I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Andrew Burnes, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.
Thank you, good morning, everyone, thank you for joining us on this call today. I'm joined here this morning by our Chief Financial Officer, Mike Smith, and I'm joined here by our Chief Operating Officer, Cinzia Burnes. We've got three reports. I have three reports sitting in front of me, and I'm gonna talk to one of them, which is the investor presentation. I think, run my discussions and commentary around through that. You will have no doubt also seen the results announcement, which is on the pricey version of our investor presentation and our consolidated interim financial report, which we also launched today with the ASX. Thanks for joining us. The first half of FY 2026 was positive from our perspective.
I think really the call-out that occurred during that half was our margin went up by 0.5%. It went from 4.6% to 5.1%. It's not an easy thing to achieve, but I was very, very glad that we were able to do that on the back of better commercials, particularly from our airline partners, but also our land and other partners as well, the product that we sell. That was very, very positive. The other call-out I would like to make is in relation to our acquisitions. We made quite a few of those throughout the calendar year of 2025. I think that they are all performing well and in many instances, above expectations.
That expansion through our acquisition activity has been very positive in terms of its contribution to the overall business. The largest of those acquisitions was MTA, Mobile Travel Agents, 450 home-based brokers, all under the umbrella of MTA, and we paid just over $36 million for that, for the 50% that we didn't already own. That business is actually going extremely well. The ETG business that we purchased a couple of years ago for $70 million, that's also going very well and continuing to record profitability and TTV that's ahead of our expectations. The other ones that I won't go through all of them, but please feel free, obviously, to ask about any of them.
Barlow, Gilpin, Brighton Travelworld, Phil Hoffmann Travel, they are all, we have equity investments in all of those now. Gilpin and Barlow, we own 100% of, they are doing very well. We're pleased with the outcome there, they will continue to make a great contribution to the overall Helloworld Travel Limited business. I think if I can take you to page five of the investment fundamentals, it mentions obviously the margin improvement, going from 4.6 to 5.1. It makes the point, and I just make the point in relation to the number of agencies and brokers in our network. It's fairly consistent. It took about 2,600, we've maintained that now for quite a while.
Most particularly, over 10,000 travel professionals working in those businesses that form part of the Helloworld Travel networks in Australia and New Zealand. I'll touch on AI a little bit in a moment, but there's 10,000 people out there who are providing professional travel advice and services to their customers right across Australia and New Zealand. They're what help us put together some almost 4 million, 3.7 million, I think it is, bookings in total that we make in an annual in any 12-month period. They're booking flights, they're booking cruises, they're booking tours, hotels, car hire, et cetera, et cetera. It's complex. The destinations they go to are not always easy, and they need the help and the support of a travel agent.
Remembering that our demographic, our average age of our customer is 55 years of age, it's remained fairly constant at that for the last eight or nine years. The average is still about 55. This is a market that values service, values personal connection. We are, I think, really providing a tremendous service to that coterie, and both sides of it, obviously, as well, those younger and older.
It is a really tremendous effort on behalf of our agents to continue to get a high discretionary spend from their customers, and they continue to support not only the Helloworld agent, it's one of our brands, Helloworld, the Helloworld brand and network, but all of the agents as well that sit in other parts of our networks, whether it's within the ETG business, within the Helloworld business as well, or whether it's across in New Zealand, in the First Travel Group, et cetera. It's the collective and combined demand from all of those agents that obviously underscores our business and makes us able to go and get the deals that we need and that our agents need to put to those customers.
I think that our investments in technology as well across the last period, and I'll touch on those a little bit later in this presentation. We continue to provide, I think, some really world-leading, world-class technologies, particularly in the areas of ticketing, and some of our other wholesale and inbound technologies as well. If I go to the key financial metrics on the following page six, I'm not gonna read those back to you. For those of you who have this report, you can see them there. I think that revenue up 10.1%, driven by that yield going up as well. Our TTV was up 1.8%. What's going on there?
It's not a huge increase, but what we found throughout the first half was that airfares actually fell. Whilst we issued a lot more tickets than we'd issued in the previous year, the value of our average international fare and our average domestic fare actually declined. That's what really held at a pretty much similar level to the previous period, held our TTV pretty steady at that point. So you can see the other points there, and the underlying EBITDA margin at 28%. I think that will we think that will certainly improve in the second half, and we're gonna try and get towards what is our often stated goal from an EBITDA margin to get to 30%.
Obviously, we'll see how that pans out across the coming six months and going forward, but I think that is a very good performance from our perspective for the first half. Dividends, AUD 0.05 per share. Fairly conservative in that regard. Previous period was AUD 0.08 per share, but we've obviously made some significant investments in various businesses, including our shareholding in Webjet. We thought an AUD 0.05 per share dividend was the appropriate amount at this point in time, and we'll obviously be reconsidering that in a few more months' time when we come to the end of the full financial year, and we're considering the dividend payment to shareholders at the end of that period.
