Welcome everyone to HomeToGo's Capital Markets Day 2023. Personally, I always feel so energized when I watch this movie, and I'm sure you feel the same way. For those of you who don't know me, I am Sebastian Grabert, and I'm responsible for investor relations and corporate finance at HomeToGo. Today, I have the pleasure to be your moderator. Knowing how much effort the entire team has put into the preparation of the material and the organization, I'm even more thrilled to present to you today's agenda. So what do we have in store for you today? Besides the update on group strategy, as well as our supply and demand business lines, we also give you a deeper insight into our M&A ambitions, details on how we approach our B2B side of the business, and a deep dive into our world-class product and technology innovations.
As always, there will be plenty of opportunities during the Q&A sessions to pose your questions to the speakers. You will have the opportunity to ask your questions during four Q&A sessions, either by writing your questions in the chat box or to speak with management directly via audio or video by raising your hand in Zoom. More details to come later. Also, please note, this Capital Markets Day will be recorded and will be made available on our Investor Relations homepage. This presentation is already available on our Capital Markets Day event website. Dear analysts and investors, this, dear guests, is a good part of our award-winning leadership team. My colleagues and I are thrilled to be here with you today.
There are familiar faces to you, like our CFO, Steffen Schneider, and our CEO, Patrick Andrae, and there are new members of the management team you will meet today as well. I'm convinced that they will inspire you with what inspires them at HomeToGo. Let us now start with the group strategy part, and without further ado, I'm heading over to our co-founder and CEO, Dr. Patrick Andrae. Patrick, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Sebastian, and welcome everyone, also from me. If we look back since 2014, when we founded HomeToGo, we have been following one vision: making incredible homes easily accessible to everyone. You should expect to continue on this path for the next 10 years and beyond. The entire team at HomeToGo, and also personally, I am more motivated than ever to make this vision a reality. There are so many exciting things that we are working on, and some of them we will reveal today. So stay tuned what we are up for. But first, let us have a look at our numbers. As you know, HomeToGo consists of our marketplace business and our subscription and services, enabling mainly the supply side of our marketplace.
If we look back on the last nine months, there are two figures I really would like to draw your attention to. On-site booking revenues in the first nine months of 2023 alone are almost the size of the entire company that we had back in 2019. On top of that, subscription and services, at the same time, have shown a growth of incredible nine times compared to 2019. Let's look also closer at what we achieved during 2023 and are planning to achieve. Improving adjusted EBITDA by around EUR 20 million in just one year. Steffen will talk more about this later in detail. Increasing the share of our subscription and service IFRS revenues to 20% or one-fifth of the entire group.
There was something we aimed for at IPO, and now we successfully transformed our company also into a leading software and service solutions player in the vacation rental industry. You will also get more details on that later. We increased booking revenues from repeat customers by more than 50%. As you know, winning of returning customers is at the very, very core of our set of internal KPIs. There are two reasons for it. One, obviously, happy customers, because they can turn into an ambassador for our company, which is a fantastic way to boost our organic branding. And secondly, as you know, we save almost 90% of marketing expenses when customers return for the second or third time to HomeToGo. Let us have a look at our market. As you know, we are active in a huge and highly fragmented market.
That was actually the reason we initially built HomeToGo. So if you look at vacation renters alone, there are hundreds of thousands of suppliers. So for the traveler looking for a vacation rental, it is often impossible to have a holistic and transparent overview of the market, and that's where HomeToGo was initially founded on. And also, if you think from the supply general sector perspective, very few sectors worldwide have not been that much digitalized as our sector. And that is also why, on the supply side, there's often a lack of access to the right demand, technology, and data. We set HomeToGo out to solve all these key pain points in the vacation rental market and for its participants. So before we come to that, let's take a quick look at what are the current trends that we see in our market.
So the underlying trends in our core market, especially for the vacation industry, are various topics we see. On one hand, online penetration. Yeah. No surprise that it's already high, but it's set to still grow from 71% to 75% from 2020 to 2027. It doesn't look like a massive move, but considering the market size of our industry, one percentage point equals easily a few billion EUR of additional market size. And who's our target customer? If you look at our data, it suggests she is around 35 years old and has family. And how do we secure the next average cohort of our customers? By making really sure, like we always did, that we develop services exactly in the way our customers prefer to consume them. So with 84% of the 18-25, 20...
35-year-olds searching on mobile first, and currently only 49% of them booking via mobile, we expect this gap to close to the upper end in the coming years. And that is also why we invest so much into our market-leading, customer-friendly app, especially if you think of our AI features that we first launched also in the app. The COVID-19 pandemic is over, but it left us with one lasting trend: work- from- home and vacation are here to stay. What does it mean for our industry? So we have witnessed, and continue to witness, a high interest in work-cation related stays, because who, who wants to stay in a hotel to work from it? You really want to work from a home away from home.
So people choose a vacation home for a work-cation, which is still a higher increased level than it was prior to COVID-19, where people work- from- home. And despite the fact that vacation renters were already the fastest growing vertical in travel prior to the pandemic, and COVID-19 only accelerated that trend, there are still millions and millions of people who book a vacation rental for the very first time. So switching from hotels or other options they were using prior. These first-time bookers in vacation rentals offer a huge potential to grow our business. And the interesting fact on top of that is that existing users from platforms show high brand switching, which means we also have a massive opportunity to gain marketing share, gain market share. Lastly, and this brings me back to our vision from the beginning, why did we even start HomeToGo?
It is the structure of the vacation rental market. Highly fragmented, more than 95% of properties privately owned, and just as an example, even on the professional side, a region like the German Baltic Sea alone has more than 400 different property managers catering it. And many of these smaller actors are also unprofessional in their digital offer. So HomeToGo, as you know, is here to solve these pain points for the industry and to lead the ongoing massive, massive digital transformation in the industry. So with these market trends in mind, let's take a first look what to expect from us in 2024 and beyond. Our marketplace flywheel, the way you know it. HomeToGo, as the marketplace with the largest selection of vacation rentals, connecting travelers and suppliers, demand and supply.
But as you know, we have not only been very successful in matching demand and supply, we also are very successful in the, in the context of professional software and service solutions for hosts, property managers, and other travel, travel industry players. And because these B2B activities are not only the fastest growing part of HomeToGo, but also play a vital role to the further development of HomeToGo, we are today introducing HomeToGo Pro. So contrasting to the HomeToGo marketplace, signaled with our unique signature color, twilight purple, as you know it, it has its own pro dash and color, polar light purple, that resembles the different brand and products it combines with.
So what we are doing with HomeToGo Pro, as a new home for our B2B software and service solutions, including subscriptions, we are grouping these for the entire market under one umbrella, and this is HomeToGo Pro. So this business unit has a special focus also on software as a service for the supply side, and we continue to invest in new solutions. By M&A, you will hear that from my colleague, Bodo, after me, but also building them ourselves. So today, today is a day where we reveal a lot of new things to you. We also will be announcing HomeToGo Doppelgänger. And what, what is it? A suite of solutions to utilize HomeToGo platform technology and inventory for third parties. But you will learn more on that later.
So from 2024 on, HomeToGo will combine a traveler-facing marketplace and a newly introduced B2B software and service solution segment, HomeToGo Pro. If you want to see how these segments are breaking down, so HomeToGo Marketplace, basically representing 70% of our IFRS revenues, featuring the largest selection of vacation rentals worldwide with 15 million offers. HomeToGo Pro, our new B2B segment, with 30% of our IFRS revenues. So when you have asked yourself, "What is behind that?" We are also very, very proud that reporting for the first time in such an environment, that we have almost 60,000 paying accounts that are utilizing HomeToGo Pro solutions. And this equals almost 200,000 in inventory running on HomeToGo Pro solutions already today.
And this ends up that the basket sizes and gross booking value you see being catered by our solutions are already generated in the first nine months of this year, more than EUR 1 billion in GBV. If we now look ahead to 2024, and think of what we want to do with these segments and with HomeToGo as, as the whole company, we will return to higher growth rates for the whole company, clearly surpassing this year's growth rates, so faster than 2023, while staying adjusted EBITDA profitable. And that means the marketplace will grow clearly faster than 2023, and a key focus area of growth will be HomeToGo Pro, as already witnessed 2023, with the high growth rates of subscription and services.
Besides dividing HomeToGo in the marketplace and the Pro segment, these segments will also have revenues breakdown by type, to make it more transparent also for you to understand what we are doing there. The marketplace itself will be divided into its core business of bookings, our current on-site business, as you know it, and an advertising part. So what we use to call off-site or meta business. HomeToGo Pro, on the other side, will be divided in subscriptions and volume-based software and service solutions. Steffen, our CFO, will go more into detail on the numbers later, comparing also the old consolidated view with how we look on the company in segments from next year on. So you ask yourself, why we are doing this?
We first and foremost decided to take this step in order to increase transparency in our reporting, but also to steer these segments better internally. By introducing HomeToGo Pro, we improve the alignment between how we steer operations to reach our KPIs, how we allocate resources most efficiently, and this results in better measurement of the underlying performance, which we can then report to you in a more transparent fashion. We are convinced they will ultimately help us to increase shareholder value, and with that, reach our overarching objective. Coming to the next topic, 2023 was also the year of leveraging on our very own foundation. We kept revolutionizing the user experience. We launched HomeToGo Modes. Modes is a collection of curated search experiences from HomeToGo that makes finding the perfect vacation rental intuitively fast and easy.
We announced it with the first launch of our first mode, the AI Mode. So if you look at the right-hand side of the slide, you see the first curated search experience in the vacation rental space. With it, it's much easier and often faster than a user search, where you have to put in filters and all of these kind of things. So we actually invite you to try it out on our HomeToGo app today. You will be amazed how easy it is and how intuitive. But obviously, that was just the beginning. There are more modes to come in 2024, and you will get a glimpse on that later. I said a lot about revealing today. Speaking of AI, you will hear plenty of features linked to AI, to AI from us today.
