Thank you, Darcy. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for your time. Joining me this morning is Layton Shannos, our Group CFO. Today we're very pleased to take you through the first half results for Webjet Group. We'll turn to the first page, please. I'm looking at page number three in the bottom right-hand corner. Last week we updated the market on our preliminary first half results, which are now confirmed as provided last week. Given the market has the key figures already, I just wanted to start first with the key messages, as I always like to do, what we think you should take away from this morning. I think that is that despite a pretty tough domestic market, we've shown resilience and stayed disciplined in executing on our strategic priorities.
This half result definitely reflects the softer trading conditions that we've experienced in the half, and also some unique conditions faced by Webjet given the ACCC impact I spoke about in detail last week. For those of you that did miss that last week, our EBITDA delivered is a 9% decrease on a prior comparative period to AUD 14.4 million. Importantly, statutory impact is up 51%, and that's a very strong signal of the underlying health of the business. I think throughout the half we've really continued to invest for growth and done so responsibly and delivering on what we said we would. A great example of that is the costs out and the automation we've delivered in our Cars and Motorhome business. The balance between investing and obviously managing costs is critical in this environment.
You can also see that balance sheet remains a real strength with a net cash of AUD 111.9 million, still no borrowing, and net assets of AUD 150.2 million. That gives us the flexibility and the confidence to keep moving forward. Most importantly, I think a key message is we're accelerating our strategic plan with strong execution. International flight bookings are up. We said we would do that. We've expanded our tours and our packages offering. We said we would do that. We've launched our Webjet Business Travel, and the early engagement with that business has been very encouraging. I'll talk more about that shortly. Importantly, for our OTA brand, we've refreshed the brand, the website experience, and a brand new creative marketing campaign that is already resonating with customers. I can't wait to share with you some of the results from that.
We're doing the right things: investing where it matters, managing costs, and delivering on the potential of these brands that we have and our promises to shareholders. Most importantly, leveraging and maximizing the opportunity that our demerger over a year ago brought. We're building the foundations for sustainable growth, and we're doing it in a really disciplined way. Lastly, for those of you who have already read ahead on the ASX announcement, we're very excited to declare our inaugural interim dividend of AUD 0.02 per share. That's a payout ratio of 100% of underlying NPAT and well above our stated target range of 40%-60% payout range. That's consistent with our previously stated intention at our full-year results in May and then our AGM in August that the board has the intention to maximize the distribution of franking credits as they become available to the company.
Again, we had planned to commence an on-market buyback following these results after our blackout period. That is now on hold due to receipt of an MBIO, which would be another release you would have seen on the ASX this morning from ourselves. The details you can see in that announcement, I won't comment on that further. Turning now to page four, let's look at the key metrics. Underlying EBITDA, as I said, at AUD 14.4 million. The key things here are bookings at 724,000, TTV was AUD 726 million, and revenue was AUD 67.9 million. If I look back on that half and between April and September, as I said, trading was in a heavily subdued customer environment, particularly the April to June quarter, which I think was universally acknowledged across the travel industry as a very difficult leisure sector time.
We all saw global uncertainty, some cost of living pressures, and persistently high domestic fares following Rex 's exit last year. In the second quarter, leisure still remained subdued through winter. International demand has strengthened. As I mentioned last week, we've really seen this skew towards short-haul destinations rather than those higher yield long-haul routes. Despite this, for most of the half, our underlying results were tracking broadly in line with our budget and expectations. However, there did come some impact for us late in the half owing to the ACCC infringement notice on our OTA site that related to an investigation from 2023 and the choices that we made thereafter. Given the decline we saw in site metrics across that 60-day period, we made two strategic decisions.
One, to delay the OTA brand refresh and the launch of that by two months and to pull back our underlying market efforts just to make sure that we kept our powder dry, basically to ensure financial efficiency on how we're spending the marketing dollar. This did lead to a decline in obviously searches, bookings, and also leads, the leads that we develop each month that we then nurture into the following months. Whilst unfortunate, this is a sort of temporary impact. You can see here though that on the revenue margin, we've strengthened our revenue margin to 9.4%. I think that's a direct result of the hard work the team have been doing to optimize revenue. That for us is focusing on higher margin products and ancillary attachments, both air and non-air, and growing our share of international flights as part of our booking numbers.