As you know, and many of you hopefully have benefited from, we try to pay reasonable dividends and good returns to our shareholders wherever we can. Key business highlights on page seven. Wholesale and inbound, I just wanna underscore the importance of the-- I mean, air is a huge part of our business, but I just wanna underscore the importance of our wholesale and inbound businesses to the overall margin in the business. Both of these operations run at much higher margins than our air margins, the air margins we achieve. That's just the nature of the business, and we end up with that 5.1% margin as the blended mix of all of the different things that we sell. Wholesale TTV up 23% in Australia and 19% in New Zealand.
Inbound as well, also up quite significantly with good growth from U.K., Italy, Germany. They're three of our absolutely key markets. Our wholesale bookings up, and you can see there when we look at air tickets, the number of tickets issued was up 10%. But despite that, our TTV was only up 1.8%, so that was because of the decline in airfares. And it helped to grow the market. The demand for flights went up, but the TTV that we generated went down. Partnerships with 154 airlines around the world, so we cover most of the aircraft in the sky.
We have an arrangement with those carriers, in differing amounts, our top five carriers still remain Emirates, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, and Virgin. I think that will continue as well for some years to come. That's as much as I wanted to point out there, you can see some of those other points. I've already brought up the recent acquisitions, including all of those, except for Hunter Travel Group. We increased our ownership interest from 12% to 16% in that group. They are the largest franchisee member of the Helloworld Travel network, as you can see, with 175 people located in 35 locations across Australia. They're a very important part of our operations.
In fact, Cinzia Burnes sits on the board of the Hunter Travel Group. I sit on the board of Brighton Travelworld, and I sit on the board of.
Phil Hoffmann.
Phil Hoffmann Travel. That's right. Thank you. The other, obviously, businesses where we own 100% of that we mentioned in there, MTA and Barlow, and we have some of our New Zealand colleagues on the Barlow Travel Group board, and we have a couple of people, senior executives within this business, now make up the MTA board. Outlook, obviously of interest to everyone, including our good selves. Underlying EBITDA guidance, this is what we put out last year, last calendar year. It was provided at our annual general meeting in October, $64 million-$72 million. We're reaffirming that, beg your pardon. We're reaffirming that's where we will land, somewhere between those two numbers in the second half.
We've got off to a great start, I have to say. January, up 11.6% in TTV for the month. Our forwards are very strong, and we believe that we will certainly achieve that guidance there. The only other point that we make, or the other point that we make in that opening dot point on that page nine, is around Webjet Group Limited. They've got a bit of a yo-yo going on at the minute, and the shares have dropped quite a bit in the last few weeks. That guidance does not include any P&L impact of the remeasurement of our investment in them, and we'll see how that goes.
I think, the points around the future, the guidance, et cetera, as I said, we're very, very positive in reaffirming our guidance that we brought out last year, AUD 64 million-AUD 72 million, and we'll be doing our best to get to the upper end of that, if we can. I think, if we actually move on a little bit to page 12, you can just get a sense of what the year is shaping up like in our TTV graph there. July started okay, August dropped down a bit, September was down a bit, October was down a bit, and that's remembering, that's the TTV, not the issued tickets.
That was really reflecting the lower fares that were available out there and that we were selling many of them, but it obviously took our TTV down. In November, obviously, we had some growth there, as you can see from the chart. December, the same, and January, the same as well. We track our forwards through until the end of 2026, and we'll start tracking them very shortly, right into June of 2027. You can see the trend there, that the TTV dropped down for three months, August to October. It's picked up again November, now to January, and we expect that to continue on the forwards that we currently hold. We expect that to continue for the remainder of the financial year.
On page 13, we've got our group results. I don't intend to highlight really anything there. I think I've touched on most of the key points in that. If anyone has any questions, of course, we can talk about that. Cash flow, page 14. For those of you who followed the stock for quite a while, you'll know that our cash flows are often a or they're impacted significantly by where we are with the BSP payments to the airlines, remembering that, you know, we pay out somewhere around AUD 50 million, AUD 40 million, AUD 50 million, or AUD 60 million a week to the airlines. First half of FY 2026 included an additional BSP collection from the agents, so that's AUD 40 million-AUD 50 million. Then we had one less payment as well.
That very much impacts the ebbs and flows of our cash flow, and we've done quite a few explanations of this in the past. The other thing is, of course, that we've made our contribution to Mr. Chalmers and others by paying quite a bit more tax, including our tax installments that in FY 2025, we didn't have such significant installments because we'd been coming out the back of COVID, and that hadn't yet materialized. Given our outcome in FY 2025 and now our outcome looking forward, our tax installments have come back and we're of course, meeting those, but it does have an impact on our cash. The other point there, I think, is self-explanatory.