We will also reveal more topics that we are just launched. So with the rise of artificial intelligence in the form of generative AI last year, it just resonating with our DNA. We have been, from the beginning, a pioneer for the entire industry, using machine learning to process data since the inception of our company. So just as an example of our capacity, today we progress more than 3.5 billion photos of properties every year. Read information from them, beautify them, add intelligence to them, to make the experience even better for the traveler. You know that from the past, but as a result of that, obviously with Gen AI, we can now, now do the next step. So what is new is our product vision to become a fully AI-powered marketplace.
With that, we will reveal today new AI products and features, such as our AI-powered HomeToGo Smart Summaries and Reviews on property details and descriptions, or our AI travel assistant. But we don't stop there, as we also boost our whole team with AI. All of that is based on our own tech architecture. We built our own architecture for as an AI platform that is secure, and most importantly, also agnostic to use any large language model that is out there. We can combine several large language models. We can use for one use case, one model, for the other, another. Whatever suits best.
So there's a lot more to expect from us, as you have seen, but we are also extremely proud to share that our experience is already today ranked top in the industry worldwide, and also being recognized by the press. Our leading user experience led us to be ranked by Handelsblatt, a very, not well-known, newspaper in Germany, as the number two vacation rental brand in Germany with HomeToGo. But not only that, we have actually four of our brands in the top six, clearly showcasing our footprint in our home turf. What an amazing result if you, if you look at what we achieved in almost 10 years.
I would like to finish up my group strategy part with a topic which is very personal to me as a passionate train traveler, father, as well as a member of our society, and especially as a CEO of a company that takes its responsibility seriously. We knew that ESG, in all its various aspects in corporate life, has been at the core of how we developed and formed the company. So we weren't at all nervous when investors asked us to be independently measured by a ESG rating agency. So this is what we did over the last couple of months. And being competitive is part of our DNA, so I'm beyond proud of our team to not only have landed in the low-risk category, but we have also landed in the top 10 of the global internet and software services industry.
We have won against larger market players such as Airbnb, Booking or Expedia, in terms of our risk rating. Before I hand over to my colleague, Bodo, on the M&A part, let me quickly summarize what our group strategy means. Current consumer trends support the HomeToGo marketplace, and we are ready to lift this opportunity with our supply partners, but also with our product becoming fully AI-powered. Secondly, with HomeToGo Pro, we have been introducing our new B2B software and service solutions. We were strengthening our key focus area for further aggressive growth, powered by the marketplace network effects, as HomeToGo Pro will play a vital role in the further evolution of the company. Lastly, again, we will focus on growth in 2024 to clearly surpass this year's growth rate, but with adjusted EBITDA break- even as floor for profitability.
For sure, as we always said, we will look for profitable M&A on top to accelerate our revenues and EBITDA growth on top of that. With that, many thanks for your attention, and I would like to hand over to Bodo to give you more insights on our M&A strategy. Thank you.
Thank you, Patrick. Hello, everybody, and thanks for having me in this group over a couple of months now. I started my career in M&A more than 20 years ago. I have a good mix and match of experiences I bring now to this winning team, and I'm really happy to join this winning team. We know each other for quite many years as business partners, as well as transaction partners. So, I've done more than 40 transactions within M&A. Out of that, already 20 or more in vacation rentals. One example was a tiny, but meaningful investment, early stage in Airbnb through my more than 10 years at Axel Springer.
With the case of @Leisure, majority investment of Axel Springer, rolling up in the vacation rental space, Belvilla, DanCenter, Traum, and later sale, sold it to OYO. That was one of these, typical buy- and- build cases I like to, pursue. Since, 2022, I'm also on the, Holiday Home Association here in Germany, and since a few months now, Chief Investment Director at HomeToGo, where we want to move forward with M&A next to the organic growth. So let me take you quickly on the investment timeline of HomeToGo. Most recent acquisitions have been e-domizil, Atraveo, SECRA, and amivac in 2022. This year was, and is, more a year of consolidation and, to properly set us up for new investments. Next year, we will accelerate our deal flow.
The deal flow is already there, without saying too much, but there is, of course, planned growth by acquisition, also by new anchor investments within our ecosystem. And we want to execute these kind of roll-up strategies, where we have one anchor investment and do more add-on acquisitions for the specific business activity going forward. So looking quickly back, as the company has grown via M&A as well as organically over the last couple of years. So it started with the first acquisition being Casamundo, followed by Tripping, Wimdu, and lastly, e-domizil, really to growing and consolidating more demand on the marketplace business.
Patrick just mentioned and introduced our HomeToGo Pro segment, which is more software and service solution driven, where also a bunch of subsidiaries, brands, individual businesses, for instance, Smoobu and SECRA or amivac, are forming part of this group. This is always supply-oriented, enabling supply not only to go on our marketplaces, but also on other channels out there, wherever you can find vacation rentals to book. Software and service solutions are really helping homeowners, property managers, or destinations to professionally manage their properties. Going forward, looking forward, looking ahead, we want to do M&A in both of these segments. There are additional opportunities on the marketplace business model, we, to add more traffic, to add new kind of audiences, channels, to do cross and upselling, for the instance, in bundling it with experiences or ever.
On the HomeToGo Pro side, we also want to massively expand our footprint in the vacation rental tech ecosystem, with mainly software-driven business models, be it subscription as a service or be it commission-based, but software, software-fueled businesses. We see as customers, of course, on the marketplace, the guests. We see private homeowners, property managers, destinations, and other kind of customers on the HomeToGo Pro side in a B2B business model. In terms of geographies, of course, we will strengthen our current footprint being Europe and North America before we go beyond. Summing that up, in terms of scope of our M&A strategy, I've showed you the slide before. In terms of criteria, it is totally clear to us it has to be EBITDA positive.
It will be top and bottom line growth, so therefore, it will be accretive to our overall group P&L. We want to do also more transformative deals. That means not necessarily 100%, but majorities in new areas or in areas where we see more consolidation opportunities. We want to partner with entrepreneurs, maybe other investors. We want to do anchor investments for such roll-up cases, and then do add-on deals on top of these anchor investments, being 100% post-merger integration then, to really make bigger business areas, and lead them into leading market position in their specific segment. And last but not least, as you all know, financially, we have a strong firepower. We have the cash, that we can use on our balance sheet.
We have own shares, and we might even use debt leverage to really make not only smaller, medium-sized, but larger deals happen. Summing that up, M&A, as it has been in the past, will also be, in the future, part of our strategy. We will do a buy- and- build execution of our growth story, so both organically and by acquisitions. We will strengthen both our segments, the marketplace, as well as the newly announced HomeToGo Pro segment on the B2B side. And we will use very wisely our firepower, and do only deals that will be value accretive from day one. Thank you very much.
Fantastic. Thank you so much. Patrick, do you want to join us for the first Q&A session? ... So this brings us to the first Q&A session. Dear investors, dear analysts, now we have the opportunity to ask questions regarding HomeToGo's group and M&A strategy. As already mentioned, you have two options embedded below the video stream. You can either write your questions in the chat box, or alternatively, you can directly ask management via video or audio. Therefore, please click on Reactions and press Raise Hand. I will nominate you, and you get unmuted by the operator.
As long as the operator is looking for the first question, in the meantime, I would actually like to pose the first question, which has arrived to us last week already, and that question is: On the last CMD, pretty much one year ago, you were highlighting that vacation rentals have traditionally fared well during periods of weaker economic momentum and consumer uncertainty. Looking at your muted growth during 2023, and given the recession-like times we currently experience, what has changed this time around? Patrick, is this a question for you?
I am happy to answer. Yeah, so like, obviously, we have, been seeing, like, from our expectations going into 2023 and also what we know from forecasts, from our partners at Google and so on, that 2023 was expected to be higher in terms of demand for the vacation rental space. During the year, this turned out to be wrong, right? Like, in summer, we saw that, demand for vacation rentals was, lower, and especially in some of our key regions, like the, German Baltic Sea or German North Sea. So you, you witness, like, -20, -25% of demand going down for vacation rentals in the, in the 2023 summer.
But as you can see from our numbers, we fared very well going through this topic, because we nonetheless are aiming and aimed for adjusted EBITDA break- even as our number one goal for this year. This is what we are still looking fully confident to achieve this year, despite the setback in demand during this summer. We also see in the off-season now a higher demand, and we expect, like, next year, that demand will be higher again above the 2023 levels. So we are very looking very forward into the next year. That recession and other topics connected to it are not a problem.
Because as we also know from the past, and as the question is also mentioning, vacation rentals have always fared well during recessions and times of crisis, and have always been the most secure and recession-safe and resilient vertical within travel.
Great. Thank you very much, Patrick. The next question comes from TruVenturo. Are the +50% booking revenue from repeat customers versus 2022? Very clear answer. Going ahead with the audio question from Wolfgang Specht of Berenberg. Wolfgang, please go ahead.
Sorry, now I should be hearable for you, right?
It works out.
One question more on the mid- to long-term outlook. What needs to happen to bring your, let's say, organic, top- line growth back to this 30%-35% that you were targeting, let's say, some years ago, as a mid-term growth rate?
Yeah. Thank you, Wolfgang, for that question. So in general, we are targeting the 30%-35% CAGR growth rate over time. You know, last year, we grew 55% year-over-year in IFRS revenues. This year, our growth will be lower, but as said, we will turn into growth mode, next year again. So we expect clearly higher growth than this year. And also, as we always pointed out, we have accretive M&A on top, so that's also why Bodo is standing next to me. So this is something that we always have been doing as a company and will be doing in the future, to also procure higher growth rates organically, but also inorganically.
Okay, thanks a lot. And maybe one additional one. We haven't in detail discussed the U.S. market yet, but can you already give some indication how the U.S. is progressing? Believe it's still a drag on your EBITDA line, and especially on free cash flow, but how is the progress there?
