I would now like to hand the conference over to Katrina Barry, Group CEO and Managing Director. Please go ahead.
Well, good morning, everybody, thank you for your time this morning. First up, let me address a few things. Firstly, apologies for the delayed start. What with the trading halt, it took the ASX a little bit more time this morning to upload from 7:30 A.M. when we posted. Let me just address that trading halt before we get into today's agenda, the FY 2026 results. In terms of, I can confirm the trading halt has been lifted, there's been a release that has just been released to the ASX this morning, where we voluntarily requested the trading halt to ensure that we had sufficient time to get to certainty on a material commercial issue.
As per the release, I'll let you read that at your leisure, Virgin Australia, one of our key partners, has advised us that with effect from the 1st of July, they will substantially reduce their commission streams and commercial arrangements with us. They're still a valued partner, this does have a significant impact on our future commercials. To give it some context and size, you'll see in the release that we've said had this been implemented at the beginning of FY 2026, it would've had an impact of approximately AUD 3 million to underlying revenue. I'll leave that there. I'm sure there'll be questions on it. What I'd like to do now is present our FY 2026 results. Joining me in the room today is Layton Shannos, our Group CFO. Let's get started. All right.
I'd like to set the scene with, I think, three themes that really underpin today's result and presentation. The first is that we've delivered a balanced execution in what remains a fairly challenging and dynamic macro environment. We've also continued to execute on our planned priorities around capital management, with shareholder returns underway as promised. Lastly, we've made meaningful progress, really starting to deliver on our strategic growth plan through disciplined and targeted investments and a lot of effort. As we look at the first one, there's the key number there for you. Our group EBITDA was AUD 28.1 million. Look, it was a tough year, and with softer trading than expected in patches. We've made planned one-off strategic investments in brands, technology, and also investments in people and talent.
This has been somewhat offset by higher than usual variable revenue items. More importantly, we've got through the year with balancing out all of these thematics and getting to a good result. Cars & Motorhomes, we had a great story. We focused on that business, and we've delivered a significant turnaround during the year, with EBITDA increasing material on FY 2025 to AUD 4.3 million. This follows the successful restructuring and the efficiency and automation initiatives we've been driving in there. We've also maintained a very strong balance sheet, so we'll end the year with net cash of AUD 93.9 million, no borrowings, and net assets of AUD 138.4 million. This provides us the flexibility to continue to invest in growth, but also ensuring we're financially disciplined with that.
The second piece, capital management. This was a really big thematic and commitment from the management team, and you'll be pleased to see in our announcement this morning that we've announced a fully franked dividend of AUD 0.02 per share. That brings the total for FY 2026 to AUD 0.04 per share, and that's above 100% of underlying NPAT as part of our commitment to maximize distribution of capital, as franking credits became available. We also commenced our much-anticipated on-market share buyback, although execution has been constrained at times given corporate activity and blackout periods. Thirdly, we've made really meaningful progress against our strategic growth plan and all the key priorities among that.
I'm going to go through to a lot of detail on each of these in the following pages. I think the key highlights for the year would be the relaunch of the Webjet OTA brand, continued optimization of our OTA products, also our pricing proposition around that. All that supporting our focus. One of our key focuses on growing our share of international flight bookings. One of our key pillars was moving further into the business travel space. We acquired Locomote and have integrated that. Now we have de-risked our business and now have a business travel business within our own portfolio. We've delivered significant cost savings, as I said, across the Cars & Motorhomes business. Have really started the movement on the top-line growth. Organizational capability has significantly lifted. There's been significant investment in talent and technology along with AI.
As I said, we'll go through these in detail. I think I'd summarize, and the key takeaway is here. Look, the macro environment remains really challenging, and we've certainly had some internal challenges as well. We are making extremely strong progress against our things, the right priorities to support long-term growth and increase shareholder value. If I turn to page four for those of you following along with the presentation, here are the key metrics of the group. For those who can't see, FY 2026 bookings across all divisions was 1.4 million. TTV was AUD 1.5 billion. Revenue, AUD 136.4 million, with a revenue margin of 9.4%. Underlying EBITDA, throughout when I refer to EBITDA, I'm only referring to underlying EBITDA with AUD 28.1 million as mentioned.
It's been an investment year, as I said, but this is reflective of sort of two parts. There's definitely been trading headwinds, and obviously this is a strategic investment year. I'll talk further about how that occurred in each of the individual units. Turning to page five, you'll remember the strategic growth plan that we set out February, just over a year ago. That had four kind of key pillars that we need to invest in for the future of this brand so that it is as strong for the next 27 years as it has been for the last. That's being the leading brand in each of our categories, capturing more of the travel wallet, expanding our TAM, the total addressable market, as always, doing what we do well, operational excellence.
I've listed under here the really the key progress we've made against each of these pillars. If I strip it back to the five things that really drive value in this business, and we've really focused on this year, and those, some of those are highlighted in red, and I'll go through the other details in later pages. Really this is about growing our international flights share. We're a domestic business, growing international has been a core focus. That's one of the key levers, and we've grown that as a percentage of total flights. It was about expanding and capturing more of that travel wallet, particularly around our hotels and packages. Non-air ancillaries have grown as a percentage of total revenue. The third piece was launching a scaled business travel offering.
We serve business travel offerings. We've laid out a plan to build this capability. What we did was acquire a business. That accelerated our movement into that market by approximately three years at a more cost-effective and less risky process. We're really pleased with how that is performing. Lastly, refreshing the brand. Refreshing the brand for the Webjet has been critical. The last time we did that was over 15 years ago. This has been critical to ensure that the brand is fresh, contemporary, and relevant. I've already spoken about the last fifth piece being making sure that the Cars & Motorhomes business washes its face and is now we've really delivered and continue to drive that transformation.
