Good day, and welcome to the Webjet Limited first half FY 2022 results briefing conference call. Today, you are able to view the briefing by a webcast and listen by a webcast or a teleconference. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. John Guscic, Webjet Limited Managing Director. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, operator, and welcome everyone to our first half financial year 2022 results update. I'm delighted that you can join us. Joining me in the room is Tony Ristevski, our CFO. We will spend the next short period talking through everything that's happened in our business over the past six months, with a focus on what we think is gonna happen going forward. In an environment of severe disruption to the established travel markets, I'm delighted to report we've made substantial progress in the half on our strategic objectives. The business has turned around, and most importantly, we've finished the half with cash of AUD 446 million in the bank.
We most importantly have been able to derive a cash surplus of AUD 3.5 million a month, which is a circa AUD 9 million a month turnaround from the AUD 5.5 million cash burn rate that we had in the previous half. We're delighted to announce that our deferred FY 2020 interim dividend will be paid. Going back into our respective business units, WebBeds is now being profitable since July. That's primarily driven by the outperformance of our domestic North American business and the recovery of inter-regional European business. Our cost base is down 31% compared to pre-COVID levels. As we have previously stated as a strategic objective, we believe that we are on track to be more than 20% more cost-efficient at scale for that business.
On the Webjet OTA, profitable in the first quarter, but as everyone knows, in Australia, we've been impacted by border closures, and we've seen a dramatic drop-off in the second quarter. As borders reopen, we start to see an immediate rebound, and we see that happening in October, and we are starting to see international travel for our OTA business. On the Online Republic or soon to be known as the former Online Republic, we have rebranded it under GoSee. We have re-platformed that business, and I'll spend a little bit about the logic of what we've done, why we've done it, and the expected outcome as we target growth opportunities in both the motor homes and car division of our former Online Republic business, now known as GoSee.
Like all business in a rapidly transformed and changing world, we've got intense focus on global employee engagement and retention. During the period, we were able to increase employee numbers and go back to 100% salary payments for all employees across the globe. We're delighted to see that the business continues to turn around, and we are addressing the significant opportunities in all of those businesses. Within WebBeds, the market opportunity expansion that we're previously seeing is being enhanced, and I'll spend significant time talking about that. The ultimate driver is that we will be in a strong position in the ensuing years to deliver against our 8/3/5 objectives when we are back at scale. The Webjet OTA, we're continuing to target market share growth, and as has been well documented, consumer preferences continue to shift online.
We are a beneficiary of that shift, and we are enhancing our offering, and we'll talk about an acquisition that we made to derive even greater market-leading technology in the Webjet International component of our business. On GoSee, one platform which deliver cars and motor homes at hopefully greater efficiency, but give us the opportunity to leverage the platform to the extent possible that we can maximize both bookings and revenue and EBITDA margins for that particular business. Operator, if we move to Slide 3, the key metrics are there. I don't need to read them out to you other than to say from a horrible first half of financial year 2021, we're starting to see significant rebound at both volume metrics such as TTV, booking metrics. We're seeing substantial improvement in revenue.
Margins are returning, and we're seeing a substantial reduction in expenses, giving a better performance at an EBITDA level. We have a high degree of confidence that that will turn around to become a substantial contributor to a positive environment at an aggregate across all of our businesses in the ensuing periods, reporting periods. Moving to WebBeds, Slide 5. It goes without saying the world has changed, but in that world changing and in the travel marketplace itself, it's increased the opportunity for the WebBeds business. The changing market dynamics have played to our advantage in the following sense. Over the last 12 months, I've spoken about how we have retooled the WebBeds business to focus on the domestic marketplace as our anticipated recovery strategy had the domestic markets opening up first.
That's proven to be correct, as it played out to our ability to distribute inventory to B2C channels, which require what we provide through the WebBeds platform, and we're seeing a substantial uptake of our offering. Our technology has made it easier for people to integrate with our significant content that we have. Hotels, like all travel businesses, are desperate to take advantage of a recovery strategy, and people like ourselves that fulfill their distribution needs are an important component.
As such, we've been able to solidify and, in many cases, expand our connection to those hotel partners to derive greater benefit to them in distribution of hotels, and a greater opportunity for us in being able to take advantage of the reduction in competition that we're seeing in our particular industry as a result of a number of smaller to mid-size players, either shrinking their capability significantly or disappearing altogether. What we have done is increase our ability to drive revenue growth through the domestic offerings in all regions. The North American market was previously our smallest of the regions. It's now becoming a significant component of our overall distribution side. Our B2C markets, I've touched on, the B2C clients, is being optimized and has been a key growth driver.