So, the U.S. is obviously a super interesting market for us. As you know, we are working there to also increase our strategic, like, kind of roadmap, how we did it in the DACH region and how we did it in Europe. So you know that the DACH region with on-site bookings, for instance, is about 80% of bookings happening on HomeToGo directly. For Europe, it's about 50%, and for the rest of Europe and the U.S. is the next coming behind. But we also know that where the U.S. is, for instance, Europe was a few years ago, and where DACH is, the rest of Europe was a few years ago. So that's basically the playbook that we are progressing and we're also progressing in the U.S. and make good progress.
Although, you will see that in the relative terms. Our on-site bookings are a bit lower, or were a bit lower in the U.S. this year, because there was a lot of market participants also on the offsite, or, how we now call it, advertising site, that we're pushing on that side. And for sure, we have a fair marketplace mechanism. So basically, looking into who pays us what, and this obviously is part of the ranking we have there. But on the absolute number of on-site bookings, not looking only at the relative one, U.S. also grew compared to last year. And so we see ourselves very well on track with the U.S. also being growing and following basically the footprint that the DACH region and the rest of Europe are already following in our playbook.
Great, Patrick.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you very much. Also welcome to you. Thank you very much. The next question comes from Marcus Diebel. Marcus, please go ahead with your question.
Hi, everyone. It's Marcus Diebel from J.P. Morgan. One question is if you can just elaborate a little bit more on the competitive environment. Apologies, I'm, I'm not covering you, and so I'm not, like, fully in the numbers at this point, but just want to understand a little bit more what the latest trends are, not only the big gorillas in the, in the space, if you see them kind of, like, changing a little bit in their, in their behavior, but also your, your direct peers. That would be very interesting. Thank you.
You want to take the question, Patrick?
Yeah, sure. So, you might refer to growth rates of Airbnb and Booking, as you know. So, HomeToGo, as we started the company, we are serving as an aggregator for the whole vacation rental space. And we work together on the B2C side and on the B2B side, combined with almost every company in the space. So meaning like, on the B2C side, the only big inventory holder that is missing on the HomeToGo marketplace is Airbnb, but we work with Booking, Vrbo, TripAdvisor, and so on and so on. While on the B2B side, we are also, like, working with Airbnb, supplying them with supply, basically, of hosts through softwares like Smoobu or SECRA in our HomeToGo Pro segment.
I think that's important to understand in the first place. If you look into what is happening, and you see in the earnings, some people say, "Oh, Booking and Airbnb have faster growth." But if you look really into the details, this growth came mainly from Asia and South America, regions where we are not really active. And if you look further down into Europe and North America, you see similar patterns.
Thank you very much, Patrick. We will continue with Felix Ellmann of Warburg. Felix, please go ahead with your question.
Yes. Hello, good morning. With regards to your separation of the both segments you mentioned in the beginning of the presentation, and looking at the growth rates of software business and the marketplace business, the question arises for me: will you become a software company in five years or 10 years? Or, also, with regards to acquisitions, will the acquisitions rather be in software and technology or rather be in the marketplace segment? I question myself, is there a development path towards a software company?
Patrick, do you want to start and maybe... Yeah?
So first of all, this is what we set out also at the IPO, right? Like we said, we will transform the business. So we started the business as a meta business, transformed it in the marketplace, that is enabled by software as a service solutions and other services that we offer. As said today, we see ourselves already, like, as a software and service solutions player. Although, yeah, as you see, HomeToGo Pro only makes, like, only makes now 30% of the overall IFRS revenues, and obviously, this segment is growing faster than the overall business. We are, like, looking very forward to have these two sides of the business as we see the network effects working very well between them.
As an example, like the HomeToGo Doppelgänger product suite, is something that is born out of the marketplace, right? So you can utilize, for instance, the HomeToGo front end, and you will learn more on that later, today. You can utilize the HomeToGo front end, for your own website if you don't have a vacation rental platform. And obviously, this is something that was born or was built for the marketplace, but that we can now sell also as a B2B service and software solution, with HomeToGo Pro and in that regard, with HomeToGo Doppelgänger. Yeah, I think that's... So the answer is, we are both, but obviously, like, software and service will further grow and make us more moving towards that.
And maybe let me add that, as I said, the deal flow, I am currently, or we are generating, and we are really funneling into both segments. So, basically, the marketplace brings us more deal opportunities as well as the software side of HomeToGo Pro, whereas there's also more differentiated areas of business where we can add businesses to our P&L via M&A. So we do build deal flow, really funnel into both segments.
Okay, thank you very much.
Thank you, Felix. Next one is Silvia Cuneo of Deutsche Bank. Silvia, please go ahead. Yes? If not, wait just for a moment, and we're gonna continue with the next question, which comes from Ben Kohnke of Stifel. Just to be clear, when you say significantly higher growth in 2024, this includes the contribution from M&A. Would the statement also hold true for the organic performance of HomeToGo?
Yes.
Again, a very clear answer. Let's try again with Silvia Cuneo of Deutsche Bank. Silvia, can you hear us? In case you can't speak with us via audio, you can also write down the questions in the chat, Silvia.
Hello?
Hi.
Hello. Can you hear me?
Yes, loud and clear.
Okay. Great. Thanks very much, and apologies for the audio issues. So I wanted to say, first of all, thanks for the update on the strategy for the group. It's interesting to see how you have moved forward up in the presentation, the focus on M&A, compared to previously. So I think it's a bit more prominent perhaps in the strategy. So I wanted to ask you, what has changed more recently, particularly in terms of size? Are you able to give us any more indication of, you know, how large of a deal you might be thinking of? I think so far the size in terms of consideration has been up to low, sort of, double-digit EUR millions. So, what should we expect going forward, and is there anything already in the pipeline? Thank you.
Thank you also for this question.
Please go ahead.
Obviously, I'm not able to talk about the pipeline. That is a well-hidden secret. But nevertheless, I think I've shown we have ample firepower. We have done single-digit, double-digit million deals in the past. We will continue to do these small to mid-sized deals, maybe also see larger deals. It has to be value accretive. It has to be very disciplined. That's our duty together, but definitely we would not exclude, exclude deals in a higher size than what we've seen in the past.
Thank you very much. If there are no further questions left, I would like to thank Bodo and Patrick. Thank you for coming on stage. Patrick, see you later. I thank you also for your questions. Dear analysts and investors, it is time to take a look under the hood, starting with demand and product. I now have the pleasure to introduce you to the great leadership of our demand and product side of things. First of all, Caroline, a lead on our marketing team that has been with us through the IPO and has over a decade of experience working with global brands. Secondly, Danielle, who has been leading global customer experience transformations for top international brands. Anke, our Director of Consumer Product, unfortunately, turned ill this morning, so Patrick covers her part.
Patrick has been responsible for product since day one of the company, so clearly this is the right team for you. Let's set the scene, looking at how our travel experience, HomeToGo, in the past year.
Good morning. I'm Caroline. I'm a director on the marketing team at HomeToGo, and I'm really excited to take you all into the heart of the HomeToGo experience, our traveler demand, and the product that drives it. We are so proud of our superior product experience, and on top, we have a very proven and efficient marketing playbook. This leads to consistent, cost-effective demand from travelers, specifically repeat demand, which, as you heard, grew very strongly this year, a key to our profitable growth. We call this our HomeToGo demand and product formula for sustainable growth. Let's break it down. We start with a very cost-effective and smart marketing, combining a high-converting product that also solves key problems for the traveler, and a little magic, especially with AI.
This overall leads to brand loyalty and repeat demand, a flywheel effect that drives our sustainable growth, and we'll take you through that today in this section. So looking at the overall need for what we are solving in the market. The vacation rental market is incredibly fragmented. There are literally thousands of suppliers and options to choose from, and if you yourself have tried to book a vacation rental, you've probably asked yourself certain questions: "I've saved up so much time and money for this long vacation to Florida. Is this really the best place at the best price?" Or, "Why is it so hard to find exactly what I need for the workation I want to take in Portugal? ... and I'm booking a huge trip for my whole family to the Baltic Sea. Can I actually trust this brand with my payment information?
At HomeToGo, we solve this need. Looking at our formula in action, we start again with efficient marketing. So seen here, we have significantly improved our demand acquisition efficiency. Marketing and sales cost ratios have dropped 58% this year from last year's 75%. So we're increasingly seeing travelers come back to us directly, and we're less and less reliant on paid marketing. Looking at our direct traffic as a result of this efficiency, booking revenues from direct traffic is rising globally. So people are either visiting HomeToGo directly or using one of our brand names to search. And revenues from direct traffic had a 22% growth in the past year. Travelers are also increasingly coming back to us from free channels, like our email and our app, notably an increase of 71% since pre-pandemic in our core market of DACH.
And we've seen all of this direct growth with notably very limited spend on brand campaigns. Part of our efficient growth is definitely due to our advancements in search. Search is an incredibly important channel for us. As a traveler, it's the first place you start when you want to book a trip. On the paid side, we are incredibly efficient with our search engine marketing. We have a demand buying machine, so we tap into AI efficiency tools to be really effective and targeted with our spend. And on the organic side, as seen here, we are continuously gaining share ahead of competing brands in the search results. So if you're searching for a vacation rental in Miami, in the U.S., we are the first result. Or are you looking to go away to Nashville or peaceful Lake Placid?
Again, we are the first result, and this is in the U.S., which is a key market that we are still growing. And we are continuously gaining share ahead of other travel players. So looking at Germany across HomeToGo Group, our visibility has skyrocketed far ahead key competitors such as Airbnb or Vrbo, and we've successfully adopted this expert SEO playbook in other core markets in Europe. So you heard it from us last year, an efficient marketing playbook that we plan to roll out globally, and we're well on our way. So now that we've officially captured demand from travelers and trip planners, we're delivering a world-class product that makes it easy for them to come back to us. What do we offer with our product? It's very intuitive, it's easy to use, it's AI-powered. We also make it incredibly convenient, simple, end-to-end convenience.