We've made meaningful progress against each of these four pillars, and I'll cover them more in detail, particularly around some of the metrics as we go through. Let's focus on our Webjet OTA, the largest part of our business. Flipping straight through to page seven for the key metrics for this business. OTA delivered 1.1 million bookings, TTV at AUD 1.2 billion, revenue of AUD 115.3 million, and EBITDA at AUD 38.7 million. OTA has continued to deliver against its priorities this year. I'll talk more about how the year panned out. If we go onto the next page eight. These are the high-level metrics in detail there, I won't go into the detail here. You can read that at your leisure.
I'll talk to the drivers behind it. I think the story for OTA is there's two parts to this story. There's the macro environment and the internal forces. If we start at the start of the financial year, and we covered this a lot in November at our first half results. The macro environment for our first quarter was fairly challenged. Trump tariffs, we had a unusual Easter- ANZAC holiday period, elevated domestic airfares as the other airlines had exited the market. We started to see increasing in airline pressures. The cost of living pressures and geopolitical tensions all contribute to a softer and well-reported across the entire industry of a softer consumer environment, particularly in domestic leisure. Quarter two for us saw a recovery.
However, we were impacted, as appropriately by our ACCC infringement notice, that was on our site, between August and September. We reacted and responded to that, reduced our marketing activity when we saw that that was having a big impact and our spend. It also meant that we delayed our brand relaunch. That had a real impact for us across quarter two. Quarter three was where we really started investing in the brand. Now we did have some hangover from the ACCC leading into October and November. This is where we started to really focus the business on its future and launched and drove the revitalized brand and marketing campaigns, launching all our new products. Q4 was excellent. We had really started to see the benefits beginning to emerge. Came the Middle East and the fuel crisis.
We took advantage of that, I think, a little bit in February with customers pivoting towards short-haul destinations rather than canceling. There was also a lot of rebooking. That preserved some booking volumes. Ultimately, unfortunately, we saw that great momentum build across Q3 and Q4 start to fall away. We focused on what we can control and adapt and pivot to what we can't control. As a result, our total bookings are down for the year disappointingly. Domestic's down 10%, and that's really very much reflecting the cost of living pressures and the elevated fares which impact our mass market average mortgage belt Webjet customer.
International bookings are up, and that growth is now slightly skewed to short-haul destinations in recent months. Particularly around the Asia- Pacific destinations, which carry sort of and bring forward to the P&L lower average booking value and lower TTV compared to long-haul. The revenue despite all that remained broadly flat. Because we're focused on capturing the whole travel wallet, but also we benefited from some customary and inherently variable revenue items. I'll talk to more recent trading conditions in April and May at the end of the presentation. In terms of expenses are up, but this was planned and deliberate. The investment has been critical for this business on brand, technology, and talent. That has been a leveling up that has been required to deliver on the strategic growth plan.
A lot of these items are one-off, including the brand relaunch and then a new step up in talent. But we're also rounded out by some higher costs from the demerger-related IT dyssynergies that we've spoken about at length before and the general cost of doing business on a financial basis. At the same time offsetting that, you know, we've really this year, started to see the real benefit of our automation and AI deployment across the business, which is increasing productivity and efficiency. It's making us faster and it's offsetting some expenses. I'll cover, I know AI is such a huge topic right now, and it's a core focus of us, so I'll cover that in a bit more detail.
Regardless, we're very pleased to have seen a very strong EBITDA margin this year at 33.6%, despite it being a difficult macro and internal trading year and significant strategic investment. To give you a bit more detail on some of the product initiatives, I'm now on page nine. There was three things that we really needed to do in the OTA. That is continue to broaden our product so that we can access that fuller TAM. Continue to enhance our value proposition to our customers, that's about having better, more unique product at competitive pricing. It's also about connecting with our customer and ensuring that we deliver a full value proposition to them. Lastly, about improving our revenue from our ancillary expansion.
International flights, now you'll see a call-out box on the right-hand side of the chart, page nine, for those of you who are viewing the presentation. International, we're continuing to grow international as a percentage of our total flight bookings. This is the area where we can most easily leverage the strength of the brand. International is always the land of bricks and mortar. As we develop and as we're using these more AI tools and making this easier to do, it will be increasingly become a more focused online business. We've continued expanding our content and getting access to better content through additional NDC integrations. I can cover NDC later for those who aren't familiar with the new distribution capability across airlines. We're also enhancing ourselves and expanding content by integrating a new LCC, so low-cost carrier flights aggregator.
We spent a lot of work on that list this year, which is very shortly to be launched. We've had great traction in dynamic packages. This is where somebody buys, I might buy my flight and my hotel. I might buy my flight and my hotel and my car. We're seeing a 10% increase on that, a real lovely green shoot. Bookings up 10% year- on- year since the brand launch and since we started investing in this. Underpinning all of that is significant investment in our underlying technology platform and our data foundations, our CRM foundations to further scale our hotels and packages experience. The middle column there really focuses on how do we deliver better product, more unique product at better competitive pricing. Here the key tool we're using is machine learning and AI.
We this year we launched a predictive AI solution that across all our flight searches that allows us to anticipate pricing and then move our pricing to continue to enhance our conversion rates, but also better prices. This is delivering real pricing, competitive pricing for our customers. That's all done with a predictive AI solution. We've integrated Trip Ninja, our own internal AI Center of Excellence across our long-haul mix and match. We're also, we built a proprietary machine learning dynamic pricing engine to see how we can further take advantage of the moving and dynamic pricing that is available in our products, primarily being flights. Lastly, ancillaries. It's been about paid seats. You'll remember, golly, when I was first started the role, we had zero paid seats.
Well, we did 18 last year, and now we're up to 50 airlines that we allow paid seat selection for. It's customer experience, but it's also a revenue stream. Paid bags and the development of that has been a huge behind the scenes investment across FY 2026. Now pleasingly, our non-air ancillary revenue is a share of our total OTA revenue of 33%. This continues to diversify our revenue base. Turning now to some of the marketing initiatives. As I said, this brand refresh for Webjet was one of the most significant strategic achievements we've made in recent years. This was the first time we've in many, many years, done a deep dive on customers. Our customers, the market, what do they want?