I think the key thing here is this is an investment year, and we've been very clear about that. We're deliberately investing in initiatives that will drive long-term growth. I'll talk to some more of those next. Turning over to our strategic plan, this is our strategy on a page. I just wanted to recap on this because this plan really is the foundation for everything we're doing. This has been helmed by our board of management. I've told the market that we're going to keep coming back to it to measure success. It's very clear, and it's designed to double the business by FY2030. Most importantly, our long-term trajectory remains intact. We're confident that this plan provides the right framework and the right path to maximize long-term shareholder value.
Within this, the sort of four big strategic priorities you can see very much around the brand, international flights, and capturing more of the travel wallet, and always underpinning that by our operational excellence. We're making strong progress against each of these strategic priorities. We'll turn now to the next page. You can see there's a lot of detail here on page six. This captures all the work that's been done by our incredible team across the last half in terms of driving the strategic plan forward. Arguably, some of these things have taken a huge amount of effort, and they're the right things to do. The team is so excited to be now finally delivering on them, taking advantage of the opportunity of the demerger and the individually focused board and management team.
If I look first on the first pillar there on page six, brand leadership, I'll talk more about OTA shortly. We did refresh the Airport Rentals and the Motorhome brands, and those businesses are now offline and finding new partners. In terms of capturing more of the travel wallet, we've done some deep work on our loyalty strategy, and that's an announcement for later in the year. We've really implemented paid seats across 30 airlines with a target of 50 by the end of the year. That's adding extra revenue to each time a customer interacts with us. More importantly, we replatformed two key marketing platforms. That is essential stuff to allow us to have more personalized engagement and develop those cross-sell opportunities.
Third, on addressing and expanding the total addressable market, we knew that business was a massive opportunity for us based on the analysis of the customer base. Rather than building it at a lower cost, we have accelerated that Webjet Business Travel mission by three years through the Locomote acquisition completed on the 1st of October. In addition, we have secured key patches for Tours and Exclusive Packages, which are now live. Finally, on operational excellence, the team in New Zealand absolutely overdelivered in terms of Cars and Motorhome. I'll talk more about that. OTA has continued to improve its customer service to record levels. A huge focus of the group is continuing to advance our tech and our AI roadmap. The execution is strong, and these initiatives are absolutely setting the foundation for growth and reinforcing why our long-term trajectory remains unchanged.
Let's dive now into sort of core business unit. First, I'll deal with Webjet OTA. I'm now on page eight. Let's have a look at the key metrics here. Despite everything I've spoken about in terms of market conditions, the ACCC notice, and the overall softer April to June, our first half revenue was flat. That's a good achievement. I think that's really shown by the growth in our international bookings, despite mainly short-haul leisure. That stronger revenue per booking and that margin growth by focusing on our higher margin projects, products, and ancillaries. You can see that there in the revenue margin lifting to 9.2%. If I turn to the next page, we've got the core numbers here. I won't go through all this, but therefore for consumption later.
You can see the bookings were at 593,000, TTV at AUD 637 million, and revenue at AUD 58.3 million. Really pleasing that the revenue came in flat and the EBITDA for that business at AUD 21.2 million. Moving on now to unpack some of the things behind that, I'm turning now to page 10. International flights, as I mentioned, this is a critical growth leader for us. We're making really strong progress towards our FY2030 targets. As you can see from the small chart on the right-hand side, we're continuing to increase year on year the total number of international bookings as a percentage of our total flight bookings. Why is that important? One, we're predominantly a domestic flight business. International flights is the easiest extension of the brand.
With the tech that we're doing, the AI tools that we're implementing, this means that booking multi-stop difficult international trips is far easier online. That is the second reason. The third reason is it really just mitigates that domestic market dependency risk. That is why this has been such a crucial focus of the team. In terms of the other kind of core momentum we're building to support this, the first piece, one of the key things we wanted to do was expand the product. What I mean by that is expand the flight options that we have available. We have broadened our NDC adoption, continuing to add more airlines for the new distribution capability. If you have not got across that industry acronym yet, we can do that in Q&A. We have broadened our adoption across more airlines.
That gives us better content at more competitive fares from premium carriers. Importantly, and as signaled in February and March, we've also selected a new flights aggregator to integrate over 400 low-cost carriers in the second half. That's going to be huge. The next thing, expand the product, improve pricing. Trip Ninja, this is our internal incubator, our AI hub, our experimentation unit. This unit that we purchased a few years ago has a few different pieces of technology. The one we're really excited about that has been implemented in this half is now live across long-haul routes. What that does is take a really complex multi-stop trip long-haul and returns back a unique itinerary combining airlines that just don't sit normally together. What that delivers is better prices for customers. It also makes it really hard to compare.
