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spk01: Good day, and welcome to the Monday second quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference call over to Jeff Houston, Senior Vice President. Jeff, please go ahead.
spk03: Hey, thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Monday's second quarter 2022 conference call. With me today are Chairman, CEO, and Founder Prasad Gunamungala, and Chief Financial Officer Dan Fuginshew, who will present our results. Also available are Vice Chairman, Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer Orestes Fintiklis, and Chief Operating Officer Jim Dullam. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements, including statements about revenue, growth of our business, our management and governance plans, and other non-historical statements as further described in our press release. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, including those related to MONDI's growth, the evolution of our industry, our product development and success, our management performance, and general economic and business conditions. We undertake no obligation to revise any statements to reflect changes that occur after this call. Descriptions of these and other risks that could cause actual results to have a material difference from these forward-looking statements are discussed in our reports filed with the SEC and on our press release that was issued this morning. During the call, we also referred to non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of the most comparable GAAP measures are also available in the press release, which is available at investors.mondi.com. Note that our second quarter results are for the three months ended June 30, 2022, and Monty's stock began trading on the NASDAQ after that on July 19. Since we were still a private company during the second quarter, Legacy Monty is not required to file its 10-Q with the SEC. While we are not required to publish an earnings release or host an earnings call, we decided to hold this call and file its content in an 8-K including an updated investor presentation, which is available on the website and you can flip through at your leisure, so that we can provide an update on our business and financial performance now, instead of waiting until November when we plan to report third quarter earnings. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Prasad.
spk00: Prasad? Thank you, Jeff, and welcome everyone to Mondi's second quarter earnings call. We appreciate your interest, whether you are a shareholder, a client, supplier, business partner, employee, prospective shareholder, or analyst. I will begin today's call with a summary of our business highlights and strategy, and then we'll turn the call over to our CFO, Dan Fickenshew, for a more detailed review of our financial results and outlook. We will then conclude the session with time to answer a few questions. I'm excited to announce that in the second quarter of 2022, Legacy Mondi continued to deliver profitable growth. Gross revenue of $614.8 million was up 180% year over year, while net revenue of 42.7 million was up 81% year over year. In addition, as we scaled, we continued to deliver profitability Second quarter adjusted EBITDA was 4.4 million up from breakeven in Q2 2021 and doubled quarter over quarter. Among many accomplishments in the second quarter, there were three key areas that drove our strong financial and operating results and set us up well for the second half of the year. First, we capitalized on the ongoing travel market recovery. Second, we continued to improve and evolve our tech platform. And third, we positioned our company for M&A growth with our public market debut. Starting with the recovery in the leisure travel market, the travel industry, especially international travel, which was subdued during most of 2021, began a strong recovery through the second quarter of 2022. Although it was uneven in some parts of the world, which were impacted by differing post-pandemic recovery policies, ongoing effects of the war in the Ukraine, inflation and recessionary threats. Our domestic market opened first, followed by international travel. International travel recovered in some areas more than others, based largely on regional post-pandemic re-openings. With our agile operating culture, we were able to dynamically adjust our marketing sales focus, and go-to-market investments. Slide 4 of our most recent investor presentation sets out the mix of transactions by region in the second quarter of 2022 versus the pre-pandemic second quarter of 2019. It shows, for example, North America has recovered in line with our pre-pandemic mix, Europe overperformed in the first half of this year, and Asia represents an opportunity for the second half of 2022. Our North America air, hotel, and ancillary transactions returned to 90% of pre-pandemic levels by June. Since North America, our primary market, and the market where we are market leaders, was the first to open, we focused our go-to-market resources to capitalize on the recovery. As the European and Middle Eastern regions opened next, we adjusted marketing programs and resources to increase our market share there, which added fuel to the general recovery tailwinds. This strategy resulted in strong transaction volume and market share pickup in European markets in the second quarter, which now represents 27% of transactions, which is more than double from 12% in January 2022. Overall, the European and Middle Eastern regions have now exceeded our pre-pandemic mix. However, the Asia market has more room to improve as certain regions continue to have travel restrictions during the first