What we came up with, and then tested that, was a new, fresh, contemporary, and modern Webjet. It's a really important part of repositioning Webjet as a multi-product travel platform, a destination for Aussies and Kiwis to trust the destination for Aussies and Kiwis to buy their full travel solution. We took a disciplined approach to that investment, and we've talked about this a lot. We talked about a one-off, below the line. We did not put this as a one-off, but we included it in as OpEx, an original budget of AUD 6 million to support this. Given the challenges we saw in Q3, we managed that and pulled that back slightly and moderated, just to ensure that we're being disciplined with capital.
What we have now got, and you'll see here, across these four key buckets, is the improvement in not just the brand, but the way that we do marketing. What we needed for our marketing was a serious maturation. If we're honest with ourselves, we were behind the eight ball on this. I'm pleased to say with a new CMO and a fantastic team, we have matured within one year our marketing strength and capability, which was already good. We now have a strong multi-channel strategy. If we before, Webjet was a we were kind of a email, billboard, and a bit of YouTube. Now we are TV, BVOD, SVOD, podcasts, influencers, social media. What that means is increased exposure.
When I'm seeing Webjet, I'm seeing it more times, this brings it to the front of mind of Australians and Kiwis again, that is what we wanted to do. This has been driving our conversion propensity. We've talked about in the past upgrading our MarTech, or our customer engagement platform, Braze. Its capability is now live and continuing to release new features as we continue to grow in this capability. As I said before, we were mainly a push email communication. That's really effective for us, but now we also do push on SMS, push notifications, in-app messages in addition to email. What's coming, and we're starting to do is more personalization, more behavior-driven communications to meet customers with the right offer at the right time in the right channel.
What this all does, along with our, you know, simple thing, we're using AI to transform our content production to become more efficient in visual, but also copy, et cetera. This drives to efficiency gains across our entire performance marketing and our entire marketing team. This has delivered real results, this is the results that set ourselves up for strong years to come. Firstly, the campaign reach. Again, across multiple channels. This increased our exposure significantly across different mediums that we haven't played in for a long time. You can see the numbers there, 23.7 million reach on TV, cinema, and other screens, so BVOD, SVOD. 15.4 million on social media, 17.5 million on billboards, we also added digital displays, bus stops, et cetera, to this.
You need both offline and online to increase that reach and that familiarity with the brand, and that was the ambition of this. You can see the results in that. We now brand test our brand health every month. What we have seen since we launched this brand campaign is an 8 percentage point increase in our packages brand awareness, so Webjet as a solution for your holidays, and 5% on our flights. For those of you who aren't in live or die by marketing metrics, these are extremely good results. That leads into improvements in your performance marketing dollar. Despite the fact that we have actually spent more money on brand, we have had to spend more money on performance marketing to fit that in and be disciplined with our expenditure. These figures are extraordinary.
The improvement in our performance marketing driven by the brand awareness and campaign, you can see there across generic performance marketing or our branded performance marketing, significant improvements in conversion, CPA improvement, and CPC. That's our cost per acquisition improvement, up 29% and 17% up on our cost per click and 33% up on conversions from our generic. These are every CEO loves it when their CMO can deliver by numbers and show measurable improvement. This also meant that our full funnel across efficiency, so our cost per acquisition, our cost per search increased as our media investment increased, then normalized after that. More importantly, it's bringing new customers to the brand at 9.7% increase in new customers to the site, and we're reactivating dormant customers.
Both these two metrics, new and dormant, have been in decline for a long time. By starting to bring new customers to the business and bring younger customers and also reactivating dormant customers is what is setting us up for long-term growth. Dormant customers, particularly, they logically respond sooner than new customers. That is really returning, getting more return on investment we've spent in the past. Most importantly, this is exactly what we expected after doing a brand investment of this nature. These early results reinforce the strategic rationale of our big investment into this space and a shift towards more brand-led marketing. Let's talk to customer service now. I'm on page 12. Still on OTA. Customer service in our experience. You know, we are a digital business.
You've always got our 24/7 customer experience to back up for when things fail or you just wanna talk to a human. This remains a core part of our strategy. It is a significant cost advantage of ours that we have invested so much in our digital experience. What we have done during FY 2026 is continue to make sure that our service is the best that it can be. Everybody outsources to BPOs. What we've done is that we have some BPOs, but we've created a scalable center of excellence in Manila, where they are Webjet employees. They are dressed in red. They are our employees and not contractors. That means that we've had far more dedicated training and capability.
Shout out to our incredible team in the Philippines because they, along with our team in Australia, have led to these extraordinary growth and customer metrics. I'm just gonna look at the little gray box on the bottom right-hand corner here. This is the first time that we've actually shared openly the exact customer metrics that we achieve. We've always just shared the year-on-year improvement. This year, the year-on improvements are great. 4% up on first contact resolution, 2% up on agent satisfaction, 2% up on net promoter. What's outstanding about these is these are very, very high scores. They're outstanding, and that is a full credit to the huge investment in operations and improving that has led.
A lot of this has been underpinned by focusing on automation and workflow improvements with AWS Connect. That's reduced manual handling. It's improved our customer convenience, if you will, and self-service, and it allows our teams to focus on more higher value or more complex customer interactions. As I said, improving our self-service has helped reduce our contacts per booking and allowed simpler inquiries to be resolved. Obviously, AI is playing a huge part in this area. We've always had AI implemented across the last two years, helping us with quality assurance. This year, we launched a great agent-facing AI chatbot. That's for our internal agents that rapidly improves their response speed and accuracy.
I guess it would be remiss of me also not to note that we were, you know, very proud and very humbled to receive two of the most sought-after awards this year in terms of recognition from external bodies. The number one recognition we need is coming from our customers, and I think I've covered that, how these metrics, whilst we're building a scalable customer service platform, these metrics are what we hang our hat on. Let's turn now to Trip Ninja. I'm on page 14. Trip Ninja, just to refresh you, is very much a Canadian-based company that Webjet Group acquired a few years ago that has very much become our internal Center of AI Excellence.