As you'll recall, we sold our corporate business to CTM for $170 million, and that comprised $100 million in cash and $70 million in CTM shares. You'll be pleased to know that our CTM shares were all sold in the first quarter of FY 2026. I think it's coming end of July, we didn't have any left. Did I have any prescient information as to what was happening and what might happen? The honest answer is I did not. We just wanted to liquidate the investment, and we had other uses for our cash, particularly purchasing shares in Webjet. There's nothing, how can I put it?
There's nothing untoward there, or there's nothing that would make you think that we had any more information than anybody else, we did manage to get out of that one back then. I don't think there's much else to say about that cash flow page and that cash flow information. Our balance sheet, net assets, $359 million, and you can all have a look at that and see if you have any questions around that. Obviously, our cash and cash equivalents, $67 million, as at the 31st of December, $79 million at the 30th of June, the other numbers there are pretty self-explanatory. I've put in a page here on page 16, just the ABS, Australian Bureau of Statistics for Leisure Departures.
They're up 8%, which is a sign the market is still going well. Leisure arrivals into Australia are up 10%, that is a positive for our inbound businesses as well. That I think very positive, particularly when you start to see what some of the biggest markets are. Obviously Indonesia, that's Bali. We all know that. New Zealand's still very popular, although it's a lot of people who live in Bondi, I think, going home for a holiday back to New Zealand, in any event, they come and go. Japan, up to 712,000. Sorry, take that back. 951,000.
That's up 150,000 people, Australians, going to Japan more at 2025 and 2024. Japan is now the third most popular destination for Australians in the world. The yen obviously has been favorably priced, and the visitor arrivals into Japan are enormous. It's a great product to sell from our perspective because it's reasonably priced. Not cheap, but it's still reasonably priced compared to some other destinations, and our agents are very good at selling it, so that's a big positive as well from our perspective. I won't go through the others. They speak for themselves. It's shaping up to be another pretty good year, I think, for outbound business from our perspective.
Our commentary on page 18 and onwards, our retail networks, we talk about those here. They are very, very important to our business. They're the bread and butter of what we do. They sell our wholesale products predominantly. They sell our airline ticketing ticket products, and they are the core of what this business is all about. I think the highlight, the one thing I'd point out, stability and strength. These networks are very, very stable. They're very, very strong. We work extremely well in partnership with our agency networks. I think that that is going to definitely continue. If we look at wholesale over the page, our various brands there. We operate across Australia and New Zealand.
To highlight, wholesale TTV up 23% in Australia, 19% in New Zealand, which is great. It's continuing to move ahead. ReadyRooms, which is predominantly a hotel booking engine, now also has transfers and tours on it as well. ReadyRooms is really going from strength to strength as well. That's run by our team in Athens. We acquired a company back in 2019, Excite Holidays. That's right. Excite Holidays. They had unfortunately gone under. We acquired it for the technology, which we thought was excellent, and the team that they had in Athens. We still have that team in Athens.
We've expanded that team quite a lot. We would expect the TTV out of that business alone would be sort of north of AUD 100 million this year. At the rate it's increasing at the moment, it will be a significantly bigger contributor to our overall TTV and profitability in FY 2027. Inbound business there. Look, we're still the biggest inbound operator in Australia and New Zealand. That is working well for us. Our customers, particularly in the U.K., Germany and Italy, we call them out in the highlights there. They've been doing very, very well. Our group business is going well from our inbound clients as well across Australia and New Zealand. We also do inbound in Fiji, plus we run a transport business as well over there.
I can say that the inbound continues to be a very strong contributor, and it's a contributor as well at the highest margin of our anywhere else in our business. It's a very good lucrative business to be in, and we're very grateful that it continues to perform. Air consolidation, as I mentioned before, you know, the retailers are at the core of our business, and our air ticket sales are at the core of our operations. Commercial partnerships with 154 airlines. I've put the numbers in there about what happened to average fares, down 8% and 4%, respectively, in Australia and New Zealand. Domestic fares fell 1% and 9% in Australia and New Zealand, so that obviously impacted our TTV.
The good news was that the number of tickets we issued in the first half of FY 2026 went up 10%. That obviously helped to pick up the gap in TTV created by the fall in the fares. I just make the point at the bottom there, 98% of all tickets are issued by our automated systems, so obviously, there's a lot of efficiencies in that for both ourselves and for our agents. The ability to change tickets is largely automated as well. To get refunds, that's all automated, et cetera, et cetera. It's a very, very good piece of technology and is taken up by all of our agents in our networks, but also quite a few others as well.