We've been well-respected and trusted by our hotel partners, as I previously would have called out. During the pandemic, we ensured that we dealt with everyone with a high degree of integrity. That's given us great kudos and it's given us a head start in the recovery cycle because of our reputational strength with our distribution partners. We have got all of our existing platforms in place, whether it's the hotel supplier relationship, global customer network, as well as our existing technology to enable us to take advantage of our historic base, as well as our emerging markets. What we're seeing is month-on-month improvement to the extent that November TTV is tracking at 63% of pre-COVID levels and bookings are tracking at 69%.
We've been able to achieve that, notwithstanding that a significant number of markets haven't opened. I will go through Slide 6 relatively quickly 'cause I have discussed this previously, including as recently as the AGM. We are targeting an AUD 10 billion TTV market opportunity. The market is still substantial. The initiatives that we are undertaking are as described, diversifying in previously untapped markets, increasing penetration in North America, B2C channel expansion, streamlined technology, leveraging our blockchain initiatives, and in particular Rezchain, the efficiencies that that gives us, a high use of data analytics. We've simplified the business over the course of the last 18 months, and we're on track to be 20% more cost-efficient at scale, which enables us to make the assertion that our profitability target, which was previously 8/4/4, is 8/3/5.
Getting to the first half summary and the results for WebBeds Global, we are seeing bookings in TTV increasing as markets start to open up. First half average booking value is significantly lower than our historic numbers. That's primarily because of the mix of business that we're doing, which has a significant skew towards domestic compared to our pre-COVID business. Cost base 31% on its previous pre-COVID levels. TTV margins are improving. Second half of calendar year 2020 was 6.1%. Quarter one of calendar year 2021 is 7.3%. The half just gone is now doing 7.5%. We are improving at a margin level. The organization has been restructured, as previously described, to include a dedicated CEO for the business, four commercial regions, including the Americas being separated out.
We also have Umrah Holidays International as a focus on capturing religious tourism opportunities. As the Saudi market has only just recently opened, that was nonexistent for the previous six months, we expect to see opportunities for us to grow beyond our four commercial regions as well. Moving on to profitability, we'll see that quarter-on-quarter growth, first quarter versus second quarter, the expectation is Q3 will be, already is, better than second quarter of 2022. We have, as previously stated, pivoted to do domestic travel. Talked about North American penetration, but what we are seeing is organic business growth in all regions. When markets do rebound, they rebound very, very quickly back to pre-COVID levels. Average booking value is starting to increase as the customer mix of international travel is opening up, and we accept that acceleration to continue into.
It is already continuing based on our forward bookings into December. What are we doing to drive profitability? The key outcome is that by focusing on domestic markets, we were able to capture the early booking trends in the recovery process. That number continues to grow, yet the substantial component of our business, which is international travel, has seen a rapid acceleration in the first quarter to the second quarter in the half itself. What we are capturing is substantial new clients, existing clients booking to new destinations, and we are getting better and new inventory, so we have more contracts available for our entire customer base to take advantage of.
If you have a look at the box on the bottom right-hand corner, it shows you what we've been able to achieve since October 2019 on a number of directly contracted hotel bases. Which goes with the thematic that the B2B distribution channel is vitally important as it is in all elements of a normal working environment, but in particular in a recovery scenario, hoteliers are very keen to ensure that we remain a viable alternative in giving them a broadest reach of customers and giving them access to the largest market opportunities. That's been signified by our ability to recontract our previous contracted hotels pre-COVID, as well as add to that componentry, which gives us great confidence in our ability to continue to grow our market share.
If we move to Slide 10, we can talk in particular about what's happening in the international marketplace. From a non-Australian perspective, we can see that markets are operating at a bifurcated environment that has some markets when they do recover, exceeding their pre-COVID highs, the best example are North America and Russia. Distribution channels such as OTAs substantially exceeding their pre-COVID highs. Some key leisure destinations in particular, such as Dubai, Vegas, and Mallorca, substantially outperforming their pre-COVID levels. Yet at the same time, a lot of our important markets, in particular, are skewed towards Asia-Pacific, are less than 25% of their pre-COVID TTV levels. We can talk about South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, in particular, in total, and China, with the exception of what we've been able to achieve domestically, but the international outbound market is basically nonexistent for that market.
Now, those, three out of those four markets are three of our largest markets in Asia-Pacific. pre-COVID, Asia-Pacific was our largest market by booking volumes. There is still substantial upside to be achieved as we get those markets heading towards a more normalized environment. As we've seen in the last six weeks or so, we're starting to see a number of these Asia-Pacific markets start to reopen. At a destination level, it's even more severe when we've got major destinations such as Singapore, Bali, and Bangkok, which are less than 10% of pre-COVID levels. Now, we've suggested that we are well-positioned to deliver TTV growth as more markets open.
The commentary that supports all of that, the data that we have that supports all of that, is that our transformational strategy is delivering as previously identified, such as new domestic hotels, new domestic customers, new OTA customers, a substantially expanded North American presence, a streamlined technology office, and a significantly lower cost base. What that's been able to deliver for us as we look into December, next month, is that we're on track to be greater than 70% of pre-COVID volumes. Month-on-month, performance against pre-COVID volumes continues to improve. We're seeing improved average booking values, improved margins, across the board, and most importantly, improved TTV numbers in aggregate, across the board.
