Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today for our full year 2023 results presentation for the 12 months ending 31st of March 2023. I'm David de la Roz, the Director of Investor Relations at eDreams ODIGEO. As always, you can find the resource materials, including the presentation and our resource report on the investor relations section of our website. I will now pass you over to Dana Dunne, our CEO, who will take you through the first part of the presentation.
Thank you, David. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. In our 20+ year history, FY 2023 was a record year for EDU across many of our important KPIs, such as Revenue Margin, Cash Revenue Margin, bookings, mobile bookings, and many more. The key takeaway from these results is that we continued our rapid sales growth with equally sharply improved margins. In fact, our Cash EBITDA margins improved 8 percentage points since the start of FY 2023, moving from 9% to now 17% in Q4. Overall, we are on target to meet or exceed our self-set targets for FY 2025. Today, we'll take you through the key points of our strong set of results. This will include, 1, EDU benefits from being a subscription company focused on leisure travel.
Two, the Prime model, another year of strategic success in our excellent FY 23 results. three, our investment highlights. four, to conclude today's presentation with some closing remarks about our long-term fundamental growth potential well beyond FY 25. Please now turn to slide four, which is a summary of our performance of our fiscal year 2023 results. As mentioned, in FY 23, eDreams ODIGEO continued rapid Revenue Margin growth and sharply improved margins, resulting in rising profitability. Most importantly, we are on track to meet or exceed our self-set targets for FY 25. As guided, the maturity of Prime members is the most important driver for profitability. This has resulted in strong improvements in margins as we have more and more Prime members reviewing their memberships.
Some of the key highlights for today's presentation are: First, EDU is a subscription company focused on leisure travel, and we benefit from the very positive characteristics of both. That means subscription business. It's a well-proven growth model which achieves superior economic returns, and there's a leisure travel market, an extremely large, growing, and resilient market with attractive fundamentals. The second highlight, in FY 23, EDU had rapid growth with significant improvements in profitability, driven by the maturity of Prime members, and we have hit records across many KPIs in our 20+ year history, including bookings being 29% above FY 22 and 42% above pre-COVID. Cash Marginal Profit and EBITDA margin had a 9 percentage point and 8 percentage point improvement since the start of the financial year, FY 23.
Third highlight, the Prime has proven to be a success with yet another year of impressive results. EDU is ahead of implied run rate needed to achieve FY 2025 target, meaning we are on track to reach our self-imposed target of 7.25 million members. A key feature of subscription companies is that they show high growth and penetration. In FY 2023, we reached 4.3 million subscribers and added 1.7 million new subscribers. This is a 64% increase versus the same period last year. There is significant upside since EDU still only penetrates 2.7% of households in the top 6 markets in which Prime was launched. We currently have 4.6 million subscribers in total, and EDU has demonstrated the ability to capture new customers through the Prime program.
In fact, 67% of Prime members are new customers, and Prime is the main driver in the rest of the world for us. Four, long term and beyond FY 25, EDU has strong fundamental growth potential. This is due to the attractiveness of our area of travel. We will continue to benefit from the strong online consumer leisure travel, in which there is a structural shift from offline to online, convenience and desire to travel. We will benefit from EDU's ability to further increase household penetration in the markets in which we currently operate, given the current low penetration levels, and we will expand into new markets, moving from 10 markets to many more. Enter new customer segments and further launch products and services into Prime. In sum, Prime has proven to be a success.
It delivered significant uplifts in profit margins, which will continue, and helped us to deliver a record year in subscribers-... bookings, and revenues. We believe we have the right model, right people, and right structure to seize and deliver on the exciting shareholder value-creating opportunities ahead of us. Now I'll take you through more details about why a subscription company focused on leisure had such positive fundamentals. Please turn to slide six. First reason: subscription models have proven to have high growth. A feature of subscription companies is that they show high growth and penetration over many years. Companies like Costco have shown over 30 years of growth, Netflix over 20 years, Spotify over 13. In addition, major subscription businesses continued to grow their members in the last 12-24 months, even after the strong growth during COVID-19.
If we look at eDreams, we have achieved the fastest growth amongst subscription companies. In other words, we have grown faster between year 1 and year 5 than Costco, Netflix, Spotify, or other major subscription companies. In addition, we believe there is ahead, because we only reached 2.7% household penetration in the top six markets in which Prime was launched, while other subscription-based products achieve, in Europe, 20%-60% household penetration. Please turn to slide seven. The second reason: leisure travel is attractive. We are operating in a strong growing marketplace despite economic concerns, with good growth prospects. Based on latest data published by IATA, the air industry closed 2022 stronger than the previous year. Once travel restrictions were lifted, people have confirmed the strong desire to travel. Furthermore, according to IATA, it is expected this momentum to continue in 2023.