Our customer service team is award-winning for a reason, and our checkout process has all of the trusted payment methods so that you know you can trust us. Of course, we have the largest selection, over 15 million rentals all in one place. There's no more FOMO that you're missing out on the perfect rental for your trip. The best way to experience our brand in action is our app, the HomeToGo app. This key top-of-funnel channel is incredibly important to our retention. If you love a brand, you use it—you use its app, and our loyal customers are reengaged directly in the app versus coming back to us from paid channels, which further fuels our growth in free traffic. As you can see here, we offer a lot with the app.
It's really first class, so an inspiring front door experience with the breadth of our inventory. Whether you like a design-inspired home, historic, glamping, castles, tiny houses, we have everything. A very easy and intuitive map. Exclusive discounts for the savvy traveler, especially important this past year, and now powered with our AI Mode, where you can ask just about anything. So for the remote worker, I want to go surfing in Portugal, or what are some good destinations or rentals close to the beach? Or for anyone's needs, "Can you find me wheelchair-accessible homes in Florida?" We are the first vacation rental player to launch an AI product, and we are so proud. It's a huge milestone for us, us this year. And on our app, we continue to see growth.
Our cumulative install growth has grown significantly since 2019, achieving a CAGR of 90% in that time period for the DACH market. You see again, from pre-pandemic to now, our growth continues to rise as vacation rentals are the mainstream choice of accommodation. Our app is top-rated, increasingly used by more and more of our travelers, so we see them coming back. Again, key to our retention. We've also actively this year improved how efficient we can be with our install campaigns. The ad cost compared to net revenues improved by 56 percentage points this year alone. We keep building up our app as an experience that travelers love and want to return to. Looking at our product and marketplace platform overall, we see it from our data, we hear it from our travelers, everyone loves booking on HomeToGo.
Our conversion rate has improved 83 percentage points since 2019. We know that it's our personalized experience, our notable features, and in the end, the fact that we can do easy matchmaking between demand and supply. We do this by improving AI and machine learning. We have more than 100 A/B tests in running at once with our fabulous in-house product and engineering team to fulfill what we call our DACH promise, observed in our logo, that we can find you your uniquely perfect rental for your uniquely perfect trip. We know that travel is an incredibly emotional and personal experience, and we've built an industry-leading product that reflects that. Here's a few of our industry-leading features that we're particularly proud of. Starting with one, flexible search. So we have a history of releasing relevant features for our users far ahead of the competition.
Travelers book based on price and selection, not concrete dates, which is why we launched flexible search in 2015. Now, notably, during the pandemic, this feature skyrocketed in use, and over 600% increase in people using flexible search. Because what did the pandemic bring as a trend? Flexibility. Travelers demand that.... We saw that first, we launched it far ahead of the competition. Airbnb only launched this same feature six years later. Secondly, pet-friendly. Vacation rentals are the perfect place if you're traveling with a pet. I know that actually from my colleague and friend, Brie. She's absolutely obsessed with her French bulldog. His name is Potato. This is Potato. Potato and Brie only choose vacation rentals, and we see that trend continuing across a lot of our travelers. Almost 80,000 pets traveled with us this year. We knew that this would be important.
We knew that it's a selling point of vacation rentals, and so we launched this feature back in 2015. Airbnb only announced this feature just a month ago. Travelers also want options of how they can travel more sustainably. We're really proud to offer also end-to-end climate tech integration, so you can choose to compensate your trip at checkout. Airbnb is testing this, but they haven't fully rolled this out. On top, we also have green amenities for our partners, so they can highlight sustainable features in their homes, knowing that travelers want this. And of course, AI Mode. In a survey we did this past summer, 76% of U.S. travelers would use AI to plan a trip. We are so proud to be the first vacation rental marketplace to launch an AI product, notably not rolled out by other vacation rental brands yet.
It's so important for travelers to trust us, to trust our checkout experience. So we also have the option for pay what you see pricing. There are no hidden fees or taxes at checkout. On top, we have trusted reviews. They know that the listings are reliable and accurate, and of course, local payment methods, including buy now, pay later options. And we know that once a traveler books with us, the journey doesn't stop there. Whether you want to protect your trip with insurance, add some adventure with GetYourGuide, or easily manage transportation logistics, we have it all. So how convenient? You book a trip to Iceland, you insure it in case your plans change, add a hiking tour, and a rental car on top. It's really a traveler's dream experience.
Now you are all extremely lucky to have the first look at what's next in our product innovation. I have the pleasure to reintroduce our CEO, Patrick, who since the beginning of HomeToGo, has been leading product. He'll give you a first and exclusive look at what's next. Patrick, over to you.
Thank you, Caroline. So, as you know, and as already pointed out in my group strategy part, and what was announced earlier this year, Modes is a collection of curated search experiences from HomeToGo. And these collections make finding the perfect vacation rental intuitively fast and easy because they cater to the use case of the traveler. So as you also know, our first mode, AI Mode, is one we are incredibly proud of, but it doesn't stop there. So this is a first look at two upcoming modes you will see next year that we reveal today. It will be the Unique Mode, how we call it, and the Save Money Mode. They are both built to understand our guests' needs and intuitively deliver an unparalleled travel planning user experience, and that all with just one click.
So you basically go to the mode selector and turn on or off a mode. So in the end, whether travelers are looking for a perfectly unique home or something to fit their budget or searching for discounts, we look really forward to revealing these new modes in 2024. And on top of that, we have a lot more things that are coming, but take a look yourself. So looking back, in May this year, we launched AI Mode on our app as a public beta. Since then, the tool has undergone significant upgrades, and part of that is that it's also now accessible on web and not only on the HomeToGo app. And on top of it, it supports conversations in both German and English, so it's launched for all German and English-speaking markets.
As pointed out earlier, AI Mode provides personalized vacation home recommendations through written conversation, so you know it from ChatGPT, but in a version for HomeToGo. The aim is to offer more of these personalized and better conversation for our top-of-funnel guests. The nice thing of it, it not only benefits the traveler, but as you know, we are a marketplace, combining and matchmaking between demand and supply. It's also our partners that benefit from it by receiving more highly qualified leads and bookings, especially from top funnel users. On top, today, we are introducing HomeToGo Smart Reviews. Travelers can now access concise and personalized reviews based on other guests' experiences. What this means in action is that through the power of generative AI, we are able to highlight key information from past guests and summarize the most loved features of a home.
This feature also translates reviews from other languages and provides summaries in our guests' preferred language. So HomeToGo's AI summarized reviews benefits travelers by providing them confidence and helping them make more informed booking decisions more quickly. But that's not yet it. We're also introducing today, HomeToGo Smart Offer Summaries, so travelers can easily receive a personalized overview of a vacation home and the details of it through the power of Gen AI. And what it means is that our AI highlights specific amenities, nearby restaurants, and points of interest, as well as other selling features of the property the traveler might be interested in. So these smart offer summaries also enable more personalization. They allow us to highlight features and amenities that the guests have specifically searched for and make it a more personal and personalized experience on HomeToGo.
So travelers benefit by saving valuable time and energy when comparing vacation homes, so they can book their trips quicker and with more confidence tied to their use case. Last but not least, and as pointed out, coming soon, HomeToGo is also upgrading our guest relations expert that we call Sunny. So our customer-facing chatbot, leveraging the advanced capabilities of Gen AI. Sunny will not only provide answers to frequently asked questions, but also points travelers in the right direction about where they can learn more about their stay. So Sunny helps to free up more capacity for our guest relations team by answering common questions, but more importantly, also gives travelers more answers more quickly. So in the end, also more confidence while booking.
So as the premier AI innovator in the vacation rental sphere, that is why we today announce our new product vision to build a fully AI-powered marketplace. This will allow us to continue to deliver an unparalleled and truly revolutionary experience to our travelers. And with that, thank you. I pass it over to our Director of Guest Relations, Danielle, to show how this incredible product experience is leading to a key to our profitability, retention, and repeat demand, AI-powered by the human touch of our guest relations team. Thank you.
Great. Thank you, Patrick. You've just seen a great overview of the experience that we provide our travelers with. We are extremely proud to share that our experience is ranked top in the industry worldwide. In 2023, we won both the Newsweek Award for America's Best Customer Service and the German Institute for Service Quality's Award for Best Customer Service in the vacation rental space. Our leading product and service experience, as Patrick mentioned, also led us to be ranked by Handelsblatt as the number two vacation rental brand in Germany. A major reason for these recent incredible rankings is our excellent experience, including the experience provided by our service teams. Our service teams provide personalized experience throughout a traveler's entire trip, across six channels, to be exact.
One additional new offering that we just launched this year is support through WhatsApp in a hands-on, personalized way across five of our markets. Launching this proves that once again, we innovate ahead of the competition. The work of our service teams has helped HomeToGo progress towards profitability by delivering clear value while increasing efficiency and reducing costs. We know that there's a strong correlation between experience and revenue. A recent study by Accenture stated that brands like ours, that view customer service as a value creator rather than a cost center, experience a 3.5x greater revenue growth, and we've seen that in our own experience. Interactions with our service team have a positive impact on key profitability metrics, including retention. Guests that contact us are 3.9x more likely to return. Conversion.
We've seen an 18% year-over-year increase in conversion of guests that contact us. And basket size. Guests that contact us and then book with us have a 1.2x higher basket size than guests that don't contact us. Travelers are also very likely to recommend our positive experience to a friend, ranking us with a very high net promoter score, or NPS, of 58. And all of these outcomes have been achieved while we've been driving down our operating costs consistently year-over-year. So we see the positive impact of our experience, not only in our worldwide rankings, not only in our numbers, but also in what our travelers tell us.
