Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Flight Centre Travel Group full year result conference call. All participants are in listen only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a Q&A session. If you wish to ask question, then please press Star then one on your telephone keypad. I'd like to turn the conference over to Mr. Graham Turner, Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for our FY 22 full year results presentation. To keep you on your toes a little bit, we've changed our order. First up, you'll hear from Adam Campbell, our Chief Financial Officer. Adam will run you through the numbers and the highlights before handing over to Skroo.
Skroo is gonna focus on outlook, which is starting to look a little bit more promising this year than it has for the last couple, before handing over to our three divisional Chief Executive Officers. Firstly, Chris Galanty from Corporate, then James Kavanagh from Leisure, and Melanie Waters-Ryan from Supply. Skroo will then come back at the end, to close things off and to take some questions. Thanks. I'll hand over to Adam.
Thanks, Graham. Look, as we mentioned in our market release last month, we finished the 2022 financial year with solid momentum. Our final underlying EBITDA loss of AUD 183 million was better than initially expected. Results in January and into February were heavily impacted by Omicron. Our trading from March and particularly the final quarter of the year allowed us to break even for the second half. With both corporate and leisure returning to profitability within the anticipated time frames of March and June, respectively. As you can see on the graph on page four of our deck, our Q4 TTV alone exceeded the full year FY 2021 TTV levels. This was driven by both higher airfares, particularly international, and significant demand uplifts in both corporate and leisure as government restrictions continued to ease.
For the Q4, both global corporate and global leisure, as well as all geographical regions other than Asia, were in positive EBITDA, and we've been generating positive operating cash flows since March. Just a couple of other key financial highlights on page five. Firstly, with our corporate business. As we've spoken about right throughout the COVID period, our corporate brands continue to have exceptionally high customer retention rates. We've won more than our fair share of new customer accounts, almost or around AUD 2.5 billion in annual spend secured in FY 2022 alone. This has resulted in the corporate brands growing at a faster pace than the industry recovery and our primary peers. In the month of June, TTV was at pre-COVID levels and transaction volumes at around 89%.
Our leisure brands have also made solid market share gains in our core markets of Australia and New Zealand, with many new customers using us, or for that matter, any travel advisor for the first time. TTV growing across both our traditional and new business models. Our consultant productivity is at record levels, thanks to the customer demand we're seeing, as well as our investments in new consultant technology. With our reduced physical shop network continuing to contribute the majority of our leisure volumes. One area that I think we have balanced very well over the last two years has been the need to initially reduce and then maintain our cost base with the equally important need to continue to invest in our people, products and technology.
We'll talk to both our cost base and investments further this morning, as well as the strength of our balance sheet as we progress through this recovery phase. I've included the P&L in the slide deck, but the following couple of slides after that, we've actually addressed the key takeaways from it. I'll just talk to those. Firstly on slide seven, it shows TTV of just over AUD 10 billion for the year, which was a significant improvement from 2021. As mentioned earlier, it was very heavily weighted to the final quarter, thereby giving us good momentum as we head into the new financial year. This momentum can be seen across both our corporate and our leisure businesses, with corporate sitting at pre-COVID TTV levels in the month of June and leisure at around 60%.
The increased yields we're seeing with international and to a lesser extent, domestic airfares, mean that transaction volumes and revenue are lower than the TTV recovery, but still increasing month-on-month. As mentioned earlier, we're certainly seeing good market share gains across our core geographic markets for both our leisure and our corporate brands, which can be seen in the graph at the bottom of the page. I mentioned earlier our success of structurally changing our cost base as we progressed over the last two years. This is evident on slide eight, where we highlight our current cost base versus pre-COVID. While it's not providing guidance on our future cost base targets, I can absolutely say that we expect to be able to service pre-COVID TTV levels with a significantly smaller cost base.
In the short term, all companies will be facing the impact of a high inflationary environment, but we should be somewhat shielded, I think, from the full impact of wage inflation, given the natural flex within our remuneration systems. With the current high productivity, high demand environment benefiting our incentivized sales staff. The extension of the Global Recovery Rights Share Plan for a second year also assisting with that. I've spoken about our segments already, and there's a bit more detail on pages 9 and 10 of the slide deck. I'll simply highlight once again the diversity that we have across both our geographies and our brands. That we're seeing a return to EBITDA profitability across all of those segments. The only exception, of course, is Asia, which is heavily impacted by the continued restrictions in China.
I'll finish the results section, before handing over to Graham Turner, by just commenting on our cash and liquidity position. Note that with AUD 1.3 billion in total cash and a liquidity position of AUD 700 million, even after a full working capital wind down and the exclusion of client cash. Now generating operating cash flows inflows on a monthly basis, we remain in a solid financial position. Our bank covenant relief has been extended until June 30, 2023. We've fully repaid the GBP 115 million COVID funding facility in the U.K., and we have accumulated tax losses of around AUD 1.3 billion to offset against future profits.
All of these positive factors give us a great benchmark to consider our optimal medium-term capital strategy, taking into account funding requirements for future growth, optimal debt structures, and shareholder returns. I'll now hand over to Graham Turner to talk about our current trading opportunities and outlook.
Yeah, thank you, Adam. That was very exciting what you had to say there. Hope you didn't write all that yourself.
I certainly did.
We'll just look a bit at the outlook, some of the opportunities we see over the next 12 months and two or three years. I think as we all know, the global travel market's a very resilient one. This slide will show you on the right-hand side of the graph with the GFC, 9/11 and the first Gulf War. You'll see there are hiccups that don't last too long. Now, COVID obviously will be worse than both of them because of government restrictions. This is a positive thing, and obviously because of a lot of the cancellations, the lower capacity, there'll be greater need for expert assistance. We believe there's gonna be a lot of upside potential in travel generally, as you'll see, as normal travel patterns return.
We don't expect the full travel market recovery in the countries we work in in this financial year until 2023. Certainly somewhere in the second half we will probably be tracking at pre-COVID levels in our TTV. As Adam said, strong momentum from quarter four in February 2022. The corporate TTV recovery was achieved to 100% on a monthly basis in June. Leisure was about 70%. If you look at the figures on the right, we probably expect ours somewhere between 18-20 million TTV in this financial year 2023. Most of you will know about the supply constraints.
It is particularly evident in Australia obviously, because we obviously locked down a lot worse than most other countries except China and Japan and perhaps Japan. It's gonna take us longer to recover than the rest of the world. I think the rest of the world airline capacity is about 87%. Australia and New Zealand's around the 50%, outbound. That was the end of July. Obviously this lack of capacity because of our extended shutdowns has led to higher normal airfares, particularly in premium. Even so, we've had a good look at a 10-year view of fares and cost of living increases and wage growth. Still even in economy, they're generally just as affordable as they were 10 years ago. It's not all bad news.
On the next slide, monitoring macroeconomic changes. Obviously we know cost of living increases. Inflation has started to rise after some years of low inflation, but one of the upsides is at the same time is very low unemployment. Obviously very low unemployment is good for outbound travel as we all know. One of the things that's been quite well highlighted, and the next slide shows this, is our lack of staff. We went from 21,000 people globally to about 7.5. As Adam said, we had to keep this low cost base for more than two years. Getting back the numbers of travel experts that we need means we have to attract a lot of talent.
In Australia alone, we're getting about 3,000-4,000 inquiries each month and employing about 200-300 people. Globally it's more like 500 people a month. We've still got a number of months to go before we'll have enough people and obviously in most areas we're winning market share. We will probably come back considerably more in the next 12 months. If you look at the macroeconomic tailwinds, we talk about interest rates and unemployment rates. You can see by traditional history that even now the current rate longer-term average is still a lot lower than the longer-term average one.
The orange graph is much bigger than the blue one, and the same with unemployment rates. We think that the economic outlook looks pretty good for travel because the interest rates are still relatively low and the unemployment rates are also low. Our outlook for 2023, it's obviously too early to provide guidance because we're still in a recovery stage, and we think particularly over the next six months, it's gonna be a little bit lumpy or, as Adam would say, volatile. But as the year progresses, we think it will become more and more normal with financial year 2024 getting back to a reasonably high level of normality, you know, subject obviously to global events.