You're not going to get that on an airline site or another OTA. It's unique to us with this Trip Ninja technology. In addition to that piece, we're developing a predictive AI solution and a dynamic pricing engine, two different projects that the team has been working hard on, designed to sharpen competitiveness and lift our conversion rates. Some really great progress in the half there. As stated, capturing that whole travel wallet. This is about ancillary attachment. As I said, paid seat selection. We only had 18 airlines that you could buy a seat with in FY2025. Now we've got 30 and then tied by 50 by the end of year end. This non-air ancillary revenue continues to grow and now represents over 30% of our total revenue. This gives us a more diversified revenue mix, again, mitigating risk.
Looking ahead, we also plan to launch paid bags as an additional air ancillary in the second half, further strengthening our offer there. That's international flights. I want to just now move on to hotels and packages, a stated area of focus. I'm now on page 11. They're a big part of our growth story, and that is because 74% of customers in our deep brand research last year told us they want to book it all in one place. They said they were frustrated with booking their flights with us and then going somewhere else to book their hotel. Most of them didn't know that if you book it with us, you can get up to 20% discount on that hotel. That's a marketing challenge for us and a messaging challenge, and that's one we're really happy to take on.
Again, you can see here some really pleasing progress in the half around sort of our core pillars, expand the product, ensure people know that we do this, expand our brand awareness and acquire new customers to these products, and make sure we're setting up the tech to deliver on this. In terms of product, we've launched new exclusive packages. There are some really great ones on the site now if you want to go buy. We've also launched over 3,000 new tour products that are available on our site. We've got some really exciting, what I call the killer deals coming up across this next six months. We've done our first dedicated marketing campaigns on hotels, on tours, on packages. This will feature more in the next coming months.
Most importantly, we've done the work and the tech and the platforms that are needed to deliver on our FY2030 strategy. Now, that's going to be a process of development. We are also doing some smart things using white label solutions in the meantime. That's enabling us to deliver static packages now. While it's early days, the strategy is in place and the momentum is building around this really core ancillary product. Lastly, I'm on page 12. We can't not cover today what I think is one of the most compelling highlights for the OTA business, which is our customer experience. It's a core part of the strategy and operations. We've made, again, great progress. In October this year, we were super proud to be recognized with two major awards.
You can see there the Most Outstanding OTA, the National Travel Industry Awards, and the Leading Online Travel Agency for Oceania at the World Travel Awards. They're not easy to win. During this, that's great. It is really, I think, a testament to the transformation that the team have been leading. You can see some key metrics there in terms of the improvements in our first contact resolution, agent satisfaction, and our net promoter score, which we're really, really proud of. I think underpinning all of this and why we've been able to achieve such improvement in the area where it's notoriously hard to continue to improve is we've built a center of excellence in Manila. Not outsourced, but actually Webjet employees. We're really creating that as a center of excellence in addition to our Australian team. We're expanding our AWS Connect.
We handle over 90% of our back office activities through AWS Connect. That means it's a really far better compliance, visibility, control, average handling time, just how the operational bolts fit together. I think these results show sort of how our core metrics are up. Yes, we're a tech company and we're continuing to invest in that. There is always someone at the end of the line or at the end of the chat if you need. We're continuing to deliver measurable improvements in that. I'm going to move now to Cars and Motorhome, our two businesses based out of our New Zealand office. Let's have a look at the key figures here on page 14. EBITDA came in at AUD 1 million. That is up from AUD 0.2 million in the first half of 2025. It's a five-fold increase. We'll take that.
That has really been driven by the simplification of the product offering and the increased automation and then the cost out. We worked really hard on that this time last year. The results from that are now delivering. Importantly, you can see revenue margin there at 10.6%. The market is soft. If you are not flying, you are not attaching your Car or a Motorhome. You can see that in the bookings or the TTV. We knew that going into the year. That is why we had a clear plan early and made those tough but necessary calls. We did restructure. We optimized the cost. We used our technology and leveraged our technology to drive automation. In short, we said what we were going to do there and the results are shown.
If I go into the detailed numbers on the next slide, again, I'll leave you to digest those. I think what this business is showing now, it's on a much stronger footing and it's positioned for profitable growth. Now we have a very strong new management team and a CFO and a GM down there who are really focused on growing the top line. I'm pleased with how that business is starting to perform. You can see there the expenses were down 13%, reflecting that successful delivery of headcount and IT savings as planned. In terms of just highlighting and reinforcing that point, as I said, I think the key progress for this business now, I'm on page 16, is that this automation has been driving efficiencies. I do want to draw your attention to the chart on the right-hand side. It's small.