Our MyWay Travel and Events business, that's being run by Simon Lethlean, he's continuing to deliver an expanded range of event travel packages at various venues. We have a strong partnership, as it says in the highlights, with the AFL and Marvel Stadium as well. We've just signed up a new partnership with the Collingwood Football Club. As a Carlton supporter, that breaks my heart, anyway, we've signed up the Collingwood Football Club. They are great partners down there, Craig Kelly and the team, we're looking after all of their travel needs, both in-house, match day, and event travel packages for all of their supporters. They have the largest supporter base of any club in Australia.
I think it's around 140,000 they're expecting this year, part of their membership base. We touch on technology here, page 24. What's our technology about? Well, our technology is obviously, as we make the point, like all technology, is designed to deliver and give us a very highly efficient and seamless range of solutions for our agents to be able to book travel as easily as they possibly can. Now, people don't come into a Helloworld store and ask for the cheapest airfare. They don't come into a Helloworld store and ask for the cheapest hotel or any of our other agencies and, or brokers as well. They come in and they're looking for service, advice, recommendations, and they want an agent to put it all together. All right?
I recently was looking at a booking, that was being put together for somebody, and it's an AUD 250,000 booking. Right? That is by no means an exception. All right? Some of our agents will tell us stories about AUD 500,000 bookings and AUD 800,000 bookings that are made by family groups, and many others. Of course, the ones that are six figures are more the exception than the rule, but the average, booking value that many of our agents make, around the country is very high. It's driven, obviously, by the area and the, socioeconomic situation in the particular areas where the agents are based.
What we do also find is that the agents who are based in areas where there is a it's a tighter budget, household budget on the travel expenditure, they get more bookings. Just the sheer volume of bookings helps support their businesses. Those who are in areas and who target Australians and New Zealanders with larger budgets to fund their travel, they often are getting bookings to the AUD 30 thousand, AUD 40 thousand, AUD 50 thousand. The technology has to deliver. It has to deliver the flights, it has to deliver the land. When I say the land, it's got to deliver hotels, cars, insurance, cruise, et cetera, et cetera.
Being able to transact that efficiently and effectively through our technologies is a very important part of what we deliver to them and why they stick with Helloworld Travel Limited. There's some information on the following page about our proprietary solutions, and I won't go through that, but I've taken you through this before. ResWorld continues to grow with our agents, so, you know, we're very pleased about that. We've got some apps and other things that we're also utilizing. We'll talk about that on page 26. We have some global technology partnerships with organizations that provide us with third-party systems that we also utilize within our stack and provide to agents to assist them in what they do. I'll move on to page 29, our brand portfolio.
We seem to be running out of space, particularly in the retail one. We'll have to slow up that acquisitions there. We just. Otherwise, we're gonna have to chop up one of those little chunks of cheese there and give it to retail and move somebody somewhere else. In all seriousness, we are a house of brands, right? I know, obviously, Helloworld Travel Limited is our listed brand. Helloworld Travel in our branding networks and associate networks in Australia and New Zealand is extremely important to us, but all of those brands on that page there are important parts of our business and form the major planks which we trade on and which our agents utilize to trade upon. They are all a very, very important part of it.
Page 30's got a description of our brands and businesses. Sorry for the tiny font, to squeeze them all in, obviously, to give everyone a sense of who does what, where they're based, et cetera, we wanted to put in some details about that. If anyone has any questions around any of those brands and what they do, please don't hesitate to ask. It's 11 o'clock. I've been talking to you now for 30 minutes. In fact, it's not 11 o'clock, it's 12 o'clock. It's 11 o'clock somewhere, but not here. It's 12 o'clock here now, I'd like to hand over back to our MC, Moderator. moderator. Thank you. That's the right word. I'd like to hand back over, I'm very happy to take any questions.
I did actually mention, sorry, earlier when I was speaking, I'll just take another minute to talk about AI. AI is no doubt going to be a huge part of everyone's life and everybody's business. People are investing AUD billions and AUD tens of billions of dollars in it, and it's gonna reshape the global economy, it's gonna reshape work in many instances. I think that, like many things, its impact, I think Matt Cohen made a great comment yesterday, that it's gonna be uneven, highly uncertain, and will differ quite a lot between different tasks and different sorts of roles and different industries. How is it going to affect our industry?
We firmly believe that our customers want to deal with people, and they don't, particularly at the minute, wanna deal with, from everything we're seeing, they don't wanna deal with a computer program. Now, that might be the case with people who want to fly to Sydney and have two nights' accommodation. It might be the case with people who want to book a seven-night package to Bali in a hotel they've stayed at the last 10 years. Right? It's not going to suit somebody who wants to go and do a European holiday or an Asian holiday or a U.S., North American holiday, et cetera, et cetera, where they're going to many places that they may well not have been to before.
