Welcome to the Amadeus Q3 2021 presentation webcast. The management of Amadeus will run you through the presentation, which will be followed by a question and answer session. You can ask a question by phone by dialing zero one on your telephone keypad at any moment during the presentation. I am now pleased to hand over to you, Mr. Luis Maroto, President and CEO of Amadeus. Please, sir, go ahead.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our 2021 third quarter results presentation. Thank you very much for joining us today. As usual, Till is here with me to elaborate on the key financial aspects of this quarter. Let us start with slide four for an overview of our financial results in the period. Our volumes continued to improve in the third quarter, and this drove a consistent strengthening of our financial results. For the second consecutive quarter, we saw important improvements in revenue and EBITDA growth versus 2019, which also supported cash generation. We had positive free cash flow in the nine month period, excluding cost saving program implementation costs, and expect to increase quarterly free cash flow going into quarter four on the back of continued progress in volumes.
In the third quarter, Amadeus delivered group revenues of EUR 739 million, representing a 47% decline versus the third quarter of 2019 and advancing 9 points from the evolution we saw in the second quarter. The progress in revenue performance relative to prior quarter was driven by continued improving revenue performance across our three segments. EBITDA also continued to advance, resulting in the third quarter, excluding cost-saving implementation cost of EUR 207 million. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, we had a positive free cash flow result for the whole quarter, amounting to EUR 104 million in Q3, making, as I was saying, our free cash flow for the year to date positive as well, and totaling EUR 57 million in both cases, excluding cost-saving implementation cost.
Also, we now expect free cash flow to be positive for the full year 2021, making an important achievement in this period. In the third quarter of 2021, we had, for the first time since 2019, a positive quarterly adjusted profit result amounting to EUR 24 million, also demonstrating a continued positive trend from prior quarters. Finally, on cost optimization, sorry, which accelerates our profitability and cash generation as volumes recover, on aggregate to date and compared to 2020, our total fixed cost reduction amounts to EUR 186 million. Till will elaborate more on these topics later. Let's move to slide five for a market update. In the third quarter, we continue to see good progress in volume performance across all segments.
Amadeus travel agency air bookings declined by 58.5% in the third quarter compared to the same period in 2019, advancing 9 points from the air booking performance in the second quarter. By region, North America continued to be the best performing geography, followed by Middle East and Africa, LatAm, and Asia regions, all of which were close to the 50% mark of 2019. All our regions saw the improvements in volume performance quarter-on-quarter. The most notable advance taking place in North America, but also relevant was the quarterly progress made in Middle East, Western Europe, and LatAm.
In the third quarter, the GDS industry contracted by 59.1%, and although the regional mix has, at the moment, a negative impact on our global market share, as NORAM has been outperforming slower regions such as Western Europe and APAC, where we are last provider, we have grown faster than the industry, supported by market share gains. With respect to our passengers boarded, in the third quarter, Amadeus PDS contracted by 50.7% versus the same period of 2019, improving 17 points over past quarters' performance. This has been the largest quarter-on-quarter improvement in passengers boarded in the past quarters. We saw considerable improvements compared to the previous quarter across regions, and most notably in Western Europe and Central Eastern Europe. Monthly growth rates versus 2019 also continued to improve sequentially throughout the third quarter.
Our best performing regions were North America and Central Eastern Europe. With the data we have for the month of October compared to September, we have seen again and across regions a strong improvement in the bookings performance. Our bookings growth in the month of October was -45% versus October 2019, which represents a 10 points enhancement over September's performance. In the last week of data, our bookings growth was -39%, the best week on record this year. We also had an improving evolution in PDS in October with an estimated growth of -45% versus October 2019, which is 4 points stronger than the performance in September. This is mainly the update for our most important KPIs, bookings and PDS. As you know, for our third segment, which includes hospitality and payments, we do not report a KPI.
As we have explained, on one hand, in this segment, the weight of transactional revenues is lower. Secondly, in hospitality specifically, which is the largest piece in the segment, there is no one operating metric driving the revenue due to the wide breadth of hospitality solutions that we offer. We have revenues based on different KPIs, properties, rooms, users, clicks, bookings, reservations. I would like to say, nevertheless, that our metrics driving transactional revenues in hospitality, such as reservations, bookings and media clicks have continued to improve this quarter with respect to the previous one on the back of progress in the hospitality industry as well. Our data shows that the third quarter demonstrated a steady performance for the global hospitality market. Worldwide occupancies throughout much of the quarter remained in the mid- to high-50% range.