half of 2022, particularly China, which was a significant market for Maldives before the pandemic. As these travel restrictions ease, the Asian market represents a substantial opportunity for our continual recovery in the second half, and we are positioning our marketing and other resources to capitalize on that trend. In addition to the general market recovery, we have capitalized on other market channel opportunities with our Triplanet go-to-market initiative performing well. As a reminder, Triplanet is our solution for member organizations and small to medium enterprise closed user groups. A noteworthy highlight in this segment of our business is the almost 4x increase in average daily tickets booked on our Triplanet platform for these closed user groups since January of this year. Driving some of this growth is our recent strategic partnership with EBG, a leading activities and events content provider for theme parks, events, and more, which together with strategic alliances such as ours with Gallagher Efrity and others, increased our access to about 125 million members. Currently, up from less than 10 million in the beginning of 2022 and 4 million in 2021. The second driver of our performance is our technology-led revenue growth. Mondi's travel marketplace is enabled by our travel tech platform, effectively connecting our global content service hubs through our distribution channels and affiliates to target close user groups. This continuously evolving ecosystem features the following. First, in our global content hub, where we are already the leader in North America private airfares, we are rapidly expanding hotel and vacation rental content, actively adding theme park and event tickets, and aggressively exploring options to add cruises, and tour content. In addition, our technology is now positioned to add user-generated content through crowdsourcing. Second, in our service hub, we provide full coverage for customer and traveler needs on a 24 by 7 basis and expect to expand local expertise and content curation further on a gig economy fuel crowdsource basis. The service hub provides a full suite of support for our leisure, closures group, and retail distribution channels and customers last but not least the content management service support and distribution capability are enabled by our continuously evolving gig tech platform which now includes capabilities such as omni-channel delivery of conversational commerce features this next-gen tech platform continues to achieve solid traction, and we expect it to fuel improved results going forward. It is driving additional benefits for our over 50,000 travel advisors and emerging gig economy travel workers whom we connect with our high-value content from more than 500 airlines, over a million hotel and vacation rentals, and various ancillary offerings. As a reminder, Mondi sources, prices, and assembles travel combinations at scale that is comparable to the largest global online travel companies, albeit with mostly privately negotiated affairs. Demonstrating the current momentum and ability of our platform in the second quarter, we facilitated approximately 550,000 transactions, up 46% year-over-year from approximately 460,000 in second quarter 2021, We define transactions as the consumer's complete trip and travel experience. So a single transaction could include multiple flights and hotels or vacation tentels, as well as ancillary solutions. In addition, our platform provides fintech, martech, and insurtech solutions customized for the travel industry, ranging from virtual cards and fraud protection solutions to social media and digital campaign and travel insurance. A further example of the success of this platform is the result from our FinTech offering for Q2 2022, which was an impressive 184% growth year over year. More excitingly, we made solid strides on our tech-led evolution on our next-gen gig economy platform and our piloting with customers in the gig worker space, including a major leisure-focused travel company. We expect to move into full deployment of our next-gen platform in the second half of the year. We also offer our tech platform, Power Trip Planet, to member organizations, closed user groups, and SMEs. Our platform extends the benefits of the Mondi ecosystem to individuals in these various organizations and closed user groups for their personal and leisure travel needs. As mentioned above, Transactions in this channel have increased almost 4X since the beginning of 2022. Turning to our recent NASDAQ listing, which is our third area of accomplishment and positioning for the future. On July 19th of this year, Mondi began trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol MOND, M-O-N-D. Becoming a public company is a significant milestone, and I would like to thank all of our shareholders employees, customers, suppliers, and partners for their continued support and hard work. We are thrilled to commence our journey as a NASDAQ listed company. We look forward to leveraging our public market status and post-merger capital structure to enable us to execute acquisitions of companies that fit our strategic vision aggressively. We have a history of well-calibrated and successfully integrated M&A transactions, delivering strong revenue and cost synergies. We plan to aggressively execute a targeted accretive acquisition strategy, which will help accelerate our growth plans. We have identified a number of accretive acquisition targets that we believe are a good fit for our platform as we continue to disrupt and transform the travel industry. I will now pass the call over to Dan Fikenshu, CFO of Mondi for a review of our financial performance and outlook.