At a high level, that's a summation of what we've seen in the first six months of the financial year for the WebBeds business and also giving insight into the last six weeks of trading and what we think will happen at least for the next six weeks of trading in the WebBeds business. Moving on to the Webjet OTA. Again, we've seen it's a profitable business, which we're delighted to announce heavily skewed to its performance in the first quarter before borders shut down. What we're seeing is that and what our expectation is that domestic activity will be the key driver of this business. It was the key driver in Q1. We expect that to continue as the domestic borders reopen across Australia.
We've been able to lever our highly scalable cost base to pick up demand as soon as markets reopen. We see that in the first quarter with the results, and we also see that post the first half results with the rebound in October and into November. The increase in first half TTV expenses, for clarity, is related to obviously higher volume, base costs and also that all employees are on full wages for the entire Webjet OTA business. We're starting to see TTV margins reflect what we would expect to happen over a normalized period, which is between 9%-10%. Our brand strength continues to drive share.
Our marketing spend has reopened as markets reopen, and we expect on an ongoing basis marketing costs to be less than our historic 2% TTV, which has been a driver of building up that brand over the course of the last 20 years. We're seeing that in an environment of lower international OTA competition, reduction in the validity and veracity of metasearch as a competitive alternative that our B2C business continues to improve against the markets themselves, and we are continuing to see a rebound as domestic borders reopen in the Webjet business. If we go to domestic borders reopening, we're seeing a return to profitability. We are profitable again in October, and we will be profitable in November for the OTA business.
We expect to start to see domestic bookings return to pre-COVID levels in calendar year 2022 as state borders reopen. Clearly, there's a significant international opportunity as international borders start to reopen, but we see that as being more muted during the balance of calendar year 2022. The monthly booking profile that we've got on the graph shows what happens when borders close, and you start to see the immediate rebound as borders do open, and we expect that to continue in December and January as some other states open up their borders to enable domestic traffic to move more seamlessly across Australia. How have we gone in regards to the market? Well, we've been consistent over the course of the last 18 months of growing our share of bookings.
We are now. We've now grown consistently over the last nine months, where we are 1.5x the underlying market in the growth and the shift towards Webjet. We're now consistently 11% or greater than 11% of all bookings through the GDS that are captured in Australia. Our objective pre-COVID or our marketplace pre-COVID was circa 5% of all domestic passengers in Australia. We're growing at a rate faster than that today. Our international outbound was 3%. Clearly, that's a little bit more difficult to measure in a market that's shut. We've made, and we continue to make investments that will enable us to capture that market and be a more viable and significant player in that international component of the Webjet OTA business.
I won't read through all the opportunities to significantly grow our market share. They're on record on Slide 14. Suffice to say that the underlying premise that has predicated our success in the OTA business of convenience and choice continues to be the overarching mantra of the organization. As we're gonna see on the next slide, we're gonna enhance our ability to provide convenience and choice to consumers with an acquisition that we're going to announce. Moving on to Slide 16. We have agreed to acquire 100% of a Canadian travel company called Trip Ninja. Trip Ninja is a bunch of guys who have taken a complex problem without having the historic biases of travel industry personnel and thought about how can we use technology to solve them. They have delivered some incredibly innovative products.
So much so that I've previously said on public record many times in investor briefings that if you are a consumer and you want a complex itinerary or you want to have a multi-stop itinerary, you are best served by going to a bricks-and-mortar agency to fulfill your needs. Webjet has its place in the distribution cycle and distribution environment, and we fulfill the needs of a large percentage, in fact, 100% of the needs of domestic travel and a substantial percentage of international outbound travel. With the acquisition of Trip Ninja and its integration into the Webjet OTA environment, we will have the expertise and the speed that no bricks-and-mortar OTA will be able to replicate and match when it comes to providing a complex international itinerary.
That's a compelling, unique value proposition that we now have that is going to differentiate and contribute to a specific ability of us to grow our international outbound business. Not only do we have that capability today, we are also going to build out some capability to enable us to do it in airfares as well as dynamic packaging going down the track, which again will change the competitive landscape during calendar year 2022 for the Webjet business. We are delighted to announce Trip Ninja being part of the organization. We have a specific strategy that is different to the way we've operated our other businesses in that Trip Ninja will be available exclusively through the Webjet OTA in Australia.
Beyond Australian shores, we will be selling it directly to other travelers, other travel organizations, whether they're a retail leisure environment, corporate travel environment, et cetera, other OTAs. There is an opportunity for an additional revenue stream to come through the Trip Ninja product, as well as the unique competitive position it gives us. Very excited with what that brings and delighted to think of where we could be in 12 months time once this is integrated into our core offering, giving us, as I said, a point of differentiation that nobody else will be able to replicate or nobody in the short term will definitely be able to replicate. We believe it gives us a head start into driving more business to the Webjet OTA organization.