Please turn to slide eight. Consumers are prioritizing travel over other types of discretionary spending. 77% of Europeans plan to travel between January and June 2023, representing a 16% surge over the same period last year. Furthermore, 58% of respondents intend to take multiple trips in the next six months. The majority of the 6,000 respondents have said that they would be prioritizing their discretionary spending in leisure, travel, and food and home supplies, the two things that they can't live without. Moreover, 75% of Europeans interviewed stated they will spend about the same or much more in travel over the next six months. In sum, as a subscription-based business which is focused on travel, we have excellent fundamentals in a huge and attractive market.
Now let me pass it over to David, who will take you through Prime model and our excellent FY 23 results.
Thank you, Dana. If you could all please turn to slide 10 of the presentation, I will take you through the financial results in more detail. Our KPIs reported today show strong growth, with record year in Prime cash revenue margin and significant marginal profit uplift as maturity of Prime members increases. Strong growth in cash revenue margin and Cash Marginal Profit has led to 46% cash revenue margin and 56% Cash Marginal Profit in fiscal year 2023, now being delivered from Prime members versus 40% and 50% a year ago. You will recall that Prime membership profitability increases substantially from the 2nd year onwards, as customer acquisition costs reduce very significantly. As we have a larger proportion of our Prime members in the 2nd year cohort and subsequent years of membership, the level of profitability of Prime continually improves. Please turn to slide 11.
On a run rate basis, we are well ahead of the required pace to achieve our target. Please note that net adds of Prime members are influenced by seasonality. For example, the net adds of Prime members, like in the 3Q of fiscal 23, were negatively influenced by seasonality, as less people are looking to book travel at this time of the year. Net adds increased in the higher volume seasonality period, such as the 4Q in which the seasonality positively influenced versus the prior quarter. While on the topic of seasonality, let me say a few words about what to expect for the period of April to June 2023, our first fiscal quarter of fiscal 24.
Last fiscal year, we had an abnormally high seasonality as customers made bookings in that period that they would have normally done in the January to March period, but were not able to do because of the Omicron wave. Therefore, we do expect to have, in April to June 2023, a lower number of bookings than we had last year, and also a lower number of net Prime member adds. Remember that the main driver of the financial results is the absolute number of Prime members and the proportion of those which are in their second and subsequent years. Therefore, we do expect to have a materially better financial results in the upcoming quarter than we did one year ago, despite the fact of having a lower number of bookings. We now are truly a subscription-driven business with the majority of our revenues and profits from subscription.
Thus, the actual transactions or bookings in our case is less important, and the most important KPI is truly the number of Prime members. Coming back now to our target of Prime members for fiscal year 2025. With the excellent progress made, the figure needed to hit on a quarterly basis from now to March 2025 is absolutely achievable. We will continue to improve our Prime addressable market, launching Prime in new countries to accelerate our run rate further. These factors give us full confidence in exceeding our fiscal 2025 targets. Please turn now to slide 12. As established previously, Prime members are on track to reach or exceed the 7.25 million by fiscal 2025. As you can see, our forecast implies eDreams would reach an average 4.5% household penetration in our top six markets.
In France, we already have met that goal with 4.6%, we are confident that we will meet and or exceed in other territories, too. Ever since our Investor Day of 2021, we have consistently used this measure of penetration over our bigger European historical markets. Since then, we have opened in four more markets and will open even more before March of 2025. The target of 7.25 million Prime members will represent a much lower penetration over the households of all markets in which we will have Prime available by then. eDreams is the fastest growing subscription company, over the past five years, we have achieved compound annual growth rates of 220%, which means that we have, on average, doubled the number of Prime members every year ever since our first year.
Please turn to slide 13. Cash EBITDA is on track to meet our target of over EUR 180 million in fiscal 2025. The growing maturity of Prime members has resulted in strong improvements in profitability during the last fiscal year. In the fourth quarter of 2023, cash margin or profit in continued to improve. It increased to 30%, the margin, from 21% in the first quarter of the year. That's a 9 percentage points improvement. Cash EBITDA also improved substantially. In the 4Q Cash EBITDA margin nearly doubled to 17% versus 8.8% in the first quarter of fiscal 2023. This is an improvement of 8 percentage points, well above the first, the 2Q and the 3Q of fiscal 2023 margins. Please turn to slide 14 of the presentation.
In fiscal 2023, cash revenue margin hit record levels and is 47% above fiscal 2022 and above pre-COVID-19 levels by 9%. Cash margin or profit and Cash EBITDA have improved again this year due to the large increase of Prime members in the year and the increased average maturity of those customers, with more of them being in their second and subsequent years of membership. In fiscal 2023, deferred revenue growth associated with Prime has increased following the subscription of 1.7 million new members over the course of this year. This amounts to EUR 61.4 million. That's up 25% year-over-year. Cash EBITDA, with the full Prime contribution, was EUR 84.4 million in fiscal 2023, an impressive improvement of 91% over last year. In the fourth quarter alone, Cash EBITDA was EUR 26.9 million.
