On The Beach Group Stock

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining me today. I'll be presenting our results for the first half of FY '26. This has been another period that has and will continue to test the resilience of the industry. What I want to demonstrate today is that our model is particularly resilient to these shocks, and that the strategic direction we've set is working. Normally, I would be joined by our CFO, Jon, but he's currently waiting for a minor medical procedure. Therefore, I'll be taking you through the full presentation today. On to the agenda, I'll follow the normal structure, starting with key highlights, moving on to financial performance and closing with strategic progress and outlook. I will, of course, leave time for questions at the end.

So on to highlights. Four things I'd like you to take away from this slide. Firstly, record half 1 booking volumes. In a very challenging environment, bookings grew by 7% year-on-year, and we delivered that volume growth significantly ahead of the market. Secondly, significantly more people went on holiday with us during this period than last year. Departed volumes were up 22% across the half and 35% in quarter 2. This has been driven by strong growth in Winter Beach and expansion areas. City breaks more than doubled year-on-year. Bookings from Ireland grew by 74%. These are substantial numbers and show real progress.

Third, investment in our technology is delivering results. Search conversion is up 24%. So people searching on our site now, 24% more likely to make a booking. Nearly 40% of all bookings are made on our mobile app and every loyalty metric we have is improving. In-year repeat bookings up 24% and 2-year repeat rates up 17%. Finally, we are profitable and generating cash. The last 6 weeks of booked volumes are up 9% even in the context of the challenging environment we find ourselves. This, therefore, gives us confidence to reinstate guidance for the year. And given the strategic progress, we remain confident in the medium term.

Before we get into the trading detail, I wanted to spend a moment on this slide because it gives some really important context for understanding where we are today as a business and why we're confident about where we're going. Over the last 4 years, we've been through 3 very deliberate phases of transformation, and I'll take you through each one briefly. Starting with simplification, we have simplified our business model. This meant exiting the B2B channel last year and transitioning to a single tech platform powering all products and markets. That includes our expansion areas in city breaks and selling holidays from Ireland. Our tech investment is mobile-first and with a focus on self-service through our mobile app.

Secondly, increased levels of automation. Today, 98% of our bookings are automatically fulfilled. This compares to 60%, just 4 years ago. This is a real transformational change, particularly in the context of increasing our offer to 80 billion holiday combinations, up from around 1 billion only a few years ago. This, amongst many other examples, has enabled us to grow from 1.4 million passengers traveled to 2 million, more than 40% volume growth whilst reducing head count by the same amount. And then there's AI. We were the first U.K. package online travel agent in ChatGPT, which we launched early this year, and further integrations are in progress. Our share of voice overindexes for package holidays, which means we're well positioned as customers increasingly use these products.

Traffic from these products are still small, but is growing fast. There's 10x more traffic coming directly from large language models this year, and I'm sure more of our customers are using it as part of their research journey. And it's not just customers who are increasingly using AI, all areas of our business are benefiting from it. Agentic AI is deployed across engineering, supply, operations and customer service. This is improving both quality and productivity across the business. Overall, whilst each of these phases can be delivered to some extent on their own, to achieve the best results, you must deliver against all 3 of these, and that's why we've not seen them as separate initiatives, but as one program of transformation. And lots more to come.

Moving on to trading for the period. I think important for me to give you some more context on the trading picture. Even before the war commenced, booking patterns had changed. People were booking their holidays much closer to departure. This is market-wide, not specific to us, and it reflects a challenging consumer environment. Despite this, October to February, bookings were up 10% year-on-year, with significant growth in bookings for city breaks and winter travel, including Winter Beach. From the 1st of March, there was a significant change in demand.

Customers planning holidays to the Middle East and East Med destinations slowed significantly. That reduced our half 1 bookings growth from 10% to 7% and has shortened lead times even further. These dynamics mean that first half bookings have a lower average booking value, and some of the summer volume we'd normally take in half 1 is coming later. Our forward orders for the second half of the year are about flat to last year, but this later booking curve means there's significant volume still to come, and we know that most people are still planning to spend at least as much this year on their holiday plans.