In addition, moving on to Slide 17, we have made an investment during the half with LockTrip. As anyone who's followed our journey over the last five years knows, we have been strong advocates of the potential for blockchain solutions to provide greater security, greater certainty, and ability for us to take costs out of our business through the use of blockchain initiatives. LockTrip is an investment we've made with 25% in that business, with an option to move to 51%. That provides a unique hotel marketplace, again, underpinned by a blockchain economy, powered by its own utility token called LOC. They also provide its own decentralized public blockchain called Hydra, again, powered by its own coin called HYDRA. The LockTrip guys enable genuine commercial applications delivered scale.
We think there are incredible opportunities that will fall out of our partnership with the guys at LockTrip, whether it's just as simple as accelerated development of our own in-house expertise, the previously announced integration of LockTrip into the Webjet OTA, which will be coming in calendar year 2022, and the migration of our Rezchain application. Over and above, with all the things that the guys at LockTrip are doing, we believe that it has a compelling opportunity in its own right, and its ability to build out its own environment and marketplace shouldn't be underestimated. We're delighted with the last eight months of our working relationship with the guys from LockTrip, and we look forward to a number of interesting innovations that will come out again in calendar 2022 on the LockTrip business.
All in all, I've loosely coupled this under the innovation heading, and to pre-empt some of the questions that I inevitably get asked, the strong capital position that we have, the strong cash position that we have, the two most recent investments are innovations that we couldn't deliver in-house. We recognize this is a unique point in time in which the rapid technological transformation off the back of new entrants into the travel tech space gives us, with our capital strength and a depressed travel market, unique opportunities to pick up assets at reasonable valuations that we believe will be significant to the longer term benefit of all Webjet shareholders. We continue to look and invest in other attractive technology assets to support our growth.
Moving on to the business unit formerly known as Online Republic, Symbol. We will talk about GoSee from now on, which is the rebranding of Online Republic. Before I get into the launch and why we did it, just to go through the results. Costs are down 30%, but just like the OTA business in Australia, the market lockdown, in particular, an environment where it's Australasian-based between Australia and New Zealand, had a severe impact on this business. Trans-Tasman bubble is important to this business, and as New Zealand continues to remain shut to Australia, that's got a significant impact on the organization. The business was marginally profitable for a short period of time during the half, but it's been a challenge when its major marketplace has remained shut.
Costs are down significantly. Margins are expected to be similar to the OTA margins, around 9%-10% as we roll forward. We relaunched the brand in October for a number of reasons that strategically make sense. From an investor perspective, I'd like you to think about in the context that under the GoSee brand, we have the opportunity, albeit with a teal color instead of a red color, to build out a Webjet-like brand experience for the consumer. In the Online Republic environment, that proved to be challenging for us. Notwithstanding that it was a substantially profitable business, we believe we can rebrand and relaunch this business and to be profitable at an even greater scale than we were pre-COVID. One core brand, one core tech platform.
We believe it will improve the underlying performance, improve the customer experience, and provide us with additional global growth opportunities as we can scale into new markets easier, cross-sell between our existing product, and ensure seamless product extension opportunities across the one brand of GoSee. If we move to Slide 21, this is the new look and feel, which is much cleaner and I believe will have a significant improvement in conversion than the old Online Republic. The mission is an improved customer experience, empowering travelers by offering unrivaled choice and an effortless experience backed by people who care. You can go through the journey that is at the bottom of the page. In essence, we have reinvested significantly in the business and we see an opportunity to exceed the highs that we've had previously.
We believe that under the single platform, we can do that again, as we've said for both the Webjet and the Webjet businesses, at scale, more cost efficiently than we have previously. We will be able to convert better, providing a better customer experience, and by building out a brand over time, reduce the reliance on pay-per-click to drive activity and volume on the site itself. Delighted to see that we've made great progress in the GoSee environment. With that, I will hand over to Tony Ristevski, our CFO, to give a summary of the first half 2022 financials.
Thanks, John. I'll turn everyone's attention to Page 24, which is the statutory P&L. Just as a reminder, we're still in the transition year this year with regard to the new financial year being March. As John talked to at the operational divisional level, we've provided like-for-like financials in the compare window. Whereas here in the statutory P&L, we're providing December as the compare six months. John's gone through the underlying operations from the EBITDA and above line, from a statutory P&L perspective. Below the EBITDA line, we've got a couple of non-cash, large, items going through the P&L, which I'll go through a bit later in the coming slides. Below the statutory EBITDA line, the D&A and the Acquired Amortization for the first half, we've continued to see that being in line for the second half.