There's still room for improvement to return to the 2019 occupancy levels in the mid-70% range. The annual consistency worldwide occupancies offer optimism. The U.S. leads all regions. Canada saw a significant increase in occupancy this quarter, and Europe saw a noteworthy increase in performance as occupancy rose steadily from 40% at the beginning of the quarter to a high of 59% in late September. Asia and Latin continue to experience variable occupancies impacted by changing travel regulations. Leisure travel continues to drive the most demand, and booking lead times continue to improve but have not yet returned to 2019 lead times. Let's move to slide six to really have some of the business update. We continued in the quarter to expand our customer base across our segments.
In air distribution, we signed 14 new contracts or renewals of distribution agreements with airlines, including JetBlue, EVA Air, and UNI Airways, amounting to 51 signatures in the year to date. Progress in relation to our NDC strategy continued through new agreements signed with Etihad and Cathay Pacific. Amadeus today has 17 airlines signed for the distribution of their NDC content through the Amadeus Travel Platform. Additionally, KAYAK and Amadeus have renewed and expanded their IT partnership to power KAYAK's ability to process billions of queries across its platforms with Amadeus Flight Search technology. In relation to airline IT, we were pleased to announce Etihad Airways signed a landmark multi-year agreement with Amadeus for a major digital transformation and will be implementing the full Amadeus Altéa PSS suite in addition to several other solutions, including digital experience and Amadeus Altéa NDC.
Pakistan International Airlines contracted for the full suite of Altéa PSS, and Ultra Air, new Colombian ultra-low-cost carrier contracted New Skies. Our upselling efforts continued to yield results during the third quarter, and Lufthansa Group airlines have contracted for Digital Experience Suite, and Amadeus supported Lufthansa Group in launching its new airline, Eurowings Discover, which has implemented a range of Amadeus solutions, including the Altéa suite for reservations and inventory. Saudia contracted for passenger recovery and Air Algérie for several solutions, including Traveler DNA, Amadeus Anytime, and DiSC and Altéa NDC. Finally, Azerbaijan Airlines adopted Amadeus Segment Revenue Management. In hospitality, we renewed our strategic partnership with Ctrip for access to extensive hospitality content. Flemings Hotels contracted for integrated booking suite, and The Leading Hotels of the World have selected Amadeus as its provider of business intelligence.
We also expanded our partnership with Cvent, allowing hotels using Amadeus Sales & Event Management to expose their function space to Cvent planners, enabling this to seamlessly book any available inventory at any time. In Airport IT, we continued to see momentum during the third quarter. Sofia Airport and Prague Airport both contracted departure control for ground handlers, and we also continued to expand our footprint in the U.S. Memphis International Airport, Missoula Montana Airport, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, and Sacramento International Airport contracted for solutions from our airport IT portfolio. I would also like to highlight that Amadeus, as a digital connector and tech enabler in travel, has created a range of solutions to support the recovery of travel. Traveler ID for safe travel is one of these solutions which supports self-service check-in and allowing passengers to verify their health documentation directly through the airline app or website.
A total of 12 airlines are now using this solution, with Lufthansa and Airlink being the latest airlines to announce implementation in the quarter. With this, I will now pass to Till for further details of our financial performance.
Thank you, Luis. Hello, everyone. Please turn to slide eight for an overview of our revenue in this period. As Luis has explained, our group revenue declined by 47.3% in the quarter of 2021 relative to 2019. This evolution represents an improvement over the second quarter performance. Air Distribution revenue declined by 57.7% versus 2019. This was a 10 percentage points improvement relative to prior quarter, supported by an enhanced volume performance versus 2019, as Luis has described. Also, despite the negative effect from the higher weight of local bookings versus 2019, Air Distribution revenue per air booking expanded compared to 2019, supported by contractions at a softer rate than the air booking decline in several revenue lines, such as revenues from solutions provided to travel sellers and corporations.
For Q4, our current estimates point to Air Distribution revenue per air booking being single-digit % dilutive when compared to Q4 2019 as a result of the continued high weight of local bookings in the mix relative to 2019. Air IT Solutions revenue performance in the quarter improved again over prior quarter, decreasing by 39.4% versus 2019. This result was driven by the lower PB volumes than in 2019, coupled with decreases at softer rates than airline PB in several revenue lines that are not directly linked to PB evolution, such as services and airport IT, among others. As you will have observed, the average revenue per PB in Q3 diluted relative to Q2.
While the revenue per PB remains high relative to 2019, we expect it to trend towards 2019 levels progressively quarter-on-quarter as PBs grow quarter-on-quarter. Hospitality & Other Solutions revenue also improved relative to the second quarter, contracting by 30.2% versus 2019, impacted by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospitality continued to outperform payments in terms of growth with respect to 2019, driven by hospitality's higher weight of non-transactional revenues. Payments is largely composed of transactional revenues and remains most impacted by the pandemic effects within the third segment. Within hospitality, we group our hospitality solutions offering into three sub-segments. First, hospitality IT solutions, primarily including central reservation, property management, guest management, sales and event management, and service optimization solutions.