Important to note, and I do remind people of this, that unlike others in the industry, we report on a booked basis. Others report on a traveled basis. Therefore, these trends are more apparent in our half 1 financial performance than some of our tour operator and airline peers. This will normalize across the full year, and by the time we get to the end of the year, we'll all be judged on the same travel period. In terms of traveled volume, this was well ahead of the market, up 22% in the half. For me, this shows that what we're doing is working, and our outperformance has been very consistent. Every quarter has been in volume growth since COVID. That's 18 quarters of consecutive volume growth.

I have another slide, which gives some context on how lead times are impacting, I suppose our booked performance. This slide is really important context for that, and hopefully it will give people confidence about how our forward order position will evolve. The chart on the right-hand side shows how each number on this slide represents the forward order position for May '26 travel, and that's important because it's the first month of the summer. So I think it's a good indicator of what's still to come. As you can see from this slide, May departures are currently 5% up year-on-year, but all of this growth in May travel has been driven by later bookings. Bookings for May departures since the 1st of April are up 27% year-on-year. And this isn't just a flash in the pan for May. This is the pattern that we've now been seeing for several months and we expect to continue. The booking curve has shifted. Customers are still planning to travel. They're just making that decision closer to departure, and that's what you can see in our half 1 reported numbers. For a business with an asset-light model, this is very manageable. We don't have the complexity of managing this demand shift. We don't have aircraft seats or hotel room inventory to worry about. Our business will naturally flex with this demand, and we are confident that people are still going to want a summer holiday this year. We can see it coming through in the numbers.

Now on to financial performance. Traveled bookings were -- of 201,600, were up 22% year-on-year. As I said earlier, that's the real demand picture for our business and for the industry. Booking volumes were 324,200, up 7%, and total sales of GBP 626 million were up 2% year-on-year. Adjusted revenue of GBP 52.9 million was down GBP 6.4 million on last year, and that movement has several drivers, which are largely a function of market-wide dynamics. The Middle East conflict has had an impact on booking volumes and particularly higher-margin summer bookings. There is mix dilution from growth in lower-value, shorter-duration holidays, city packages and winter travel. And of course, in this environment, there is competitive pricing, which obviously we would respond to. Some of these dynamics, we would expect to unwind in the second half of the year, which will be more weighted towards bookings for summer travel.

Further down the P&L, marketing costs fell by GBP 4.5 million year-on-year. That's down to efficiency. A greater share of bookings is coming through the app, through brands and through repeat customers, all of which cost far less to acquire than paid search. As a result, marketing as a proportion of revenue fell from 44% to 41%. Overheads increased by GBP 3.1 million to GBP 21.6 million. That's primarily driven by the investment in technology, which enables us to scale into new areas, increase site conversion and drive marketing effectiveness and operational efficiency. These investments cannot be viewed as a snapshot point in time. They should be viewed in the context of overall strategic delivery. EBITDA and profit before tax was around GBP 6 million lower than the prior year. This change is explained by the revenue shortfall resulting from the external and mix-driven factors I mentioned earlier, which we expect to be short-term impacts.

On to the balance sheet. Net debt reduced by GBP 2 million year-on-year to GBP 27 million, with GBP 88 million of headroom on our facility. This is after committing GBP 33 million of capital to buy shares and pay dividends during the period. The balance sheet remains a genuine strength. The trust account balance is GBP 210 million. The year-on-year reduction of around GBP 14 million simply reflects the shift to shorter lead time bookings. Customers are paying later, so less sits in trust at every given point. This is simply a consequence of the later booking curve. An interim dividend of 1p per share has been declared consistent with the prior year. This is a demonstration of confidence in profit and cash generation. We have a profitable, cash-generative business with a strong balance sheet. We can manage through volatility and periods of weak consumer demand without compromising our strategic investments.

Now some slides going into a bit more detail on our strategic progress, starting with an overview. Our addressable market is large and rapidly expanding, and we've been expanding our share of it. Customers booking closer to departure is a market-wide trend, and our significant growth in traveled volumes tells us the demand for our product is strong. The Middle East conflict is a headwind for the whole sector, but travel has always been prone to these shocks and challenges. In my experience, long-term structural growth has always reasserted itself. And our asset-light model is a key competitive advantage in exactly this kind of environment. Our strategy is working. We are taking share in this market.