In financial year 2023, profit and TTV are probably weighted to the second half more than the first half. We'd be disappointed if on EBITDAR basis, we weren't in positive territory each month over this first half. There's been a solid start to the year both in leisure and corporate. We're hoping to maintain that about half our growth in revenue will be converted to EBITDAR profit, and conversely, that our costs won't be significantly or more than about half the growth in profits and half the growth in EBITDAR. In the next slide, we believe that Flight Centre Travel Group is well placed to benefit from the conditions now in the medium to longer term.
We aspire, and this is probably fairly obvious, to be one of the largest diversified travel companies globally, with a large and growing corporate business, with a global footprint in 26 countries, I think. A high-profile leisure business in six countries, but particularly in the southern hemisphere, in the mass market of leisure, but also in the northern hemisphere with a more specialized business in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. We believe that, particularly with both the opportunity to have online and offline travel, both in corporate and leisure, as well as developing some of our well-known in-destination brands, that we're well placed in the next three or four years to come back very profitably and with significant TTV growth.
During the last two and a half years, we've enhanced our tech platforms, both in corporate with our Melon program and Helio in our leisure, and also TPConnects, which you may remember we purchased the remaining significant part of the remaining shares there some short time ago. We also believe we know we've got an experienced task force team in place. I think there's an average tenure in Flight Centre of 25 years. Maybe someone got rid of some of that now. But even our next layer, the people who report to the seven people in my task force team, or the 6 people besides me, have an average tenure of 20 years. There's an enormous amount of experience and capability and ability in our senior leadership teams.
As we've said before, the resilience of travel, which we believe is a discretionary product that people do reinvest in every year, whether it's domestic or international. Particularly in places like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and the U.K., there's no doubt and the U.S. at the moment no doubt that it is discretionary. It's something that people do every year. We'll have an ongoing strategic focus on growing our TTV market share growth at the same time, making sure that we can grow our overall margin and revenue and obviously keeping our costs under control from a lower cost base that's happened during the last two and a half years of COVID.
The one bit of really good news is Kirsty Rankin is a new board member. She's gonna join Gary Smith, Colette Garnsey, Robert Baker, John Eales, and myself on Flight Centre's board. We've tried to steer her off by getting her to come to a few board meetings, but she insists she still wants to stay. Welcome to Kirsty. Thank you. Now I'd like to hand over to Chris Galanty who's just getting out of bed in the U.K. at the moment. Thank you, Chris.
Thanks, Skroo. It's my pleasure to give an update on our corporate travel performance today. There remains a simple message behind our strategy, which is focused on driving growth. In fact, we called our strategy Grow to Win.
Our growth is a result of driving a high-quality customer experience that enables us to retain and win customers, and therefore take market share. In addition to the numbers Adam provided earlier, I'll highlight some performance trends. I'll give a quick recap on our Grow to Win strategy and our focus on the next 18 months. But I'll start with some reflections on 2022. Firstly, the return to travel. We've been really pleased with the rapid returns of travel since the world opened up.
In fact, it's exceeded what we thought at the half year. There has been lots of friction in the industry, and I think it's really the return to travel really shows the resilience of the corporate sector. You've heard all about the shortages of staff at airlines or airports, difficulty in getting passports in some markets, delays, cancellations, lost baggage, et cetera. Despite all of this short-term friction, there's been a really active return to travel. Customer needs have changed. We've seen the volatility, the friction in the industry really highlight the importance of a high-quality travel management company such as ourselves. We've seen customers really desire a need for great customer-friendly technology to help them navigate the new world of business travel.
Combined with that, we've seen a real reliance on high-quality people, which is something we've prided ourselves on for many, many years. There's also been for many customers, a strong focus on sustainability, making sure as their travel program restarts, we are able to help them achieve their sustainability goals. Just a quick view of the competitive landscape. Well, there's certainly after the consolidation of the top end of the industry, there's fewer choices for large enterprise customers, which has really helped FCM. In fact, we've been invited to more RFPs than we ever have been in our history. Some of the legacy TMCs have struggled to adapt to the new, needs of the customer, struggled to invest for a post-COVID world, and again, that's really helped us.
Some of the tech-only startups that we saw emerging in some parts of the world prior to COVID have really struggled to deliver what customers need when technology and people are both required. To look at some of the trends, you can see on this slide, our corporate recovery at the June 30th. We exceeded our pre-COVID level of TTV, actually six months earlier than I predicted at the half year. I thought we'd get to this level at December 2022. We, in fact, reached it by June, partly delivered by a faster return to travel, partly delivered by an increase in average transaction value or the average cost of an airline ticket. Transaction volumes, though, were close to 90% and they've increased since then.
Our revenue has got to 80%, which really all three of those KPIs are way ahead of the competitive sets in the market and is a testament to Grow to Win. The next slide really shows Grow to Win in action. This is a slide that we showed at the half year, and we've updated it since then. What it's trying to show is that we are not and have never been in our Grow to Win strategy reliant on the market recovering to 100% of pre-COVID. We called, we thought it would get to around 70%, and that's what we based our Grow to Win strategy on. You can see the big red chart at December 2019 was at pre-COVID TTV levels.
At the half year, we got to 33%, so our existing pre-COVID customers were traveling a third of what they did pre-COVID. Then the dark gray, the 8% is customers we've signed, new customers we've signed since the beginning of COVID. Fast track to June 2022, and you can see that our customers, our pre-COVID customers have recovered 78%, and our new customers traveled at 22% of pre-COVID volumes has got us to 100% of where we were ahead of what we thought. Taking that forward to December 2022 to looking into the future now, and we can do this in corporate because we can actually see our active pipeline and customers that we've already won.
We think that our pre-COVID customers will go down to about 73%, and that's largely because of a fall in average transaction value as we predict the supply and demand imbalance to get slightly better. We think that the customers we've already signed will reach 25%, and then new customers we've already signed, but are currently in implementation solution design, will reach 9%. By the end of this calendar year, we'll be about just under 110% of pre-COVID levels. Then fast-forward again to June 2023, and we introduced a new category, which is customers who we haven't yet won, but we're in the final stages of RFPs. We can comfortably predict that we'll get to about 120% of the size we were pre-COVID. This is all through winning and retaining customers.
This isn't required for China to open up or Japan. We can't predict any of that stuff. We don't know when that will happen. This is just accepting the world as it is today. Really strong growth. The next slide shows this at a transaction level, the same sort of trends. You can see the black line from December 2021 to the half year to the full year of June 2022. The black line is a rapid recovery in transaction numbers as the world opened up. Well, you will see that trend continue as we implement new customers. A linear growth of transaction numbers, more volume coming to our business. Again, not requiring China to open or anything like that. This is simply us implementing new customers.
Similarly, you see a rapid increase in income per transaction from the half year to the full year. You'll see that trend continue as well. Some increase in income per transaction, so the money we make per transaction. Then you see a rapid drop in cost per transaction as economies of scale kick in, and you'll see that trend continue downwards as well. This is Grow to Win in action. This is how it impacts our bottom line. Vastly more volume, better income per transaction over time, lower cost per transaction, therefore better profitability. Another performance slide is the Grow to Win timeline. This really shows some of the innovation in corporate, some of the investments we've made, largely technology and consultancy investments to improve the capability in both of our brands and some of the productivity growth initiatives.
Really what this results in is a record AUD 5.8 billion of new annualized new wins during the COVID period and a record financial year that's just concluded of AUD 2.5 billion Australian. You can see some of the fantastic customers that we're really privileged to have brought on board in the last couple of years. Now, these are the customers, the enterprise customers, the governments that you've all heard of. Actually, it's important to remember that the majority of our new customers are SMEs. Average spend is $200,000 a year on travel. Now, these aren't household names, but they're very important. They're the foundation of our business. A quick recap on the strategy. Why are we winning all of this business?
Well, to start, we play a two-sided model really, which is on the one hand, travel customers, so the corporations, the businesses, and on the other hand, our supply customers, the airlines, the hotel chains. It's really when we deliver value to both of these customers that our performance really shines. We address the market with two brands, FCM in the large market space, which is really the only global alternative to legacy TMCs and really offers a different approach to travel management. A lot more flexibility, great customer-friendly technology, and I think really it's fair to say that FCM has shaken up the large top end of the market in the last couple of years.