It should be bigger given the amount of effort the team has gone into. You can see here half on half across a year what the team have done to automate this business. For a Motorhome, no amendments could be done online or by a customer self-service. No cancellations could be processed. Now, you can see there over a third can be done. A third are now done online by self-service and 50% of cancellations. That all takes efficiency out of the processing. I think it really impresses this business, as I said. We did the hard work. We did it. Now it's delivering. Most importantly, it's set up to grow. That's what the team are very much focused on. You can see here the other achievements in the half across the pillars around the product, the brand, and the customer acquisition.
This is a scale-based business. All about 50% of the revenue comes from affiliates. It is about continuing to add affiliates and then making sure you have the best supply for all those affiliates. In terms of product, the key thing here is introducing Apple Pay, Google Pay, WeChat, Alipay. The Motorhome market is core in the Asian markets, actually. We are doing ourselves a disservice. We are not on WeChat and Alipay. We have nailed that, and that is crucial to support growth in those markets. One of the coolest uses of AI, we are saying, "Who needs to pay for imagery these days? We are just having AI create it." This is just a small example of all the efficiency pieces we are trying to use with AI to drive across all our different platforms. On this network, as I said, the business needs scale.
We have signed a new meta affiliate for Cars, signed a new supplier in Motorhomes, and a real focus on that European market. We have delivered a new German aggregator that'll be coming in in the second half. Looking ahead, just while I'm on this business, we will relaunch the Airport Rentals app shortly. That'll be after some analysis. We have a channel incentive to really drive that repeat rate. We've identified, obviously, clearly those repeat customers are our most valuable, and we're not making the most of them. We'll be doing that. Pardon me. All these initiatives build the scale. We've improved the automation. We have improved the customer experience. Now this business is positioned for growth. All right. That is the half that was and all the incredible achievements from our team in the half.
I'll now turn over to Layton to talk through the financials.
Thanks, Katrina. And good morning to everyone dialed in. All right. Turning now to slide 18. Just before we go into the detail here, I just want to take a quick moment to recap on the accounting policy change that came into effect during the half. In terms of timing, after the transition to a standalone business last year, and once we'd completed the FY2025 full-year results using predecessor accounting back in May, we undertook a comprehensive review of our accounting policies. As a result of that review, the accounting policy for the derecognition of gift card liabilities was revised. Previously, this was based on historical redemption patterns.
Under the revised policy and really aligned with prevailing industry practice, we now only recognize breakage revenue once a gift card has expired, which under Australian consumer law currently occurs after three years. In line with the accounting standard, this change has been applied retrospectively, meaning prior periods have been revised as if the new policy had always been in place. This has resulted in an AUD 3.6 million reduction to revenue and EBITDA in the first half of FY2025 and an AUD 800,000 reduction in the second half of FY2025. Noting this change was specifically related to the Webjet OTA business, and you'll find the full details in the appendix at the back of this presentation. Importantly, this is purely a timing adjustment. There is no cash impact. What it does is really improve the comparability and consistency of our reporting.
There's no longer that estimation element that was used previously. With that context, let's turn our attention to the first half financials. Now, as I flagged at our FY2025 results back in May, we've now moved past all of those one-sided demerger-related accounting items that previously made that statutory result a bit noisy, which now means the difference between the statutory result and underlying operations simply reflects share-based payments and a small number of one-off non-operating expenses, which I'll cover off on the next slide. For the half, total revenue was down 1%, coming in at AUD 67.9 million. Underlying EBITDA was down 9% to AUD 14.4 million. That really reflects the planned step-up in growth opex that we flagged at our strategy day back in March.
Moving down the page, depreciation and amortization for first half 2026 is marginally lower than prior year, which is in line with expectations. You'll also see that net interest has now swung into a positive position driven by interest earned on our strong cash balance, no debt, and also the absence of the related party interest expense post the demerger, which is still present there in that first half 2025 comparative. In terms of tax, our effective tax rate is now starting to normalize around that 30% mark. That reflects our predominantly Australian-based earnings profile. Lastly here, underlying net profit after tax for the half came in at AUD 7.8 million, up 16%, and statutory NPAT of AUD 6.2 million, which is up 51%. Let's move on now to the next slide and take a look at Trip Ninja, corporate overheads and non-operating expenses.