And we have, as the next slide shows, a clear strategy for growth, which many of you will be very familiar with. It is consistent and key to delivering our medium-term ambition. As a reminder, stickiness is about increasing how often customers book with us. Choice, making us more relevant for more customers and more of our existing customers' holiday spend. Scale and automation, this is about designing for 10x scale, not plus 10%, and scaling the business potential at a much faster rate than the structural cost base increases. And peace of mind, making sure the experience customers have with us builds trust. By delivering on these pillars, we will attract more new customers to the brand, and we expect those customers to book with us more often, generating greater value.

Some proof points of how we're delivering against these strategic pillars. On stickiness, monthly active users on our app are up 29% year-on-year, and nearly 40% of bookings are now made on the app. We are now in a position where more than 90% of our customers access the app at some point between booking and traveling. Every retention metric we measure is up. Our customers are traveling with us more often in any given year, and they are more likely to book with us again in subsequent years. In-year repeat bookings are up 24% year-on-year, and 2-year repeat rates are up 17%. On choice, we continue to address more of our customers' holiday needs, adding more choice for our customers and now offering more than 80 billion holiday combinations.

We continue to perform well in all of these expansion areas, and I'll come on to that shortly. Each product expansion or market we add uses the same technology, the same brand and the same people. The execution risk of adding new products or markets is, therefore, very, very low. On scale and automation, we have created a scalable business. Earlier, I shared our focus on simplification, automation and AI, and this means that over the last 4 years, we have scaled our offer from 1 billion holiday combinations to 80 billion. We are sending 40% more people on holiday every year, and we have a head count which is 40% lower. This shows real progress against our pillars.

On to our addressable market. Two years ago, our addressable market was 16 million passengers, represented by the 3 blocks in the bottom left of this chart. As well as beach, our market now includes city breaks, cruise and the Republic of Ireland as a source market. Therefore, today, our addressable market is 3x as big as it was 2 years ago, 50 million passengers and growing. Ireland growth year-to-date is 70%. City bookings have more than doubled. These areas continue to grow. And in a very short space of time, we are an established and significant player in these markets. It's our pre-existing technology investment that has enabled us to establish a presence in these areas so quickly and for a relatively low level of investment. That's a structural advantage that we have that newer entrants cannot easily replicate.

And finally, on to current trading and outlook. So despite the challenging environment, we continue to trade profitably and generate cash. Demand has improved and settled since our last update in March, and momentum is building for the summer. Over the last 6 weeks, bookings are up 9%, and month-to-date bookings for summer are up 17%. These recent trends and our experience in the industry gives me confidence that consumers value their summer holidays very highly. And therefore, despite the current challenging environment, we are confident in delivering adjusted profit for the year of between GBP 18 million and GBP 25 million. Looking further ahead, we have made significant progress this year and are well positioned for the medium term.

Excellent. Well, thank you very much for listening to me and really appreciate it. Thank you.

Welcome, everyone, to the -- On the Beach FY '25 Results Presentation. We have split this presentation into 4 parts. I'm going to start with some highlights. Jon is going to take us through the financial performance, and then I'll provide updates on the markets in which we operate and the strategic progress we've made this year.

So starting with some of the key highlights. This year has been another record year for On the Beach. We've delivered another very strong financial performance with TTV growth of 11%, improving operating margins and record amounts returned to shareholders through share buybacks and dividends. Overall, this results in a 45% increase in earnings per share to 19p. Within this, we are growing ahead of the market, significantly ahead of the market. Summer '25 volumes were plus 13% year-on-year with volume growth to all destinations and star ratings. In addition to our core beach destinations, we have made good progress in our expansion areas, which I'll talk about more later. We continue to make significant progress against our strategy with double-digit growth in lead indicators against our 3 core strategic pillars: stickiness, choice and peace of mind. And finally, we enter FY '26 with trading momentum in a very resilient market with confidence that this will be another year of strong growth and strategic progress.

So moving on to trading performance. On this slide, you can see that trading -- you can see the trading performance on both a booked and a traveled basis. The chart in the top right shows booked sales by month. And as you can see, sales momentum continued from the first half through into the second half with booked sales growth of 11% in both periods. As you know, we reported a slowdown in trading in September, in particular, due to the shortening of lead times that impacted bookings growth of summer '26. This was widely reported across the travel market. However, you can see on this chart that we've extended through into October and November that post year-end trading has returned to strong growth. In the last 8 weeks, TTV is 16% up year-on-year. And within that, summer '26 is plus 8% year-on-year and strengthening. So no signs that, that slowdown in September was structural.