Corporate Traveller, our brand that specializes in the SME space, operates in six of our core markets and has a completely different customer value proposition designed around those smaller customers who need that expertise. Having these two brands enables us to win both at the top of the market, the large high-profile enterprise customers throughout that whole market and then right down to the local SMEs as well. Our unique value proposition, our strategy on a page, it really starts at the top with our two differentiating winning brands, Corporate Traveller in the SME space and FCM in the large market and enterprise space, both of which have their own proprietary customer technology.
Melon in the digital platform in Corporate Traveller and the FCM Platform, both of which are differentiated from what the competitors have to offer, but both of which are specifically designed for their respective customer categories. The FCM Platform launched originally in China and is now operating across all of our 100 markets. Every new SME customer goes straight onto the platform, and all existing customers are in the process of being migrated. Melon has gone live in North America, and is about to go live in the U.K. Again, both of which are receiving great feedback and are one of the reasons that we are winning so much business right now.
We also have our industry-leading organic growth, what we call our sales and marketing machine, and it's enabled us to reach more customers than any of our competitors and to convert them into new customers.
We share capability across both brands, but both brands have dedicated sales and marketing teams because the customer sales cycle is so different between the two categories. We then have our high-touch service automation. This is really our operations and trying to make them as efficient as possible, particularly in SME. We introduce a lot of artificial intelligence from robotics and automations and process transactions quickly and accurately. We also back that up with great data and with a great offline personal experience for all of our customers too. We then have our supply partnerships and proprietary aggregation. Mel will touch on this later, but this is really about making sure we get the right content via the right channel to the right customer at the right time.
Being really world-class at this, and I'd argue better than any of our competitors in the corporate space, gives us the big competitive advantage. The foundation of all of it is our people, our culture, our sustainability. Really everything is built on our people and our culture. It's why we're different. It's why ultimately I think customers do business with us. They say they love our technology, they love our consultancy capability, but I think it's ultimately our culture that makes a difference. Just looking at the next 18 months. Firstly, what are we doing? Well, we're gonna focus on accelerating customer growth. We're gonna continue our growth with a strategy of retaining customers. I'm proud to say that, you know, in SME, our customer retention rate on our contracted customers is well over 98% again this year.
We're gonna add more new customers to the business over the next 18 months and carrying on with our technology product rollout. We're gonna accelerate service model productivity. This simply means being more efficient, so turning more of the revenue into profitability, giving a better customer experience in both brands. Finally, we're gonna leverage our new market dynamics. We're really working with our supply customers who have their own strategies they want to achieve, and they're using technology now to change that, and we want to be a key strategic partner in that. Really the message for the next 18 months is carrying on with Grow to Win. It's working really well. We're gaining market share. We've delivered on the promises we've made to customers, and we want to carry on doing that.
That was a brief summary on our corporate performance and strategy. I'll hand over to J.K. now to give an update on Leisure.
That's great. Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to give an update on the leisure category, and I'll focus specifically on some of the trends that we're seeing our main leisure objectives, and also the key areas of investments that we're focusing on. Pleasingly, leisure sales really accelerated in the second half of last year, and it's great to see that pent-up demand that everybody's been talking about is really turning into travel bookings despite the airline capacity challenges, disruptions, rising prices, et cetera. We've been the beneficiary of this, where we've actually been growing market share as a result in the main countries in the Southern Hemisphere. What's really happening, what we're seeing with our customers is that they're certainly keen but also cautious.
Some of the trends is that they're booking a lot closer to departure now, where we're seeing customers book about 70 days prior to departure versus pre-COVID would have been about 90 days. Pleasingly, we're also seeing that holidays are now replacing visiting friends and relatives travel or VFR travel for the first time. We're also seeing that trips now are on average three days longer than pre-COVID. While we call uncertainty is the new certainty in the travel industry, what we're also seeing is a renaissance of the trusted travel advisor. We're welcoming many new customers that they haven't actually booked with a travel agent before in our retail network, but also seeing many customers start to book online too, which I'll speak to in a few minutes.
Our brands are now gone through a lot of that rejuvenation over the past couple of years. This means that we're also appealing to a wider audience, and we're actually seeing the purchase intent increase into a younger demographic. Where we've seen that purchase intent grow from 16% interested in booking with us, up to 25% of customers in the younger age group. That's actually flowing through to bookings, which is great to see. The main three objectives in our leisure business now in the next slide is really, number one, is about differentiating and growing Flight Centre's market-leading position in the Southern Hemisphere. In the countries we operate there, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, while also fast-tracking plans in the U.K. and Canada.
That will be done with our Flight Centre Omni program, which I'll speak to a little bit later. Number two is about rapid global expansion in the growth categories of leisure travel, which is really in that premium and luxury segment, but also in the independent agent community. The third main objective for leisure is to really accelerate our investment in a portfolio of complementary brands. We call these products specialist travel brands, but also seeding future viable options that are really complementary to our main leisure strategy. On the next slide, you'll see really our portfolio of brands in the leisure segment. What's really unique about this proposition is that we have enough brands that actually can offer our customers with the widest range of products, services, and value in travel across a diverse portfolio of brands.
The great thing about this then, it also is beneficial for suppliers because in turn, it gives our supply chain access to the most diverse range of valuable customers. The areas that we're focused on in the B2C segment, we're really focusing on growing Flight Centre, which is in the mass-market category. Now, Flight Centre's always been famous for flights, but we're now really offering an expanded range of value-focused holidays to complement the expertise and great value that we offer in the flight segment. In the premium and luxury travel category, Travel Associates went through a bit of a facelift and has repositioned itself as designing one-of-a-kind travel experiences for discerning and luxury travelers. That segment is really returning fast into the marketplace, and the business is growing exponentially.
When we talk about our portfolio of complementary brands, these specialist brands, and we have many of them, and there's a slide in the pack that you'll see, are really focused on areas such as the ready-made holiday segment with MyHolidays or student and youth travel online with StudentUniverse. Or brands that are quite specific in the segment of foreign exchange, like Travel Money, just to name a few. Over the past two years, while we've reshaped our retail property network, and in Australia, we talked a lot about this, whereby our retail network is now within 5 km radius of 95% of our customers. We're also looking at ways to reach a broader range of customers. We scaled up our offering and invested quite significantly in our solutions to the independent agent community.
We announced a few months ago, just a partnership with Goldman Travel and Spencer Travel here in Australia with the formation of Link Travel Group. Now, this group here is actually complementary to our broader strategy. We have a similar model that's up and running in New Zealand, and we're effectively looking at these agency member models and exporting this model, which is quite successful, to be able to grow globally. On the next slide, you'll see, by investing in these new channels and new models, over the coming years, we really expect to see Flight Centre continue to be a major part of our leisure portfolio. That will make up just over 50%. We'll see these new complementary models making up also half of the leisure segment.
In the last quarter alone in FY 2022, we're seeing independent is now 2 x bigger than pre-COVID. In our complementary portfolio, the Ignite business, which is MyHolidays, is now 50% bigger, and the premium brand of Travel Associates is also bigger than what it was pre-COVID. Onto the next slide, we'll look at the five key areas that we are investing in leisure to achieve growth. Firstly, it's about global expansion of our brands, network, models, and people. We expect to open a further 38 stores in Flight Centre in the coming year, which will really complement our omni-channel offering. We'll see more stores open in the Travel Money segment as well. Number two is very much about digitizing the customer experience.
We certainly didn't waste this crisis and have invested heavily in digital customer solutions to really pivot our business from a traditional bricks and mortar business, and to move more into this omni-channel segment. We've spoken a little bit about omni-channel before, and I'm really pleased to say that the program of work is really on track to enable our customers to move seamlessly across online, app, call center or in-store channels to be able to shop with their shopping cart and improve the customer experience. What we've also seen here now is that online sales have grown quite considerably from 5% of our volume, and they now make up 20% of our volume even as we continue to grow.
Our market share, which has been shared with us from our GDS partners, shows that our online share has doubled to 24% in recent months. We're also seeing now that about 65% of our customers' journey is actually starting on mobile. Some of the reviews that are actually showing up on our mobile app shows that we're about 4.8 in the App Store, which has actually shown customer experience is actually supporting and enjoying the experience that we're providing. Another area of focus in digitalizing the customer experience is actually how we leverage data as a core asset. Just recently, our new artificial intelligence bot, Annie, has been set up to be able to provide good data insights that will really allow us to present product offers to our customers when they're most likely to buy.