spk04: Thank you, Prasad, and thanks again to our audience for attending. We are proud of the legacy company's second quarter financial performance, particularly the continued growth of adjusted EBITDA profitability, especially given that this performance was driven entirely by organic revenue growth. We have used part of the liquidity provided by our entry to the public markets to optimize our capital structure and we are now turning our attention toward commencing our planned M&A strategy, as Prasad just mentioned. Second quarter gross revenue grew 180% year over year to $615 million. Net revenue grew 81% year over year to $43 million. The aforementioned growth drivers in the quarter more than offset some pockets of pressure. Take rates in particular, which we define as net revenue divided by gross revenue, are beginning to come more in line with expectations after significant volatility in prior periods. While take rates for the first half of 2022 of 7.5% was in line with our expectations of 7 to 8%, Q2 2022 declined somewhat to 6.9% as projected. Regardless, Q2's take rate is still up 1.5 percentage points from 2019's pre-pandemic levels due to the success of our ancillary solutions and FinTech revenue. Take rates were counter-cyclical during the pandemic, particularly with our ancillaries, such as travel insurance solutions, as well as higher change and cancellation fees, where demand for protection, changes, and cancellations spiked due to changing global travel patterns. As expected, demand for these solutions has declined somewhat as the world has reopened. Going forward, we expect take rates to trend upward as a higher portion of our revenue mix comes from the more sticky and higher margin revenues such as ancillaries, FinTech, and subscription, as well as a greater mix of hotels that typically carry higher margin. This is even before taking into account the impacts of the subscription revenues of the disruptive Tripp Planet and Unpub products. We were able to more than offset any headwinds due to the strategic actions Prasad mentioned. Furthermore, we are happy with our overall business trends Over 1 million tickets sold in the first six months of 2022. Over $1 billion in gross revenue in the first six months. We doubled EBITDA quarter over quarter. Turning to expenses, Q2 GAAP operating expenses were $38.7 million, or 90.8% of net revenue, and that's down from 99.9% in the year-ago quarter, while investing in revenue-generating opportunities such as marketing, events, and product launches. Sales and marketing as a percentage of gross revenue quarter-to-date decreased from 6.6% as the first quarter of 2021 to 4.7% in the second quarter of 2022. G&A's percentage of net revenue has been relatively flat on both a quarter-to-date and year-to-date basis. Our Q2 net losses were $2.1 million, and that compares to a $12.9 million loss in a year-ago quarter. And our Q2 net loss per share of 3 cents compared to a 16 cent loss last year. On a non-GAAP basis, adjusted net losses were $3 million compared with a loss of $6.3 million last year. On a per share basis, adjusted losses per share were 3 cents compared with adjusted losses per share of 7 cents last year. Adjusted EBITDA was $4.4 million, an improvement of $4.4 million as compared to a in the second quarter of 2021 adjusted EBITDA of $0, even after increased marketing costs to acquire lifetime customers and grow market share at this inflection point post-pandemic recovery. Note that reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP are available in today's earnings release. Net cash flow used from operations for the three months ended June 2022 was $1.1 million, and that's compared to $1.2 million for the three months ended June 2021. We expect net cash flow from operations to be positive for full year 2022. Turning to our outlook, we would like to take this opportunity to establish our guidance approach. Going forward, we'll provide an annual guidance on our fourth quarter earnings call. So when we report 2022 fourth quarter results, we will establish 2023 guidance. For 2022, net revenue is projected to be in the range of $150 million to $160 million. representing year-over-year growth of 66% at the midpoint. Adjusted EBITDA is projected to be in the range of $15 million to $22 million. This represents growth of 463% year-over-year and a margin of 12% at the midpoint. In summary, we believe that Mondi is in a strong financial position to capitalize on the reopening of the travel industry and on future growth opportunities. I will turn it back over to Prasad.