The chart in the bottom right shows the value of holidays departing by month. This is in line with how tour operators report their numbers, so you'll be able to do a read across. Winter finished very strongly with 17% growth, which is nearly 40% on a 2 year-on-year basis. And sales for summer departures were 14% up year-on-year and significantly ahead of the market. We also have a very strong forward order book for the winter, which runs from November to April and is currently at 12% growth year-on-year. This is driven by demand for both winter sun and the popularity of our new City Breaks proposition.

So I'll now hand over to Jon to take us through financial performance.

Thanks, Shaun. Good morning, everyone. I'll start on Slide 7, which provides a summary of the key results for the year. As Shaun said, it's been another record year, and there's 3 points that I'd like to bring out on this slide. Firstly, we've achieved strong top line growth with record TTV of GBP 1.25 billion and bookings up 9%, which are well ahead of the market.

Secondly, we've continued to improve our operating leverage with a further 150 basis points improvement in our EBITDA margin. And these 2 factors have resulted in a 20% year-on-year growth in PBT.

And thirdly, our strong cash generation has resulted in significant shareholder returns through the dividend, which has seen a 33% increase year-on-year and 2 share buyback programs, which have contributed to a 45% increase in basic adjusted EPS to 19p. So overall, we remain on track to deliver our medium-term ambition by 2029.

Moving on to Slide 8. I'll run through the key P&L highlights. So as I said, we've seen 11% growth in TTV, which is 9% bookings growth and 2% growth in ABV. And that bookings growth has predominantly come from growth in beach holidays with 3-star, 4-star and 5-star all growing as well as our long-haul business. And this is a real testament to the strength of the brand, where we've now got more than 80% of TTV coming across 4-star and 5-star holidays.

Moving to overheads. The change year-on-year has got 3 elements to it. So variable credit card and debit card charges have increased, but below the rate of bookings growth. We continue to invest into talent within our technology and product teams. And AWS cost, cloud costs have increased year-on-year linked to the growth of our hotel portfolio of now 24,000 hotels. Our amortization charge this year is lower as a percentage of capital spend as a result of investment into longer-term strategic projects, which have got a longer useful economic life than was previously the case. And whilst not reflected in the continuing operations P&L that we're showing in the presentation, we do show in the statutory P&L a loss on discontinued ops, which relates to the wind down of Classic Collection, and this loss of GBP 16 million was largely noncash relating to the write-off of brand, goodwill and other intangibles in addition to trading losses in the year and the costs of closure.

On Slide 9, we set out our usual financial KPIs. I'll just touch on a couple of those that I haven't already covered. So as I mentioned, average booking value is up by 2% in the year, and this is 4% growth in Beach ABV, which is offset partially by a 2% impact from the growth in our cities proposition. Revenue is up 6% on an adjusted basis, which eliminates the exceptional Ryanair refunds income in the prior year. You'll see here that average margin per booking is down GBP 6 year-on-year, reflecting the move into both cities and Ireland. So cities has got a lower margin per booking given the relative ABV relative to beach. And we also invested into price in Ireland in the second half in order to support our marketing investment.

And as Shaun mentioned, Q4 in the later booking market, we did further invest into price in the last quarter to compete in that very late market as well. Total marketing costs are down 4% in the year, driven by increased effectiveness of our online marketing spend. And you can see here that the total marketing spend per booking is down by GBP 10 year-on-year. And that also includes a net GBP 2 million spend in marketing into the launch in the Republic of Ireland. And there's 2 factors for that really that our cost per acquisition has reduced because across new customer acquisition, we've become more effective with our media activities, which are driving lower customer acquisition costs. And in retention and loyalty, we've built capabilities through CRM, through the app and through our customer data platform, which are driving greater repeat purchase rates and frequency with customers increasingly coming back to us directly.

And our offline marketing campaign remains highly effective. We've got our highest ever top 3 consideration score as a result of that ad campaign, which really resonates with our customers. And the effectiveness of our marketing has meant that gross profit after marketing as a percentage of revenue has improved by 3% year-on-year to 65%.