They want to expand their horizons by discovering and exploring new places, and they want to talk to somebody who has some expertise and knowledge in that, and get them to make their bookings and handle their bookings for them. We're actually seeing, and you've seen in the last couple of months, we're actually seeing demand is increasing for the services of our travel professionals. I think the other thing that, and AI will probably get me for this at some point, because it's probably listening somewhere or other, but it's proving itself to be somewhat untrustworthy. That is, in one way, that's actually helping us because people aren't quite sure what parts of it they can trust and whether or not what it's telling them is actually true or not.
Now, that was manifested, no more clearly than a New Year's Eve event in New York, where AI literally created an event out of nothing, and it told people this event would be happening, down along the East River, at one of the bridges going across from Manhattan, across towards what, the, whatever that, next suburb is across the river anyway. 10,000 people turned up to this event, and they're all standing there, and there's some fantastic footage you can get on Instagram and other things. Fantastic footage you can get of people standing there, and they're holding their phones up, and they're going: "Oh, hang on, it's two minutes past 12." I'll stop the American accent. "It's two minutes past 12. Where are the fireworks? It's five past 12. Where are the fireworks?" There were no fireworks.
AI made it up. These sorts of things are going on, more and more, and from our perspective, we think that that really is going to continue to support the professional travel services and advice that our agents give and that we assist them in the product negotiation, et cetera, to provide them with all of that product. That's enough from me on that, but I just did want to touch on that. We're looking at seeing where it can help us with processes, help make us more efficient with product loading, images, and so on and so forth. Right? There's certainly a big role for it to play within this business, but we think that our agents are going to be the critical factor that's important for the sustainability of our business in the long term.
That's it for me on that front, on the AI front. Thank you for listening, and I'll pass back to the moderator for any questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Kseniya Chadayeva with Jarden. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my question. You mentioned your forward bookings looking strong into FY 2026 and into 2027. Can you please give us more color on whether this booking skewed more to short-term or long-haul destinations, and what would they imply to your revenue margins?
They're skewed. There's no difference in their skew compared to what their skew has been in, A, previous years, and B, in the first half. You know, we have a huge mix of customers going everywhere. We do bookings for around 3.7, 3.8 million people. The skew. If there's any skew within it at the moment that we've been able to detect, it's actually a bit of a skew to U.K., Europe. North America is just holding its own, and for all the obvious reasons, and we've, you know, all read a lot about that. The volume destinations, New Zealand and Bali, are still selling extremely well. It looks a lot like the first half, which looked a lot like the previous few years as well.
That basically means your revenue margins should be, at least be in line going forward?
We'd like to think so, absolutely. It's not going back to 4.6% this year. You know, 5.1% is I think we're very, very pleased to get it to 5.1%. It did get pulled down when we purchased ETG because they have a significantly lower margin. We knew that because of the heavy skew towards air business that they have. We've been everyone's been working hard to achieve a better margin outcome in the business, and that came home to roost in the first half, and we are very confident that that will continue into the second half.
Great. Thank you. How do you think you are performing in relation to market broadly? Do you feel like you are still holding or winning fair, and do you see any channel shifts, any color you can share on competitive dynamics, that would be helpful?
Could you just repeat that question? I'm sorry, I missed a bit of that.
That's okay. How you are performing in relations to market broadly? Do you feel like you hold an win share, and any competitive dynamics change you are seeing currently?
I think if you look at the ABS statistics on outbound travel, and, you know, recognizing that outbound travel is by far and away, the largest part of our business. If you look at the statistics on outbound travel for Australia. And New Zealand is a little bit different there. Outbound travel fell away a bit last year, obviously in Australia was up around 8%. The number of airline tickets we issued was up 10%. I think, you know, we've tracked fairly much in accordance with the demand for outbound travel, and we've maintained our market share in that space.
We're always trying and looking to try and see it grow, but I'm very happy to have actually achieved, I think, what I think is a reasonable market share across the first half, and we're obviously continuing and endeavoring to achieve that in the second half. Cinzia has a comment.
We're also advised by our preferred supplier partners in both land and cruise, that with some of their brands, we are actually outperforming the market, which has been very pleasing for the first half.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Belinda Moore with Morgans. Please go ahead.
Hello, team. Helloworld, congratulations on a great result. If I may, could I ask three questions, please? The first one is, obviously, in your segment accounts, really strong number from Australia. New Zealand fell away. Was that just given the economy, how should we think about the sort of second half? I know also Fiji fell away. Is that just sort of a switch in destination? Around those two, the segment accounts, firstly. Secondly-
Can I answer that question first?
Oh, yeah, go for it.