spk00: Thanks, Dan. In summary, Mondi is a leader in travel technology with a modern platform underpinning a continuously growing next-gen focused travel marketplace. We believe we provide the best travel content to target consumers through the most effective opaque distribution channels on the most efficient technology and tools. We believe that we are well positioned to continue gaining market shares benefiting from the recovery of international leisure travel in the medium term, and addressing the rapidly evolving travel experience needs of today and tomorrow's consumers over the long term. Thanks for attending our first earnings call, and we look forward to your ongoing support.
spk03: Operator, we are ready to open it up to Q&A.
spk01: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, please press star followed by number two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your phone is unmuted locally. Our first question comes from Tom White from D.A. Davidson. Tom, please go ahead.
spk06: Great. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. A couple, if I could, maybe just a high-level one first, maybe for you, Prasad, but just curious to hear how your discussions with travel supply partners are going. There obviously is a number of different kind of cross-currents, I guess, between people you know, wanting to travel again and, but also maybe some, you know, inflation and sort of macro pressure. So just curious how, how your supply partners, uh, airlines and, and hotels, uh, are viewing, uh, kind of the, the wholesale, um, kind of private channel, uh, in this type of environment and, uh, how, how you think maybe Mondi, uh, might be positioned, you know, if, if we do see sort of more of a sustained kind of slowdown in the economic backdrop.
spk00: Yeah, thanks for the question, Tom. Let me give you my take. We have been a valued partner with our suppliers for many, many years. And we continue to be, you know, more valuable partners in the years to come. Of all of our discussions, our focus is to see how we can add our value to our suppliers by providing access to their content in a more narrow-cast basis, not in a broadcasted, and also bring a better yield for them based on their yield curves. And as the market is recovering, as you all will know, that the capacity, the more and more capacity is available as the routes, new routes get added. And also, and it comes with the servicing issues and all the scale related issues. So historically, we have been helping them to handle that service issues as well as finding the niche customers where we can help to get the transactions without cannibalizing their published markets. And Fuel with our technology platform, which has some unique capabilities of connecting their systems directly, as well as ability to service our customers in the most efficient way, adds great value for them. So we, all in all, we feel that it's a great partnership. We have it with our suppliers until now, and it's even greater with the addition of our distribution capabilities as well as our technology platform and our nature of our closed user group distribution.
spk08: Hey, Tom, it's Jim Dallin. Let me just add on to what Prasad has said. He's pointed out we are the opaque channel that can help them fill during the short term. We can help them fill pockets because of some of the variability in the market. But also bear in mind that our primary business is with personal and leisure travel, which tends to have a little more extended period of booking prior to travel. So yes, we are seeing sort of a surge in current demand. But remember, we're also selling tickets and bookings, et cetera, that are six months and even further out. So that also feeds into the partnership with the suppliers where we continue to give them those channels for future sales and revenue, which again, as Prasad pointed out, helps them manage their yield more effectively.
spk02: I would like to add two points. The first one is that even though there may be an intuitive feeling that with the reduction in excess capacity, there will be less of an interest from the part of suppliers to engage in opaque channels like MONDI, in reality, this reduction in excess capacity is not homogeneous. So airlines and hotels, they want to push demand in different directions. So Mondi continues to be a very valuable partner. And stark testimony to that is the fact that many of our suppliers have improved the terms at which we are transacting, as well as the incentives that they are providing to Mondi. The second point that you made about macro pressures, two points on this one. The first is that indeed there is an inflation which is driving an increase in the value of the tickets, which on the part of the airlines and the hotels is also driving an increase in the cost structure. And like that, Monday is benefiting from the inflationary pressure on the sales price, but we are not carrying these increased costs, like increased fuel costs, increased personal costs that our suppliers are, which makes Monday a very unique proposition in this inflationary environment. The other related point to the macro pressures and the general environment is that we are seeing a very strong US dollar for various reasons that we believe will continue in the foreseeable future. And this very strong dollar is highly beneficial to our business model because as you may recall, Monday's business is 80% outbound international U.S. travel. So with more power, more purchasing power in the hands of the U.S. consumer, we anticipate and we believe that this will fuel even further our future growth. Thank you.