Second, media and distribution, mainly comprising digital media solutions as well as hotel current insurance content distributions through the Amadeus Travel Platform. Third, business intelligence, including our suite of business intelligence solutions. In the third quarter of 2021, the best performing sub-segment within hospitality in terms of growth versus 2019 was business intelligence, supported by a high weight of non-transactional revenues, followed by hospitality IT, which has a mix of transactional and non-transactional revenues, and saw an improving quarter-on-quarter performance in CRS transactions. Finally, media and distribution, whose revenues are highly transactional, saw the largest quarter-on-quarter improvement within hospitality versus 2019, supported by a notable increase in media clicks and bookings performance. Please turn now to page nine.
In the third quarter of 2021, our EBITDA, excluding implementation costs, amounted to EUR 207 million, resulting from the combination of the revenue evolution just explained and a 59.7% cost of revenue reduction, very linked to the air booking volumes evolution and an 18.5% decrease in our combined personnel and other operating expenses cost line. Excluding bad debt effects and cost saving plan implementation costs, our P&L fixed costs in the quarter started to increase slowly. Below EBITDA in the third quarter, DNA expense declined by 12.9% relative to 2020, resulting from less PPA amortization, no impairment losses accounted for in the quarter, and a small decline of 1.6% in ordinary DNA.
Despite an increase in interest expense driven by the new financings in 2020, net financial expense declined by EUR 4 million compared to 2020 due to a reduction in exchange losses and upfront financing fees incurred in the third quarter of 2020 in relation to the new financings. Income tax adjusted for the tax impact from the cost saving implementation costs amounted to EUR 4 million. The group income tax rate was 28%. Supported by the EBITDA evolution, adjusted profit amounted to EUR 24 million in the third quarter of 2021. Turning to page 10 to review our cash flow evolution, let's start with CapEx.
As per our cost optimization goals, CapEx declined by EUR 73 million or 18.9% in the first nine months of the year versus the same period of 2020 on the back of a lower CapEx on intangible assets and a reduction in CapEx on property, plant, and equipment. The decrease in CapEx on intangible assets over the nine-month period was mostly due to lower capitalizations from software development, resulting from an 18.8% decline in R&D expenditure, where we have followed a selective approach and prioritized our investments in the most strategic projects.
Free cash flow in the third quarter amounted to EUR 104 million, excluding cost saving program implementation costs paid, and was mainly driven by our EBITDA evolution, a reduced CapEx amount relative to last year, and a cash inflow from change in working capital. We are expecting continued free cash flow expansion from Q3 into Q4, supported among others by volume performance progress driving EBITDA evolution and the working capital inflow. As Luis has explained at the beginning, our free cash flow in the first nine months of the year was positive, excluding implementations costs paid, and we expect free cash flow for the full year 2021 to be positive. Please turn to page 11 to review our fixed cost optimization progress.
In the first nine months of 2021, we achieved a fixed cost reduction relative to 2020 in the P&L and in capital expenditure combined of EUR 186 million. As explained before, our cost savings definition refers to the change in fixed costs, excluding cost saving program implementation costs and bad debt. To date, our fixed cost reduction in 2021 versus 2020 exceeds our stated target of EUR 50 million.
Remember, the EUR 50 million, together with the EUR 500 million we achieved last year, will take us to the EUR 550 million fixed cost reduction in 2021 versus 2019. In Q4 2021, we are expecting fixed cost growth versus Q4 2020 as planned, likely in an estimated range of EUR 30 million-EUR 60 million, with the larger part coming through the P&L and the rest through CapEx, driven by discretionary spend gradually coming back. Therefore, we will exceed our EUR 50 million fixed cost reduction target in 2021 versus 2020. Please note, this excess in cost savings over our EUR 50 million target is not a structural fixed cost reduction, and we expect this cost to come back in 2020 versus 2021 progressively throughout 2020. 2022. Apologies. 2022.
With regards to implementation costs related to our cost savings program, in the first nine months of 2021, we incurred implementation costs amounting to EUR 33 million, thus totaling EUR 202 million incurred to date. The balance to what we expect the total to be now, around EUR 210 million, will be incurred in Q4 2021. Finally, of these implementation costs, EUR 95 million were paid out in the first nine months of the year, totaling EUR 129 million so far. The balance to the EUR 210 million will be paid out through Q4 2021 and H1 2022. With this, we have now finished the presentation and are ready to take any questions you may have.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Q&A session starts now. If you wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. The first question comes from Adam Wood from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon, Luis. Good afternoon, Till. Thanks for taking the question. I've got two if I could. First of all, one of your competitors mentioned that they lost the domestic business with a major OTA in North America. Could you maybe just help us? I didn't see that as a win that you announced during the quarter. Could you talk about whether that was business you were competing for and won, or whether that was business you were not competing for and went to somebody else in the GDS industry? Secondly, if I could follow up a little bit on the cost progression in Q4 and into next year.