This is all about how can we actually grow ancillary sales, use the assets we have, and add more value to our customers to be able to actually increase top line and bottom line. Mel will speak a little bit more about supply, but on the leisure segment, one of the areas that our designers have been really focused on is about growing and expanding our range and actually creating new ranges that we haven't had before. To attract more customers, we're really focused on designing more one-of-a-kind experiences, and you can see a slide there that will give an example of some of the hosted tours that we're actually doing with our own people.
We're really expanding our range in luxury and expedition cruises, and a new range that we'll feature quite prominently is either tagging options that are sustainable options or ecotourism products that we'll position to our customers to enable them to make the choices they want when they're traveling. All of these are actually complemented by the services that our customers are familiar with, such as the Captain's Package or Purple Ribbon Service. This service range continues to have a lot of interest with our customers. On to number four, which is really about how we simplify the business. In our leisure business, we're on a journey to be more productive. We've spoken about this for many years.
Over the past two years, we've made the effort to really rationalize a number of our systems and to make sure that we're actually operating the business with half the previous systems that we used, half the previous number of systems. We launched Helio, a new system in our business for our consultants to be able to sell more productively. What we're seeing now is that our consultants are 2 x more productive at a booking level, and new starters to the group are also twice as productive. As you know, the labor market is quite tight right now. As we're actually growing our customer and our consultant numbers, we're able to get them up to speed and booking quite productively. I just wanna close off about talking about our people. They've been nothing short but outstanding as travel returns.
We are in a tight labor market, and we are recruiting quite significantly. The good news is that, interest in the travel industry has really returned. While it's a tight labor market, we're now hiring over 300 staff a month, and we're seeing applications increase month-on-month. There's renewed interest in the segment overall. It is a core capability of ours to be able to actually recruit at scale and actually invest, training our people, and also in focusing on our culture, which is why people stay. There's a few more slides in there that highlight the various complementary brands that are in our portfolio. I'll hand over to Mel now, and she'll give an update on how we're going in supply.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much, J.K. In the latter months of last financial year, we formalized the creation of our supply division in recognition of our strategic commitment to a shared group capability in this key space, which you've heard both Chris and J.K. reference. The supply pillar really has three core areas of responsibility. The first is to deliver and oversee on behalf of our corporate and leisure divisions, their content and distribution needs. The second, to grow and capitalize on our active destination and product businesses. The third is the growth horizon for Flight Centre Travel Group by delivering content and platforms to other travel businesses.
Firstly, as a supply mart for our corporate and leisure brands, we ensure the breadth and depth of content, both global and local, they require is there to support all their customer needs.
This amalgamation of content then also allows our brands to innovate product offerings for their customers and assist differentiation by leveraging content maybe not traditional to their travel segment, but available from supply. The supply division also then has a mission to simplify and reduce cost and friction to technically connect with our group for our supply partners. By creating a one-door entry point effectively into the entire FCTG brand portfolio, we can provide better value for them, as well as for our own businesses by simplifying and providing access to this content in one place. NDC is an example of this strategy in play, and in April, you may remember we accelerated the acquisition of the majority stake in TPConnects, the Dubai-based business. This was to ensure access to differentiated air content for the entire group.
By bringing together our 40 years of air capability and the technical prowess of TPConnects cements us as leaders in the global air marketplace. To be honest, at the start of the pandemic, it was unclear whether airlines would continue to see NDC as a key strategic objective. This has become clear that they do, and we want to work with our air partners to deliver on this and be the distribution group of choice. On the next slide, you can see we've arrived at some of our own projections regarding NDC penetration. Don't think these have been pulled from anywhere. We've kind of normalized what we've read about over the coming years, and we see ourselves very well positioned to capitalize on this channel while still having a GDS-first approach. Moving on to our supplier destination businesses.
They're also now recovering and looking to solid futures. Touring posted a limited 2022 season. It's selling into a full 2023 program, and advance sales are going well across both Topdeck and Back-Roads. Discover has returned to profitability in the Americas, is now opening up across Asia as those countries open and has a strong pipeline of new accounts won during the pandemic to start trading. Cross Hotels & Resorts has continued to expand its keys under management, and the Cross Group was in fact profitable just in the month of July gone. All of these businesses have customers beyond those of our FCTG leisure and corporate divisions, while also providing unique product opportunities to promote for these brands' customers as well. J.K. mentioned sustainability. Discover is helping drive a suite of ESG initiatives.
Our Munggu Village project in Bali, where an eco-tented camp is under construction, is an example of this and demonstrates our commitment to sustainably open up the world for those who want to see. I'm excited to be fully focused now on leading our supply division. I feel like I've got the band back together, where we can both help enable the aspirations you've heard about and plans of both our corporate and leisure pillars and develop further horizons of growth for the group as a whole. Thank you. I'll hand back now to Graham Turner.
Oh, thank you, Mel. Again, that's very interesting and exciting, particularly the supply and in-destination businesses. Just in, I suppose, a very brief summary, we see the next six months continuing to be underlying profits on a monthly basis. As I said, it's going to be a bit lumpy. But certainly, in the capacity and the supply of, particularly premium seats, particularly around Christmas, is one of the issues. But we think that will return to a lot more normality in the new year. The second half we certainly feel will be a reasonably profitable half for us getting back into the whole travel industry, getting back to pre-COVID levels, probably in around Christmas in the financial year 2024, we think.
Obviously, that's assuming there's no more COVID madness in the government restrictions and that sort of thing. I think we can probably open up for some questions now.
Yeah.
Ada?
If you wish to ask a question, please press star then one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star then two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up your handset to ask your question. Our first question will come from Mark Wade with CLSA. You may now go ahead.
Hey, guys. Great presentation. Thanks for the chance to open the batting on questions. Hey, starting with, we've heard about the strong demand, new customers, higher market share than before COVID, and high degree of bookings being modified. I completely buy into this argument that expert travel advice is more relevant than ever. The question is, are you being appropriately compensated for your services from the travelers and the suppliers?
Mike, it's Graham Turner here. Look, there's a range of issues at the moment. You will have heard, you know, Qantas, for example, is one of a few airlines that have dropped margin. There's a mix of business is different too to pre-COVID, and that will change to back to more normal. You know, obviously, we've got more domestic business. We're doing more online, so and also more domestic online and more corporate business, you know, particularly in FCM, where we've won some big accounts. Yes, but we think this overall revenue is increasing. But whether the margin gets back to pre-COVID levels, we just don't know at the moment. What do you think, Adam?
Okay.
Yeah, no, I agree. I think that's exactly right. There's a lot of factors at play when you're looking at, if you're specifically looking at revenue margin, there's a lot of factors at play. It's just too early to tell. I think given the whole industry is in that early phase of recovery, there's a lot of moving parts in there at the moment.
Yeah, sure is. Thank you. Despite plenty of new hires, your own business looks like it's got about 700 fewer selling staff than six months ago, but up on a year ago. I mean, how have you managed to navigate some of these real extreme challenges posed by the industry restarting and
Look, as we said, we are employing, you know, about 500 people a month. Obviously, you still lose some too. I'm not sure where that number comes from because we've basically been growing staff for the last six months. Most of those are frontline selling-
Yeah, it's in the deck. It's in the deck, Graham Turner.
Oh, well, that's Haydn's fault. I'm not sure how to explain that. Haydn?
Yeah. Well, it's gone from 6,384 at the half to now 5,760, the exact numbers. Look-
Oh, okay.
I mean, you're adding a lot, and that's the main thing.
Yes. Well, pre-COVID.
Right.
You know, in total staff numbers, we had, and I think we said this, 21,000 approximately. We cut our costs down to AUD 70 million a month. Went down about 7,500. We're at about 10.5, 11 now, and we've been growing that for the last six months. There's also, you know, we're also growing quite a few of our independents and third-party people who obviously wouldn't be on our books. They're contracted to us, independent contractors and people like that I'm not sure, but I can't explain those numbers other than that, because we have been growing each month for the last six. We're just having a look and see.
Might be typo.
What we got wrong.
That's right. Hey, in the 99 Bikes business, like I know it's a small part of the business, but it looks like you had a really tough second half. I mean, profits collapsed. How much of that's got to do with the market? How much is it more internal factors such as Matt’s departure?