spk06: Got it. That's very helpful. Thanks, guys. Maybe one follow-up, maybe for Dan. Appreciate the color around kind of the different drivers of take rate and kind of explaining the delta there between the gross revenue growth and the net revenue growth. I guess, can you just maybe give a little bit more color on what the drivers of the, I think you mentioned that you expect kind of take rates to rebound here in the back half of the year. Um, you know, what the drivers behind that are, is it certain ancillaries that'll be, uh, maybe, uh, kind of more resilient to reopening, uh, or at least, you know, relative to last year. Um, um, is it, is it hotels coming on in a much more meaningful way? Um, just kind of curious here on, um, that take rate rebounding commentary you made?
spk04: Thanks, Tom. Yeah, a big portion of that rebound, we believe, will come from hotels, which represent a larger and larger slice of our total revenue picture. And as mentioned, hotels carry a higher margin. So that helps drive and expand our take rate in future quarters. And so we think that's an important part of what will be the second half of 2022, and certainly into 2023, an important part of that take rate and that take rate story. Other important parts that will impact take rate, as we mentioned, are going to be some ancillaries, especially on the FinTech side. But also significant is going to be our subscription business, and as mentioned, the Trip Planet and Unplugged products, Those are only just beginning, as we've talked about, and those will have significant impact on take rate as they have a 100% margin on the take rate side. And so those drive take rate even further up. Hopefully that's helpful, Tom.
spk06: Yep, very much so. I'll get back into you. Thank you.
spk01: Thank you. Our next question comes from Mike Grundle from Northland Securities. Mike, your line is open.
spk07: Hey, guys, thanks and congratulations. Can you talk a little bit about the outperformance in Europe and really how flexible? I would imagine marketing spend is pretty flexible, and you basically go to where the volume is to keep pushing that. But maybe help us understand the outperformance in Europe and kind of your confidence in Asia recovering in the second half. And then if you had any comments on July or August, that would be great.
spk00: So the European market, we have a good story in the first half of 2022. It all started with a 12% market share of our business. And now in June, we are at 27%. And July, it's continuing and continuing to grow. The primary reasons are the travel restrictions and you know, the opening of the markets there and, you know, propensity of the travelers traveling to those areas. So we have deployed a very agile go-to-market strategies to capture that market and to, you know, focus on the customers using our real-time data analytics tools and be able to help our marketing strategies to, you know, focus on delivering products the access to the right content to the right customers at the right time. So we are doing that with the travel agencies and gig economy workers who participate in this area from North America. And we also open our gates to a European customer base and to be able to take advantage of our platform, which they never have an access in the past. and that drives the growth also significantly.
spk08: Mike, it's Jim Dollem. So obviously, you know, relative to Asia as an example for the second half, we can't predict when they will open up to travel more and more, when they will relieve some of the restrictions on COVID-related and other pandemic issues related. However, we see signs that it is improving and we see further signs that it will continue to improve. So that's our basis for, you know, currently what we're seeing in the market. We would expect that throughout the rest of the year, those markets will continue to open up. And since they have been such a large portion of our business in the past, we expect that to recover to those levels as they reopen. So that's our optimism, if you will, for that second half performance. The other thing to remember is even for Europe and the ability for us to move our marketing and sales efforts around, since a lot of our business is done through that intermediary channel, as Prasad mentioned, the agents, the affiliates, the gig workers, etc., Some of those will change their focus, and we simply then provide them the marketing programs as they focus on different markets to emphasize that. But in other areas, we can actively target that channel, that opaque channel, where it is going to markets that are now opened or in the midst of opening. So that's what gives us the flexibility to move that around pretty quickly is working through that channel.