If we put the middle of that range in for the fourth quarter of EUR 45 million, I think we get to about EUR 530 million of CapEx, P&L, OpEx for the fourth quarter. If we were to annualize that number for 2022, would that be a reasonable starting point in terms of thinking about your plans for costs next year? Could you maybe just talk a little bit about the gives and takes? You know, if we see gradual progression, is that the right way to think about it? What would lead you to put more money into the business? Would it be a much more rapid recovery? You know, would it be customers asking for R&D, and you seeing opportunities to do more business? Thank you.
Hi, Adam. Thanks for the questions. Let me take the first one. We talk a lot about engagements with travel agencies, but travel agencies use more than one GDS. Our objective always is to get, you know, the bigger pie, especially the ones that are using different GDSs in parts of the world. At the beginning of this year, we communicated to you that we reinforced our partnership with Expedia, covering air, but also covering other parts of the business, such as car, hotel, and IT solutions. We have a very broad relationship with Expedia. We already started to see the results of this enlarged partnership with incremental business.
Our figures in the third quarter have started to see incremental volumes in different parts of the business. We are extremely pleased with the relationship with Expedia. Look, let me say that, Expedia is again very important, but we have had a very strong commercial performance across the board. We have increased our market share in this third quarter in most of the regions. There is still a country and regional mix. That's why we are not, and it's a bit subjective the way you can read into the figures, but our underlying performance has been very positive. Of course, again, it is our objective to engage with Expedia, a very, very important customer.
For us, it's also very important to really get you know medium small all kind of travel agencies and increase the volume of that we have in our platform. Finally, just to mention that this situation of the pandemic in my view has had an impact, and it's the fact that many travel agencies are faced with requirements of investing to aggregate content to have end-to-end user experience, and they are trying to simplify their operations and working with tech players that can support them in this evolution. I consider we are extremely well positioned to benefit from that.
Coming back to the Expedia question, yes, we expect to really benefit from our relationship with them and seeing volumes coming to us. More than that, I'm not going to share, Adam.
Let me take the cost question and just walk you through from a different angle. First of all, just confirming again the EUR 550 million are structural, and as you rightly, rightfully point out, we are obviously planning to exceed this cost saving target in 2021. A way to look at it is basically if you start off from the third quarter, and you actually, which we have highlighted, we are now EUR 185 million higher cost savings compared to 2020. The first thing is how much is gonna come back in the fourth quarter, and we've guided you EUR 30 million-EUR 60 million. If you pick the midpoint of 45, that's your choice. That's perfect. That's fine.
Of course, we need EUR 50 million over and above the EUR 500 million that we had achieved already in 2020, and that would give you an idea of the excess savings that we would be ending 2021. The next point, if you now think about 2022, those excess savings, they are not structural. I do expect, as I said, for them to come back throughout 2022. That's the first thing. That is in line with what we always said, EUR 550 million structural.
Now, the third point is, we've spoken about it before, when you think about now our cost base as we are in 2022 and also 2023 and beyond, of course, we are exposed to inflationary increases, which we've talked about. This you always need to consider, as one of the factors that is driving up our cost base again, as it is exposed, you know, payroll costs and most of our business is also exposed to inflationary cost increases. The fourth point, which we also spoke about is, about wherever we go into where we've got new deals, that come with additional revenue and additional contribution margin, of course, we will also continue to invest into.
That's very helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Neil Steer from Redburn. Please go ahead.
Morning. Thanks very much for taking my questions. I just have a couple, if I may. Luis, thank you for your color on the relationship with Expedia. The reality is that it seems from Sabre's comments that what you appear to have done is effectively seen a transfer of around about 15%-20% of their overall GDS volumes from them to you. The last time we saw such a marked shift in market share was a few years ago when Sabre themselves seemed to take a large chunk of volumes away from Travelport.
What we then saw over the subsequent sort of two-three year period was a period of somewhat irrational incentive payments going through the market as the loser of market share tried to sort of stabilize and reclaim. Do you anticipate a similar period of irrationality and incentive fee? Or do you just view Sabre as having a balance sheet that's too weak in order to be able to fight back? Thank you. That's the first question.