Look, Matt's still there. He's, I think his official title is Executive Chairman. He's certainly taken more of a back seat. There's no doubt, you know, I think, the COVID year they did about AUD 52 million PBT, and last year it went down about just under 40, yeah, about 35, I think, in the end. They've had to take a bit of a hit there with being overstocked, and so they've written off stock that they still hope to sell. You know, I think, you know, if you look at pre-COVID, I think they were AUD 18 million or AUD 20 million profit. They've grown quite a lot in the last two years, as you know, not just in-
Oh, yeah.
...stock and that numbers. I don't know whether we've announced, but we've bought a business in the U.K. and that's.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, I'm reasonably bullish that.
No, I heard on the grapevine. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm reasonably bullish.
Yeah.
That they'll come back. Yeah, they've certainly got some growth pains and they certainly are overstocked, and they have written some of that stock off. If you wanna buy a bike the next few months, there'll be some pretty good bargains around just to get back to the right stock levels.
Fair enough. Hey, last one, if I can squeeze it in. How come EBITDA has become the preferred metric for a financial performance for the business? I mean, 'cause it's before about AUD 180 billion of lease costs and D&A and true interest. Yeah, why not PBT or even EBIT back in the day?
Yeah. Mark, look, we made the change about 12 months or a couple of years ago. Really, when we started to look at bringing the convertible bonds in particular, it just changed the profile there for us. Certainly at a group level. That's the sort of way that we're looking at it at the moment. We are at pains, though, to make sure that we are disclosing, obviously, at a PBT, at a line, so people can sort of talk to any of those. Also just for a bit more comparability with some of the peer set who report at that level. You're right, it's
Yeah.
It's not quite as clean as it used to be, particularly with the lease accounting. We try and give that full-
Yeah. Fair enough.
...both PBT and EBITDA.
Yeah. We'll keep going with the bike. That'd be helpful because, I mean, those rivals just don't have that huge lease cost base as well. All right, guys, look, you're heading in the right direction, so congratulations and keep it going. Thank you.
Thanks, Mark. We'll do this tomorrow.
Our next question will come from Tim Plumbe with UBS. You may now go ahead.
Hi, guys. Just two questions from me, if that's all right. First one probably is for Chris. If we think back pre-COVID, I think you guys were doing about AUD 10 billion of TTV in calendar year 2019 for the corporate PBT of AUD 285 million, so call it a PBT margin of 2.9%. You guys had some really substantial and impressive wins over the last few years. Five point eight, I think from memory, you guys adjust that for, like, a 20% structural impact, when you're coming up with those numbers. If that's the case, how are you guys thinking about everything once it does return and once you get a normalization of airfares and TTV, etc.?
Should we be thinking about the 10 becoming 8 post restructuring and then adding AUD 5.8 billion onto that? The second part just around PBT margins of 2.9%, is that the right way to be thinking?
Yeah. Look, it's a good question, Tim. I think that we're moving so far away from 2019 now. We're really referring back to that just to give you some a view of consistency, I'd say. We're very much looking to the future now. As you can see in the chart we set out, we think by this year we'll be TTV-wise, about 120% of 2019. I think 2019 we got to AUD 8.9 billion for the last full financial year. We're expecting to be significantly above that now. I think that in terms of PBT margin, yeah, look, I think we're very comfortable getting back to those levels.
As you can see in that slide, the message we're trying to communicate is that we've got economies of scale in the corporate business in both FCM and CT. Our intention over the last couple of years is to build a high quality, scalable business, and that's what we've done. Our cost base at the moment is very much geared towards being able to grow. As we grow, more transactions flow through the business, more of it converts to profitability. We're very confident we can get back to that PBT level. Whether we do it this year or not, time will tell. It's all about scaling up again. The emphasis for us is consistent growth every year through retaining customers, winning customers. We believe we're very much on track to do that.
Got it. Just, sorry, just to clarify, when you say PBT level, are you talking PBT margin level?
Yeah, we think we'll get back to that PBT margin level. Absolutely. It just comes back to scaling up. At the moment, we are very much invested in being able to grow. We're not trying to maximize short-term profits. We're very much saying we're trying to build a long-term business. As scale comes back, the PBT margin will return in Corporate.
Got it. June 2023, 70% from pre-COVID customers with a 70% market recovery. Does that imply that you guys are now thinking that the longer term structural impact will be lower than you previously thought?
Yeah, I think look, the 70% is we didn't know where the market would come back to. We said somewhere between 60% and 70% was what we felt. That's what we're still thinking. We think it will get back to about 70%. To be honest, though, it's very difficult to tell because the customers have proved probably more resilient than we thought. Bearing in mind, there's still parts of the world you can't travel to. There's still some significant capacity issues in some markets, particularly Australia, for example. It may be we're being a bit conservative there, but we're calling 70% because it focuses our management team on saying, "Do not be reliant on the market recovering to 2019. Grow by winning new customers." That number kind of works for us in terms of driving our growth.
Got it. The second question, probably for James, just in terms of the leisure business. Having tried to get a quote recently, the wait time's fairly substantial, which suggests that demand is well outstripping the capacity to supply within at least the Australian leisure market. I think you guys have mentioned that you had 4,500 applicants. You're putting on 300 heads. Is there any reason why you couldn't just take on a huge number of staff and do an extra big training recruitment drive, given that imbalance at the moment that you're seeing between demand and capacity to supply?
That's a good question, Tim. I mean, we certainly go through a rigorous selection process to make sure that we can have expert consultants on the front line. Even though we have that number of applications, there's a lot of sorting to figure out which consultants are actually fit for the industry, particularly at a time where we need to do a lot of troubleshooting, a lot of triage. So we're certainly converting those applications and upskilling as fast as we can. But we suspect it'll probably be a little bit lumpy for some time, for the next few months in terms of just because of all the challenges and the disruption that's going on.
Certainly we're hiring rapidly and the response times are reducing as supply starts to come back on board.
Understood. Thanks, guys.
Thanks.
Our next question will come from Ben Gilbert with Jarden. You may now go ahead.
Morning, team. Just a quick one from me. Just in terms of the revenue margins, appreciate the question before, but would you expect those to move above that 10% as we move forward? Like, if you look at the premium piece and how you've talked about the changing mix in leisure, I would expect that should probably still move closer to pre-COVID versus now. Have you seen any impact through July with the changes in the commission structures in Australia?
I might start with that, Ben. It's Adam here. Certainly I think the expectation over as we progress is that those revenue margins will certainly continue to improve for various reasons. I can get perhaps J.K. to talk to the Australian space or actually Mel, probably from a supply perspective. We would certainly expect them to continue to increase. As you said, the commission reductions only came into effect for July. We are certainly seeing some of the other areas and other factors that have impacted on revenue margins start to stabilize, albeit in the early phases of that. Mel, do you wanna talk some of the timing issues?
Ben, there's a couple of key drivers of revenue margin, and as we've highlighted, air pricing is the biggest one at the moment. Remember, it is our lowest margin product. Thank you, Mark, for pointing out, are we being paid enough from our supply chain on a couple of instances? No, we're not, but that hasn't changed. The air yield is driving a very, you know, suppressed margin. The other ones are basically sales mix and business mix, whether it's SME to CT or offline to online, which I think we've indicated, you know, we were strategically aiming for in some areas. The third area is perhaps the supply margin. Some of that's timing.
Something like GDS last year where we were in negative and actually didn't start earning, I think until June, that started to correct itself. Timing of overrides, accruals, we get paid on accrual, but you know, we recognize those at the revenue line, et cetera, et cetera. Some of that timing will adjust. Yes, we're building up for the kind of, when does that normalize? A lot of that will be dependent on when this air pricing starts to normalize. No, but we do expect them to start increasing. Where they end, again, depending on what the strategic intent is for both the corporate and leisure guys will kind of dictate that.
I will add on nearly all our supply margins, apart from a few airlines, we're holding or improving on where we were pre-COVID, so we don't have any issue in the majority of our supply space.
That's helpful. I suppose sort of wrapping that up with some of the other comments, the aspirations medium-term is still to get above a 2% PBT margin at group level?
Yes.
Yeah, that's right. You know, I think that the key thing there, Ben is, you know, any reduction in that revenue pre-COVID revenue margin that we see through some of the channel changes, et cetera, that we've been talking about for a little while now, will be more than offset by the efficiencies in the structural cost base changes that we've been putting in place over the last couple of years.
The product mix.
Ultimately you can have a much lower capital base now too, right? Given you've got considerably less leases, you mix towards online and mix towards corporate, so your return should be materially higher.