Our net interest expenses are up for the like-for-like six months in December. This is primarily driven through the convertible bond. If you can recall with the last bond, you're required to bifurcate the instruments between a debt and equity component. With the current bond, we've undertaken that exercise. About 85% of the AUD 250 million is deemed to be borrowings, and the residual 15% is deemed to be equity. With a three-year put option, we're required to reverse back sort of 15% bifurcation back into the P&L through the interest line. What you're gonna find is a high interest charge being non-cash going through the P&L in the coming years.
Below the NPAT line there with tax, we see the tax at an effective level after AA being around the mid-teens going forward, as the business starts to return to profitability. I'll turn your attention to the next slide, which is the cash flow. We start our waterfall here using the pro forma position that we presented at the full year. Just to remind everyone, which was the AUD 261 million of closing cash plus the AUD 170 million of net proceeds from the bond. We've obviously done the investment in LockTrip and the final earn-out for DOTW. The most pleasing aspect about this six-month period has been the positive cash surplus being derived from the business of AUD 3.5 million per month.
I should remind everyone going back 18 months to the quarter being April to June, our cash burn then was AUD 14.2 million. We had no revenue. We were expanding, you know, north of 14 million. As time progressed and as the market started to progressively open up in some small ways, that cash burn in that sort of first quarter of July through to September we started to reduce that down to AUD 10 million. Then as the financial year completed, being March, that ended up being AUD 5.5 million as we started to recover and get some TTV and working capital benefits come through. It's pleasing to see now in this six-month window, we're in the black at a comfortable AUD 3.5 million, driven as a consequence of working capital inflows.
As people would appreciate, with TTV growing the B2B business, we start to get the benefit of the timing difference between the debtors and the creditors going forward. Lastly, talking about the dividend, as John mentioned, this, to remind people, is for the declared dividend back to February of last year for shareholders on the register back in March 2020. That's approximately around AUD 12 million for the investment benefit. As we start to grow our business back into the pre-COVID levels, profitability will improve along with the TTV, which will then equally drive an uplifting working capital. Go to the next slide, on Slide 26. A quick summary around corporate costs.
They are down on pre-COVID levels as we start to review, like the rest of the business, in terms of cost control, but up on the same period last year, primarily driven as we return to 100% in salaries across the corporate team. Equally, the material uplift is around D&O insurance, which is common across the ASX-listed community. Unfortunately, and our renewal window is February of each year, so we start to see the full-year costs come through at the start of each financial year. Going on to Slide 27, a summary of our non-operating expenses, as John talked about earlier with regards to the rebrand of the Online Republic business to the GoSee.
We've accelerated the impairment, albeit the depreciation of the goodwill that's been sitting on our balance sheet, which is not a cash item. When it comes to cash items, we continue to restructure our B2B business to ensure that we're building it to scale on its return and bidding for volume. Government subsidies continue to taper off, and these are primarily received from overseas markets. Lastly with the ERP system, as mentioned in the last update of the full year, we've decided to expense that and we'll continue to expense that going forward. I'll talk a bit more about that in the context of the accounting guidance when it comes to the CapEx slide. Going to the next slide on the balance sheet.
We've called our cash previously. The other thing to take note is obviously as the business starts to grow meaningfully in the TTV sphere, that we'll start to see debtors and creditors grow. Over time, you would see those numbers get substantially larger. One thing to note here is obviously we continue to abide by our debtor policy and continue to keep in check the aging and the like, and that's resulted in great collections going forward. One thing people have asked is around capital management and cash being sort of north of AUD 450 million on the balance sheet or thereabout. The way we think about cash going forward is through the context of the current ratio, which is on the bottom there.
What we believe would be healthy to preserve in the medium term is at least a ratio greater than 1.1. The high-level idea is that if cash sits above that, could be deemed to be available for M&A activities and the likes of the business looking forward. With regards to other major movements on the balance sheet, there is a -AUD 100 million there. Majority of that is for the derivative from the old euro bond, the EUR 93 million, that was pushed through the equity as we collapsed that back in April of this year, as we launched a new EUR 250 million euro bond. Lastly, with regards to borrowing, we have AUD 86 million on our balance sheet of term debt.
That's not due until November 2023, so there's a long runway there of two years. Obviously with the bond, which is not due from a put option until April 2024. From a capacity on our balance sheet, we've got a long runway in as far as capital is concerned and will be the need to revisit that. Quite comfortable with the overall position as it stands today. Moving forward to the next Slide 29, as relates to cash flow. I've gone through this in the waterfall, so I won't spend too much time at all on this slide other than it's being presented there for the sake of your benefit. I'll probably then move to the next slide in the interest of time, being Slide 30.
