Very helpful and all the best for future.

Thank you. Thank you, Gaurav. This was our last question. Now over to you, Rajesh, for closing remarks.

Thank you. Thank you, Vipul. And thank you everyone for your patience and for your time to listen in to us and for all the good questions that you had. And see you in the next quarter. Thank you.

Thank you everyone. This brings us to the end of the call. You may please disconnect.