Yeah, that's right. Yep.
Yep. Fantastic. Thanks guys, appreciate it.
Thanks, Ben.
Next question will come from Tushar Nair with Goldman Sachs. You may now go ahead.
Hi, team. Thanks for taking my question. My first one is regarding the physical presence of the Leisure brand. Now, thanks to the forecast in terms of FY 25 outlook between mass market, complementary and premium, can you give us a sense of how your physical presence in these brands compares versus pre-COVID levels in each region?
J.K.?
Sure. Thanks for your question. The retail network is definitely downsized from where we were pre-COVID. In markets like Australia, we're down by about almost just slightly less than half of the network that we had previously. It's important to note that with that network, a lot of it wasn't necessarily performing pre-COVID. Even though we have structurally changed the size of the network, we're now at about the 469 locations globally, including some of the Travel Money outlets. Of those that we have, we've got about 82% open now, and we'll progressively open about another 38 over the coming year.
We think that that's the right size network for us to be able to actually balance the other models that we have operating, being online and also the independent agent community. That will enable us to actually grow our sales volume being a different business model than what we were pre-COVID. It's not just all about a shop network anymore. It's very much different models within the Leisure business going forward.
Yeah. Thank you. May I just confirm that 369 is your full capacity, including the progressive re-opening, or is that what it is as of today?
No, sorry, it's 469.
Yeah, sorry.
469 are the ones that are open currently, and we'll open an additional 38 coming for Flight Centre, and there'll be some more Travel Money stores that we'll open as well in the foreign exchange segment.
Okay. Thank you. My second one is probably for Chris. In terms of the revenue recovery in corporate, now you've noted that, revenue is back 80% and volumes at 89%. Can you give us a sense of what was the margin impact between, you know, the mix being between like SME and large corporate and versus higher ticket prices?
Yeah, good. Thanks, Tushar for the question. Yeah. It's a good point. What's happened is the very large wins in FCM has meant that FCM, which is our large market customers, have recovered slightly faster than SME, which does slightly reduce the revenue versus turnover. It's not that Corporate Traveller is not growing and recovering. It absolutely is. It's just that we've won so much new business in FCM, the growth has accelerated. The average ticket value has increased, and therefore that does reduce revenue margin slightly. Again, we see this as very short term. We think that the average ticket increase at the moment are very much a supply demand imbalance, which eventually will resolve itself over time. We're actually pretty confident in Corporate that, you know, the we...
We're actually talking now about income and revenue per transaction internally, because I think that's more of a relevant KPI for us because, you know, ultimately we in the short term can't control the supply issues. The airlines tell us they're gonna address it over time, but it's not something we can control. We're actually pretty happy with our revenue. We think as that chart showed in the presentation, it is all about economies of scale. As volume kicks in, you'll see profit per transaction improve, and that's what Grow to Win is all about.
Yeah. If I may just quickly follow up, maybe in between the large customers and the SMEs. Within your cumulative new wins of AUD 5.8 billion, how is that roughly split?
The majority is SCM. I think this is something like two-thirds SCM, 1/3 Corporate Traveller. The reason we report SCM is we can actually, because they go into a longer solution design and implementation, we actually track that number in advance. The advantage of CT is when we win business, it starts normally within 30, or even 60 days. SCM is a longer pipeline. It's stretching out up to a year. With Corporate Traveller, really we're only talking about wins in the immediate future. It doesn't have the length of pipeline.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Our next question will come from Wei-Weng Chen with RBC Capital Markets. You may now go ahead.
Hi, guys. Just the first one on the Leisure piece. There were a few trends, I guess, during COVID, which were considered structural, but turns out they weren't. Now, I guess, on the flip side, for you guys, we've had no travel for a few years, and now we're seeing a natural kind of release of pent-up demand. I guess I'm trying to ask what your sense is on how much we can read into some of these early trends we're seeing to Leisure. You know, things like trips are three days and older on average, increased relevance of advisors, et cetera. I guess, what's your view on what's structural and what's maybe kind of temporary?
Wei, you're cutting out a little bit there, but I think that the fundamental thing for J.K. is really some of the early trends that we're seeing at the moment, J.K., around, yo u know, that demand piece there, the length of trips, that renaissance we're talking about, the travel expert.
Yeah.
How does that flow out over the next couple of years and beyond?
Look, certainly over the next year, there's no doubt that a travel agent is gonna be in high demand because of the amount of uncertainty. We have certainly seen new customers come in that have never actually used an agent before. That's showing that there's a lot of uncertainty, but customers are definitely keen to travel. Even though the prices of fares are quite expensive in some seasons, we think that travel will continue even though we actually come through this. There'll be a lot more once we start to see a lot more capacity come into market. You'll then start to see a fair bit of supply and demand reducing the actual cost of travel. We anticipate that travel is gonna be here for the long term.
We don't see it actually slowing down. We just need to see a bit more capacity come into market and that will stimulate more demand. The other thing as well is remember that we don't have a lot of Chinese carriers operating at the moment. Typically, when the Chinese carriers come back into market, prices start to drop, competitiveness starts to increase, and that will stimulate more demand as well overall, which will be good for the industry. We can't really see. I can't imagine it's gonna slow down too much, but certainly, there is a lot of support required for people on trips, given the amount of disruption that we continue to see with cancellations, last-minute changes, et cetera, et cetera.
Wei-Weng Chen, probably one of the other ones there that's pretty relevant is if you look last year at the ABS data for outbound, I think 48.3% of the people who traveled overseas said they were VFR. It's normally much lower than that. It's normally like mid-twenties, so about double in percentage terms. Those people, I think Mel might have mentioned earlier on the call, those people tend to, you know, book the flight, but no attachment and things like that. The holidaymakers have started to pick up a little bit. I think in June the number was a lot higher than what it had been. As that VFR percentage starts to normalize, you know, we should start to get a little bit of a benefit as well in the leisure space as the holidaymakers come back in greater numbers.
Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Does the, I guess, heightened demand for agents tempt you guys to start rolling out new stores?
New stores. With the demand we've got.
Yes.
We look to open new stores. Yeah, we certainly will. At the moment we will be filling the existing stores that we have. We've still got capacity to hire staff within the stores that we have. The plans are to open another 38 stores for Flight Centre alone, and that will help with servicing extra demand that's coming through.
The other one, too, is the guys in leisure are opening quite a few direct teams or about to anyway. It's not necessarily just stores, it's agents available as well. I know you guys are doing-
Yeah.
A fair bit of that.
I think geographically, we feel like we have enough presence to be able to reach, customers from a physical perspective. It's now just making sure that customers can access us through all the channels that they need to. What we're actually seeing, though, is, customers are starting their journey more so on mobile now, and, some of the stats that we're seeing is about 65% of bookings are starting their journey on mobile. We think they'll actually transition through the various channels, as well as online is actually picking up quite a bit as well.
Okay. Excellent. Just last one, if I can. I guess, just back to the airline commission cuts. Just wondering if you could give us an idea of how much the impact will be from you guys, just from the air piece alone, and then maybe speak to the offsetting measures. Lastly, on any lag that we should kind of expect between, you know, the cuts that are happening, which a lot of them came in first of July, and then when the remediation sort of efforts might start impacting and kicking in.
Okay. Wei-Weng Chen, I think I heard most but sorry, the line is a bit bad. Just again, to be clear, the commission cuts are mainly in this part of the world, in the APAC region related to the Australian and New Zealand carrier base, which overall I think somewhere around 15%-20% in terms of volume out of this marketplace. Again, just to be clear, it's only in those ones, and we are talking to those particular carriers about other forms of, you know, payment as things move forward. That one's still in negotiation. Remember also this has been going on for a couple of years. They did do the first reduction about a year ago, I think. It's not something that's new to us.
If we look at the rest of the supply chain, as I said, generally, it's been very positive. We're holding margins, if not growing them. I think we've actually improved our hotel margin in the longer term. We've signed long-term touring and cruise deals. Again, to your point, that's a bit of a timing issue. While we've been selling cruise fairly heavily, those overrides, that won't hit for a little while until the actual travel happens. To give you a point, the touring season in Europe this year was a bit of a non-event because remember the poor tour operators were only just scrambling to operate around, as we were with Topdeck, around March, April. We actually don't even have a lot of that hitting, and they're kind of quite big, juicy overrides as well.