Moving on to Slide 10. We retain a strong balance sheet with our asset-light business model demonstrating, as you can see on the chart here, the strong cash conversion in the year. And that conversion enables continued investment into our technology platform as well as significant shareholder returns in the year. And as well as returning cash to shareholders, we also funded a new employee benefit trust to make market purchases and mitigate future dilution from the exercise of grants. As we said in September, we completed a refinancing in the year, so increasing the facility to GBP 120 million with a further GBP 30 million accordion. And we were delighted with the level of interest that was shown both from existing lenders and new lenders to join that facility, which enabled us to improve pricing versus the previous facility.

Slide 12 sets out our capital allocation framework. So this remains the same as the prior year. Our focus is on investment to drive organic growth. And as we've said, the return on investment there in organic growth remains significant. In the second pillar, we've proposed a final dividend of 3p, which if approved at the AGM, would mean a total dividend of 4p in the year, a 33% increase year-on-year.

We do continue to review M&A opportunities. However, given the strong EPS accretion that we've been able to deliver through both organic growth and share buybacks, the hurdle rate for M&A, I would say, has increased year-on-year.

And finally, as Shaun said, we've been able to generate cash and utilize the facilities to return GBP 50 million to shareholders over the past 12 months since we announced our first buyback at final results this time last year. So that means that we've bought back and now canceled 14% of our issued share capital.

And before I hand back to Shaun, just touching on Slide 12 and the current trading and outlook, we've had a really strong start to the year with TTV up 16%, which is 14% volume and 2% ABV impact. And when we reported in September, winter bookings were plus 12%, and that's now increased to plus 15% with customers increasingly seeking winter sun and also being attracted by our city breaks proposition. And summer is also building momentum with volumes now year-to-date plus 8% and the summer season now into growth year-on-year. So given the strong start to the year and the continued progression of our technology and our proposition, the Board is confident in delivering FY '26 adjusted PBT in the range of GBP 39 million to GBP 43 million this year. And also finally, we remain confident in delivering our medium-term ambitions.

Shaun, I'll hand the clicker back to you.

Brilliant. Thank you, Jon. Right. I will have got a few slides to take you through an update on the market. I'll just start with a few headlines. I won't cover all of these because I'll cover them in future slides. But what I will say is we operate in a large, resilient market, which is enjoying a trend of uninterrupted long-term growth. Whilst our core beach holiday proposition continues to account for the majority of our business and growth, in the last 18 months, we have moved into new areas and demonstrated just how scalable our business model is. In fact, we have more than tripled our addressable market. And today, we report tangible progress in these expansion areas and against our strategy and are very confident about the year ahead and the medium term.

So providing a little bit more color on the market. The overseas travel market is significant in size and growing. Overseas travel is embedded in the fabric of U.K. consumer behavior and a protected category of spend with 1/3 of Brits now taking 3 or more overseas trips per year. Within this and helpful to our business, there's been a significant shift in the last 10 years to people choosing to book their holiday as a package rather than a separate components. Growth in package holidays is particularly strong in the younger age categories, which supports long-term structural adoption. The value, convenience, flexible payment options and consumer protection of a package holiday are increasingly attractive factors driving this behavior.

And finally, the financial health of the consumer remains good, particularly in the mid and top deciles of the economy, which is where travel spend is at its highest. On to our addressable market. So not only do we have a healthy share of our core beach holiday market shown in the bottom left and estimated at 16 million passengers. In the last 18 months, we have more than tripled our addressable market through the addition of City Breaks, Ireland is a new source market and more recently, cruise. We expect to rapidly expand into these new areas by attracting new customers to the brand, increasing share of wallet of our existing customers and new customers and improving customer retention.

Developments to our technology over this period means we can access these additional markets with no -- with modest or no increase in operational cost. This will enable us to improve operating leverage as we scale. On the next couple of slides, I will talk about the progress we have made.

So this one really about the beach market. So with respect to Beach Holidays, which represents 92% of our business, this year has been a year of growth in all areas. All core beach destinations are in growth, including short and long haul, and we have grown across both value and premium. Within this, 4- and 5-star holidays continues to be the fastest-growing segment, now representing more than 80% of our sales, further increasing the resilience of our business to any future consumer downturn. During the year, we took -- as Jon mentioned, we took the decision to close our B2B segment, Classic Collection. This enables us to focus on the faster-growing, more profitable core B2C segment and significantly simplifies our technology and operation.