That's a 17% increase versus the 3Q, sequential improvement, and year-on-year improvement, it's a 93% increase versus the first quarter of 2023, which amounted EUR 23 million and EUR 14 million, respectively. Please turn to slide 16 of the presentation. In fiscal 2023, Revenue Margin hit record levels and was above pre-COVID-19 levels by 1%, despite the macroeconomic headwinds and industry disruptions. Revenue Margin in fiscal 2023 increased 49% versus the same period last year, due to higher bookings, up 29%, and the increase in Revenue Margin per booking of 16%, which was driven by the increased quality of our business with the focus of subscription and the strong growth in diversification and traffic customer revenue. Variable costs increased by 44%, caused by the rise in the volume of bookings and an increase in variable cost per booking of 12%.
Variable cost per booking increased from EUR 25.2 in fiscal 2022 to EUR 28.3 in fiscal 2023 because of higher acquisition costs to acquire Prime members and a rise in merchant costs, which are associated to high growth sales and our strong international expansion. Overall, fiscal 2023 has seen the improving trends that we saw in the 3Q, last time we spoke, and significant improvements in profitability as we have more Prime members renewing their memberships. Cash Marginal Profit stood at EUR 164.7 million, an increase of 53% of the amount in fiscal 2022. Fixed costs increased by EUR 17 million, mainly driven by higher personal costs and external fees, both related to the recruitment of new employees, and is offset by EUR 1.1 million positive impact of FX for the 12-month period.
I would like to remind you that we do not expect the increase in fixed costs from EUR 63 million in fiscal 2022 to EUR 100 million in fiscal 2025 target to be linear, because recruitment is front and loaded in order to deliver our business plan. As a reminder, in total, we plan to add 500 new employees by March 2025, of which 80% have been added since we announced our fiscal 2025 target in November of 2021. As a result, Adjusted EBITDA was EUR 33 million. That is an increase of EUR 15.7 million in a single quarter. Adjusted net income was EUR 34.7 million loss in fiscal 2023. Turning now to slide 16, I will take you to the cash flow statement.
In fiscal 2023, despite headwinds and normalization in the market, we ended the year with a positive cash flow from operations of EUR 102.5 million, mainly due to a working capital inflow of EUR 69.4 million. The inflow in fiscal 2023 is mainly reflecting strong growth in Prime members. The volumes between March 2023 and March 2022 have increased, as well as the fact that the average basket size has increased between fiscal 2022 and fiscal 2023. Working capital inflow is smaller than it was in fiscal 2022, as the growth versus 2021 was abnormally high, given 2021 was the main COVID period. We have managed our liquidity position well, a consequence of our strong business model and active management. Liquidity has remained more than sufficient and stable throughout the pandemic.
At the end of March 2023, the liquidity position was strong at EUR 196 million. We have invested EUR 38.1 million in fiscal 2023. That is EUR 11.2 million higher than fiscal 2022, increasing our development capacity and therefore higher capitalization of software developed. Cash used in financing amounted to EUR 67.7 million, compared to EUR 60.9 million from financing activities the previous year. The variation by EUR 16.8 million relates to the reimbursement of the super senior RCF by EUR 5 million and the repayment of our government-sponsored loan by EUR 3.8 million. The variation is partly offset by the reduction of EUR 50 million of the senior loans in fiscal 2022 and the payment of the cost associated with these transactions for EUR 19.5 million in 2022 and EUR 4.9 million in 2023.
I will now turn the presentation back to Dana to go through our investment highlights and some closing remarks about ambitions from fiscal 25 onwards.
Thank you, David. In the next 12 slides, I'm going to share some additional data on eDreams and try to summarize why we are an attractive company for investors, and we believe we have ample room for valuation expansion. Please turn to slide 18. eDreams has demonstrated the ability to grow its membership base and capture new customers, and we expect that to continue as the market recovers. In FY 2023, we reached 4.3 million subscribers. This is a 64% increase year-on-year, despite the industry moving to more normalized seasonality patterns. This growth in subscribers has continued, and as of the 15th of May 2023, we reached 4.6 million Prime members. Also, to note, 67% of Prime members are new customers to eDreams, demonstrating the appeal of our proposition.
We're in pole position in an attractive market and a first-mover advantage. Travel is over a EUR 2 trillion market, and within e-commerce, travel is one of the largest segments. Within Europe, over 40% of the leisure travel market is still offline, and several percentage points of it moves to online every year. Please turn to slide 20 of the presentation. Within travel, eDreams is the global flight leader, excluding China, and we leverage this for our success and in providing a competitive advantage versus others. Please turn to slide 21 of the presentation. eDreams is unique in terms of profitability and growth. The subscription model has been proven in other industries to generate both long-term high growth and good profitability. This is the case for subscription companies such as Netflix, Costco, Spotify, amongst many others.