You'll probably see again some normalizing as we move into the northern sort of season, you know, summer season next year for travel. You'll see some normalizing, but again, I can't reiterate how much the impact of high airfare pricing is having on yield and margin at the moment. We've been speaking to a lot of our supply chain about when they expect to see some of that normalizing. I was up in Singapore about a week ago, two weeks ago, talking to Singapore Airlines. They're seeing some of that around October, November, but it's quite destinational in nature because for them, China's not open, Japan's not really open as well. Again, it's really impacting this market so more the Northern Hemisphere. You also then have capacity.
A lot of the American airlines kept a lot of their planes and people and then are managing to operate fairly well. It's a bit mixed. You will see, I reckon, patterns kind of normalizing within the next six-12 months.
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks so much. Apologies for the bad line quality.
That's okay.
No worries there.
Probably our age listening as well here.
Our next question will come from Hailey Kim from JPM. You may now go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I guess just firstly on the online. I think your online TTV contribution of AUD 750 million in the full year, I think that's around 18% of the total leisure TTV, which is the same as what you did in the first half. Are you able to talk about whether the online penetration hasn't seen much of an improvement in the second half? And then are you still targeting the 29% online contribution by FY 2024 or has this changed with your model shift in leisure?
I can answer that. Thanks for your question, Hayley. What we're actually seeing is that percentage is remaining static. In the Flight Centre brand, it's holding at about 20%. If you look at the mix across all of the leisure segment, it's around the 18%. It is quite constant. We expect it to probably sit between that 18%-20% in the immediate few months as we continue to grow. That's the current situation.
What do you expect it to get to?
Look, I think in terms of the investment, because we're moving more to an omni-channel situation, customers will move across all the various channels that we offer. We kind of see that it will sit somewhere between 20%-30% over the coming years. Knowing that customers will touch more than one channel as opposed to just online only.
Hailey , that number too, you're looking at there, when you look back historically, we had a larger contribution from the Jetmax online travel agents as well. They didn't generate much because they largely sell international. They weren't generating that much TTV and revenue over FY 2022. If you go back to pre-COVID, they were quite a significant business. They're almost as big as flightcentre.com.au, I think, from memory.
It was about a third.
Yeah.
StudentUniverse, flightcentre.com.au and BYOjet or Jetmax.
Yeah.
It's only just started picking up recently, hasn't it, J.K.?
Yeah.
With Jetmax?
Yeah. There's a much smaller contribution from those OTAs in the number that you're looking at there. You know, on the flip side to that, flightcentre.com.au has actually had a record year for TTV, so it's done really well. As J.K. said, it's not really gonna matter too much in the future with an omni-channel offering. You know, if a customer starts or finishes online, it, you know, it doesn't matter as long as they're transacting through the brand.
Okay. That's quite clear. Thank you. Just on the independent agent model, can you give some color around how the overall margin from this channel, including the agent fees, actually compare to the margins in the overall leisure business?
Yeah. It is a lower revenue margin, but it's also a lower corresponding cost margin. In terms of PBT margin, it's slightly lower than our traditional 2% target that we go for. It allows us to scale quite a lot from a volume perspective, quite rapidly from a low cost model. We see it sitting somewhere between 1%-1.5%, is probably where it will land over the coming years.
That's on the PBT basis, right?
Yes.
Okay. Thanks, guys. That's all for me. Thanks.
Our next question will come from Abraham Akra with Credit Suisse. You may now go ahead.
Hi, team. Thanks for taking my question. Firstly, on slide 14, I'm curious whether the extrapolated TTV numbers account for seasonality. Also, how did the full Q22 and the month of June 2022 compare to the corresponding FY19 periods?
Abraham Akra, no, the extrapolation is based purely on that Q4 result and then as you can see the June extrapolation as well. It's not factoring in in seasonality there. It's simply multiplying that Q4 by four to get those run rates. You would expect that Q4s are normally seasonal, but you know, if everything was to continue the way it's going, you would think next Q4 will be stronger again than this one because of some of the conditions that are in play at the moment, but won't be next year. I've forgotten what the other part of that question was.
Yeah. The second part of that question was, how did
Yeah.
The Q4 in June compare to the FY19 corresponding period?
Well, June in Corporate, you know, I think it's actually written in there. June in Corporate is 102% at a gross level of TTV.
Yeah.
Measured 68% from memory, on a gross perspective. Over the quarter it'll be a bit less than that because it did escalate in June in leisure and in corporate.
Got it.
Yeah, it's pretty similar in corporate. Leisure, a little bit of, you know, space still between FY 19 and now.
Understood. I understand some of your competitors in the brick-and-mortar space have moved to a service fee pricing model in response to front-end international air commissions being cut. What are your thoughts on pivoting to a pricing model in leisure towards a fee for service and being compensated for, I guess, all the work you guys are doing in elevated demand currently in the marketplace?
I'll answer that. Thanks for that question. In leisure, if you look at the two, division, two brands, specifically Flight Centre, which is mass market, and Travel Associates, which is premium. In our Travel Associates business, we've actually implemented what we call a concierge fee, which represents the entire range of services that we provide to customers in that premium luxury segment. That fee already exists, and it's contributing to our margin, as well at this point. From a Flight Centre perspective, we offer what we call a service package, which is a Captain's Package. That's an optional service fee that we would apply to bookings, assuming that our customers take up the various services that are associated to that. That would include things like price drop protection, et cetera.
It's an optional charge, and it's not mandatory. I think we've got about a 50% uptake of that alone.
Yeah. Understood. Thank you. Lastly, in regards to the $1.3 billion contract wins in the second half of 2022, what visibility do you have, I guess, mainly on the FCM segment? Do you have the medium term in regards to RFPs in the pipeline? Can we suspect a similar amount of wins or anything of that nature in FY 2023?
Yeah, thanks for the question. The RFPs for FCM at the moment are stronger than they've ever been. I've been saying that for the last two years, but it keeps continuing. I think a lot of that is due to the strength of the FCM offering, both from the technology and the ability to be alternative to the traditional TMC, but actually still have global capability. It's quite unusual now that the large global RFP, FCM is not included. We're getting included. For us, really, it's about you know, just making sure we've got the investment in solution design and implementation to handle all this, the RFP pipeline we've got, and that's what we've committed to. Part of our investor growth strategy was to say, we're not gonna maximize short-term profits.
We're gonna invest in the capability to win and implement and trade customers. That's why, you know, we can have such a large pipeline, but also more importantly, convert it to trading business. Yeah, stronger than ever. The final point, now the pleasing thing is now we're seeing a very strong pipeline in all parts of the world now. In all the four regions, the pipeline is very strong.
Thanks for that. Chris, and lastly, one more question from me. I appreciate your comments on the front-end air commissions. Can you provide some color on the air override commissions on the back end, and what's in place for FY 2023 and perhaps looking into FY 2024 relative to what was in place in FY 2019?
Sorry, Abraham. I mean, as I said, most of our deals we've managed to carry forward. There are a couple, as I said, I keep referring to in this part of the market, in Australia and New Zealand that have materially changed. Other than that, we expect, from a timing perspective, most of the others will start delivering in the next six-12 months.
My question was pretty much on FY 2023. Comparing that override back end, I guess, commission in place, and how does that compare to FY 2019? Is it? Do you have a rebate structure in place for this year, or is it just a flat versus FY 2019?
Look, the mixture between guaranteed and volume-based overrides is a moving target at the moment because it's related to whether the airlines have the capacity in the market, et cetera. Remember, some airlines are still operating at sub- sort of 30%-40% reduction on the capacity they had previously. Again, it's a mixed bag. If I look in, say, the North American marketplace, where the airlines are generally at reasonable capacity, the deals are holding up, and we would expect as the travel starts to return, that those overrides will look relatively reflective or similar to what they did in 2019. That's why I'm saying it's very hard to give a singular answer 'cause it is different per region.
The Asia Pacific region is very impacted by the lack of the Chinese carriers being here, which we still don't know when they're returning. Japan is quite restricted as well at the moment. You've also seen in the Asia Pacific region a lot of those second-tier airlines are not as strong as they used to be. You're seeing someone like a Singapore Airlines grow. I think they just delivered the second biggest profit they've ever had. You're seeing a little bit of a reshaping of who's who in terms of the top airlines, and that's impacting things as well. Again, it's that recovery and who's got the capacity when. That means we can't give a direct line of comparison to a 2019 override profile just yet until we've got a more stable marketplace.