Rather than give me all three questions at once. Can I just touch on that one first? Because it's a great question, and with this, it's a slightly complex answer. What happened in New Zealand, it's economic. It's just the economics, right? We started to see it recover just towards the end of the year, and we're seeing it continue to recover now. All right? The New Zealand economy has been, and not spluttering along, but it's been suffering, and demand for various items, including obviously, leisure travel, has diminished. We also now have a great couple of corporate businesses over there, Gilpin and Barlow Travel, and they are continuing to go ahead extremely well.
It's in the leisure travel segment that we've seen a drop off in demand, and it seems to be early signs, green shoots. It seems to be recovering back to where it previously was, which I'm very happy about. Cinzia, did you want to make a point?
I also note that the New Zealand market is very active in cruise bookings, and there has been a few cruise lines that have pulled out of that market, which is reflected in some of the numbers we're looking at for New Zealand.
Hello?
Just maybe on Fiji, I know it's small, but is that just sort of?
Uh.
Switch in destinations or?
Look, no, well, it is. It is a switch in destinations. Fiji has become, and became quite rapidly, very expensive. Like many parts of the travel industry, not only in Fiji, but all around the world, suppliers tested the outer edge of their price elasticity of demand. You know, we've seen that with the airlines, we've seen it with the hotels globally, and part of that global trend we saw in Fiji. The rates went up dramatically. The market's got a lot of different choices if they're looking for a beach destination around the South Pacific and up into Asia as well. Fiji, within about a 12-month period, went from being reasonably priced to being significantly overpriced, and it continues to be a bit of a struggle to sell it.
We're working with Tourism Fiji on promotions in that area. We're working with Fiji Airways as well to get more people back into Fiji. It's very popular, it's still in New Zealand because it's a relatively short flight from Auckland, and it's a relatively cheap flight as well. The properties that we sell are different than the properties that we were selling 12 months, 24 months ago. Will Fiji come back? I believe it will. There's a lot of investment going on there as well. We'd like to think that the pricing there is going to actually stop going up for a while.
Great. Thank you. Maybe if we can turn to my second question. Can you just sort of talk about the top and bottom line, sorry, the top and bottom end of sort of the guidance range and sort of the drivers? If this second half TTV growth of over 11% continues throughout the second half, is that sort of yeah, the, sort of the mid to higher end?
Mike?
Yeah.
Would you like to talk to that?
Belinda, first of all, good morning, or good afternoon now. In terms of the guidance, as we've said, we've, you know, we're continuing to reaffirm that subject to any, excluding any impacts of fair value revaluation of the Webjet, the Webjet shares. You know, I think if you look at the first half, AUD 30.5, we expect to do a little bit better, or to do better in the second half. You know, I think sort of that midpoint of the guidance is kind of, you know, where it will likely land.
Y ou know, according to what we've seen at the start of this first half, sorry, the start of the second half is, you know, a strong January of reported TTV and, you know, expecting a good second half.
Fantastic. Okay, thank you. The question you're probably expecting is, what now with sort of WJL? Do you just sort of sit back? Are there other opportunities, or really, you've been so acquisitive in the last 12 months, you've got enough on your plate for now?
Well, certainly those that work in the M&A team here are telling me to go away. Having obviously, we've made quite a few. Look, our strategy with WJL, you know, we're not going to disclose that publicly. You know, we currently hold about 17.3% of the stock in that business. We're the largest shareholder in WJL. They came out last week and obviously announced that their two potential suitors had not moved forward, and therefore, that was obviously within their purview to do. We think it's a good business. We think it's a good brand. We're very happy to be a major shareholder in that business.
We think that we can help to influence some of the outcomes in that business in a positive way for all shareholders. So, you know, we're gonna obviously. We're not looking to sell out any of our shareholding. I know they're about to commence a share buyback, but we won't be participating in that, I don't believe, unless we have a change of strategy at the minute, which we're not going to do at the moment. We'll continue to watch that business closely, reflective of our investment in it. Wherever we can help, we'll try.
Thanks very much.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one. Your next question comes from Philip Pepe with Shaw and Partners. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys, thanks for taking the question. Firstly, let me congratulate you on the announcement with the Collingwood Football Club. I think that's worth another 10% of the share price, at least.
We're looking forward to you living up to that.
I said share price, not price value. Just on other matters, you made a number of acquisitions, as you've pointed out in the past. There's a lot of brands on that brand page. Other than adding TTV, what scale benefits has adding more agents given you over the last few years?
Well, I think, one of the bigger benefits, obviously, apart from the scale, one of the bigger benefits, Phil, is the agents that we've invested in, start leaning far more heavily into our wholesale range. You know, we've got our Viva Holidays brands, our Cruiseco brand. You know, over in New Zealand, we've got our GO Holidays, GO Cruise, and we've got ReadyRooms. They're important parts of our business, and as I mentioned earlier, and as you know, they deliver higher margin into our business as well. What we've seen with many of the partners in which we have a stake...