At the same time, we're not just copying, but innovating, taking the model to new heights and in doing things that no one else has done. Based on our targets and analyst consensus estimates, eDreams has the fastest growing top line and EBITDA in the industry. Based upon our FY 2025 self-employed targets and comparing these to sell-side analyst consensus estimates for global OTAs and subscription companies, eDreams is forecasted to grow revenues over the same period of time seven percentage points above global OTAs and 17 percentage points above global subscription companies. At Cash EBITDA level, eDreams CAGR is forecasted to be 21 percentage points above global OTAs and 31 percentage points above global subscription companies. Please turn to slide 22 of the presentation.
Fifthly, I would like to reemphasize that we believe, regardless of the macroeconomic environment, our business model and track record positions us to outperform the industry. We have demonstrated that we are the platform where customers prefer to book their travel. This is driven by Prime best prices, value, and customer experience, so meeting customer needs better than competitors through depth of choice, the speed of overall experience, after-sale service, and so many other things that have taken years for us to perfect. This results in higher customer satisfaction scores than our competitors. Also, customers now, in more challenging economic times, will focus on price even more. It plays to our strength and value proposition. Hello? Hello? Can you hear us? Okay.
As I was saying, if you go back to my first strategic presentation that I gave to you as investors back in 2015, I said that we would distinguish ourselves through leading in technology that would enable great products and customer experiences. While others may be turning their attention now to AI, given that AI is much external press, we, however, have been doing this for almost a decade. For us, this is part of our DNA, and we have been repeatedly recognized for this. Most recently, you may have seen from Google Cloud quotes, right? From Google saying, "We are thrilled to have eDreams ODIGEO innovate with our generative AI tools. eDreams ODIGEO is a global reference in e-commerce, beyond travel, and knows how to best grow its customer experience with technology." Please turn to slide 24 of the presentation.
Our strategy over the past years has always been very clear, which is to lead in AI for customers and shareholders by leveraging the unique advantages of Prime. Starting with AI-driven teams, with all development teams using AI for greater productivity and using latest generative AI technologies with one of the largest AI teams in Europe. Prime gives us a competitive advantage in that we know our customer, their history, and that they are logged in, so from the very first moment, whether looking for inspiration or a specific travel plan, we know the individual customer and thus have the unique ability to individualize our entire experience, from inspiration, to booking, to post-booking, pre-travel, and all the way through to completion of a member trip. This provides unique competitive advantage for us. Please turn to slide 25 of the presentation.
Six, we are very well-positioned, well-financed, and well on our way to meet our self-imposed FY 25 targets, which, as you know, are Prime members over 7.25 million, ARPU around EUR 80, and a Cash EBITDA in excess of EUR 180 million. Please turn to slide 26 of the presentation. Seven, eDreams has ample room for valuation to expand. This in turn, is due to three reasons. The first reason for potential valuation expansion: well, eDreams is on track to meet its FY 25 targets, and it is ahead of the run rate needed to achieve 7.25 million subscribers by FY 25. Let's turn to slide 27. You see, eDreams is on track to hit the Cash EBITDA FY 25 target of EUR 180 million, of which 84% will be derived from the subscription business.
Let's turn to slide 28. The second reason for potential valuation expansion is that edoo is unique in terms of profitability and growth. Based on the current performance and projected performance, edoo is the fastest growing in top line and EBITDA in the industry, well in excess of our peer groups. Please turn to slide 29. The third reason for potential valuation expansion is that edoo, strong positioning relative to peers, creates a significant opportunity for value upside, because edoo is trading at a meaningful discount versus consensus average valuations for global B2C subscription companies and OTA companies. edoo is also the fastest growing in top line and EBITDA in the industry, edoo valuation, applying global subscription and OTA multiples, implies edoo has ample room for upside. If you could please turn to slide 31.
I would like to conclude by highlighting the strong fundamental growth potential we have beyond FY 25. The longer-term potential beyond FY 25 is huge. Prime is only currently in 10 countries, yet as a transaction model, we are in 44 countries. Over time, we will continue to expand Prime to many more countries. Within each country where Prime is currently offered, we are nowhere near the normalized household penetration of Prime. In other product categories that have had much longer tenure of introduction of subscription, European household penetration can be 20%-60%, depending on the product. Our current average penetration of our top six markets is 2.7%, and we are growing more rapidly than some other famous subscription companies at a similar stage.
Even in our very first market, France, we are at 4.6% penetration, this market is nowhere near reaching long-term penetration levels. Therefore, the penetration potential is large, even in existing markets. Third, many successful subscription programs evolve into more segmented offers by customer and product segments. This provides significant market growth opportunities for us, as travel is one of the largest e-commerce markets in the world, with the travel market worth EUR 2.1 trillion. Overall, eDreams ODIGEO is a much higher quality business with a pivot to our subscription model. This delivers loyal and repeating customers, resulting in a more and more profitable and predictable business. With ever more sustainable relationships with customers, we are delivering high underlying profitability and have huge growth potential.