One of the key customers obviously is a Webjet OTA, and it's more than paid for itself within Webjet OTA. In terms of the focus for this year for this business, we've continued to sell, and we are continuing to serve our customers. One of the key choices that we took was to ensure that we really deliver the value here and to ensure that this business is delivering to its most important customers has been to rightsize this business and to drive a leaner, more efficient operating model. It will continue to play in a central role for the group, but we've integrated it into our Webjet OTA digital team. It is doing projects for our Webjet Business Travel team and also our New Zealand team.
By integrating it, focusing it on our OTA and existing customers, this allows us to really accelerate our execution and better leverage this. It's a shift of focus, and we're continuing to service our core customers, but we are increasing our focus and embedding it within OTA, where it's really delivering significant and unique product using the AI tools that it develops. This will be the last time that we'll report on this as an individual unit. Moving now to our Cars & Motorhomes business. For those of you who are new shareholders, this consists of a brand, Airport Rentals, and a brand, Motorhome Republic, two individual sites, with two individual backends and one team based out of New Zealand.
As a reminder, 50% of the business almost for these two brands comes from own brand, and 50% comes from affiliates. Let's look at the key figures for this for this business this year. I'm on page 16. Bookings are at 260,000. TTV is AUD 189 million. Revenue at AUD 19.5 million. I'd like to call out EBITDA at AUD 4.3 million. The revenue, sorry, the EBITDA margin lifting to 21.6%. As I said earlier, this is one of our strongest operational turnaround stories in the business this year. It's a small business, but it shows that we're doing and we can do. We've got proven history now of going into a business, doing the right things, and turning it around.
This outcome is a result of deliberate strategic and operational action taken throughout the year. More importantly, this business was not immune from patches of softness in the market, impacts from international. Fuel crisis is certainly starting to affect this business. We've made and shifted strategy to take account for that. This is summarized. We restructured the cost base, simplified the operations, leveraged automation, and improved our overall execution, particularly with respect to our marketing. Our performance marketing activity, you'll see there that you would have expected, okay, well, I would have thought bookings would have been much higher now. What we have turned off is any booking and focused on much higher quality and more profitable bookings rather than purely pursuing booking volume growth.
Yes, this has impacted overall bookings and TTV, but it's materially improved our profitability and setting us up for this business for the future. The next page on page 17 has the full details there. I'll let you read those at your leisure. Just to call out the key points. As I said, bookings are down, TTV is down, but the expense is down 15%. Most importantly, really strong as everything started to deliver coming through in that second half. If I look at how we did that, I'm looking at page 18. Having done the operational turnaround, the margin improvement, it was about, okay, where else do we need to focus? We need to improve the product and the customer experience.
We've got to push that brand awareness and customer acquisition as a feature for the whole group, and then the scale and diversification. The key highlights here, we've rolled out a 24/7 chatbot to really help with our automation and our customer service. Most importantly for the cars, we launched a new app, and this is about driving down our cost of acquisition and keeping them within our network. The app, we developed it, soft launched it, but it was hard launched in February. In just that time to the end of March, our app share of bookings increased to 7%. This is gonna be a focus. This equals keeping people within our ecosystem and keeping them coming back. We expect further opportunity to grow that within the year.
Motorhomes , the story here was very much about making sure we were turning off those unprofitable bookings. We importantly expanded our affiliate network here, introducing a significant number of new affiliates and four major new affiliates. This was crucial 'cause it allowed us, when we got softer here in Australia and New Zealand, to quickly switch and focus on the Northern Hemisphere markets of Europe and North America. We've modernized here, we've done the brand work, and now we're scaling the platform. Really looking forward to seeing how this business improving over the next year. Turning now to Webjet Business Travel. As I said, this is one of our big four moves.
We knew that we had customers in this space, and on our research, people said they really wanted an online, digitally-led travel corporate solution that was not old world. We were about to build that, but we didn't. We found one, and this is actually going to accelerate our movement into this space with a great team, with customers, and already with the sales force. This transaction has been completed. We've completely integrated into the group, rebranded it, increased the sales force, and started marketing for this business. One of the key highlights about this, it's a beautiful stack. It's a solution that doesn't require, like most other corporate, heaps of plugins from other different systems. It's all contained. It's incredibly rapid in terms of product development, using significant amount of AI to do that.
That's why we've been able to deliver over 90 new improvements to the product or features to the product within the first six months. The results underpinning the why for this acquisition are here on the page. 271% increase in our sales pipeline. 255% increase in deals won, and 100% up on our TTV wins. FY 2027 will be an investment year. It's a really unique time in corporate travel, and we're gonna take advantage of that. Most importantly, our customers love us. Our customer satisfaction remains well above 90%. Page 21 has got the key figures here.
Not much to see here. Pleasingly, the EBITDA is a loss as it's an investment year and we did the integration and the synergies are starting to come through. It's at the favorable end of our expectations. Importantly, I'd like to call out in the second half, our direct to business TTV, excuse me, was up 41% on prior period pre-acquisition. With that, what I'm going to do now is hand over. I'll come back at the end and cover off our future trading. What I'd like to do now is hand over to Layton Shannos, our Group CFO, to cover the financials in more detail.
Thanks, Katrina. Good morning to everyone on the call. Turning now to slide 23. Again, look, just before we get into the detail here, as we disclosed at the half year results, I'll just briefly recap on the accounting policy change that came into effect during the year relating to the recognition of gift card breakage. Previously, breakage was recognized based on historical redemption patterns. Under the revised policy and aligned with prevailing industry practice, we now only recognize breakage once a gift card has actually expired, which under Australian Consumer Law currently occurs after three years. In line with accounting standards, this change has been applied retrospectively, meaning our prior periods have been restated as if the new policy had always been in place.