CapEx, we continue to look at our efficiencies, particularly in the B2B organization. We obviously consolidated IT under one umbrella 18 months ago as COVID hit. We continue to look at and focus on ways in which we can leverage our spend in that instance. Obviously with regards to the remainder of the year, we expect to be in the order around AUD 22 million for full year spend. As relates to the ERP program, as we talked about at full year results, obviously a new guidance came through as relates to accounting for SaaS implementations. Conservatively we expensed it last financial year and we'll continue to expense it going forward is the position we've taken. So far we've spent to date on that program close to AUD 7.7 million.
The overall budget is around AUD 16 million, and we're more than three-quarters of the way through that program at this stage, comfortable around the go live early in the calendar year. On that note, I'll hand back to John.
Thank you, Tony. One thing we've certainly seen over the course of the last two years is that markets operate differently from each other and with a degree of variability. The one thing we've also learned is that our geographic diversification has become a strength as those different regions recover at different times. It's interesting for us to note as an organization that runs a global business to see that where demand does come back, it comes back in a hurry. We've seen that across the board. If I think about the market opportunity for us, it's substantial. If I think about WebBeds in particular, the market came back first in North America, then Europe.
What we're starting to see is rebound activity in both Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. All of that and the rate in which we have picked up business suggests that we are well ahead of our pre-COVID market share numbers. The aspiration that we have to be the number one global supplier in the B2B marketplace, you know, we're tracking to that huge goal of getting to 10 billion. Webjet OTA has been remarkably consistent in its leadership over the course of the last 12 months, and we've grown at 1.5 the market. As I've spent a bit of time talking through, we've got great optimism around what GoSee can do as part of the transformation on the back of its singular platform and a singular brand.
Our cost base is substantially lower across all three business units, and that scale will continue to be substantially lower than it was pre-COVID. As I've already spoken about, we've got significant cash reserves and runway, and like many global businesses, we're focused on attracting and retaining the best talent to support what is a global travel business that has a superior set of opportunities than I would say the vast majority of global travel businesses in the world. We have a high degree of confidence in what the travel recovery scenario looks like and what our place in the world in that travel scenario looks like. Getting into specifics of the current financial year. WebBeds, I touched on this. We're seeing the snapping back of booking volumes to pre-highs in certain markets.
You know, WebBeds' third quarter TTV is on track to be higher than the second quarter, which is on track to be higher than the first quarter. Notwithstanding, it's a lower seasonality, which, you know, I've been involved in that industry for a long time. If you ever told me that you're gonna get a better result in November than you did in July, I would have thought you're dreaming. If you ever told me you'd get a better result in December than you did in August, I'll have what you're having. That's a factor of the strategic initiatives that we've spoken about, the domestic opportunities, the investment in North America, and all of our infrastructure remaining in place across the other regions.
We are on track to get to pre-COVID activity in WebBeds in the second half of financial year 2023. I'll talk a little about that in the next slide. With Webjet OTA, we're starting to see bookings improve, as you would expect, as domestic and international borders reopen. GoSee starting to see some improvement on the Australian domestic side, but the big change will occur when the Trans-Tasman borders open, and that will drive some profitability. What are we seeing? We're seeing the markets when they are open, they're seeing significant pent-up demand materializing. Where there's uncertainty, consumer behavior is cautious. For us, a number of our important markets are closed. Trans-Tasman's closed. A lot of Asia- Pacific is still shut.
We're still being able to see substantial rebounds in a lot of other markets where they do open. At a group level, Q3 trading is currently tracking ahead of Q2, and you have that information in front of you. As we go to beyond financial year 2022, clearly there's going to be variability in outcomes on a global basis as the pandemic goes through its iteration of various waves. We are at the tail end of the pandemic. While there will continue to be short-term uncertainty, the incredible work that's been done with regards to vaccinations, boosters, and antiviral treatments will stabilize the impact of COVID over the next six to 12 months.
As we've outlined over the course of the previous 45 minutes, there's been a substantial outperformance of all of our businesses where markets are open, in particular WebBeds and Webjet OTA, where we are outperforming the underlying market at a substantial level. You can see in our appendix what the market recovery looks like according to IATA, and you can see that we are well ahead of that, as a proxy for our WebBeds business.
Based on that assumption that there will be uncertainty, but based on the assumption that vaccines, boosters, antiviral treatments will stabilize the health risks and the impact to the health system over the course of the next six to 12 months, we believe that we will be back at pre-COVID booking volumes by the second half of our financial year 2023, which to remind everyone is October 22nd through to March 2023. With that operator, we will be delighted to take any questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, you can do so via the phone or webcast. To ask a question via the phone, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. A voice prompt on the phone line will indicate when your line is open. Once again, please press star one to ask a question. We'll pause for just a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal for questions. We'll take our first question from Quinn Pierson from Credit Suisse. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, John and Tony. Thanks for the time. Maybe just firstly, Trip Ninja sounded like a pretty interesting acquisition. I was hoping you could answer two questions, please. Firstly, with regards to selling this product to third parties, could you just talk us through, I guess, the revenue model and I guess how you think that business could scale? And secondly, in Australia, I would imagine you're at a bit of a disadvantage given the dominance of the home carrier. I just was hoping for some idea on what maybe realistic international aspirations might look like. Thanks.