All of this will drive superior returns for shareholders, excellent service for customers, while at the same time transforming and revolutionizing the industry.
Thank you, Dana. With that, we would now like to take your questions. We will answer the questions sent to us in writing in the webcast. We will take questions on a first-come, first-served basis. We will also try to group questions of similar nature. Should we not have time to respond to questions on the webcast, the Investor Relations team will make sure those are answered afterwards. Let me now go to the questions that we already have. The 1st set of questions comes from Guilherme Sampaio from CaixaBank BPI. Congratulations for the results. Could you provide some color on four different things? First thing, I'm going to read them 1 by 1. The 1st thing is the year-on-year decline in bookings in Northern Europe during the H2 of fiscal 23.
Let me first put a let's say, a context here, because I've said this as well in my prepared remarks, and I was going over the evolution of the Prime members. I said, and I repeat, that the most important driver for our business is the number of subscribers. It is not the number of bookings anymore. When one looks at our business, you have the Prime side of the business and the non-Prime side of the business. We are focusing more, and more, and more over the Prime side of the business, and in the non-Prime side of the business, we are favoring quality over quantity. Okay? Now, let's go back to the question of Guilherme.
In Northern Europe, we had approximately 1.8 million bookings in the H2 of fiscal 2023, which was about 4% less than the number of bookings in the same period, the six months in Northern Europe. Over that same period of time, we had EUR 23 million of marginal profit in Northern Europe, which compares with EUR 10 million of marginal profit in the H2 of 2022. That is an increase of 130%. That reflects two things: one, that Prime is getting bigger in Northern Europe, and therefore is driving the results in a very significant way. Two, that for the non-Prime side of the business, as I just said, we're favoring quality over quantity. I think the results speak for themselves.
The second question from Guilherme says: color on how are the first quarter of 2024 bookings trending versus the fourth quarter of 2023? Well, more than versus the fourth quarter of 2023, and I also said this during my prepared remarks, when one compares year on year, so first quarter of 2024, April to June of 2023, versus the same period of 2022, you are going to see a decline, which was the third question, a decline in the number of bookings versus the previous year. That is because the previous year was abnormally high due to Omicron period, not having people doing bookings, and therefore, summer bookings being moved from the ones that are usually done in the January to March period, to being done in the April to June period.
Nevertheless, what really matters for the results is the amount of Prime members, and we enter this period with 4.3 million bookings, when we exited the first quarter of 2023 with 3.2 million bookings. That is going to make for a lot more business coming on the Prime side, and also a very increased seniority of those same Prime members. You're going to see much bigger cash every day in absolute numbers, and you're also going to see much bigger margin when you compare the first quarter of 2024 with the first quarter of 2023. The last question, I responded the second and the third from Guilherme, and the fourth is: could you give us more color on the level of CapEx anticipated for fiscal 2024? We expect to have a range of EUR 45-50 million in the CapEx.
The exact number will depend on the speed at which we are able to recruit. As you know, both the fixed cost and the CapEx, there is a main driver there, which is the number of employees, and the majority of those employees work in software development, and a portion of that software development is capitalized and shown as CapEx, and therefore, the driver is the same for both of them. We finished fiscal 23 with 1,440 employees. As guided, two years ago, we intend to get to a number of 1,550 employees, so there are still a bit more than 100 that are pending to recruit. The faster we recruit, the closer we will be to the EUR 50 million range.
If recruiting goes a bit slower, we will be closer to the EUR 45 million of the range. With that, let me go to the second question, which comes from Pena of GVC Gaesco. I would like to ask you about the decision of the French government to ban national flights connected by train in less than two and a half hours. Do you think that it could be replicated in other European countries? What is your view about this decision and its potential impact in the company's action?
Absolutely. Let me provide some context in this. First of all, our high-speed rail is quite well-developed within Europe. Actually, if you take within France, most of it has, in a sense, if I can say, between flights and rail, most of it is already migrated already. What do I mean by that? In our results, if we take this law, that for any trip that you can do in train in less than two and a half hours, should be done by train, instead of flights, that would mean that the bookings that we currently have for flights would go down by five, one hundredths of 1%. Okay?
You see how much has already transferred over, because really, quite frankly, high-speed rail has been around for well over in excess of 30 years, right? When you start to think about not only that, but then you start to multiply that into other countries, where actually Spain is the most densely popular, it's the densely covered, high-speed rail network in Europe. You know, you get to something like, you know, let's say 1% of our total bookings on it. Let me turn it around and actually say there is actually a potential upside. Meaning because in a sense, all of those flights, so to speak, have gone to rail already. We could easily offer a rail product, particularly within Prime, that could actually bring it back and capture and actually product more value on this. David? Okay.