I mean, look, we are trying to really increase our positioning with customers using all kind of, you know, competitive weapons and advantages that we have using our technology, as we mentioned, I mentioned before. Incentives are part of that, the content aggregation, the capabilities we offer. Look, I don't know what they plan to do. We will try to do our best, compete with them. They will compete with us, and sometimes we will win, and sometimes they will get customers. Overall, hopefully, we will be able to really increase our share. I don't think I should speculate about the reactions or the strategies of our competitors.
Again, we will try to focus on keeping relationships with our main customers, Expedia being one of them, but there are many. Overall, try to keep what we have always tried, you know, increasing the volume and the content into our platform, and try to really, you know, make a difference with our technology to convince customers that we can support their business evolution. More than that, it's difficult to speculate, Neil, about reactions and competitive dynamics in the market. We'll need to see and as always compete in the market for getting our customers.
Okay. Thank you. Just one clarification. As you went through the prepared remarks, you mentioned what is, if we just take the sort of the headline airline IT revenue figure and divide that by the PB volumes, obviously, this was both sequentially Q3 on Q2, there was a fall. Obviously there's a mixture of transactional revenues and non-transactional revenues there. On an underlying basis, is there any reason to suppose that there's been any change whatsoever in the actual PBC that either Navitaire or indeed Altéa is charging, or has that been fairly constant as we've gone through the last year or so?
You're quite right. We have obviously seen a super strong PB growth quarter-on-quarter. I mean, we added more than 100 million PBs quarter-on-quarter, 64% up, but our revenue did not grow as fast. It grew by 15% because we are benefiting still from a number of non-transactional revenues in the mix. And that basically as the transactional part of that revenue mix starting to increase, we obviously are trending from this unusually high.
Revenue per PB, we are trending downwards. Look, I mean, from an underlying point of view, I have not seen any changes in our Altéa or in the Navitaire, on the Navitaire side.
Okay. Thank you. Just one final quick one. Free cash flow positives in the fourth quarter. Is that excluding restructuring charges or including the restructuring charges for the fourth quarter?
For the fourth quarter, it would be in essence. Look, provided that we are seeing further support in the volumes, we expect to be free cash flow positive also including having paid the restructuring cost. Absolutely.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Stacy Pollard from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you very much. Two from me on the hospitality side. First of all, can you talk about the sales pipelines for CRS and PMS? Or perhaps maybe just discuss the kind of environment, how open hotels are in discussing these solutions with you. Secondly, you signed The Leading Hotels of the World for business intelligence, and you talked about that. Can you dig in a little bit more on the sub-sector, maybe exactly what you offer in BI? How big is that division? How many customers do you have today and who the competitors are? Is this more other travel specialists or generic data analytics providers?
Okay. Let me try to cover both hospitality. I mean, Stacy, I know you ask this question quite often. We keep working on that and talking to customers. We are optimistic about our capability to sign additional customers for the CRS. The pipeline is good, is positive. And again, hopefully this will translate into final, you know, signature of contracts. More than that is difficult to say because until we have a contract, nothing is real, okay? But the pipeline is good. There is an appetite in the market. We are well-positioned. We have a good solution. And hopefully this will become a reality. With regards to BI, look, we offer many capabilities from the BI space.
There are different information and data that we offer to the hoteliers. This was coming mainly from the acquisition of TravelClick. It's a sizable business, has been doing very well. With the recovery now, an expectation about this recovery, this information and data is quite relevant, so we are using that quite actively in our discussions with the chains, with hoteliers. There are competitors, yes. There are mainly more local ones, and there are also the fact of chains trying to really leverage their own data to really estimate the market. We have a broad information that we use, and we provide information about many different things.
It's a good way of having a use case for exploring, for exploiting data that we inherit and we are developing and we are enhancing this capability. This is a business that we expect to grow, and this is why signing new customer is important. Look, there are a number of offers that we have with regards to market information, you know, in the different properties in different cities. I mean, there is a kind of of broad range of offers that we provide, very customized to the customer's needs. Competition is always there.
I would say even if there is competition, of course, is more trying to leverage the data and information than we have to offer that to the industry somehow. Yes, there are people that can do that, but of course it depends their access to data information that they may have themselves.
Great. Thanks. That's very interesting. I'll watch that space.
Thank you. The next question comes from Neil Green from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Oh, good afternoon, everybody. If I could also take two questions, please. The first one on broader air travel market recovery. We've heard from IAG this morning, for example, stressing the pace of recovery on the transatlantic. As Asia opens up more slowly and in a quite a fragmented fashion, I'm just interested in the early feel that you're getting for the pace of recovery and the bookings coming in on Asia international routes. Are we seeing a similar velocity to when the transatlantic announcements were made, or is there a more cautious approach to booking international travel in Asia? Then the second question on the R&D side. Till, you mentioned selectivity, which has been clear over the past eighteen months.