spk02: So may I add on the Asia point, the idea is that we're not really predicting when the recovery will happen. But the point that we're making is that Asia was almost 20% of our business prior to the pandemic. And we were able to achieve this overperformance without having that business in full throttle. We tripled the gross revenues, doubled the net revenues, doubled the EBITDA. and that was even without Asia. So the clear point here is that when Asia opens up, whether it's in 22 or early 23, that is clearly more upside to come from the current levels of recovery. Now, on the European point that you made, I will make two points to basically analyze a bit more on the reasons for the success of going basically from 12% to 27% in a matter of six months. There are two main reasons. The first one is that Mundi has the ability to target its customers. As you know, our marketing strategy is not to throw a bunch of marketing dollars on Google, but it is effectively to target through our customers by offering them specific net rates and specific incentives. So what we did when we saw Europe recovering, we focused on travel advisors that sell predominantly in that area, and we increased the incentives to those cohorts of our customers. The second point was that due to the prolonged impact of COVID in the European travel market, many of the opaque channels in Europe either went out of business or they had to reduce substantially their market dollar, which gave us a window to increase market share in this very, very important market. Thank you very much.
spk07: Got it. That's helpful. And then, hey, flipping over to your M&A strategy, in the past you've talked about kind of a robust pipeline and, you know, a number of these targets you had gotten close to. Is there a way we can think about, you know, maybe what is a base case for year end? I mean, do you think you can get a couple targets announced and possibly closed with revenues between 10, 20, 30 million. What's a fair way to think about what you can achieve by year-end 22?
spk00: Yeah. I mean, yes, of course, it is possible, but we cannot predict that it will be done 100% because, you know, it's not only we both agree to continue with that. There's a process of diligence, a process of, you know, doing, you know... acquisition complete in the right manner. But we are currently working actively with our pipeline targets, and we expect to close certain targets that are very accretive for our business, producing tens of millions of dollars more in EBITDAs in the months to come.
spk08: And Mike, I would just add as well that as you can see from the 14 acquisitions we've done in the past, all very accretively, once we have closed the acquisition, we can bring them on and make them productive because of our platform extremely quickly. So to Prasad's point, we can't exactly predict when they'll happen. We're working very actively. with a number of candidates right now and are now positioned to be able to make this happen as quickly as the process will allow. But as soon as it does happen, you can expect to start to see results very quickly from us.
spk07: Got it. And then lastly, EBG and the Arthur Gallagher partnerships, relationships. I know it's early for both of those, but how are those going?
spk00: They're going extremely well. We are doing a complementary, you know, offerings to each other. We are providing technology platforms to them and to tap into their distribution networks, and they're providing the content that we do not have access. So it's been, you know, a a great partnership and we know that we are only scratching the surface with those partnerships right now. And, you know, months to come and, you know, and especially in the second half and in 2023, we expect to take these relationships to the next level, which will be good for both of us.
spk02: I may add a point here. So parts of the joint ventures are already up and running, and they are producing very material results with thousands of flights sold on these platforms every week. And then the second point is that these relationships are very symbiotic in the sense that these organizations, they have vast distribution capabilities in the hundreds of millions of users. So, with our technology, we believe that we will be able to increase the adoption rates within these distribution networks, and this is basically where we're focusing our energy in the next few months. Thank you.
spk07: Great. Okay. Hey, thanks, guys. Thank you.
spk01: Thank you. Our next question comes from Brett Kuhn. Hi, guys.
spk05: Congrats on the first conference call underway. I'm just curious, you know, your guidance for $155 million to $160 million on the net side for the full year implies kind of the second half is more or less flat versus the first half. What do you have in those assumptions? Can you maybe walk us through seasonality or how we should think about, you know, just the back half kind of being similar to the first half in terms of you know, absolute dollars from net revenue.
spk00: Yeah, I mean, seasonality-wise, the third quarter is, and third and fourth quarter are at the similar, you know, level of, you know, quarter one and quarter two. However, there are, you know, ups and downs within the intra-quarter months. And please keep in mind that we make the bookings in advance and hence that, you know, some of the bookings for the, you know, holidays and for fourth quarter is being done in the third quarter, wherein that we recognize the, you know, some of our revenues streams such as our revenues and all based on the flown revenues in Q4. Overall, we are seeing, we are expecting third quarter and fourth quarter to be You know, seasonality-wise, it's in the similar size, but the recovery is continuing, and we are taking more and more market shares in these markets, and hence that we see that, you know, this will be a good outcome for us in the, you know, quarters to come.