Let me go to the next set of questions, which come from Chad Garcia, Schwartz Investment. The first one is: When do you think you'll be in a position to resume share repurchases? Thank you, Chad . We're going to have a meaningful amount of EBITDA being delivered during fiscal 2024. We're also going to have a meaningful amount on top of that of cash creation during fiscal 2024. In the 12 months, we will have that. Although I remind everyone that from a cash flow perspective, there is a seasonality to it, and there is a decline in cash in the 3Q, in the 3 months of December, followed by an increase.
The moment in which we would have, let's say, an amount of discretionary cash to look at, would be towards the end of the fiscal year. At that point in time, we will discuss at the board of directors what to do with discretionary cash. It will not sit idle in the balance sheet, and depending on the price of the securities at that point in time, the board will take the best decision in the interest of shareholders. The second question from Chad Garcia says, "On slide 26, you highlight geographic and product expansion will help you achieve your fiscal 2025 goal of 7.25 million Prime members." Two questions related to that. First, is the geographic expansion contemplated here mostly within Europe?
Let me take this. Let me first say, slight reinterpretation of this. Even if we don't expand to any country or countries, you can see our run rate. You get to the EUR 7.25 million on it. Yes, we will likely go to additional geographies over the next two years, and we could have product expansion in that. I think the more important thing is longer term. Longer term, you know, we are in 10 countries currently with Prime, and we're 44 countries with a transaction-based product. Whether it be this year, next year, or the following year, the year after, there is a very rich, large set of countries to still go to and expand to.
Every time we do, just the total addressable market, the TAM, goes up, and that provides additional set of growth for us, right? That's very positive. The same thing that's around the product as well. The product dimension is absolutely. You know, we can expand the product category and set. We started as a flight-only one. We then went to hotels. We added cars, we added packages as well in there, which is important for some European segments and some European countries. It's likely in the future that we will add in additional products and services in there. Now, like we always do, we will announce these once we have something that is ready and launched, and there's no point in telling our competition exactly which segment or which country we're actually going to go in.
You've seen our track record of constantly doing this and delivering on it.
There is a corollary, if you will, on the, on the question from Chad, which is: Do you believe that which of product or geographic expansion will be a larger driver?
They're both very meaningful and large over, you know, the next many years for us, for growth. Geographic, obviously, the 10 is very big and meaningful for us, extremely. Similarly, you know, the EUR 2.1 trillion travel market, right? EUR 2.1 trillion travel market provides us also with some unique opportunities that we will absolutely go after. We've shown that Prime is a great vehicle, and it can expand along multiple dimensions.
The last question from this investor says: Your number of employees increased 40%, obviously, to support your outstanding growth. Where are you at with respect to your headcount goals? Let me take this. I actually just responded to this. We finished fiscal 2023 with 1,440 employees. We need to get to 1,550, which was our guidance from November 2021. We have roughly covered 80% of the way that we needed to cover, and there's another 20% stretch left for us to reach our goals. The next set of questions come from Carlos Treviño, the analyst of Santander.
The first question says, "Compared with 2019 calendar year, growth in bookings have decelerated over the last quarters from 60% Q1, 45% Q2, 39% Q3, 35% Q4. When do you expect growth in bookings versus 2019 fixed base to accelerate again?" Well, here I have to repeat again the answer that I gave before. What is really important to focus on is the number of subscribers, and that is the driver of our results. Number of subscribers at any given point in time, and maturity of those subscribers, which influences on the margins. As to the bookings, the bookings are going to become less and less important because, like we've discussed many times before, in Prime, it's more important the number of Prime members than the bookings that they actually make.
much more money from a Prime member that makes three bookings than another one that makes four bookings in a year, is a marginal difference. On the non-Prime side of the business, like we said, we are going to privilege quality over quantity. There you have the example before, we have an analyst that asked about bookings in Northern Europe in particular, and you saw that in the context of a 4% decline in bookings, we were having 130% more marginal profits. I think that the numbers speak for themselves as to what is in the best interest of the business. The second question says: Could you elaborate on the reasons behind the significantly higher growth in your classical customer revenues over diversified revenues in the last quarters?
Here I sound like a broken record, but the reason is the Prime members. The subscription fees are classified in this breakdown within the classical customer revenues. Therefore, as the number of Prime members continues to increase and increase, you're going to see higher absolute numbers in the classic customer. The third one: Could you give us some references on your evolution in bookings in April and May in a comparison with pre-pandemic levels? The numbers that we're seeing are good, but not as good as you had in the previous quarter.
Because what I said before, the effect of Omicron the previous year, and we would be expecting in the first quarter of 2024, that on a year-on-year basis, it has less bookings than the first quarter of fiscal 2023, which was an absolute record ever, but it was heavily influenced by bookings that had moved in time from the January-March period to the April to June period. I think it had a significant catch-up effect from bookings not done earlier in the year. The next set of questions come from Andrew Ross, the analyst from Barclays. The first one says: Are you happy with consensus Cash EBITDA of EUR 123 million in fiscal 2024 with 5.9 Prime members?