Understood. Thank you, Melanie.
Thank you.
Next question will come from Sam Seow with Citi. You may now go ahead.
Morning, all. Glad to see you guys are back above breakeven. Probably sick of revenue margin questions, but just wanna try one more. I just wanna understand how material international capacity is to that revenue margin then converting. Is that the biggest moving part or is it more a segment being booked per trip thing?
It depends again on the area. When we've looked at the drivers of what's happening on the revenue line, again, as I said, it's very dependent on the marketplace. Here, where there's a lot more local travel happening, I'll say local, it's not just domestic, it's kind of local to the Pacific and starting into Asia as well. Versus international, we have a capacity issue. Yes, that's more impactful than say it is in a U.K.-based set of businesses who weren't selling an awful lot of local previously anyway. It, as I said, they come down to three or four key drivers which are impacting at different levels based on the location and the brand or the business that we had previously.
I'm not trying to be obtuse. It's just a little bit. You can't really say it's about one thing. It's one thing that is different. Sorry, a combination of things which have different weightings in different markets. Certainly the international domestic mix.
The lack of international capacity is probably having the greatest impact in this particular region.
Sam, one thing that airlines do with us a lot. You normally have tactical campaigns with them. At the moment, you're not getting that because they don't have the seats, and the seats that they do have, they're full. Load factors are higher probably than they've been for a long, long time. Airlines aren't coming to you with the special sort of agreements that you might have that are above and beyond the contract in lots of instances at the moment. You know, as the Chinese carriers come back and some of the other airlines ramp up, more seats, more opportunity to do some of those deals. Because of the diversity we have in being a company-owned business, hopefully they wanna do those deals with us rather than somebody else.
No, that makes perfect sense. That's actually really helpful. I guess pro forma then, revenue margin, as you look forward in a full recovery, given the change of business mix, how much lower is that?
Well, we said all along, Sam, I think that we do expect revenue margin to be lower. Without giving guidance, it's pretty difficult to run through the various scenarios that we've got. As Mel has said, there's a lot of things are gonna impact on that over the next couple of years. I think it's one that we're not in a position to put an exact, you know, percentage on it at the moment.
Okay, too easy. Then just maybe one on anything we should think about in terms of the cost base and staffing levels, given it appears obviously the inquiry is there and, you know, there's pent-up demand, but they're obviously selling less economic things. Is there anything we should think about there going forward, in particular in FY 2023 until the timing resolves itself?
I think, look, I think the main thing there, Sam, is just really that just to note that we are still looking to bring on front-end consultants selling people predominantly in the leisure space. But also in corporate. You know, we are still looking there to ensure that we're, again, as I think as Chris spoke to it, ahead of the curve in terms of making sure we've got people on the ground to service our customers. Certainly in leisure, I think it was Ben that mentioned earlier about you know, trying to get a quote and the delays that he's had there. We certainly need to be able to make sure that we're increasing our staffing levels to service all of our customers.
Certainly I would say that selling staff will continue to increase over the next six-12 months. That's something to factor into it. I think the other element, you know, a few people have spoken about, wage inflation. We're a little bit shielded from that because of the incentive structures that we have in place, predominantly around our selling individuals. We think that'll be less impactful on us than some other people.
Too easy. Thanks, guys. Yeah, good luck.
Thanks, man.
Thank you.
Our next question will come from Brian Han with Morningstar. You may now go ahead.
Thank you. First question, just looking across your entire global group, how do you think seasonality in both your corporate and leisure will change in the current environment if domestic travels within countries continue to outpace international travel?
Well, I can start with corporate. I think that in some regions, international travel has come back very strongly. If I look at EMEA and North America now, international travel has recovered far stronger than it has in, say, Australia, New Zealand and Asia. And that's just because of the recovery of the capacity, and in Asia, government restrictions maintaining in China and Japan. You're seeing back to normal, well, what we would call traditional seasonality in the North. I think that will be repeated in Australia and New Zealand and Asia once restrictions end and capacity comes back in. We don't see any fundamental change in seasonality in the medium term.
Yeah. I think that's-
Great.
... the same for leisure. We just expect it to actually. We're starting to see a return to normal patterns now as holiday makers overtake visiting friends and relatives. You can see the normal booking seasons are starting to actually pick back up, where you've got the usual school holidays, Christmas period, et cetera, all being very busy, which is very similar to patterns before.
Great. The 500 people that you're employing every month, I mean, where are you getting them from? How do you make sure there remains flexibility in your staff if, as you say, things continue to be bumpy?
Gary, do you want to take that?
Yeah, I can answer that. From a leisure perspective, we're getting a lot of firstly, the travel industry is actually seen as an exciting place. It's a growth industry once more. We're actually getting staff from a number of places. We've had a number of staff return from what we created an alumni group, and they're certainly coming back to us. We're also seeing a lot of interest through various channels, through SEEK, through referrals, et cetera, et cetera. We're getting a lot of young people interested in the industry once more. Of course, we have our own Flight Centre Academy as well, which is actually training people and moving them into the industry. There's various sources that we're seeing interest coming from. I think that's gonna continue.
It's exciting once more that people are actually seeing it as a growth industry with lots of prospects. Brian, the other thing to note when you mentioned, you know, if demand does, I think you said if it does, go a bit bumpy and go down, what would we do? I mean, at the moment, we're doing not much to stimulate demand. Very little marketing. Back to if we ever had, I can't foresee it, but if we had an issue, we would just pump a bit more marketing out there to try and create some demand. I don't think there's a potential of being overstaffed, if that's what you're kind of referring to as a possibility.
Great. Last one, if I may. Chris, these corporate accounts that you're winning are very impressive, but it seems like all the bigger players are saying they're increasing market share. My question is, are most of your new account wins from smaller players? Are you taking any meaningful business away from the other big players? You know, the obvious names.
I'm not going to comment on what other competitors are saying. You can draw your own conclusions, Brian. All of our large accounts that we have referenced all come from established large players. None of them come from in-house or from SME players because they could never deal with them. The SME wins that we win typically in Corporate Traveller are not necessarily from large competitors. They could be from smaller independents. Some of them are for customers who used to self-book on the internet and now believe they need a travel expert to help them. All of the large accounts we reference all come from large players. I'll leave you to ask them about if all the accounts they're winning.
Okay. I'll go back and do my math again. Okay. Thanks very much.
Our next question will come from Mitchell Sonogan with Macquarie. You may now go ahead.
Yeah. Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Had a lot asked already, so I'll just keep it pretty quick. Just one for Adam. Do you mind just giving me a bit more detail on the movement just in the cash at bank on hand and restricted cash from the first half to the full year? Thank you.
Yeah, Mitch. Well, there's a couple of things in there. The restricted cash is probably the key one. That is effectively the BSP payments that we hold at the end of the year or the half year as the case is. We need to just disclose that separately in the accounts as restricted because it is actually directly allocated to be swept by IATA. The increase in that from December up to June is basically a function of the volume increases that we've got. I think there was an extra day's cash trading being held before the sweep. That's just a timing thing that flows through.
From outside of that, I'm not sure what more to add in terms of the cash movements other than, you know, we've had some payments for CapEx through the half. Our CapEx was more heavily weighted towards second half than it was first half. We increased our stake in the strategically important TPConnects business during the half, which was around AUD 40 million. Outside of that, it was really just your typical movements that went through. Sorry, we repaid the U.K. government loan that we'd brought in at the start of COVID. That was a GBP 115 million repayment, so a bit over AUD 200 million repaid for that particular loan.
From memory, they're the key movements that I can think of the top of my head there, Mitch, in terms of cash movements.
Yep. No, that's fantastic. Thanks for the color. That's all from me, guys. Thank you.
Thanks, mate.
Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. Our next question will come from Hailey from JPM. You may now go ahead.
Sorry, guys. I must have registered twice.
Well, thanks, Hailey. Hailey asked a question earlier.
It appears there are no further questions. I'll turn it back over to Mr. Turner for closing remarks.
Okay. Well, yeah, thanks everyone for the questions. I learned a bit out of that as well. I hope and we probably will be seeing some of you over the next few days as well. Thanks very much and we'll see you later. Thank you, Haydn, for doing a brilliant job. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks all.