Starting with Trip Ninja, the AUD 1.7 million loss for the half really just reflects an increase in headcount in that business as we continue building out the technology and expanding its capabilities, and really particularly within the Webjet OTA business. Pleasingly, Trip Ninja is now fully live across all long-haul return routes on Webjet OTA, which Katrina touched on earlier, and really giving us those unique mix-and-match itineraries and some really great pricing options there. We also signed six new customers during the period, which takes the total now to 11, each of those progressing through different stages of the onboarding process. The focus here really remains on continuing to support the growth of the Webjet OTA business. Moving now to corporate overheads. These came in at AUD 6.1 million for the half.
We expect the second half to be at a somewhat similar level as we continue to maintain a strong and disciplined focus on cost control right across the business. Finally, just to cover off on non-operating expenses, these are all one-off in nature. We exclude them from underlying operations so we can really present a clear view of the business's underlying and ongoing performance. The two key items here, firstly, the due diligence costs associated with the recent Locomote acquisition. Secondly, the final demerger-related staff payments, which conclude in December this year. Turning now to the balance sheet. That is on slide 20. Cash reduced over the half in line with expectations. That mainly reflects the AUD 9.1 million payment to the ACCC during the period, along with our first corporate tax payment. The small increase in trade receivables and other assets is predominantly timing-related.
That really reflects the bulk of our annual prepayments, which currently nearly all fall in that first half. On the other side of the equation, the decrease in trade payables and other liabilities not only reflects the ACCC payment, but also the timing of our BSP payments. For anyone not familiar with BSP, that relates to our air ticket sales. Payments for these are direct debited weekly from our bank account. They represent our most significant supplier outflow. Depending on where the period cutoff falls, we can have anywhere from 7-14 days of sales outstanding. You will see the corresponding impact of that in the restricted cash balance, which is directly related and decreased from AUD 30.8 million to AUD 21.7 million during the period. The other main item here is other current liabilities, which reduced during the period.
That simply reflects the tax payment I mentioned above. Overall, no debt and net cash of AUD 112 million as at 30th of September. Just to be clear, that net cash number excludes the AUD 21.7 million of restricted cash. It is a very robust balance sheet. Capital management certainly remains a key focus for us. All right. Let's move on to the cash flow. Now, operating cash flow for the half and the change in working capital you see here simply reflects that ACCC payment and the timing of the BSP settlements that I just discussed on the previous slide. Once we adjust for those two really large and lumpy items, and along with non-operating expenses, underlying cash conversion for the half was at 98%. In terms of investing and financing activities, I'll cover CapEx in more detail on the next slide.
The dividend you see here, paid to non-controlling interest, simply relates to a dividend within our search for public business. As Katrina mentioned earlier, we're delighted to have declared our inaugural FY2026 interim dividend. That is a fully franked dividend at AUD 0.02 per share, representing 100% of underlying NPAT, again, well above our stated 40%-60% target range and consistent with the board's intent to maximize the distribution of franking credits as they become available. Lastly here, as Katrina mentioned earlier, our on-market share buyback has been put on hold given the receipt of that MBIO from Helloworld. Finally here, let's take a quick look at CapEx. Over the half, we deliberately stepped up our investment as we'd previously flagged, keeping momentum behind our strategic plan, but doing so in a disciplined manner.
Total CapEx for the half came in at AUD 7.4 million, which includes AUD 1.1 million of investment CapEx attributable to our strategic initiatives. Underlying CapEx was, in fact, down year on year with the recent restructure of the New Zealand business. You can expect total CapEx to lift again slightly in the second half as we continue to build out those initiatives. Lastly, just a quick update as well on the previous guidance around the AUD 5 million of strategic CapEx investment for FY2026. That figure was originally based on the assumption that we would internally build the new business initiative. With the acquisition of Locomote, that build requirement has effectively fallen away, which means the strategic CapEx investment will be lower than we had originally planned. Overall, we're continuing to invest where it matters and doing so in an efficient and responsible manner.
Thank you. I'll hand back to Katrina.
Great. Thanks, Layton. Thank you for that. A very resilient half in a tough market and very strong financials there, particularly on the balance sheet. Thank you. All right. Now, let's turn to look forward. Let's look forward to the next half. I'm on 24 now. I think the key messages here are we are expecting an ongoing subdued domestic market going into our second half for FY2026. Those interest rates will be higher for longer. Don't see any change in domestic airfares. That's going to remain elevated. From our analysis, there is no extra international airline capacity coming in. We do have to just flow out the impact of the ACCC and how that impacted us across late August, September, October, etc. We're being conservative on that pace.