Happiness, I used to have a teacher in university that said, "Happiness is a positive cash flow." And I can expand it to happiness is a meaningful amount of Prime members being added. I think we will be happy in fiscal 2024. Look, we are sitting at EUR 84.4 million of Cash EBITDA, fiscal 2023. We have an explicit guidance out there for a two-year term of EUR 180 million, which is more than doubling from today's numbers. In fiscal 2024, we're going to cover a good portion of that gap between 84 and 180. you know, let me just stay prudent on the numbers.
Only probably to reiterate that this mentioned team has always met or exceeded every guidance target that we've given. We have the same intention for the guidance of fiscal 25, even after all of the things that have happened since November of 2021 when we gave that target, which include wars, pandemics, inflations, and all other sorts of macroeconomic shocks. We continue to deliver. The second question says: Can you please talk about any changes to retention or churn rates for Prime during fiscal 24? We're not seeing anything different in the last months, last two, three months, versus what we were seeing before. I will talk about relative stability in that front.
The third one, I'm not going to answer because it's repetitive, because it asks about why bookings are not expected to grow in the Q1. I'm going to move on to the next set of questions, which come from Pratyush Rastogi from Farrer Wealth Advisors, and it says: Congrats on the strong set of results. What would you need to see to increase your 2025 guidance? Well, I think I can repeat what I just said to the question of Andrew Ross, which is that we have met or exceeded our guidance every time for many years now.
When we gave the guidance of the 7.25 million Prime members and the EUR 180 million of Cash EBITDA, certainly in the plan was nothing of the many things that happened at the macroeconomic, geostrategic level, we expect to continue to deliver. On a quarter-by-quarter basis, we will continue to update you. If there is anything that we need to say additionally to that, we will say it. At this point in time, this is where we're stopping. The next set of questions come from Fred Sundberg of Tresidder. The first one says: What percentage of your bookings are related to Prime versus non-Prime? That's not a metric we disclose anymore. What we disclose is a percentage of the category margin and the percentage of the Cash EBITDA.
On category margin, it is 46%. In basket value is 56%. The second question is: what are your latest thoughts on the recovery trajectory of the average value per booking? Look, it really depends on customer choice, the average value per booking. We are now sitting at levels of approximately EUR 380, when the standard pre-pandemic was EUR 450. We're much better than a year ago. A year ago, we were sitting at about EUR 300, and there's been a fair part of the delta between EUR 300 and EUR 450 covered, but there's still about half that is left to recover.
I have not seen in the last, I'd say three months or so, an improvement in the main drivers on the basket value, which are the number of average passengers per booking, the number of average days in destination, or the split of those bookings between domestic, short-haul, and long-haul. It will be driven by consumer choice as we move forward, and this is something that is really difficult to forecast, right? We don't really know what's going to happen with this. The third question from this investor is: could you give us an update on what you are seeing in terms of the unit economics of year one members versus year two members, i.e., variable cost per member, margin, or profit? We communicated this once with a lot of detail, and then we gave an update.
Afterwards, the last update was six months ago, when we published the H1 results. Since then, we have not seen a meaningful change which would merit a communication again to the market. We continue to be broadly in the same situation that we were before. Sorry. The next set of question is from Arnau Lopez of Olayan Group. The first one says, "From early days, eDreams has focused not on frequent travelers or business travelers, but rather on people that travel once,twice a year and that are more price sensitive. How do you see continued increases in the airfares as a threat to your model? This is in the context of airlines having to spend over the next decades to become net zero, reducing routes and increasing prices to offset, et cetera.
Yeah, I can take it, and then you can absolutely chip in, David.
Yeah.
I would say, first of all, couple things. One is if your premises is that airfares are going to increase over the next decades, why wouldn't customers be more price sensitive then? Look, I think Prime allows you to see the entire market, to feel that you get the comfort of the best value for money, right? So you get the best prices, you get the best customer experience end-to-end for it, and that's what customers are saying. We've shared this with you as investors in our Investor Day and a number of other forums, where you've seen, you know, the level of satisfaction, the reason why people choose Prime. It fits very well within that context.
If that's your scenario for it, that provides a very good, and very attractive, situation, for consumers liking and continuing to liking and supporting the Prime proposition.
The next question is, I've got it here, is: given membership numbers are now a key KPI, could you share your thoughts on penetration? Why should an OTA membership have similar OTA, I think it is what the investor meant. Membership have similar penetration to a streaming service. Not everyone travels every year, but arguably, everyone streams.
Let me take this again. I agree with the premise is that, you know, so that an OTA, sorry, that a streaming service, you know, like, let's say Netflix, right? For example, that people will consume that and use that on maybe a daily or weekly basis, et cetera. Whereas you may travel, you know, let's say, you know, several times a year, once every three months, et cetera. It depends, right? Some people do travel actually much more than that as well. The premise is right. You know, getting to, let's say, 60% household penetration, we're not trying to imply that at all. Remember, there's a big difference between where we are today, right?