I guess as we get closer to the market properly recovering, I'd love to understand your thoughts on what the most appropriate level for R&D for the business is in 2022, 2023, particularly as your balance sheet is strong and some of your competitors are challenged, whether that's as a proportion of revenue or indeed in absolute terms. Thank you.
Okay. Let me start with Asia. I mean, as you know well, as you've seen the figures and it has been reported, broadly, by different sources, Asia has been well behind the rest of the world in terms of recovery. The main recovery was still happening in the domestic market. I mean, you probably have seen the figures of China. India is also coming back, after months where the situation was quite difficult. International traffic is still small. It is also true what you mentioned, that there are countries that are talking or announcing opening of borders, and this should slowly start improving the situation. It's true, we have seen an improvement in Asia, but it's still lagging well behind the rest of the world.
We see some improvement overall, also in the international traffic, but again, well behind what is happening in the rest of the regions that the levels have been recovering much faster. It is clear that Asia, as soon as Asia recovers, I would say this is the main pending region of the world and also in international traffic to really bring our figures to a stronger rate than what we see today. The trend is positive. We see improvements every week. But look, like always, things may happen and decisions may take us back. But for the time being, the evolution of Asia is positive, and this is the main hope, that it replicates what has happened in the other areas.
With regards to R&D, look, R&D is a subject of many different things. Of course, we have the core technology that we need to keep and the maintenance of our solutions. We have some transversal projects, being the biggest one, our migration to the cloud that we have announced to you. Then you have big customer projects. Of course, success that we may have. Of course, part of that will depend on how successful we are in getting additional customers into our business. I would say, look, we were selective, it's true.
We review what we were doing, and we took some decisions, but I will say more than talking about the specific numbers for R&D will depend a little bit on the evolution of the business. We have kept all the investments that we consider were needed for the company. We are going to really keep the transversal projects. Again, as we said, cloud being one important part of that. Then depending on the evolution of our customers' needs and the demand that we see, this part may vary in the future. Again, as a technology company, investment in R&D will be, has been, and will be fundamental for our future.
Thanks, Luis.
Thank you. The next question comes from Sven Merkt from Barclays. Please go ahead.
Great. Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my questions. Over the last number of years, some airlines moved away from full content agreements, and I was just wondering if you could help us with what currently the proportion of bookings is that is coming through full content agreements. Then my second question is just on the mix of travel agent. Could you maybe comment how this is evolving and how this might be different from pre-COVID? Thank you.
I mean, look, I wanna talk about the full content agreement per se. I mean, you have seen the amount of deals that we signed with airlines. Some of them include, I mean, different agreements for different aggregation methods with NDC, with EDIFACT. I mean, our goal, of course, is to have content available in our platform, and try to really have that as an offer to the different, you know, consumers of this content, being travel agencies, being corporations, or the meta search or all the players that are part of this industry. We keep working with all the airlines, in engaging with them, in providing them the right technology of our aggregation. And this is what we do and continuously, this is an ongoing process.
Of course, things evolve, and there are different deals around the world that we have with different carriers.
On the travel agency mix, just to remind you, Sven, historically, 30% came through TMC, 30% through online travel agencies and 40% through retail agencies. During the pandemic, we saw this mix, this historic mix from 2019, shifting more towards the online travel agencies. They took a higher share also related to the itineraries that were actually booked there. We have seen quarter-on-quarter that this mix started to shift more towards the historic mix. Also within the last quarter, basically month-on-month, we've seen that this you know shift continued. You know, over the longer term, I do think that all of those three travel agencies play a key role in providing services.
also the retail travel agencies, which saw a strong rebound, actually for leisure, for the consumer, will continue to play a significant role.
It is helpful. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Michael Briest from UBS. Please go ahead.
Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon. Too for me as well. Just on Etihad, obviously, it's a major win for you. Can you talk a little bit about the timing of the project starting, when you expect it to complete? Obviously, with the industry in a pretty tough position, have you sort of changed payment terms? Should we expect working capital to maybe be sort of larger going forwards as airlines perhaps get longer payment terms on these sort of migrations? Secondly, Till, on the bad debt provisions, I think at the end of last year, it was EUR 174 million. We haven't had an update since. Can you talk about how that's trended?
Are you beginning to bring that, sort of balance down as the market outlook gets better, or has it continued to expand? Thank you.