I think the key thing is we are continuing to invest the growth behind that FY2030 strategic plan. We are on track and committed to that. It provides a very clear roadmap for us to strengthen our market position so we can continue to invest in that. The OTA brand research is pivotal in that journey. What we are doing is taking a very disciplined approach to timing and the investment and continuing to reassess every dollar to make sure it's deployed responsibly, but also while we're still unlocking the long-term benefits. As I said last week, I said the easiest thing to do here would be not invest in the strategic plan and make ourselves look really good. That is not the right thing to do to create long-term shareholder value.
Just reiterating our guidance from last week for FY2026, full year, we anticipate being in the range of an EBITDA of AUD 30 million-AUD 32 million. That excludes Locomote and any further deterioration in trading. The Locomote piece is forecast to deliver a modest loss in this half as we ramp and expect the energies. That business is well on its way. We are committed to maintaining very good discipline around the margin and making sure we're financially resilient. As previously announced, we intend to continue, certainly the board's intention to continue to maximize the distribution of franking credits as they become available, including payment of special dividends above the company's target ratio as appropriate. We'll update on that at the full. Just wanting to touch on a little bit as we look into the next half. I'm turning now to 2025.
As I said, this refresh of the OTA brand, Webjet OTA brand, is pivotal in this journey. I think what we're seeing here really gives us strong conviction moving into the second half. It is the most significant brand refresh the OTA has done in 27 years. I talk regularly to our founder, and even he's in love with our Go Somewhere creative campaign. This isn't just a new logo or a cosmetic change. This is a complete transformation of our brand and our marketing strategy and our online experience. We have modernized the iconic identity just to make Webjet more relevant for today and tomorrow's traveler and new generations, and ensuring that we represent an option for the full travel wallet, shifting from a flight-centric OTA to your trusted local travel companion. That is what this is all about.
We're introducing new verticals like tours and static packages, great packages to Fiji or Bali, etc., and business travel. We're flipping our marketing mix to be brand first. The purpose is clear there around becoming the first choice, building familiarity, earning a greater share of our customers' booking spend, and driving profitable growth. I think this key thing here is that Aussies and Kiwis have trusted Webjet for nearly three decades. This refresh is about strengthening that connection. We haven't invested in this brand marketing for a long time. This is really about powering our next chapter of growth. Now, why are we so focused on that? If you turn to the next page, brand marketing unlocks long-term value.
Now, if you look at the stats here on the left-hand side, I've covered these before, but they're really significant in terms of how the research that underpins the investment we're making in brand. If you look at our own balance sheet and our own P&L, 69% of our total TTV for a 12-month period from April to April 2024 to 2025 was earned from brand channels or brand marketing. That means people coming direct to the brand or searching direct for Webjet, not stumbling across us or us having to pay to find a new customer. They have a one and a half times higher conversion rate than other customers and a far higher TTV from those customers as well.
That's why we're focusing on this and why we're investing in brand marketing for the long term, rather than it would be easy to chase short-term performance metrics. The most important thing about brand marketing, it is a long-term play. You have to stick with it, but it does create the flywheel effect and build momentum and recognition through the consistent campaigns. Most importantly, it increases efficiency in your paid marketing, your paid search channels. Let's have a look now. It is early days. My CMO keeps telling me, "Katrina, we've only been live for a few weeks." We are really excited that we're getting widespread brand visibility and engaged viewership since the OTA brand relaunch. Our prompted brand awareness in just a very short period of time, a couple of weeks, has increased 5% in Australia and 3% in New Zealand.
That is statistically significant. New visitors to the site. One of our key objectives here was to reach new audiences to make sure we're bringing in sort of younger audiences. This growth, we're having a 19% uplift in new visitors to the Webjet OTA site. That's really driven by premium placements on Meta and TikTok, channels we've historically underinvested in. In paid search, we're starting to get far more efficient. Brand marketing makes that far more efficient. Our cost per click has improved by 13% just in the first five weeks. You can see down the bottom here, social, our sort of invested and real new focus on social media is really driving reach and views.
Now, that takes time to lead into results, but this is the key piece that we need to do to drive efficiency and strengthen our brand engagement, setting us up for long-term growth. These are really exciting results. On 28 there, there's just a look for all the creative lovers in the room. That's just our new websites. You can click through there if you'd like onto the new ads. Hopefully, you'll be seeing them everywhere. Lastly, just a comment on business travel. We started out in March after we'd done a lot of research and knowing that this was a sector that loves Webjet that we underserve. It was one of our big four moves that we wanted to deliver on and build on. We officially launched Webjet Business Travel on the 14th of October. We did that by leveraging the Locomote acquisition.