Today we have, I think it's around 2.4% penetration of households in our top six countries. 0.4%. That gives us 4.6 million members, right? Just imagine, that's doing it on the basis of we're trying to just say it's only let's spread the entire 4.6 over those six countries. In fact, Prime is in over 10 countries, the penetration then level actually even goes lower for that. Now, think about, okay, France is our largest market. It's actually at, I think, around 4.7% household penetration, our largest market. We've had record years in France, right? We're growing very, very fast. We're still on the acceleration curve in France in terms of household penetration.
You're at 4.7%, so you say, and you're still in the accelerating part, so you're not going to cap at 5, right? Six, or seven or eight. Just think about that. Even if we say, let's say 10%, just think about 10%, you apply that to all of our other markets, you come up to a massively big number on there. You think about geographic expansion. We're only in 10 countries, right? Whereas a transaction product, we're in 44 countries. It does come to, you know, a very, very meaningful and significant one.
That was all of the questions that we have for today. It's been a nice hour. With that, thank you, everybody, for joining us in person and in webcast today. Before we conclude the call, I would like to inform you that on Thursday, the 31 August, we will be hosting a conference call for the first quarter of fiscal 2024 results presentation. In the meantime, we will be happy to receive your questions via our IR team and or the investor email address, which is investors@edreamsodigeo.com. Thank you very much. Have a nice day.
Thank you. Bye.
What has succeeded?
Marcos. Marcos? Marcos, are you there? Marcos?
Yes, we're here.
Okay. Okay, we are ready. As we have agreed, we are going to read again from please turn to slide 22nd of the presentation. I will read all that page. We go, please turn to slide 23 of the presentation. He's going to say, please turn to slide 24 of the presentation. He's not going to read that page. He's only going to say-
Let me just read it just in case.
Oh, thank you.
Absolutely. They can add it.
Okay. We're going to read, Marcos, to be on the safe side, please turn to slide 22nd, please turn to slide 23, and please turn to slide 24. We are going to read the three slices, okay? You can package it up, okay?
Okay. Okay, that sounds good. Thank you.
Okay. You just tell me how you want to do it. We do the countdown again of 10, nine, eight, whatever, and then Dana can start speaking after the countdown, okay?
Okay. Okay, no problem. Thank you.
You will come down, and then we will start speaking when you tell us.
Five, four, three, two, one. Whenever you want. Thank you.
Please turn to slide 22 of the presentation. Fifth reason: I would like to re-emphasize that we believe, regardless of the macroeconomic environment, our business model and track record positions us to outperform the industry. We have demonstrated that we are the platform where customers prefer to book their travel. This is driven by Prime, best prices, value, and customer experience. Meeting customer needs better than competitors through the depth of choice, to speed of overall experience, the after-sale service, and so many other things that have taken years for us to perfect. This results in higher customer satisfaction scores than our competitors. Customers now, in more challenging economic times, will focus on price even more, and this plays to our strength and value proposition.
Technological innovation, including in artificial intelligence, AI, where our strategic investments over the past 10 years have positioned us as a recognized leader amongst AI-led companies globally, way beyond just the travel industry. We have scale, predictability, and resilience via Prime, with 4.6 million-plus subscribers, which leads to business resilience, given the higher loyalty of subscribers, margin expansion after initial acquisition, and giving us a much higher share of wallet of the travel they continue to consume. Please turn to slide 23 of the presentation. Since very early days, eDreams has been recognized as a leader in AI in Europe, always being a step ahead. If you go back to my first strategic presentation to you as investors, that's back in 2015, I said that we would distinguish ourselves through leading in technology that would enable great product and customer experiences.
While others may be turning their attention now to AI, given that AI has so much external press, we, however, have been doing this for almost a decade. For us, this is part of our DNA, and we've been repeatedly recognized for this. Most recently from Google Cloud, and I quote, "We are thrilled to have eDreams ODIGEO innovate with our generative AI tools. eDreams ODIGEO is a global reference in e-commerce, beyond travel, and knows how to best grow its customers' experience with technology." Please turn to slide 24 of the presentation. Our strategy over the past many years has always been very clear, which is to lead in AI for customers and shareholders by leveraging the unique advantages of Prime. Starting with AI-driven teams, with all development teams utilizing AI for greater productivity and using latest generative AI technologies with one of the largest AI teams in Europe.
Prime gives us a competitive advantage in that we know our customers, their history, and that they are logged in. From the very first moment, whether looking for inspiration or a specific travel plan, we know the individual customer, and thus have the unique ability to individualize our entire experience, from inspiration, to booking, to post-booking, pre-travel, all the way through to completion of the member's trip. This provides unique competitive advantage for us.
Thank you very much. We are done. Everything has been correctly recorded. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Marcos. Thank you very much. Thank you. Speak soon. Take care.
Speak soon. Take care.