Yeah, let me take that question first, the bad debt one. Look, we've only recorded a relatively small bad debt increase in the quarter. Look, I mean, what are we observing? I mean, obviously, we feel in the interaction with our customers and which includes obviously also the collection side, there's stabilization and improvement. Hence from a provisioning point of view, we felt that there was less of a need to basically increase that bad debt provision at the rate we've done in the quarters before. In that regard, I am actually. I'm just confirming we've seen actually a small increase only in the bad debt provision.
I would also expect that with travel volumes and travel recovery, that obviously also the airlines will significantly benefit from that. This will help the recovery of the entire ecosystem.
Hello. With regards to Etihad, we have disclosed what we can disclose. Unfortunately, we cannot tell you in this case exact dates, but you could expect, I mean, we are already working. We have started to work in the migration and working with our teams. You should expect a normal timing that usually takes for other migrations, but we cannot disclose terms and dates about that, unfortunately in this case.
More generally, can you say something about payment terms on any, you know, or generally around your airline IT contracts? Have they become longer because of the industry situation or as they were pre-crisis?
No, no. I would say nothing really changing compared to what we had before. No, not really. I mean, look, as you know, our contract terms are pretty long. But if you talk about payment conditions and negotiation with customers in general, I mean look, during the pandemic, yes, we had some renegotiation of payment terms, but that was mainly for short-term situation rather than really a structural situation with them. I would not expect a change in relation to that. We had that one-off impact. And we had these renegotiations mainly, I would say, much more in 2020 than 2021. This should come to an end as things are recovering. Nothing really structural medium-term was more really a short-term impact.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Victor Cheng from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions, two if I may. Maybe first of all, we increasingly see a trend where, you know, over the last few months, where not only just Tier 1 airlines, but also, you know, a few Tier 2, 3 airlines starting to add surcharges to indirect channels. I understand there's obviously very minimal impact to actual bookings right now. But can you provide more color on your long-term market perspective and how you can, you know, offset this through potentially other offerings? And then secondly, on IT solutions, can you help bridge the gap between, you know, the high PBs recovery and the higher revenue per booking versus the slower IT revenue recovery in Q3? Thank you.
I'm not sure I followed the second piece. If it is how the mix or the average PB fee, feel.
Yeah, I can walk you through the mix effects, both for revenue per booking and equally the same on the PB side. Let me just get started on the revenue per booking. You have seen that our third quarter revenue per booking was actually positive relative to the third quarter of 2019. A couple of comments in relation to that. Let me first distinguish our core underlying revenue per booking declined at a single-digit percentage rate compared to 2019. Which was driven by a higher weight of local bookings in the mix. Okay? However, the non-booking revenue caption, so the revenues that are not transacted, that are not booking related, outperformed the booking revenue.
That produced this positive effect that you could see the 1.8% growth in terms of revenue per booking. Okay? That's the key thing. Now, what do I expect? We have seen actually that the mix, albeit still elevated in terms of local bookings, compared to 2019, it has started to improve. The international and the regional bookings started to take a higher weight, which is obviously supporting the mix. What do I expect for the fourth quarter to just deal with that as well? I do expect in the fourth quarter that we are gonna see, in comparison to 2019 fourth quarter, a decline still by the higher weight of the local bookings.
Again, as the mix, basically a volume shift, I do expect that to improve further. Now, if I shift to the PB side, we have seen that revenue per PB from an abnormally high level started to go down. Again, I've tried to explain that in my previous answer, it is a function of very strong PB growth, and the revenues that are not transactional, not linked to PBs, like revenues from services, Airport IT, and others, were obviously not growing as fast as the PB passengers boarded growth was. That created basically that reduction in revenue per PBs.
Again, let me now conclude, we are still in the third quarter substantially higher than what we had seen in 2019. Therefore, my guidance is as we go forward in the fourth quarter, and as basically we are adding further passengers boarded volumes, and they continue to recover, the weight of these non-transactional revenues over total revenue continues to decrease. Therefore, we expect that the revenue per PB also continues to trend downwards more towards the 2019 levels. It's basically a normalization that's taking place.
With regards to the first part, which, if I understood properly, was related to the surcharges of some airlines. I mean, look, again, this is not new. Airlines have always tried to really push as much as possible to the direct sales. In some cases, creating different offers or different solutions, and sometimes with different pricing, because at the end, it's a different pricing between different channels. That's, you know, the decision of the airlines. We respect that. Of course, this is a commercial decision.
We don't feel this is the best approach to really have a different pricing in the indirect channel, because the indirect channel is bringing value, and what we need to do is to continuously work with airlines to really convince them on how we can optimize and improve the technology and the capabilities of the indirect channel versus the direct channel. Saying that, of course, each airline may have their own strategy and their own profile about how they want to deal with the different channels moving forward. Again, not new things. I would expect some airlines will continue doing that and others will not.