This is a modern and proven platform, completely rebuilt in 2023 for digitally led business travel, rather than the old expensive human capital models of the past that are really bolt-ons of two or three different platforms. This is one slick, clean platform, and that's one integration for a customer. These first six weeks have shown great momentum. We have had a 76% increase in our average monthly TTV since transitioning to Webjet Business Travel. People are keen. We have also seen a 187% increase in new sales deals into the Webjet Business Travel pipeline. Our 30-person team automatically implanted. We have deep expertise, fast, strong supplier ties, and the operational know-how to make this happen. We are really excited about this. This is not a one-year strategy. We are not worried about a small loss for year one.
This is not a one-year strategy. This is a long-term strategy. I think we're very pleased with what we're seeing early on. Lastly, Webjet is and always will be a tech company. It is the heart of what we do. We've been leading in this space for 27 years. Everything we've always done with robotics and ticketing and Trip Ninja, early to the party on that one a few years ago in terms of how to use AI to create and break down flight searches and deliver really unique itineraries. This year has very much been focused on AI. We've been testing lots of AI solutions and designing different engines to deliver cheaper pricing for our customers, which for us gives a lift in conversion rates for flights. Beyond pricing and the key users there, we're focused on being really practical with this.
That means where do we get efficiencies? We partner with AWS to implement AI in our customer service. That means better response times, improved efficiency. We are also using it to build internal capability and prompt engineering and data readiness, etc. We are also working with Microsoft on our AI planning agent tool. We are creating the roadmap for these modular AI components that forms a building block for what we believe is an agentic AI future. We have the governance and tooling frameworks around it to ensure responsible use. Most importantly, it is our history of tech innovation. We are positioned, I think, to lead really well in that. I will just wrap up with this. The half showed resilience. What we are really excited about is forward. We laid out a plan, and now we are delivering it.
We said we're going to grow international flight market share, international flight bookings tech. We said we're going to focus on our revenue per booking. That's up tech. The strategy was to grow our ancillaries and expand hotels packages, capture the full travel. Done and more coming. We wanted to deliver a tailored business travel solution that replicated what OTA, how that transformed travel. Done. We did that with reduced time and cost and execution risk. We've relaunched the OTA brand. That was well overdue, and we're excited about it. We're going to be building on that brand legacy tech. Positive early indicators from all of that work. Also what I haven't spoken about in detail, and will be a feature in the future, is our deep work on the loyalty strategy. We've been doing a lot of work on that.
We'll turn over to Q&A now. I just would like to say a huge thank you to our shareholders. We're really grateful for your continued support of the long-term strategy. We thank you for your ongoing positive engagement. Lastly, I'd like to acknowledge my incredible team. You guys make it happen. You're all working above and beyond with just great energy and excitement and diligence to drive this transformation plan. You guys have achieved these results today. Thank you. With that, I'll hand over to you, Darcy, for some Q&A.
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, you'll need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to cancel your request, please press star two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question.
Your first question today comes from Kseniya Chadayeva from Jarden. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my question. Is your AUD 3.2 billion TTV target for FY surge still in place? Looking shorter term, you did not give any numbers on what TTV looked like in second half to date. Can you give us a bit more color on how forward bookings might look like at the moment and whether you are seeing any improvements there?
Sure. Yes, our FY 2030 strategy remains intact. That is still the absolute priority for the business. In terms of forward bookings, as I said, we have given our guidance in terms of where the full year will land. That is built on our profiling of bookings as they go over the half. As said, we think we are expecting a softer half into the next few months. We will wait to see, obviously, how that consumer confidence responds, interest rate cuts, etc. That is what we are seeing flowing into our bookings. What I can say is the brand work and OTA particularly is really foundational. We are really excited about the early indicators on that. We look forward to benefiting off that, probably not as much in this half, but definitely later in the half and into next year.
Thank you. Secondly, on FY 2016, with the guidance, I understand it's impacted by one-off brand investment. Can you please remind us how much is that and whether your guidance also includes some marketing investment needed? If you can also share long-term EBITDA margin aspirations and key drivers for it to improve, that would be great as well. Thank you.
Hi, Kseniya. I'm Layton here. We haven't sort of specifically called out the second half marketing investment. Like we called out last week, we have moderated that slightly from the AUD 6 million. That's sort of a reduction that we'll just push into next year, just given the current trading conditions. In terms of EBITDA margins, as we've previously communicated, we'll see some compression throughout this three-year investment period. We expect them to recover and exceed sort of previous levels from FY 2029 onwards as we scale the business and start to drive some operating leverage.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone or wave your name to be announced. Your next question comes from Wei- Weng Chen from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hey, Wei- Weng.