Just in terms of impact, FY 2025 revenue and EBITDA were both reduced by AUD 4.4 million, and you'll find the full details in the appendix at the back of this presentation. Importantly, this change is purely a timing adjustment and there's no cash impact. What it does do, is really improve the comparability and consistency of our reporting as there's no longer the estimation element that was previously used. And just for context, on a like-for-like basis under the revised policy, breakage recognized in the FY 2026 result is circa AUD 900,000, compared to AUD 600,000 in that revised FY 2025 result. With the increase year- on- year there really simply reflecting the growth in gift card sales over time.
With that context, let's turn our attention to the FY 2026 financials. Now consistent with our standard presentation of these results, the difference between the statutory result and underlying operations here, that simply reflects, the share-based payment expense. A few one-off, non-recurring, operating expenses, which I'll walk through on the next slide, and some impairments that I'll touch on shortly as well. Despite lower bookings in TTV in FY 2026, total revenue increased to AUD 136.4 million, which is up AUD 1.1 million, and also includes an AUD 1.2 million contribution, from Webjet Business Travel there in the second half. Now as Katrina briefly touched on, the composition of revenue this year, does include some variability, which is quite typical for our business model.
In addition to the impact of underlying trading performance, FY 2026 benefited from a few customary items, including loyalty payments linked to the renewal of some long-standing supplier agreements, as well as the release of some old surplus provisions. These items tend to be quite lumpy in nature and fluctuate from year to year, depending on timing, so some years will naturally see a greater contribution than others, as was the case in FY 2026. Underlying EBITDA came in at AUD 28.1 million compared with AUD 35 million in FY 2025. Aside from that trading performance, that really reflects the planned step-up in strategic investment OpEx, which we'd previously outlined, including that slightly moderated one-off AUD 4.5 million marketing investment for the OTA brand relaunch.
Moving down the page, depreciation and amortization increased by AUD 1.2 million, largely reflecting the addition of Webjet Business Travel assets, and in line with our expectations. We also recorded AUD 3.3 million of impairment in the period, with AUD 3 million of that tied to the Trip Ninja technology platforms that have been discontinued, following the recent restructure there, and a further AUD 300,000 from writing off our investment in Taguchi Marketing. Net interest was AUD 3.8 million, driven by interest earned on our strong cash balance. Still no debt and no related party interest expense, which you can still see there, in the FY 2025 comparative, which ceased at the time of demerger. In terms of tax, the statutory effective tax rate in FY 2026 was circa 40%.
Look, that was impacted by some non-deductible costs, specifically relating to the Locomote acquisition. Look, as I've previously flagged, we expect this to normalize back around the 30% mark, just in line with our Australian-based earnings profile there. Finally, on this page, underlying net profit after tax for FY 2026 came in at AUD 13.6 million, and statutory NPAT was AUD 3.7 million, up 85%. Let's move on now to the next slide and take a look at corporate overheads and non-operating expenses. Starting with corporate overheads, which came in at AUD 11.2 million for the year. Only slightly up on FY 2025, despite the inflationary backdrop we're seeing, but below prior guidance.
That really reflects no short-term incentive payments to executive KMP given the financial performance for the year. Look, importantly here, we really continue to maintain a strong and disciplined focus on cost control right across the business. In terms of the non-operating expenses for FY 2026, and look, just to reiterate here, all of these items are one-off, non-recurring in nature, and we exclude them in underlying operations so we can present a clear view of ongoing performance of the business. Now the key items here are firstly, due diligence costs associated with the Locomote acquisition, along with the related earn-out accrual. Look, that will flow through over the next few reporting periods in line with the three-year earn-out term tied to that.
There's also some residual costs linked to the ACCC proceedings, which we settled on back in July last year. The balance there relates to a mix of one-off items, including some strategic and defense advisory costs, redundancy costs from the recent Trip Ninja restructure, and the final staff payments associated with the demerger. Turning now to the balance sheet, that's on slide 25. Cash reduced over the year, which is in line with expectations. That predominantly reflects the net cash outflow of AUD 13.9 million for the Locomote acquisition, which I'll touch on shortly. The AUD 9.1 million payment made to the ACCC during the period, along with our inaugural dividend payment and corporate tax payments.
As we move down the page here, non-current assets increased by AUD 19.2 million, and that was largely driven by the technology platform, recognized as part of the Locomote acquisition. The reduction in trade payables and other liabilities here reflects two things. Firstly, the ACCC payment made in August, and secondly, the timing of our BSP payments, similar to the first half. For those less familiar with BSP relates to our air ticket sales, where payments for these are direct debited weekly from our bank account, and represent our single largest supplier outflow. What does that mean? Depending on where the reporting cutoff falls, we can have anywhere from 7-14 days of sales outstanding at period end.
You'll see the corresponding impact of that in the restricted cash balance, which is directly correlated and decreased from AUD 30.8 million to AUD 20 million between periods. Other current liabilities declined during the period, primarily reflecting a reduction in gift card liabilities, which was largely driven by customer redemptions. Non-current liabilities increased, mainly due to the Locomote earn-out accrual I mentioned earlier. Overall, we remain debt-free. We've got net cash of AUD 94 million as at 31 March, and just to be clear, that net cash figure excludes the AUD 20 million of restricted cash. Look, it remains a very robust balance sheet, and we'll continue to take a disciplined approach to capital management while continuing to execute on our strategic priorities. All right, let's move on to cash flow.
Operating cash flow and the change in working capital you see here, look, that simply reflects the ACCC payment and the timing of those BSP settlements I just discussed. Once you adjust for those two large lumpy items, along with the non-operating expenses and the Locomote acquisition, underlying cash conversion for the year came in at 102%, just above our 100% guidance mark. In terms of investing and financing activities, I'll cover off CapEx in a bit more detail on the next slide, the asset acquisition here relates to the Locomote acquisition with a net cash outflow of AUD 13.9 million. That reflects AUD 15.7 million of upfront cash consideration, which was partially offset by AUD 1.8 million of cash acquired at completion.