Got it. Thank you. Thank you. The next question comes from Guillaume Sampaio from CaixaBank CIB. Please go ahead.
Hello. Thank you for taking my questions. So three for me. The first one, the airline implement NDC, how it's been, I mean, generally, the upgrades and the interest in your LPA NDC model? Second one, market share gains across all regions have been mentioned. These are a function of greater aggressiveness than the peers or a generally better competitive environment. Third one, are there any corporate travel demand recovery references that you can provide? Thank you.
We struggle a little bit to understand you, but let me try to see. I mean, look, the second question I understand was about market share, the main reason. Look, like always, there is no one single reason. We try to really convince customers. I think technology is an important piece of that. As we mentioned before, the integration of the content and the fact that we act and support our customers. But again, it's not a single matter. We try to do that. Sometimes we have an acceleration, sometimes it's a bit less, depending on the movements of the customer.
This is an ongoing process with a lot of work from the people on the ground, plus the fact of integrating the content, the technology, and working with the customers. More than that is difficult to really explain, because look, I have the full respect to, also to my competitors that are also part of this competitive environment. Sometimes, as I mentioned before, we win, and sometimes we lose. Overall, of course, our target is to really keep increasing our share and the volumes in our platform. I didn't get exactly the other two questions, to be honest. I don't know, in the first one you were talking about NDC.
Yes. Airlines have been implementing NDC, and we've been talking a lot about new wins on the distribution side, but less about the LPA NDC model, especially still, recently.
Okay.
If you can comment a bit on how has been the uptake and your conversations around these LPA NDC models with airlines.
Yeah. I mean, look, no, it's okay. We also talk about that. I mean, if I was referring to Etihad, I mean, look, we have both. We talk more about the distribution piece because it has you know different dynamics there when we talk about the way to aggregate content. Of course the NDC capabilities that we offer as part of our IT solution is a given and many airlines are taking as part of their portfolio our solution of NDC technology as an IT provider, okay? Yes, the uptake is relevant and many airlines are using that. Some others may use you know other people like in any one of our modules that we are offering.
Of course, the integration of our NDC, of IT, the integration of NDC for the distribution piece, and the core technology of the PSS is a big advantage in our offering, as with the rest of the functionalities that that we are offering to the industry because of the full integration of our solutions. Yes, I mean, look, we are being successful on that front, yes, for the IT piece.
Your third question.
Okay.
Was about corporate travel or?
The third one was-
Right. Yes.
Fine, yeah.
Yes. If there's any reference that you can provide regarding the pace of the recovery in corporate travel?
Let me start, but Till, if you want to provide any color. This is happening. And again, we see that at the beginning of the pandemic, it was mainly leisure driving, you know, the recovery. But as the quarters and the months have evolved, business travel has also came back. It's still not at the levels of 2019 in terms of mix, because again, what we track is a mix of travel agencies more than the purpose of the trip. But it's coming back more towards normality as months are evolving.
I mean, again, beginning was domestic and leisure, and then both international and business are being an increasing piece of the total bookings that we have today as volumes increase and start to really come back to normality in some parts of the world.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you. The next question comes from Paul Kratz from Jefferies. Go ahead.
Hi. Thank you very much for letting me put some questions on. Just maybe two questions on my end. I mean, you know, we've seen you guys have really good momentum on NDC, I guess, particularly in the U.S. as well, and obviously outside of that. I guess it'd be helpful to just kind of understand, you know, with the ramp of these contracts, should we start to think of unit revenue in your distribution business as potentially, you know, looking a bit more deflationary versus maybe flat to maybe sometimes up, prior to the pandemic? And maybe could you also help us understand the unit economics of these contracts on NDC?
You know, as you get more volumes, is there some give or take, I guess, at the level of gross profit, that maybe changed a little bit the way you think about that business? Thanks.
Okay. Look, I think we have communicated or we have mentioned to you in the past. I mean, we expect overall that NDC will be neutral or positive to us. There are a lot of negotiations and contracts around the world, even not just for NDC but for EDIFACT, and you have a mix of agreements, so it's quite difficult to really tell you this is the way it's going to evolve. Look, volumes will be progressive on NDC. It depends on the kind of airline and the integration of that. So look, more than that is difficult to really share with you. The only thing, as I mentioned, is that we don't expect this to really be negative to us in the medium term. Okay?
Again, the mix of customers we will have, the mix of regions, the agreements that we have are completely different per airline. But overall, look, we don't expect that to be negative.
Okay. Thank you. That's clear.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we have now reached the end of the results call. I will now give back the word to Mr. Luis Maroto. Thank you.
Thanks again for joining the call and for your questions. I'm looking forward to the full year results at the end of February next year. Thanks a lot.