Travelers not only love our wide selection of vacation rentals, but also that we believe in price transparency, something that's been core to our business model since the beginning in the EU, and is something that we're currently rolling out across the entire U.S. But in spite of our large selection, travelers also like that we still provide personalized and tailored accommodations and recommendations for their own use cases. This traveler, in particular, loves our wide selection of pet-friendly accommodations in every region, which is great news for Potato. And finally, our exceptional end-to-end journey enables us to truly deliver on our brand promise and ensure everyone can find their dream vacation rental. So how does all of this experience lead to brand loyalty? Well, it leads to brand loyalty through a growth in repeat bookings and an increase in customer lifetime value.
If you look at the graph on the left, you can see that our repeat booking rate for on-site customers has grown consistently year-over-year, which translates into a higher customer lifetime value. This contributes to profitability in two ways. First, we see an overall increase in customer lifetime value, which means the revenue from the first booking is higher. And second, as more travelers are naturally driven to return to the platform, the overall customer lifetime value increases. Ultimately, this increase in brand loyalty drives sustainable growth. As repeat demand increases, we benefit by needing substantially less marketing costs to drive bookings. This year, the marketing cost for a customer with more than one past booking was up to 88% lower compared to a first-time customer. And from 2018 to 2023, we've seen a 66% compounded annual growth rate. Excuse me.
And all of this goes back to our demand and product formula that Caroline showed you earlier. We've shown you how our efficient marketing, together with our high converting product, powered by AI magic, gives us brand loyalty and retention, which ultimately fuels sustainable growth. So to leave you with three key takeaways from our section. First, we're building profitable and sustainable growth with our efficient marketing approach. Second, our world-class experience delivers high conversion and leads to retention and brand loyalty. And third, our fully powered AI marketplace will only build on our successes and drive further repeat demand. Thanks a lot for your time and attention, and with that, I'm going to pass it back over to our moderator, Sebastian.
Thank you so much, Danielle, Caroline, and Patrick, for this fantastic presentation. Now, after we know what customers love about our AI-powered marketplace, let us now dive deep why partners love us, too. The two colleagues running this so important field of activity are our COO, Valentin, and our Director of Partnerships, Ben. Valentin has been key in the development of the HomeToGo group over the last almost five years as a member of the management board, and Ben has been leading our partner team for the past two years. He comes with more than 12 years of experience, driving growth across various industries. Let's take a look why our partners choose HomeToGo.
It's always a pleasure working with HomeToGo. They're highly professional and well-focused, which means we can reach our ambitious goals together.
For almost a decade, Awaze and HomeToGo have built a strong partnership. We've seen HomeToGo make impressive developments in both commercial performance and technology that has delivered great results. Awaze are looking forward to continuing our great collaboration and achieving even greater success together.
As a fast-growing property management system, the valuable partnership with HomeToGo is an important part of our rapid business development. The passion and professionalism of the HomeToGo team is characterized by innovation and speed, and we expect to increase the booking volume with HomeToGo continuously and strengthen the market position of the office.
HomeToGo is ein Portal, das wir als Sylter sehr schätzen. Die Kommunikation mit HomeToGo ist sehr angenehm und einfach. Ein großer Vorteil anderen Portalen gegenüber ist, dass wir die direkten Kontaktdaten der Gäste übermittelt bekommen. Dadurch erleichtert es uns als Sylter enorm die Arbeit. Die Kommunikation mit dem Gast ist einfach. Auch Mietbedingungen werden einfach und unkompliziert übernommen. Abrechnung ist auch einfach. HomeToGo ist ein Portal, das einfach da ist.
Reflecting on the past six years, our partnership with HomeToGo stands as a testament to shared success and collaboration.
Die Zusammenarbeit mit HomeToGo schätzen wir sehr. Der Umgang ist partnerschaftlich und auf gemeinsamen Erfolg gerichtet. Die technische Umsetzung läuft effizient und minimiert potenzielle Schleifen. HomeToGo ermöglicht eine erfolgreiche Präsentation unserer Unterkünfte, was zu einer kontinuierlich hohen Anzahl von Buchungen führt.
It's been an absolute pleasure partnering with HomeToGo. Their responsive support and deep technical understanding really sets them apart in the market.
We are very happy with the cooperation and fast communication between us and HomeToGo. The first client we have connected received over 800 bookings in the first month, and we expect HomeToGo to become one of the biggest channels connected to us.
Hello, and just like you saw, we are ready today, very, very proud and happy to amaze our partners on a daily basis.
... Why do we do so? Because we solve relevant problems for them. On the demand side, getting the access to the right customers. With so many providers of vacation rentals out there in the market, it is difficult to find just the perfect type of traveler for your vacation rental. But likewise, on technology and data solutions, there are lacks because our partners chose their profession to serve guests. So just looking at the market, we have over 100,000 suppliers trying to gain market access, trying to find customers for their vacation rentals, but that are also in need of technology and data solutions. Just last year, we had a 15% growth in supply in the market, automatically leading to decreasing occupancy rates. And likewise, there is a trend that leads to decreasing direct booking shares.
So there is a bigger demand for OTAs, creating a need for our partners to find diversified market access. Likewise, and just like I said, our partners chose their profession to provide travelers with the vacation experience that they dream of. So a lack of data and tech standards is just natural. Likewise, there are very high operational efforts in running a vacation rental business, so there is a need for tech solutions that are built just particularly for the vacation rental industry. Fortunately, here we are. So we solve both topics. On the one side, we bring extremely attractive customers to our partners. These customers have longer average booking windows. They have longer average stay times, leading to higher baskets, so everything beyond your own marketing efforts. And our travelers know what to expect.
They neither expect a couch to surf on, nor a hotel room, nor the standards of a hotel. We match expectations of our travelers and our partners. Likewise, our partners do benefit from the features and the infrastructure we provide, let it be the mobile booking experience, let it be smooth payments or insurances that guests can get through our platform and that therefore our hosts and partners don't need to worry about. But likewise, on the professional side, we want to enable our partners to be even stronger market participants. And so we can leverage our supply for our partners. We do have 50 million, so we can provide those back. We do build software solutions for our partners that help them distribute their vacation rentals more effectively, but also manage their local operations more efficiently. And we do so for all types of partners. Handing over.
And with that, let me prove to you that if you want to be successful with your vacation rental business, you will work with HomeToGo. Hi, my name is Ben, and I'm running our partner teams. Especially in our core markets, we know that partners working with HomeToGo have significantly more booked nights than when relying on their own distribution or on the common OTA channels within that market. As an example, we took the Baltic Sea, one of our market strongholds, but also one of the major destinations for German travelers. So we looked at 8,000 different properties spread across many different property managers, and what we can see is that partners relying on their own distribution, naturally, due to their lower reach, they are not able to fill their calendars to their satisfaction.
So consequently, you would open up your calendars to the common OTA channels. What we see here in the Baltic Sea, but also in some other markets, is that they only get more around like 13% additional book nights. But would they start selling their properties on HomeToGo, we add a staggering +48% on their business compared to when they do distribution by themselves. This is, number one, due to more bookings, but also due to higher quality bookings, as we provide a very long length of stay. So this proves two things. Number one, we're not fighting over the pieces of the cake within those core markets, but we're actually baking the bigger cake for our partners.
And number two, in those markets, our demand is so crucial to the industry that we form sort of a dependency for our partners onto HomeToGo. Now, I hope you had time to read through these two out of many super nice and favorable quotes that we received from our partners throughout the last weeks and months. They're clearly stating that not only are they super happy with the business that we're driving for them, but also with our general service levels and the way we approach partnerships. Speaking about relevance, HomeToGo is a leading booking channel for many of the most relevant and best-known property managers and softwares in the markets. Novasol, Belvilla, just naming a few of them.
When we look at our internal data, for 50% of our top 25 partners, which are also dominant players within the industry, we are either their largest or second largest contributor to their bookings. And for 90% out of those partners, we are belonging to their top five contributors. Now, this translates into partially 20, up to over 40 bookings for a single offer in one year only. That means that we are a crucial revenues facilitator for our partners and therefore, we're the biggest player in the market. Now, we are not just adding value to them, but vice versa, they're adding value to us as well. It's probably why you're interested in this presentation.
And as you can see in the graph on the left-hand side, in our early beginnings when we started with the on-site business, we were running at 6.8% of average take rate, but we were able to scale it up throughout the last five years, up to 11.6%, by the end of Q3 in 2023. How did we do it? There are two major drivers. Number one, the inventory that we newly add to the website is already coming in with much higher conversion, commercials.
The average take rate of all the inventory that we've added this year is already running at 13.2%, but also because of that relevance and dependency that we created within the market, we also renegotiate consistently the contracts with our existing partners, and we were able to do so by 13% average take rate year-over-year. Another way how we further support our partners is by enhancing their content quality with AI, and this then translates into higher conversion. Three AI power tools that we have are, number one, we're creating automatically a highly attractive offer titles for our travelers that increase the click rate from the search page to the product or property details page.
Number two, we have tools that would screen through the description text of an offer and automatically pick out amenities and put it to the respective amenity list within that offer page. Maybe more interestingly, we have the same feature also for imagery. So if you have a look at the middle of the page, in that case, the tool would pick up on the fact that there is a pool on the picture. It also goes with barbecues and garages, for example, and then would, in the same way, put it onto the list. Lastly, we're also working with imagery beautification. That means automatically, the tool would either zoom in or zoom out of a picture, would brighten or darken a picture, just to increase the overall quality and therefore the conversion on the website.
Summing up, we're becoming more and more relevant in the market. More and more partners desire to work with us, and those partners are super happy with the business that we drive for them, as well as our approach to partnerships. In return, we are able to increase our take rates over the years. Churn is negligible, as all churn partners in 2023 only accounted for less than 1% of 2022's revenue. So evidently, yes, if you want to be successful with your vacation rental business, you will work with HomeToGo. With that, I hand back to Valentin.