That's not to say that most of the agents in which we don't have a direct stake at all, most of the many of them are great supporters of our wholesale brand, I'm not taking away from that at all. Certainly the ones that we've invested in, you see their participation in sales of our preferred of our own in-house products go up dramatically. That's been the other big benefit of it.
Excellent. Makes sense. Thank you.
Thank you once again.
Thanks, Phil.
Please press star one if you wish to ask a question. Your next question comes from Mark Topy with Select Equities. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, Andrew.
Hello
a couple questions on the headwinds that might be out there. Just I'm thinking about interest rate increases domestically, how that might impact the consumer sentiment, any read on that, and maybe the Aussie dollar, how that's kinda impacting, what people are thinking about in terms of travel, whether they're tilting away to less U.S. dollar sort of orientated sort of destinations. Any sort of change in mix there?
Well, I think, you know, as we all know, when interest rates go up, the value of the dollar goes up as well. whilst certainly increases in interest rates, you know, impact, that sort of more budget end of the market, because they're the people with mortgages and often high mortgages to get into the housing, get into housing in the first place. at our average demographic of around 55, and, you know, beyond that, many of our customers don't have a mortgage anymore. They've paid them off. we've found that the interest rate rises haven't had a strong, a negative impact on demand in our business, as maybe it has in other consumer-related businesses.
The other thing, I think, is as far as the dollar goes, most people are not particularly currency aware, as I call it, until they actually decide to go somewhere. You go and ask most people on the street, you know, "What's the value of the Australian dollar compared to the U.S. dollar or any other currency line you might want to pick?" Frankly, they've got not too much of a clue. It's only, as I said, when they start thinking, well, let's go to Europe, let's go to England, let's go to the U.S. or wherever, people start going, "Oh, look at that, the AUD 0.70 or the AUD 0.72," or, you know, whatever it is.
That's the other thing that we've noticed over a really long period of time, in both our inbound market and our outbound markets, is that, unless there's been a really significant shift, and we've seen a few of those over the years, but very, very rarely. Unless there's, as I said, a really significant shift, people don't understand it until they get to actually making the decision to go somewhere. Most people as well, when they decide to go somewhere, they don't have an amount in a foreign currency that they're planning to spend. I think we can all relate to this, but, you know, you're planning to go to Europe, you've got an amount in Australian dollars you're planning to spend on your trip.
If that buys you EUR 5,000 worth of stuff, you buy EUR 5,000 worth. If it buys you five and a half thousand EUR, you get five and a half thousand EUR worth of things, if it buys you four and a half, you get four and a half EUR. What we've found over many years of doing this, is that it just doesn't have that much of an impact. There's no doubt interest rates look like they're set to go up again, that will be, as I said, a negative in the lower ends of the market.
At the same time, that should, as well, provide a better foundation for the Aussie to trade off, and, you know, people will spend more, and our inbound customers as well. They don't really pay any attention to it either. Again, they think of an amount in euros or dollars or whatever, U.S. dollars, that they're gonna spend when they come here, and they adjust their expenditure accordingly. Sorry, a bit of a long-winded answer.
Yeah, I got it. Yeah, I like it, and I was sort of wondering about demographic, that they might actually get a higher rate on their deposits or something like that, or spending the kids inheritance or whatever the case may be, I suppose so, yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Their term deposits are racing ahead, and hopefully, they're invested in NVIDIA and a few other things, and they're making a good fortune on the share market as well.
Yeah, sure. Now, a second question, if I could, just, I suppose the pronounced sort of selling of these kind of bulk packages by some of these discounters in the market, and I've probably got three relatives who've gone over to China on a very cheap sort of trip. I'm just wondering, how you see that, the impact that in the market? Are your agents selling that product, or is that purely an online discounter sort of product? 'Cause the China trip is so cheap, it's just beyond belief.
Cinzia's got something she wants to say about that, so go ahead, please.
Hi there. Yes, I know the obviously the companies you're referring to, because we are very familiar with what they package. The first thing I have to say is that if we actually look at those packages and construct them again, we can match those prices. We don't do that because what is not clear in those packages at first glance is the quality of the product that they include. You know, if it's a cruise, it's gonna be the cabin on the water, basically with no windows. It is not the type of product that our agents do sell.
We have been able to this, any time that we've been challenged on that, we have been able to demonstrate, what they actually include, and they do certainly suit, a part of the market, just not the market that our agents are focusing on.