There's also a further AUD 1.5 million in retention consideration, payable by 31 March 2027, and that's subject to no unresolved claims. Dividends paid reflect the inaugural FY 2026 interim dividend payment we made in December, along with a Search Republic dividend paid during the year. Now, as Katrina mentioned earlier, we're very pleased to have declared a final FY 2026 fully franked dividend of AUD 0.02 per share again. That represents a total payout ratio greater than 100% of underlying NPAT, which is certainly well above our stated target range of 40%-60%, and really reflects the board's intent to maximize the distribution of franking credits as and when they become available. Lastly here, as Katrina also noted, the share buyback.
That commenced briefly in March with just over AUD 200,000 worth of shares bought back and is expected to resume following these results. Finally, turning the page now, let's take a quick look at CapEx. As previously flagged, FY 2026 marked the first year of our three-year strategic investment phase. Total CapEx for the year was AUD 16.7 million, which includes AUD 2.9 million of investment CapEx linked to the strategic growth plan, as well as AUD 600,000 in the second half for Webjet Business Travel. Pleasingly underlying CapEx remained broadly flat, and that's largely the result of the New Zealand restructure that was completed back at the tail end of FY 2025.
Now the bit detailed by business unit is there on the slide, right across the group, investment in all of our technology platforms really continues to be focused on three things really. Driving greater automation, improving customer outcomes, and supporting scalable long-term growth. Lastly, just on the strategic CapEx spend, we'd previously indicated around AUD 5 million for that in FY 2026. That figure assumed we would internally build the business travel initiative. With the acquisition of Locomote, that requirement has largely fallen away, which is why that strategic CapEx investment has come in lower than originally planned. Overall, we're continuing to invest where it matters, but doing so in a way that's disciplined and aligned to our strategic priorities. With that, thank you, and I'll hand back to Katrina.
Thank you, Layton. All right. That's a very fulsome wrap for what happened in FY 2026. Let's move forward to FY 2027. I want to start with a thematic, I'm on page 29 now, which has been so important for us this year, in unlocking productivity, and speed and customer experience and is gonna attract a lot of our attention going forward, and that's AI. Previously, investors and analysts have asked us, "Okay, well, how are you using AI?" We've put there for you a list of, just a short list of how we use AI across the business. It's being used everywhere.
Importantly, you know, we are taking the governance of this very crucially, and we've strengthened our AI internal governance, our data privacy, our security, and our fraud monitoring across the Group, with significant investments in security and fraud monitoring as well. How we're seeing AI is about productivity, speed, and great customer experience. I've talked to the predictive models we're using within our engines to deliver better pricing and deliver better products. I thought just two examples I'll talk to. You know, across OTA, Webjet Business Travel, for example, a majority of our code now is either being deployed or deleted by AI development tools. Anywhere between 60%-80%, depending on the unit that we're developing.
That really does is free up our engineering capacity to focus on core architecture, scalability, and innovation and the work that we need to do to lift this and be ready in an AI world. We've got huge productivity gains across operational and customer-facing tools. You know, one that our team demoed to me the other day, previously if the customer says, "Hey, I bought this," and we would have to go through back all these logs to prove that they had actually bought Y. Now we've used AI to crunch that, and it delivers it within seconds in terms of what actually their pathway was through our site was. There's multiple practical ways that we're using this to improve our marketing, for example, in taking out costs there.
Mainly for us, it's about embedding it, the capability across the organization. One key one we released last week, two weeks ago. Gosh. Goodness, I don't know. This has been in development, and we're really proud to be one of the first OTAs to launch a ChatGPT app in Australia. This is enabling our travelers to search and compare flights and hotels directly within the world, the world's most widely used AI platform. Now you can use natural language to explore. The question has always been, well, isn't this going to replace? I mean, I, like I'm sure most of my listeners spend a lot of time reading about this and across industries, within our industry, and we see AI as really augmenting the customer experience rather than replacing it.
Trust and trusted brands is the ultimate currency in AI, and that's so important in a world we can talk to anything. For us, though, we see this developing, but our launch with our ChatGPT app is another example of how we're continuing to go where the eyeballs are. Google has been the source of eyeballs for so many years. Now it's shifting to AI. We need to know how to play smart in both and be wherever our customers are. This is about us engaging early, learning quickly, and evolving in an agentic commerce world. Really pleased with how that is going. Formally onto outlook. Look, we are not immune, and I'd really wish that solved some things in the Northern Hemisphere, but the operating environment is extremely fluid and challenging.
With the geopolitical conflicts causing inflationary pressures here. Another rate rise. Consumer confidence, as we all know, is at the lowest of, I think it's at fourth lowest of all time. This is placing significant pressures on our industry. Travel is like water, like one mentor said, it finds a way. What we know from COVID and what we know from all our customer research is this is not a discretionary item, and it bounces back, and it will bounce back strong. Most importantly, we're doing the right things now to ensure that we're set up for that. FY 2027, as announced this morning especially, is going to be challenged as the industry is challenged.
We will be impacted by lower airline commissions alongside some changes in the RBA surcharging regulations. This is not new news. Shifts like this have happened in the past, and what Webjet does extremely well is pivot, adapt, and solve. That's what we'll be doing. Just to give you some exact figures from our trading performance since this 17th of May, compared to prior period. Bookings in TTV and OTA are down 12% and 15% respectively. Cars & Motorhomes that moderated, TTV and bookings are down 5%. That's 'cause we immediately pivoted to focus on the Northern Hemisphere. Webjet Business Travel, however, is up. A unique opportunity, I said, and we're really leaning into that.
There is some moderating as businesses are putting "Do Not Travel" warnings out to their businesses. The ABV is moderating as international bookings are following. To us, those are, you know, not attractive results. When I look at the Australian market and the BSP statistics, et cetera, I'm seeing significantly scarier figures than that. We are holding ourselves very well in a market which I think is doing worse than what our figures are showing. Looking ahead, our strategic priorities remain unchanged. How we execute, we're always going to pivot. Our mission to double our TTV is unchanged, but we are reviewing the execution and the timing of that in light of what we can't control and prevailing market conditions.