Thank you, Ben. So just the same way as we amaze our partners, our partners, on a daily basis, amaze our travelers. What I ask you now to do is please close your eyes and now start dreaming. Start dreaming of your next vacation and of that one vacation rental that you open the door, you get out of the car, and then you look at it. If you now open your eyes, it doesn't matter where you want to go, we have you covered. We are offering incredible places to stay around the world. If it's the cozy cabin in the woods, if it's that nice house where you just put on your skis and you go right on the slopes, if it's you want to go to this classic Tuscany villa with two, three families, yes, do it. We got you.
The same way, if you ever wanted to have that feeling of being queen or king, yes, we do provide castles and so much more. But that's not all. There is a particular twist to it. We do offer these amazing properties with an amazing value for money. So what you thought might be unique and might have to cost that price, we might prove you wrong. So many of these incredible homes that you just dreamed of are maybe available on HomeToGo at a much better price than you many times see it in the market. And it is really whatever you want to do. So if you want to always have this infinity pool with a view on the ocean, where you go with a large group of friends or with your family just to relax, yes, we got you.
If you are dreaming of that cozy evening in front of an open fire, yes, we got you, also when it's icy cold outside. Also, if you want to be a bit more adventurous, sleeping in a tent, if you like it, if you want to have a houseboat experience, if you truly want to sleep in a bed in the middle of the field, yes, we do got you as well. So go on HomeToGo and start exploring the huge variety of amazing properties on our platform. So everything that I showed you now is coming from our professional partners. But now there's a new twist. So we just launched HomeToGo for Hosts, and so now hosts can directly list with us and can benefit of the many attributes HomeToGo has. Firstly, from 50 million monthly visits that might want to book the host's vacation rental.
But it's also a very attractive booking that we normally generate. With 90% average booking windows, it provides you planning certainty. Also, seven days average length of stay means that you don't have to clean every other day, but there is just more prediction in for you. So how do our hosts do it? They just go on My HomeToGo, click on List Your Property. You have an easy management of your listing. You can choose between different pricing models. You have full control over all your bookings, and you have a dedicated service available to you, helping you to optimize your listing, but also answering all requests with regards to bookings. So let me summarize this for you. HomeToGo offers its thousands of partners access to attractive customers and likewise, technology solutions. And with this, we are growing our partners.
We are incremental to our partners, and for many of them, we are already among the most important booking channels. So there's also something in for us, like Ben said. We are constantly increasing our CPA take rate. We've been doing so since we started our marketplace. So being now currently at 11.6%. But there's this new twist that I just told you about. We are now allowing hosts to directly list and enjoy the many options that they get through HomeToGo. Thank you very much. And with this, I hand back over to Sebastian.
Thank you so much. What a fantastic presentation once again. Valentin, stay with me. Ben, please come on stage, and so also, please, Caroline, Danielle, and Patrick. It's gonna be crowded here. Place on the stage. Dear analysts and investors, this brings me to our second Q&A session. Please go ahead. You have the opportunity to ask questions regarding our demand and supply updates. As a reminder, you have two options embedded below the video stream. You can either write your questions in the chat box, or alternatively, you can directly ask management via video or audio. Therefore, please click on Reactions and press Raise Hand, and I will nominate you, and you get unmuted by the operator. Let's wait for a few seconds to get the first question.
In the meantime, while we're waiting, there is a question which came up last week, which is as follows: How does your repeat demand compare to competitors? What specific steps and strategy are you taking with your repeat strategy? Obviously, it's a question for the demand side. I'm sure, Caroline, do you want to take this?
Yeah, sure. So I think what's really key to repeat demand is that you have to have an extensive knowledge of a market. And with our history of a meta search, we have extensive knowledge of several of our target markets, and specifically, of course, DACH. Looking at bigger players, let's say, Booking or Expedia, that have this massive global scale, you can't say the same. And what do we do with this extensive knowledge, is we funnel this into key channels like email, with really inspirational, targeted campaigns focused on local or hidden gem recommendations. Or we also build features in our app that we know that customers will intuitively want to use. And so, as you heard earlier, email and app are our two key channels when it comes to repeat demand.
Also, we've had a 50% year-over-year booking revenue growth in that repeat demand. Notably, also on the brand and organic side, on our key market, DACH, our traffic from brand and organic has also hit 50% this year. So we're not really relying on paid as much as we used to, and we increasingly have this repeat, this brand and organic traffic coming in. Anything to add? Thank you so much for the question.
Exactly. Thank you very much. Thank you, Caroline, as well. There is a follow-up question from Christian Salis of Hauck & Aufhäuser. Christian, do you want to go ahead with your first question?
Hey, guys, can you hear me?
Very clear. Hi, Christian.
Perfect. Thank you so much, guys. So I've got three questions, and I would like to ask them one by one, please. So first of all, on the AI Mode. So, thanks very much for this information. This sounds very interesting. So you mentioned that you have tested this in a beta version. So could you maybe share an indication of how the conversion has improved during testing? That would be the first question.
Yeah. So the AI Mode is a completely different way how people like utilize HomeToGo. Yeah, so. And, as we pointed out, it's a top-of-funnel tool that we provide as a feature for travelers that don't want to use maybe the website with filters or simply want to get a little bit more understanding than just, like, finding the right vacation rental, but also add information like, "Okay, maybe I want to search for the best properties to go surfing or take my dog with me." And so, like, in the end, this is a completely different way how you look at it and how you look on the side.
But we are, from what we have seen, we are actually very positively surprised because, as said, it's a top-of-funnel user feature, how well the conversion has been developing so far.
... And, secondly, I think like, for us, this was also, and, try to point it that out, right? Like AI Mode is just built on a, on the foundations, our very own tech infrastructure that we built for AI. So all of the other things you will see coming from that are utilizing the same foundation that we built. So it's not just like, a nice feature to show in product marketing, which, by the way, we believe, if we look at our brand awareness, like, pushed us a lot, because when we released it, our brand awareness, increased, a lot during that time.
We also see that, obviously, this is more than offering a easier way to search, because you will see now with all the other things that we implemented into the product, that AI will become a very important part of any part of our product. So really, like, in terms of this becoming fully AI-powered as a marketplace.
Great, Patrick, go for it.
All right, thank you. And then the second question would be on your on-site business versus off-site. So I think in the first nine months of this year, the on-site share on group level stood at 45%, while the on-site share is already at 80%, if I'm not mistaken, in the DACH region. So I know that the U.S. market is mostly off-site business, and the question I often get is: Where can we get these 54% on-site share on group level? You know, if they're, if the off-site business, for example, in the U.S. is very low. So could you maybe elaborate on that? Where do you see these 54%, let's say, in a couple of years' time?
Happy to take that one. So it's the natural development of our business model, and so, like you saw, similar to our CPA rates, and take rates, as they developed, it's likewise a development by market. So where we are now as a group, we were many years ago in the DACH market. Where we are now in the U.S. is where we were many years in the DACH market. So it's for us, a maturity development by market, by adding more partners, by really taking care of these partners, of the integrations, making sure everything is just what our customers are then looking for. And so for us, it's a market-by-market effort, that we play, and yes, our goal is to leverage that even further because it, we see it many times being the absolute superior product.
But there with, it's nothing that we have a goal for in the U.S. for next year of being at DACH already. So like I said, it's a progress.
Okay, thank you. And then the third... Sebastian?
Third question. Sorry, please go ahead.
Yeah, okay.
You're the moderator.
Then the final question, on the supply side, supply side topic. So, you say you have more than 15 million offerings on your platform, which is by far the biggest number relative to competition. But in terms of revenue, IFRS and booking revenue, you are much smaller than, for example, Airbnb. So first of all, could you maybe explain this a little bit more? And, how much potential do you see to, to convert these 15 million offerings, to, into revenues to a higher extent? Thank you.
So we see the 15 million already today as a convincing argument towards consumers. So consumers like to have the full choice, even though maybe not every object is yet to be bookable on our side. But it's an increasing effort, and you see with increasing revenues and increasing on-site revenues that it is a key focus of us. We do still have product levers open in there. We want to leverage further our insurance products, our payment products, and other things where on-site partners can benefit from. But so for us, it's also here an increase where we think about how many properties that we have on-site are getting booked and are getting bookings, and we are constantly working on increasing the attractiveness of the ones we have already. Because just like you rightfully said, 50 million is certainly enough to satisfy the market.
It is about the positioning of the properties, and about creating the appearance that then makes customers book, which is our major focus. So from EUR 15-20 million, there's limited upside, but within the EUR 50 million, there's just a lot of upside in itself that we're focusing on.
Great. Thank you very much, Christian, for your questions. The next on the list is Silvia Cuneo of Deutsche Bank. Silvia, please go ahead.
Thank you. I would like to ask a couple of questions. The first is on the generative AI functionalities that you have added or are in the process to add. Two parts to this question: First, do you think there is something that could be hardly replicated by competitor vacation rental portals, or it's just a matter of time? And second part to this question: Can you comment on what AI models you use, and how do the costs work as traffic on AI functions increases? I'll ask the second one later.
Thank you, Silvia. Yeah, so in general, as you know, like, for us, it was very important, always since founding HomeToGo, that we are at the forefront of new technologies, and this is the, like, the natural evolution also with AI. That's also why we have been the first to introduce it and in the vacation rental space. And a fun fact, we have been also like asked by other bigger market participants how we did it, because they really liked our implementation. Yeah. And on the other side. You can also see, because that's probably what you're referring to, that Airbnb has had to acquire, that's how we see it, an AI company to build AI.
We already released the topics because in the end, you see that AI is so fast, it's so fast in evolution, and they're having so many things at the same time, that even if you look at OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman said, "It's happen... Everything is happening so fast, that we also need to look while it's happening, what will be the outcome of it?" But that's why we are directly at the pulse of this revolution with our AI approach. And this also ties to your second question, because our AI approach is not tied to that. We build ourselves our own, a large language model, and so on, because this is not our expertise and shouldn't be.