In terms of our expansion areas, cities are the largest expansion area in terms of market size, I am on the right one. From a standing start this year, we have established a new City Breaks proposition with around 160 cities on sale by the end of the year. And whilst City Breaks represented only a small part of our sales growth this year, the proposition has expanded rapidly through the course of the year, and we have established a firm base from which to grow. It's very positive to see that the City Break offer is attracting repeat purchase from existing customers as well as customers who are new to the brand. The ratio of new to existing customers has been steady all year at about 60-40. So moving into this area has been very, very low execution risk and presents a very, very large opportunity.

In addition to City Breaks, we started selling holidays from Ireland at the start of the year. This year was about establishing a brand presence and a solid base from which we can grow. We estimate the market to be around 15% of the size of the U.K. market and are pleased with the progress we have made in year 1. 12 months in Ireland already represents around 2% of group volumes and 1% of group revenue, and we expect this to grow rapidly in FY '26.

And finally, Cruise. Cruise is very much in the test and learn phase. However, we are very interested in its potential. We estimate the market ex U.K. to be around 4 million passengers, and it's one of the fastest-growing markets in travel. Cruise has the potential to be very complementary to our current offer as there is significant overlap with our existing customer base. So whilst it's early days, I look forward to updating you on progress on Cruise and other expansion areas later this year. That's the market update.

So now on to strategic progress. Most of you will be familiar with this strategy wheel, but I will recap. We have a very clear strategy for growth underpinned by the 4 core design principles you can see, stickiness, choice, peace of mind and scale and automation. We chose these pillars for 4 reasons. One, customers are shopping around as much as ever. Therefore, we must design for stickiness. Two, we have historically only competed for a small share of our customers' holiday wallet. We, therefore, must design for that increased choice. And we know that customers want choice, value and flexibility, but they also want hiccup-free holidays. Therefore, we must design for peace of mind. And finally, as shown earlier in this presentation, because of the developments we've made, we have a significant opportunity to expand our customer base. Therefore, we must design for scale. By this, we mean having a platform that can deliver 10x scale, not plus 10%.

By delivering on these design principles, we expect to achieve a higher level of repeat bookings, increase our average annual customer spend by increasing the number of customers who make more than one booking with us each year, attract new customers to the brand and continue to improve operational leverage. To achieve a period of transformational growth, which is what this next 4 years is about, we must deliver against these principles. I'll take you through some of the progress we've made this year.

Starting with stickiness. We've made significant progress with all of our app lead indicators during the year. Our key metric here is the volume of bookings from repeating customers, which this year was an increase of 18% year-on-year. And on those app metrics, we have significantly increased app usage and engagement. We've had 1 million downloads, which is a 28% increase year-on-year. 80% of our customers are now using the app between booking and departure and 30% of our bookings this year were made on the app. We started the year about 20%, and we've ended at about 40%. So significant progress. And there are really clear reasons why we are investing in the app, and we see this as a key to unlocking value. App users convert better up to 6x higher conversion than web.

So people who visit the app are more likely to book by a holiday. They rebook at a higher rate. So people who use the app have up to 50% higher rebook rates, and they are generally more satisfied, scoring 22% higher for Net Promoter Score. Therefore, this year, we have significantly enhanced our app experience. We provide a seamless booking journey, and we make it easier for customers to access what they need from the point of booking right the way through to traveling.

Moving then on to choice. By adding more choice to our proposition and competing for a higher share of the total holiday wallet, there's a significant opportunity to attract new customers to the brand and increase the number of customers booking more than one holiday in any given holiday year. Our key metric for success here is the number of bookings that are being made by customers who book 2 more holidays. That has increased 15% year-on-year and represents 25% of the bookings made. This is -- there's still a lot of headroom in this number. So even though that sounds like impressive growth, the average holiday maker will take 1.7 holidays a year. So we have a lot of room to grow into with this key result. We have achieved this growth by aggressively scaling new destinations and the options within our existing destinations to significantly increase customer choice.

We've significantly increased the number of destinations, hotels and airlines on the platform and now offer more than 80 billion holiday combinations. And all of this has been achieved while significantly increasing the accuracy and the speed of holidays that we deliver on our website.

Next pillar is peace of mind. So peace of mind is a key factor in the consideration set when deciding who customers are going to book their holiday with. And fewer inbounds to our contact center means we can improve customer experience, whether you contact us or not. So work in those 2 areas is really paying off. Our Net Promoter Score has increased by 14% versus last year to 56 and customer inbounds have reduced by 21%. This has enabled us to reduce customer wait times by 23% and increase customer satisfaction scores for customers who need to contact us.