Quinn, it's unlike you to cast a negative question as the second part of your question. The home carrier, we have a great relationship with the home carrier, and everyone loves the flying kangaroo. It doesn't change what Trip Ninja can do for us, and it certainly doesn't change what the ITA opportunity is for us. Let me cover it off. Early in the new year, like circa March, we will do a strategy day in which we'll go through a lot of our thinking behind all, you know, where we think our business can be and what our competitive advantage is, not dissimilar to what we did roughly in March of this year.
What we'll do at that point is go through the specifics of what Trip Ninja can do. To the model, it's in essence a SaaS-like model of recurring revenues for new customers. Some of it will be based on access and others will be transactional based. We're still evolving out of that. We've got, you know, licensees that we would have, and we can also do a revenue share arrangement with them. That's an evolving piece, but we have a, you know, pretty clear idea of what that will be. We haven't, you know, launched the product in the market yet, so we'll reserve a little bit about that opportunity.
Suffice to say that outside of Australia, the addressable market is the tens of thousands of bricks and mortar agents, the hundreds of OTAs, and the substantial number of corporate travel businesses that would use it. To give you an idea of why we bought it, you know, we did a series of tests of our existing technology in a complex itinerary and compared it to what they were able to deliver. In 80% of cases, they were able to deliver either a more efficient outcome or they were able to deliver a cost saving for the consumer. Now, we're not talking point-to-point travel. We're talking complex itinerary, where you're stitching together different segments.
In our examples, where there is a saving, which is in 80% of the time, the savings were circa 15%-30% of our purchase price. If you translate that family of four traveling somewhere where it has got three to four stops, we're talking about savings that are potentially in the thousands of AUD per booking. We're very excited about what that does for our organization. You know, this is stitching together every available airline irrespective of its distribution channel.
Super. Thank you. Maybe just secondly on the B2C division on the Webjet OTA. Is there more color you could give, please, on the November, I guess, the current November run rate or expectations into December? You've provided the November bookings in TTV, which is helpful, but a lot has happened in Australia in the domestic landscape over the last several months. I'm just wondering how, I guess, how large the improvement would have been over the last couple weeks. Thanks.
For the B2B business, Quinn?
The B2C division for the Webjet OTA.
Right. If you go to Slide 13, we give expected bookings and expected TTV for the business. Am I missing the point in your question? Sorry.
December.
December. Well, we'll just go through what we do and why we call out the WebBeds business. WebBeds has forward bookings that are locked in for December. Our November activity is bookings made on our website today. As we're not in December, we don't have bookings made on the website in December. We don't have any confidence that we would put a number down. Suffice to say that as markets open and there are more domestic markets opening, we think it'll be better than November. You know, we don't have any insight or forward look into that as opposed to WebBeds. As of today, I can tell you exactly how much we've got in future bookings that will be traveled in December, and that's when we recognize them.
Just the nature of how we record those two give us, one gives us more certainty and the other I'm hypothesizing, but with a high degree of confidence, December is gonna be better than November.
Right. I mean, I guess my point is this, that a lot has happened with regards to visibility on border openings over the last several weeks and looking at website traffic data, which is not perfect. It looks like there's been a very material improvement over the month of November. I guess my point is. I would imagine the exit run rate at the end of November would be materially higher than the 31%. I'm just kind of trying to get a feel on kind of what the exit run rate is or the current run rate is in pre-COVID levels. If that data is not at hand, then that's fine.
I guess third and lastly then on the bed bank division, you know, of course, there's good sequential improvement happening, but there's obviously a lot of headlines on another wave of COVID. I guess my question is, are you seeing this in any parts of your business? Are you seeing any kind of deterioration, say, you know, in or out of some of the German-speaking countries where we're seeing higher trends? I guess, are you seeing this start to impact your business at all as we head into the winter months? Thanks.
I'll answer this in the aggregate. We're seeing the opposite. We're seeing an increased level of booking activity. Last week's booking activity, as I can tell you, this is updated as of yesterday. Our last week's booking activity, so you take our last seven days and you include yesterday, it's substantially above the underlying growth rate that we had the week before, which was above the underlying growth rate the week before. We're not seeing any deterioration, which is not to say it won't come.
What we are seeing is compensating impact, at least a more than compensating impact of transatlantic travel opening up, which is substantial for our business and Asian markets starting to open up. For those two reasons, we're seeing growth as opposed to a decline in. Clearly, you know, we all read the same newspapers, and I live in that environment, so I know that there is plenty of commentary around what a fourth wave would look like in Eastern Europe and German-speaking parts of Europe. All right, we move to the next question, please, operator.
Thank you.
Next.