As I said, we're focused on doing the right things, and we've done that this year, despite the ever-challenging macro environment and a dynamic year that we've had. And we're gonna continue to strengthen those foundations to set up for long-term shareholder growth and value. And that's about, for us, capturing that full travel wallet, growing Webjet Business Travel, increasing our use of automation and AI, disciplined execution, and preserving our balance sheet strength. Lastly, before we go to questions, I would like to thank our shareholders for your continued support, your patience, and your engagement across what has been a transformative year for the group, but also a very dynamic one. Mostly importantly, I'd like to thank our customers.
We love the fact that you love us, we're so excited to be bringing new customers to the brand. I'd really like to acknowledge and thank our people across the group in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the Philippines. Guys, the pace of change, transformation, execution, and the external demands on us over the last year have been significant. Nothing of what we've spoken about today, the incredible progress we've made against our priorities, despite the results, is possible without all your passion, your commitment, and your resilience. Thank you. On a personal note, I'm preparing to transition from the business shortly. I'd like to say it has been an absolute privilege to lead this with a very specific mandate through a very important period of transformation.
I'm proud of what we've achieved, as a team. With that, I'll hand over to you, Harmony, for questions from our listeners.
Your first question comes from Kseniya Chadayeva from Jarden. Please go ahead.
Thanks for taking my question. Can you please share whether any of your prior FY 2030 targets are still in place, like, AUD 3.2 billion TTV and margin improvement aspirations? Like, what are the key assumptions underpinning those, and should we expect them to change with management changes? Thanks.
Two questions there, I think is your FY 2030 targets, et cetera. We came out with a FY 2030 target of doubling our TTV. As I just said, we are reviewing the timing of that. The strategy remains unchanged and the priorities. Execution is always gonna pivot. The key drivers to drive growth and future shareholder value remain unchanged. We are reviewing the timing in light of, you know, this is an unprecedented time in the world right now, and the travel industry is being hit hard, so we need to adjust for that particular timing. I think the second question you said was in terms of management changes. Change is good for an organization. It's, change is everywhere is good, and particularly for Webjet.
You know, we've seen excellent results from various changes across the year. We are having change in chair and in myself. As I said, the levers to drive value don't change.
Okay. Thank you. Secondly, on revenue margin. It seems like you delivered good result this time. What was driver of your better revenue margin, and can you share any long-term aspirations for both EBITDA and revenue margins?
Hey, Kseniya. It's Layton here. I'll jump in. Look, obviously, like you said, revenue this year benefited from some of those large, lumpy contributions. As we've previously telegraphed, we sort of, over the longer term, we expect revenue margin to normalize at that circa 8%- 9% moving forward. From, obviously, an EBITDA margin perspective, that we'll have that compression during the investment phase, but then again, sort of normalize at or above current levels in the longer term.
Thanks, Kseniya.
Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one. Your next question comes from Wei-Weng from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hi, Wei-We ng.
Hey, guys. Hey, how are you? I'm not sure if this is a question for management or your interim chair. I'm not sure if Gary's on the line. How should we view changes in management and the board as it relates to kind of the strategic direction of the company? Maybe can we get an update on the CEO succession and how that's going?
Yeah, sure. I'll answer the second question first. In terms of CEO succession, the board are well progressed on a search, and you know, in the middle of that process right now. I expect the board will make an update on that in due course. In terms of how you should think about, Gary is not in the room. I think he's in another board meeting today. Sends his best wishes. In terms of the change, you know, Don has served this business incredibly with passion and with incredibly good governance in his various roles across the last 18 years. He is looking forward to retirement. In two days is off on a delightful trip to Europe.
We need an interim chair, and as Gary had recently come on the board, and his hand was put up for that. In terms of how this affects ongoing strategy, as I said before, the strategic levers to drive value in this business don't change. You know, we're having to adapt and pivot all the time. Fuel crisis is hitting Australia and New Zealand hard. Let's pivot to Europe and North America for motorhomes . No one's buying international long haul. Let's pivot to focus on short-haul Asia and focus all our flights and package deals on that. The levers to drive the value in this business don't change. Like any new CEO, I'm sure they'll come in, and they'll do their assessment, and they'll make their change.
My mandate was very much we demerge this business. The business had been, you know, a significantly cash producing business and contributed to the group in a different way in the past. The opportunity of the demerger remains. Which is to take this iconic Australian, New Zealand brand, do the investment and do the right things to drive growth. Those levers won't change. How it is executed is always up to incoming new management.
Cool. Thanks. Just on the Virgin sort of announcement as well today. AUD 3 million impact. One, do we assume this just drops through to EBITDA as well, the AUD 3 million? I calculate that Virgin was about 20% of last year's TTV. Is that, is that kind of ballpark? I guess looking forward, you guys don't really switch sell so much being kind of like a comparison site. Should we assume that this proportional impact sort of carries through to FY 2027, or are there ways that you know, can mitigate this by, you know, the ways you display results or whatever to sort of funnel people away from Virgin?
Sure. A few questions in that. I think you're sneaking in about three or four there, Wei -Weng. The first one, I can't make forward statements. That's why we've assessed it to be about AUD 3 million if it had been impacted in FY 2026. I think, you're thinking about that the right way in terms of it will drop through, and it should drop straight through to the bottom line. Now, Virgin is a very important partner of ours and has been a long-term partner, and we still value that partnership, and we'll continue to do marketing campaigns with them and targeted et cetera. However, you know, there's a shift in the economics in that relationship.
Same as five, six years ago when all airline commissions, you know, airline commissions dropped 80% coming out of COVID. What we did as an organization was adjust and pivot. We will be, you know, adjusting and pivoting on commercial, on strategy, on focus to ensure that we optimize. It's a short timeframe, but nonetheless, same as the RBA changes. We can do things to mitigate this loss.
Yeah. Okay. I have a few more questions, but I'll maybe jump into the back of the queue then.
Thanks, Wei-Weng.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Patrick Cockerill, from Ord Minnett. Please go ahead.