Our expertise is around vacation rentals, is around the data that we have, and that's our advantage also compared to anyone else in the industry, with the largest suppliers you just heard, and we just discussed. So with this advantage that we have, we can obviously utilize any large language model, may it be a paid one, or may it be even open source ones, and we have very good relations on that part with Google and Microsoft, OpenAI, to really, like, utilize what we need, what large language model we need for which product.
So we can utilize Google Bard, for instance, we can utilize OpenAI, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, combined even, like, we really, like, utilize AI as in our, like, own tech infrastructure that we built as a foundation for all the applications that we build on top, that you just saw some of the first glimpse today, again, not only with AI Mode, but also with HomeToGo Smart Summaries, HomeToGo Smart Reviews, advanced chatbot, and so on and so on. But just, that's like just at the forefront, but we will continually, continuously working and releasing these things because we believe that this is how you do product, right?
You, you innovate fast, you have fast cycles, you don't need big product releases to tell people, like, "Oh, this is suddenly happening." So we don't wait for another CMD to provide you with new AI features and products that we will launch. And so this is how we think about it, and this is also what we believe sets us apart from the competition, and it's also being recognized by competition.
Silvia, do you-
Okay, thanks. That's very clear. Thank you. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes. Okay, super. So the second question that I had is: I was curious as to why you're adding the private owners directly now. I think in the past, you specifically targeted property managers, so just wondering why that has changed. Is that perhaps because it is easier now to automate adding more properties? And what sort of growth do you expect in your supply from this addition, given that perhaps some of the properties were already listed by the partners? Thank you.
Sure. So for us, it's also here, the natural development. Of course, it's easier to add an additional property manager with 500 properties than taking care of an individual host with one property. But we see it as something absolutely essential, required from hosts. So the more attention we gain on the demand side, the more hosts we get requesting that feature. So it's something that has simply been derived from an ask. And then we know that once we offer that opportunity, this property gets on our platform with a much higher quality. It's entered directly into our systems. So everything they enter, we can perfectly display, which leads to much more booking success and a more direct connection with the hosts. So it is something that we now just launched and we make the first steps there.
We see where it goes. Of course, we do have our ambitions, and make our learnings every day, but we know that the global market just consists of a relevant share of people listing directly, the same as you see with Airbnb, for example, right? And so allowing them to also be on our platform, as they request so many times, is for us, the idea behind that. And for us, it allows still to be at 100%, inventory coverage than in many places, at also 100% quality, which is super important to us.
Silvia, do you have a follow-up question? If that's not the case, I'm switching over to Ben Kohnke again from Stifel. He's asking for, I guess, the question for demand side: Are you planning to introduce any sort of loyalty programs?
Yeah, I can take that. Thanks for the question. Currently, what we've done to build loyalty is more work on the experience levers that we've talked about. So, you heard us talk about how we've seen these positive impacts through actually the service that we're providing, and that's something that we're really proud of and is really a big part of our strategy. We really live in an experience world, and we have an experiential, emotional product. And so as we've kind of seen that we can drive these big levers like retention and conversion through the human touch, as Patrick mentioned, also doing that efficiently, and we've seen that as well, that's been our strategy. We have experimented with a few loyalty plays, like voucher programs that's done in collaboration with multiple teams, but that's been our strategy so far.
Not sure if anyone wants to add. Thanks for the question.
That's not the case. Thank you very much. The next question comes from Felix Ellmann of Warburg, via audio. Felix, do you want to go ahead, please?
Felix, can you hear us?
Can you hear me now?
Yes. Please go ahead.
Yes. Sorry. Sorry, I had a problem technically here. With regards to your EBITDA aims to be have a net positive or a zero on EBITDA levels together with an... This also implies a marketing budget, a certain marketing budget. And this drives me to the question, this cannot - is not always the perfect marketing budget. So when you are in conflict with your marketing guys, with the budgeting of the marketing, what would you do? Would you hear to listen to them and say, "Okay, we have this and that marketing budget?" Or would you say, "Okay, our EBITDA target is more important than that, and we would have a non-optimized marketing budget level?
... Question. So like, I think what is very important, if you look at HomeToGo, obviously we budget things, but we have, especially when it comes to marketing, a very efficient performance approach. So we have not like, okay, you can only spend that $1 million. We rather look on how much we want to get out of what we spent. And this is like efficiency metrics, like, you know, ACNR. So basically what we have to pay in terms of marketing costs to get $1 in revenues back. And so this is how we steer the marketing, and this is also how we steer the marketing over all our markets. So there's not just, like, a budget for the U.S. or a budget for, for the DACH region or for the rest of Europe.
We always look to spend the next marketing dollar the most efficient, and that's how we steer it. Yeah. Obviously, we have assumptions, and that is how we build our goals, and that's how we build also, like, next year, our official guidance and all these things. But operationally, we always work very efficiently, and that's also what you saw during COVID times, where we could, like, very quickly scale down due to this way how we approach the topic.
And so if towards an end of a business year, you would see vast opportunities in marketing spend, let's say, you would probably prioritize the marketing over the EBITDA goal?
Now, we said, like, the EBITDA goal is our, like, so like, minimum target, right? Like, to stay at break- even. But if we see that we have profitability that we believe can be spent efficiently for future bookings or future revenue, we definitely will have a look into it. And that's always the balance then between growth and further amount of profitability. But that's actually the beauty of how we steer and can steer the business, also because we have this efficient performance approach since the beginning and inception of HomeToGo.
Yeah, that was. That implies that you can, you can virtually say, okay, if we are- we- you, you will always deliver a zero if you want to, because you can, you can, yeah.
Don't walk away from that, from that topic.
Okay. Second question is with regards to AI. We've been seeing interesting opportunities using ChatGPT and things like this. But on the other hand, these systems produce vast mistakes sometimes and very stupid answers to simple questions. Sometimes you're not in it, but sometimes you just can't stop laughing with the results ChatGPT sometimes gives you. What makes you sure that this doesn't happen to you?
Like, obviously, when we started implementing it, we played around with a lot of these things, right? Like, because we were well aware of these, like, you could say, positive confirmation bias of the AI. Yeah. But, obviously, this is something that we learned in also, like, the alpha phase, that wasn't public, like the beta phase, and that's why we still say our AI Mode is in beta, because obviously, we are, as said, we are all learning still on the way. But the good thing is, so the way how we build it, on one hand, very secure that our data don't get to any AI company, but secondly, also utilizing various models, sometimes at the same time. We are trying and using, especially our data, where we can sure it's right.
We are like obviously procuring to the largest extent that this is like being a truthful answer. And by the way, you can also like tell that obviously like the AI itself to not just do predictions and have their own confirmation bias. Yeah, so... But that's obviously a thing that you need to work on and need to learn also with data from customers to understand how AI was helping them. So because ultimately, we will see that from how they interact then with booking or looking at properties and, and so on, and not just maybe stopping like a like a chat conversation.
Great, Patrick. Thank you very much. Next in the line is Wolfgang Specht of Berenberg. Wolfgang, please go ahead.
Yes, hello. One additional questions on the supply side. You showed some very interesting market data, and I wonder the 15% supply side growth, you assumed for the market, is this really new inventory coming to the market that has formerly been held, let's say, only privately? Or is it, the supply coming to your market or to the online world of the travel market? That would be interesting on my side.
Yes, I'm happy to take that one. So we see two key developments in this. First of all, yes, it is more supply in the general market that we see. Where is it coming from? There is a big generation change, where one generation is handing over to the next one. The next one does not have the same utilization as maybe their retired parents. And so for them, it's also a financial aspect of just covering the costs of a vacation rental. The second trend that we see is that during COVID, vacation rentals have been proven to have been proving such a strong financial incentive. So that's a nice investment case that many people invested into vacation rentals newly being built, and that are now also hitting the market.
This goes for professional vacation rental as well as privately managed vacation rental. That is just on the increase for mostly these two reasons that we see. And so it's actually, yes, like you said, more supply in the general market, also more supply that we see then through our partners.
Okay, thanks a lot. And one additional one, probably the decreasing occupancy rates. Is this something you see for the market, or is it also visible in your collections?
This highly depends by the market. So the overall story depends on where the price levels were a lot in this year, depending on how markets and hosts in these markets developed. But so in some markets with that increased the prices a lot, we saw a little bit of a holdback of customers than traveling rather to cheaper locations, and therefore, driving occupancy rates up. So it's not that we see less travelers, it's not that we see that they spend less. It's just that it's getting distributed a bit differently. However, we also predict rather that there's gonna be an uptick next year, again, with more customers that this year just wanted to be away.
Many felt just the first time, certain after COVID now to travel and go on this revenge travel, that we had a lot of demand, in each of the... In Turkey and Greece, also a lot for tours, so that this is now something, however, that is coming back. If they experience wildlife fires, extreme heat waves, that the Central European market, for example, is not such a bad option to spend time in a vacation rental. So we are very confident on that point.
Thanks a lot for the explanation.
Thank you, Valentin. So the last in the row is Benjamin Zoega of Deutsche Bank. Benjamin, please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks very much. I also had a follow-up question on the supply side. I think you mentioned in the German Baltic Sea area that you had a 13% increase on properties sold on channels other than HomeToGo, but a 48% increase in properties sold on channels, including HomeToGo. So I just wanted to dig a bit deeper into that, if I could. What's driving the increasing share of properties being booked on your platform? Is this due to a greater share of properties available from the supply side, or is this due to a greater share of travelers booking on HomeToGo on the demand side?
I think, particularly in the DACH market, and what we took for that statistic example is the Baltic Sea. We are a major player delivering much earlier bookings, so many times we are just filling up calendars before anyone else can. Likewise, you see that we manage to book properties that else usually don't get as many bookings, and you see that we manage also to get more bookings on the side seasons. And so these are the major levers of why we manage to increase the occupancy and night stay at partners, particularly at the Baltic Sea, that we many times pinpoint as a primary example of what a developed market from a HomeToGo perspective looks like.