Yep
Question, Oscar.
Thank you. We'll take over the next question from Tim Plumbe from UBS. Your line is open. Go ahead, Tim.
Hi, guys. Can you hear me?
We can, Tim.
Excellent. I'll just ask two questions. Just firstly around the U.S. B2B opportunity. You touched on it a little bit, but just wondering if you can go into some of the key drivers that are gonna be required to continue to take share in that $20 billion opportunity. And maybe if you can talk in a little bit more detail about some of the changes to the business in terms of inventory, partnerships, new customers, et cetera.
Okay. I'll start broadly, and then I'll come back to North America. What we're seeing as markets reopen, and not all customers have reopened clearly, but there has been failure along the way. What we are seeing is, and I'll go to one of the first bullet points we made in the overall presentation, is we're seeing a reduction in competitor distribution dynamics. If you're a hotelier, instead of potentially having 10 B2B partners, you might have a number that's less than that. We're seeing a natural inclination to drive contracting activity with us at a higher rate than we've had pre-COVID, which is great to see.
From a customer point of view, the other side of the equation, we're seeing customers who are looking to get the best inventory at the best price, and we've got a compelling value proposition there. We are picking up share in every market. I spoke a fair bit about it, that there are domestic customers that we have got that are new, and we're selling domestic inventory to domestic customers. That inventory is clearly available to all customers. We're seeing some success there that's contributing to the outperformance in the individual markets. You know, I did make reference on slide, you know, the appendix, about the IATA recovery.
If you take the middle line, which is a combination of the international and domestic market, you know, we're circa 40%-50% above that in our recovery numbers, based on Q4 and Q3. We have got a high degree of confidence. I know what the sales pipeline looks like. I know what the hotel inventory opportunity set looks like. I understand from our key supply partners their strong desire to continue to support us as we build out the recovery thematic. All that looks positive, and that's why we've made the assertion that come the second half of next financial year, we'll be back to pre-COVID booking volumes. To go to the specifics about North America, as per our ideology, you know, it's people-based business supported by technology.
We've recruited more talent and better talent in the North American marketplace. That's first step. Second, there are specific inventory weaknesses and gaps that we had that we're addressing. The North American market, we're already more than 100% of our pre-COVID levels with, in fact, no international, so it's all just domestic.
If you add the international on top of the domestic, you know, the opportunity is to double that business over the course of the next short period. What we can sell to the market is increased. We've got new customers, and we've got people who can get us access to that, and we're continuing to evolve our technology stack to meet the unique needs of the North American market. They're the high-level reasons that we're seeing success in that specific geography.
Just the other question in terms of key markets reopening. I mean, aside from the Australian domestic borders, are there some specific countries or regions that you think will provide the biggest boost in terms of overall group revenue and earnings recovery?
We're seeing the recovery cycle in Europe ahead of Asia and the Middle East. We're starting to see rapid growth in the last couple of months out of the Middle East. If we hadn't had this conversation two months ago, and I probably did say this at the AGM, the Middle East was the laggard of the markets, but that has certainly changed. That is both at a source and destination level. Dubai is booming at the moment. Room rates are very expensive. As a market, we're well over 100% already in Dubai. The source market, that is who we sell from, has picked up dramatically in the last couple of months. You start to see that in the month-on-month numbers.
Asia is slowly starting to open, and some of the key destinations are opening. Asia is still a long way from its potential. The one that has the most impact will be as Asia opens up over the course of the first half of calendar 2022.
Great. Thanks, guys.
All right, we've got time for one more, operator. I'll read it out myself. It's one that's been sent in by John O'Shea, which says: What do you think domestic airline capacity will look like over the course of 2022? Over what timeframe do you expect this to move? Difficult question for us to answer 'cause it's a airline-specific question. You know, I can only give commentary around what's in the public domain. I have no inside knowledge other than a guess on the international side, which I'll talk about in a second. Domestic airline capacity, we think we'll get to full domestic capacity at the end of 2022, and it may come earlier than that.
We certainly do like the competitive dynamic with Qantas Group, with Jetstar, Virgin, Rex and Bonza all competing, which goes to the convenience and choice element of our value proposition, which we're very excited about. You know, the more the merrier. That's great for us. I wouldn't be able to tell you the timeframe they're expecting to move. That'd be a question for them. On the international side, 'cause we do have, you know, conversations with them. A lot of the international carriers, once there is certainty around border openings and a reduction in quarantine requirements, you'll see an uptick. I wouldn't expect international airline capacity to get to 100% in calendar year 2022. With that, operator, thank you very much. Thank you, everyone.
We have exceeded our allocated time. I appreciate the questions and wish you all a good day, and thank you for your support over the journey so far. We look forward to the next six months as we see our business rebounding from the basis that we've got. We're extremely optimistic and positive about what the future holds for us. With that, thank you very much and goodbye.
Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's event. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.