Hey, Katrina. Hey, team. First one from me. Can you guys quantify the RBA surcharging impact? I guess as well, what were the lower variable revenue items this year?
Hey, Pat. It's Layton. I'll jump in. Look, just in terms of the RBA surcharges. Obviously they're going to present a headwind, particularly in the OTA business. They come into effect on 1 October, so that will be second half of 2027 onwards. Obviously it's still early in the process, right? A lot of the non-card payment providers are sort of yet to confirm their approach under the new regs, even though they're outside the scope. What I will tell you is that roughly sort of 2/3 of Webjet OTA's TTV is currently transacted through credit cards, so it will be impacted. That said, we have a diverse mix of payment options, right? We will actively pursue mitigation strategies to manage the impact as much as we can.
In terms of your second question, just around the variable. Was it variable revenue or variable costs?
Other variable revenue items.
Look, there's lots of moving parts in there, I won't go into specifics. Just to give you an indication, for context. Over the past five years, revenue of this sort of nature on average has been circa AUD 5 million. That has ranged anywhere from just under AUD 1 million to up towards AUD 10 million. FY 2026 was towards the upper end of that range.
Yep. Awesome. Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one. You have a follow-up question now from Wei-Weng, from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
You're back.
Hi. Hey. Yeah, just one question now because Patrick asked my other question. Your trading update for FY 2027, do you get the sense that that's how the broader market is tracking in, specifically in kind of leisure?
Look, I can't comment to how competitors, or peers et cetera. What I can do is look at, you know, the information that we get from our GDS in terms of the total GDS market and our shares, and I look at the Australian BSP for the market. The market is doing it very tough. Our figures, I think are much better than market.
Yeah. In summary, you guys feel like even though the market's down, you guys are actually gaining share still?
Yeah, I think the whole market is down, Wei -Weng. It is a very tough executionary market, and there's pockets that are doing well. Like corporate, for example, is doing really well. High-end, can, you know, the, those cashed out baby boomers doing those AUD 50 ABV, average booking value, you know, they are still finding a way. People who had booked to travel across February, March, sorry, February through to sort of May, still went. They actually rebooked. Your diehards absolutely said, "Okay, well, we have to have our one holiday this year, so we're not gonna go to this, to L.A., or we're not gonna go to Europe. We're gonna go to Thailand this year." That piece.
I can see from the data that, you know, pretty much across leisure, and what I can see on a ticketed basis, you know, the double-digit figures that are down. You know, we're reflective of that. In terms of some cases, doing a little better. I would say that nobody's immune, and we're all in a club of one. This is a tough year. We're using this time to strengthen our foundations, do the right things to build long-term value.
Yeah. Cool. Actually one last question, actually. Just hearing that the government might maybe lift, I guess their travel advice to avoid the Middle East. How material would that be for you guys if that happened?
Look, I think it is a material for the industry. Obviously, you know, we are a majority domestic business, and I think that's, you know, this is the, whilst our strategy is to balance that out and leverage our brand into international bookings further to almost mitigate that risk. This is where that is a strength. But for us, that would, you know, it takes more than one, I think, drop of that to change people's behaviors, particularly given people plan. You know, the travel for European and North American summer, that is booked sometime between November to sort of February. You know, that really affects the booking periods for those long hauls across that period. Booking horizons have absolutely shifted since COVID and compressed, and there's a lot more last-minute bookings.
That would be, it's always helpful for that to drop. For us, we would switch focus back again. I think it's gonna be an exciting market when more Middle East capacity does open up, because I think it'll be a competitive space. Right now, across all airlines, we're seeing capacity cutbacks. When it gets over 5%, that's a real concern. Most airlines have done that or have cut routes, and to focus on their own strategic priorities. That's where I think it will be helpful, but it doesn't happen overnight. Same with a rate cut.
We've seen that in the past, that it, you know, it slowly drops consumer confidence, and it takes a while to get back.
Cool. Thanks. That's all for me.
Thanks, Wei -Weng.
Thank you. Your next question is a follow-up from Kseniya Chadayeva from Jarden. Please go ahead.
Hey, Kseniya.
Thank you for taking follow-up. Yep. Thank you. Can you please share how your OTA brand is tracking, how your relaunch has done, and what did you do with the, on loyalty program? Like, did you manage to get back your customers that you lost during September last year?
Sure. Let me talk to you about that. The ACCC was the issue kicked off long time ago. We resolved it this year. That came with us doing appropriate management of that. That really affected us across August and September. It doesn't just affect those bookings of that month. It affects the leads going in. We saw softer leads coming through in September, October. Sorry, in October, November. That's what we used the brand campaign to reset the brand in the minds of Australian and New Zealand consumer and bring back customers. Now, there's your core. There's those that are acquired on a new basis, there's dormant customers.
The brand, has helped us reignite or, you know, reactivate dormant customers. That's grown, our reactivation has grown, year-on-year, in March, as we've improved that figure. Our new customers, that hit our strongest year-on-year figure, new customers by quarter four as a result of the brand campaign. You know, new customers have been declining over many years, and this campaign has served to hit our highest new customer volume. New customers come into the brand and into the ecosystem. And that's, we've got there by Q4. That is how we see the success of this. It takes a long time to fall through. You know, reach brings you to top of mind, brings you to top of consideration, brings you through, eventually to bookings.
Kseniya, did I miss a part of your question there?
No, it's all good. Thank you.
Great.
Thank you. That does conclude our time for questions. I'll now hand back to Katrina Barry for any closing remarks.
Thank you, everybody, again, for joining today. Apologies for the late start. Look, in summary, five things. This is an excellent business. Iconic brand, and now that brand is fresh, contemporary, and relevant for our major asset. Our second asset, we turned it around. It is now profitable and doing a great job. You know, there is, it's been a challenging year, and sometimes distracting, but the business is focused on doing the right things, setting up the foundations for growth. That is where the long-term value of this business is. Not in this year's results. It's in the foundational work that we're creating value for long term. Thank you again to all our shareholders, our team, and our customers. That's all for today.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.