spk04: Yeah, hi, it's Vic. I just wanted to add that in, you know, some of the lower-down quarters, we will still continue to grow through even that with not just the recovery but our own expansion and gain in market share. which will allow us to at least sort of hold the line in the second half of the year compared to the first half of the year, which is why we feel these are sort of reasonable expectations for where 2022 will finish on both a net and debited basis.
spk02: I may add a few points. Go ahead. What I would add is that we always strive to be conservative in our assumptions with the ability to overperform. So that's a relevant consideration. And then the second one is that about a third of our revenue is back-ended in the sense that it incentives our suppliers. And as you know, in the first quarter of the year, we had the negative headwinds of Omicron pandemic. So that is impacting the back end of the revenues of future quarters. So with that in mind, we decided to project a very conservative picture for this year with, of course, the ability to overperform. Thank you.
spk05: I know that's helpful. And then maybe on Rocket Trip, what are you seeing in terms of corporate travel and demand for corporate travel? Is that returning in line with expectations Are you seeing maybe some of the customers who utilize Rocket Trip to return to their normal spend quicker than usual? How should we think about that business and how that is performing?
spk08: Yeah, Brett, it's Jim. So we are seeing recovery with some of the Rocket Trip customers. Their rate of travel spend is starting to increase again. So we're now seeing that flow through that system. A number of our customers in Rocket Trip tend to be larger corporations. And yes, on the small-medium business side, the travel patterns are recovering more quickly, we're seeing, than on the large corporate customer side. So they've been recovering. Not as fast as we would have liked to have seen, but that's just the general pattern that's happening in the marketplace. So at that level, I think Rocket Trip is performing well. And we work on continuing to add business there, add customers. But to be very honest, we have not put a huge market push on that simply because the general softness in the market. If you think about it, a lot of companies during the pandemic, because they weren't traveling and were trying to right-size expenses, what would, you know, you can imagine what one of the areas are that they would have attacked. So they're just in the process of rebuilding their travel departments. So, you know, as that happens, you know, we will continue to emphasize there now, but previously we've sort of taken a more soft approach.
spk00: By the way, we are enhancing Rocket Trip solutions with our new tool set for their blizzard travel and for their small to medium businesses requiring to have business leases and simplified systems. So we're enhancing and adding more solutions that we feel that is going to be required for the market and we are going to capitalize our current customer base and rocket trip to start with and expand from there.
spk02: May I add a few points here? The first one is that in marketing terms, the strategy of the company is always to allocate marketing dollars in the most efficient manner at the right time of the cycle. That is why initially we focused on domestic travel, then on international US outbound travel, Then we put resources in Europe when that market was recovering. So in line with that and the way to cautiously allocate our marketing dollars, we are kind of phasing out the focus when we see the strong recovery on corporate travel. The second point I would make is that Rocket Trip is not our only product targeting corporate. The second product that we have is Trip Planet, and that is mostly focused on small and medium enterprises. And the angle there is that we are capturing not only the corporate travel of these membership organizations and small and medium enterprises, but the leisure travel of their employees. And as you can see, that is an area that we have focused and which has delivered a quadrupling of the revenues through Triplanet in the first six months of the year. Thank you.
spk05: Perfect. It's very helpful. Thanks so much, guys. Really appreciate it.
spk01: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, currently we have no further questions. Therefore, I would like to hand the call back to Jeff Houston for any closing remarks. Jeff, please go ahead.
spk03: Thank you, everyone, for joining our call today. And just want to remind you that our investor presentation is up on the Mondi website, investors.mondi.com. And we're happy to answer any questions you have. Our email address is iratmandi.com. Thank you.
spk01: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for being with us today. Have a lovely day ahead. You may disconnect.
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