Some of the key drivers of this, this year, clearly, the benefits of the Ryanair integration, the upgraded platform and significantly improving the customer booking experience. App development and features like live flight information, WhatsApp in Resort and perks on the app like price drop protection. And when things go wrong or change, we've introduced significantly more automation and the ability for the customer to self-serve more often.

So final pillar, scale and automation. I think the headline sums up our approach here and where we are. We are building for 10x scale, not plus 10%, and we are ready for an AI-first world. Taking these from left to right. Firstly, for the last 3 years, we have been building AI-ready technology. And that's not -- that wasn't necessarily about building technology, thinking about AI. It was having a modern technology stack that can connect to AI platforms. So this means that our content is ready to be seamlessly integrated into platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini when they are ready to start doing that. This is a big opportunity for us to diversify where customers can discover our product and an opportunity for us to unlock the benefits of AI on our website and app in the future, not just on third parties.

Moving across to #2. AI automation across the back office is happening company-wide, and this is already saving us thousands of hours per week. With respect to infrastructure, we have developed infrastructure that scales with a cost that does not scale in the same way, so we can add 3x the product but not incur 3x the cost. We are now able to store billions of holiday combinations and present the results to our customers in seconds. There is so much headroom in our platform capabilities now that the scale of our growth is only really limited by the scale of our ambition.

And finally, we've established a blueprint for international expansion. By moving into Ireland, this means we've developed the technology to handle languages and currencies, which will enable further international expansion when we are ready.

Moving on to brand. And I suppose this is a wrapper that sits on top of our leading-edge technology. It is our differentiated proposition and brand loyalty. We have evolved and extended our unique Perks proposition to provide peace of mind and enhanced holiday experience and to reward loyalty. More of our customers benefit from a Perk than ever before. And we have prioritized investment in those that resonate with customers the most. So our absolute spend on Perks has not gone up, but we're delivering more perks to more people. As a reminder of the overall benefit that Perks give us, I refer to the diagram on the right.

So having a unique value proposition gives us a point of difference we can communicate in a way that our customers can't. Having this differentiation increases the effectiveness of our marketing activities, and we've seen that now year-on-year come through marketing leverage. It gives us the opportunity to talk about quality in a tangible way. This strengthens our brand, broadens our appeal and helps attract new customers. And to complete the loop, these value-add elements enhance our customers' holidays, increase the likelihood they will rebook or recommend us to friends and family. So it's now become a core embedded part of our proposition. Results this year have been very strong. We've maintained a high level of spontaneous brand awareness at 27% and our top 3 consideration of 32% is the highest it's ever been.

Moving on to focus for this year. Not a huge amount of new things to say on this slide. We're very happy with the progress we've made this year, and we're going to continue driving progress in the same areas. So with stickiness, that means more app activation and engagement, more customers booking more than one holiday per year and more of our customers repeating with us year after year. We will leverage the increased choice to consistently take share in our expansion areas, move into that white space and improve customer search conversion. So again, more likely that when people come to our website, they will book a holiday. And we will continue to build for scale. And this is about being ready for AI distribution, which is a position we already occupy and leverage that AI-powered automation, both at the front and back end.

And finally, just we've laid out a high-level road map to help people understand how we see delivery of the medium-term ambition. If you start in the bottom left-hand corner, by delivering against those pillars, we will bring new customers into the brand. increase customer repeat rates and increase the number of people booking 2 or more holidays a year. The -- there's a multiplier effect on these. So modest improvements in each of those multiplies up to quite big numbers. Those metrics across the term of the medium-term ambition to 2029 combined to deliver a CAGR of 11%. So this year, the cumulative effect of that is 7%. And I think we're happy with that given the standing start that we made on some of those factors and the progress -- the progress has been graduated through the year. We then have a discrete pillar on the medium-term ambition for Ireland. This year, we've booked around 40,000 passengers, again, from a standing start with an ambition to reach 300,000 by 2029.

And finally, through an increasingly efficient operating model, our ambition is to achieve 40% EBITDA margin. This year, we've already improved our operating margins by 1.5 percentage points. So good progress this year. So that concludes our presentation.