Wei- Weng, your line is now live.
Sorry, I was mute. Hey, guys. Hey, agentic AI in the Travel sector, obviously, that was front of mind recently for investors. How do you guys view the threat at the moment to your business, like what Google, etc., have presented? Or maybe we'll start with that.
Yeah, sure. Look, I mean, I think years gone by, I'm told Webjet's been quite, there was quite a bit of existential crisis around what Google Flights was going to do to the business. That obviously didn't eventuate. I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One, it's not their core. Two, we'd always led in tech. We had superior technology around how you do robotics and ticketing, etc. More importantly, we had a brand, and there was someone to call at the end of the line. We're fundamentally an online business. For that 2% fare rate, you got someone to call 24/7, and you know they're going to have your back. That wasn't the case with many Meta or Google Flights, etc.
If I think about that in this context, all the research that we're doing in terms of AI and agentic AI and what that means, look, is definitely ubiquitous now. It is hygiene that you need to be able to plan that itinerary. How we're thinking and we'll play in that space, absolutely. That's a state of play. Everyone needs to do that. That's just hygiene. Where we see the future is AI is an enabler for us to do what we do really well. Big brands will do well in an agentic AI world. Small brands won't survive. That's why a key part of the strategy has been reinforcing and strengthening our brand for this next era. Our roadmap is ridiculously extensive. We're being smart about that.
We're seeing a lot of companies blow up a lot of cash for stuff that doesn't actually deliver. We're focused on really getting efficiency, but also knowing where the industry is going, what are the table stakes, and therefore building that out. Therefore, what are the big bets that we're making in that space?
Yeah, okay. Does it fragment what you guys are trying to do, which is package up flights, hotels, capture kind of a larger slice of the wallet? Does AI make it easier for consumers to kind of fragment their bookings, so book direct with hotels, but then book with you guys for flights? Yeah, for flights?
I think if you do any search on any LLM now and you get all the different options, you can't click through. The ones that you can click through, then you're left with putting together seven different items for your holiday. It was very clear in our research. We had three and a half thousand people, and we assessed each of their last three trips. What they came back, a resounding 74% of them said, "This is boring and a waste of my time. Can someone please pull it all together?" I think that is the power of knowing that all of these pieces are trusted, pulled together, and collated for you. What we do in terms of serving up those flights and serving up the packages, it's not easy. LLMs are just going to sort of look towards brands who pull that together.
More importantly, we see a world, and I think most people see a world where people are going to continue to go back to brands for safety. That flight to, it's all in one place. It's all organized for me. It's well put together. I can trust it. There's somebody at the end of the phone if I need to call.
Yeah, cool. Thanks. I guess you mentioned scale, which I guess is interesting given the backdrop of the offer from Helloworld today. Do you think that in this world of kind of AI, whether it be through Helloworld or whatever, but it could be you guys seeking out scale through acquisitions of your own, do you think scale becomes a lot more important going into the future?
I think it depends on your business. If I look at our Car and Motorhome business, that is absolutely scale-driven. That is what we're focused on to grow the top line for those businesses. Whereas OTA, we have a really unique model that's very attractive to the industry. With that, that sort of underwrites what we do. I feel like we're always looking for scale. We've seen drop in bookings this year in a softer market. That is because we're primarily focused on domestic flights. That is why it's critical for us to expand on our own scale, which means different products across there to capture that full dollar. We know we're leaving money on the table with customers. They come to us, they get their flights, and then they go off elsewhere to book their hotel or book this, book that.
They told us they wanted to do it all in one place. There are two breadths to that question, which is number of customers. That's why we're doing the brand work. Bring in new customers, particularly in that generation Y and Z to the brand. That equals scale. Also the size of the dollar to make that really efficient. That's about capturing the full travel wallet.
Cool. Thanks so much. That's all from me.
Thanks, Wei-Weng.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Katrina Barry for any closing remarks.
Oh, only two questions today. That is exciting. Maybe it's because we spoke to you all last week. Look, just summarizing the half, I think it's clear that we're really focused. We have a plan, and we are delivering. We've got the right capabilities to execute. We're pretty excited about what lies ahead and confident that what we're doing today will deliver sustainable long-term growth. We're about maximizing shareholder value. Some near-term softness doesn't really change the strength of our business. We're pretty excited about the forward opportunity. We see here incredible potential and incredible shareholder value. Thanks so much for your time. We'll talk again soon.