Having said that, the other thing to say about it is that we package up an enormous range of international outbound packages to destinations all around the world, and those packages sell in huge numbers. There's no issue around the quality, and I'm certainly not questioning the quality of the product that your family members or what have you, got in their China trips. I think that that's not the type of business that Helloworld and our, all of our associated brands, it's not the type of business that our agents are looking to try and sell. As I said, we package up a lot of stuff. A lot of our preferred supplier partners, Australian Pacific Touring, The Travel Corporation, et cetera, et cetera.
They package up a tremendous amount of product as well that we sell, and we get tremendous support from them, from the agents and from our customers in buying that product. Yeah, there's certainly a place for them in the market, and they've done well.
I just wondered whether it was a function of the Chinese airlines are discounting. I know you mentioned you got relationships with all these airlines, how are things working with those China sort of airlines?
Well, The China air, those China type of airlines, as described. Look, they've got cheaper fares.
Mm.
You know, China Eastern, China Southern, to a certain extent, Xiamen, and other Chinese airlines, they have a better priced product and than the other carriers. A lot of our customers as well, don't want to sit on a China Eastern flight to Shanghai and then sit on China Eastern for another 12 or 13 hours going to London. They choose to sit on an Emirates flight or a Singapore Airlines flight or whatever. We also have many people, we obviously have contracts with all those Chinese airlines. We have many people who, for whatever reason, and they have good business class fares, the food, I'm told, is fine. I've flown on both China Eastern, China Southern, China Airlines, and most of the others, as a matter of fact, nothing wrong with it.
Absolutely nothing wrong with it. They do provide a much more competitive fare than the big international global carriers. Not to say they're not big either. I mean, these China carriers, they're massive businesses as well.
Sure. Okay, just lastly, just to, if I could have, I just want to follow up on that airline then. If you've got any, if you're able to make any comments on the outlook for how you see the airlines, what the two majors are doing in terms of their sort of strategies going forward? There seems to be cheaper lounges and things, but how do you see the landscape over the next 12 months in terms of particularly the two domestic big air players?
You would have seen recently, of course, effectively the upgrade in the frequent flyer offerings and how people are being enticed with status credits and better frequent flyer points and more available tickets using those frequent flyer programs. Loyalty is a huge factor that both of them trade off, Virgin and Qantas. Virgin fares, typically in Australia for domestic sectors, are often significantly cheaper than Qantas fares by 30%, 40%, even 50%, and particularly in business class. There are many Australians who are loyal to Qantas and were happy to pay the extra amount. I don't know if they're happy to pay it, actually, they're prepared to pay the extra amount for the benefits that flying with Qantas brings, and particularly in terms of loyalty.
We sell a lot of both of them. Virgin is our fifth highest selling carrier, you know, they don't really fly overseas at all. It's all domestic pretty much. Our customers, most of them are loyal to one or the other airline, is the other thing that we find. They're trying to build up their points balances in one or the other of them, their status credit balances, and so on and so forth. The competition out there, I think it's quite reasonable, given that there are only two. As far as the rest of the carriers go, there's a commonality around them in terms of the service they're providing, the quality of what they do.
It's worth noting that, for us, 40%, in fact, 41% of our total sales in Australia are international carriage, are in business or premium economy or first class. At one point, 8% are in first class, about 36%-37% are in business class, and about 3% or 4% are in premium economy. So that's 40%. Four out of every 10 bookings we get are in the premium classes. That as well, I think, you know, tells you the type of customer that we have, and where they wanna spend their dollars in their travel experience.
Sure. Great, and lastly, could I concur on that comment on Collingwood? Is there any prospect you might change teams, Andrew, from Carlton, given this sort of state that Carlton is in at the moment, Collingwood would seem a much better bet?
Well, I think we have to go out and see how the first few rounds go. I think the great thing about not having any expectation is that you can't be disappointed. I've learned not to have expectation with Carlton, but I know that you've also, unfortunately, enjoyed a lot of disappointment with Collingwood over the years.
You don't have to remind us of that. Thank you.
I won't remind you of any more of that. I know it was painful and deep scars.
Very good. Hopefully, plenty of Collingwood supporters take up your offer. Thanks for your time there.
Cheers. Thanks.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Burnes for closing remarks.
Well, thanks very much. Thank you very much to everyone on the call for joining us today. We're very pleased to talk about our business and how it's going. We think it's going quite well. We've had some good wins throughout the half. We're shaping up for some good wins as well in the second half. I think that the demand for leisure travel, which is predominantly what we do, the demand for leisure travel, will continue unabated throughout the next period. I look forward to your continued interest.
If anyone has any further follow-ups, please don't hesitate to email us or call us, and we look forward to seeing you on our various roadshows and things that we are up to across the coming few weeks, but also again at the end of the current financial year. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.
Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.