Thank you very much, Valentin. Benjamin, there is a very final question then. Just came in, from Marcel Ghazi of Quirin. Marcel, please go ahead with your question.
Yes, sorry for the late raised hand. I have a question regarding the in-app price discounts, because I was actually thinking that there is no price benefits in the market, and if HomeToGo is able to provide some in the app, that's actually a huge benefit. Could you explain, like, how this actually works? Thank you very much.
We agree. I think offering these in-app discounts, especially in a key channel like the app, is exactly how we're going to get travelers to come back to it, download it, and keep returning to it. So we actually, of course, tested this for the recent Black Friday weekend, saw good results, and we continue to experiment with this as well. But definitely a USP of the app is the fact that we offer these discounts, especially for cost-minded travelers. And worth noting also that vacation rentals can be a very affordable destination in general for accommodation, because you can cook your own meals, you can split with friends, and so that's why we also see these savvy-minded travelers increasingly coming back to us. Thanks for the question.
Thank you so much. This actually brings me to yet another topic on the agenda, which is the break. It is time for that 10-minute break. Please be back on time. I'll see you shortly, and in the meantime, please feel free to explore one of our +50 million offers on our homepage.
... Dear all, welcome back! We come to one of the highlights of our today's Capital Markets Day, the introduction of our HomeToGo Pro business. I know that my dear colleagues, Bahira, Charlotte, and Jannik, have prepared their own introductions, so I keep it really short and hand over to Patrick, who will be your moderator for this session. Patrick, over to you.
Thank you, Sebastian. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining our HomeToGo Pro panel discussion today as part of our CMD. As presented earlier, and as a refresher, HomeToGo Pro is the newly introduced B2B segment. It consists of our software and service solutions, including subscriptions, that we offer to the whole travel market, but especially also offering SaaS solutions that are catering to the supply side of vacation rentals. Today, I'm very, very pleased to introduce you to three of our strategic leaders, representing a few of the key brands and software services and solutions that make up HomeToGo Pro. For starters, can you briefly introduce yourself? Maybe, Bahira, we start with you.
I am leading the e-domizil companies and the atraveo product. I joined HomeToGo this year, so in May, considered still fresh, more or less. Prior to that, I have been a partner with Reply for over 10 years. Reply, the technology company. So I come from the tech space, if you want so, and have been, successfully leading a few companies there to growth and, have been heavily involved in digital transformations, both on the business, but then also on the technology side of things. And I'm quite excited to be here today amongst this great group of people, really shaping the private host ecosystem.
Cool. Shall I go on?
Please.
Great. So yeah, really, I'm happy to be here today. I'm responsible for our new offering, which is our HomeToGo Doppelgänger brand. This is a product that is specifically focusing on distributing our inventory that we gathered over the last years on the HomeToGo platform, also beyond our own platforms. In the previous seven years, I've basically been responsible for building that inventory, and yeah, basically putting together the function of supply at HomeToGo.
I close off the round. I'm the Managing Director of Smoobu. I joined the company in 2022, taking over the management of the company from the previous founders of Smoobu, and since then, being in charge of the post-acquisition growth and scaling at Smoobu. I previously held several positions in different growing startups, mainly responsible for finance and operations, and in charge of growing teams, processes, and basically the overall organization. So similar to what I do at Smoobu now.
... Great. So, the reason we have built HomeToGo in the first place was because of the massive fragmented market that we see, right? And the opportunity that comes with it, and all its facets, thinking about what we can offer there, also not only on the demand side, but also, like, offer it to our suppliers in terms of services, software, and other topics we can help them with. And, so this fragmentation is obviously very visible with the different types of players, different types of hosts, property managers, et cetera, et cetera, in this sphere. Maybe for our audience, it would be good to have an idea what Smoobu is catering to.
Yeah. So for Smoobu, those customers or users for us are individual hosts that independently manage their properties. They're really important that they do want to stay in control. So they really like the self-service and self-managed aspect of Smoobu, and really staying in control of their own business for them. For this, we provide a couple of solutions. The core features actually with Smoobu to be in charge of exactly that. For example, we do offer the price and availability synchronization, smart and automated messaging for or across all their OTAs. And for the features we do not cater ourselves, we do have a huge marketplace with more than 50 actual software service partners, where the host can then still stay in control, but also add other services like smart pricing solutions or check-in services to add- on to Smoobu.
The nice thing with that is that also really increases the stickiness of Smoobu.
Yeah, they're very nice, actually. Yeah. So, now people might ask themselves: What is the difference from the customer at HomeToGo and e-domizil is catering to? Because also, like, at HomeToGo, e-domizil is, like catering private hosts. So how would you position at HomeToGo, Bahira?
So I think, first of all, we all absolutely love hosts, and similar to Smoobu, we do operate on the private host, but in contrast to Smoobu, and as Yannick just described, it's a technical platform that is pretty much tailored to somebody who wants to be in full control. The atraveo platform is actually built in order to support hosts who actively look for, let's say, support in their operations and in their... in renting out their vacation homes. Meaning that, and within our platform, besides the listing, we actually support the online presentation and marketing of objects, meaning we work on images, we work on object descriptions, on titles, and so on. What we also do is we really technically enable the online distribution. What we do is we carry the actual booking, and that's quite an endeavor.
We do support the entire customer service, so the guest inquiries, and there might be a lot during a, let's say, booking and travel journey. What we also do is we manage the payment and the invoicing on behalf of the private host. That's quite a large chunk of work that we take on. Our typical private host is actually somebody who has a full-time job, that is very often unrelated to renting out properties, but that is somebody who's interested in the additional source of income that might be connected to renting out. Somebody who might be working towards their retirement, somebody who might already be in retirement, but does want to spend their time more effectively, more precisely, rightly so.
Or indeed, somebody who might have inherited a property and has no clue or no willingness to manage that on a professional level and with the needed measures to be commercially successful across the year. So I think easily said, we're best described as a technical listing platform that opens up the gates to our professional services, both on online marketing and distribution of-
I can put it that simple for the audience, but I think that that fits it actually. To tell us more about HomeToGo Doppelgänger, let's have an exclusive look on what we revealed actually today with HomeToGo Doppelgänger. Over to you, Charlotte.
Yes. So, as you've just seen in the little clip that we provided, the HomeToGo Doppelgänger product is really a suite of products, so it's not just one singular solution, so to say. And, what they all have in common is really that they're fast to integrate for our partners. They give immediate and wide access to offers or inventory, vacation rentals, ultimately. And what is great for our partners is that we provide the full service, so we still take care of all of the guest relations, the post-booking communication, and so that our partners can still focus on their core business. And ultimately, really serving diverse needs that we've identified in the market, and maybe bridging then to your original question, like, what are our customers and who do we work with, right?
So for HomeToGo Doppelgänger, it's really diverse, so there is not just, one fits all or one partner that we can talk about, but we really see, diverse partners in the market or identified diverse customers that we see.... If we're trying to cluster them a bit more, we can basically say we see, three big groups. One is travel platforms. These are usually travel platforms that have their core business not in, accommodation businesses, but, for example, a flights platform or platform or business that focuses more on deals or creating content. So what we can bring them is basically access to, via inventory, as well as the expertise that we gathered here over the years, and, for them to really leverage their existing traffic further. So basically monetizing the users that they already have.
On a second level, we have destinations. The destination can be basically everything, but we can, for example, look at an island, let's say, Rügen in Germany, right? And destinations and the local tourist organizations are primarily focused on really providing the local services to the guests that are in that destination. So what we can offer them is really state-of-the-art technology and a full booking experience, right? So in this setup, they can offer their users or the local businesses to be displayed on a booking platform. And with their resources, which are often rather low and limited, right? Really can focus on the guest that is in the destination, and on top, they benefit from the innovation that we have on our HomeToGo core platforms as well, because that all becomes available to them.
Last one, we look at tour operators and their connected agencies, and this is a real cool new case because it basically opens a full new market to HomeToGo with the Doppelgänger brand. Because ultimately, here we get access to stationary agencies, which is completely new. Those two operators historically, let's say, focused more on hotel businesses. And here we can really add a critical mass that is important to them because they have such a vast number of agencies connected, and they also need an easy access to a lot of inventory. So what we bring to them is really a scalable and relevant solution, and yeah, ultimately allows them to easily diversify. So HomeToGo Doppelgänger product itself is a suite of multiple products and is really an adaptable solution for fast access to inventory.
Great, summary on, on HomeToGo Doppelgänger. So we just, like, introduced it today as a brand, and obviously there are, a multitude of parts of the product. But, if we look at who's already using it, so who picked up on HomeToGo Doppelgänger in the market already, could you give us some more insights on that as well?
So, yeah, I mean, we're really at the beginning of this, right? But what is great to see that we really saw this need in the market, and yeah, partners asking us for our technology and the access to the inventory. What you can see here is basically, we already scaled up and added multiple corporations, and we just recently launched as a prime example, a cooperation with TUI, so one of the most well-known travel brands in the industry. This is really showing the great state-of-the-art of the product, as well as what we can offer to players. Yeah, ultimately, it's also showing in the numbers, which is, of course, always good to see.
We already see a double-digit growth year-over-year in the booking revenues that we're driving with the solution, so that's cool that it's also paying off.
Yeah, that is truly a great start for such a product line. Maria, yeah, back to you. We have acquired e-domizil and atraveo last year. So what if you currently look at the company and the state of the company, what's the biggest opportunity you see and where you want to take it? So what are the opportunities?
So I believe that, the e-domizil companies are a really great addition to the HomeToGo group, and this is, a company that has been around for over 20 years in the private host space. 27 years, to be precise. Meaning that we have quite a tremendous level of insight into our customer base, really understanding the private host, understanding their needs, their pain points, what they're willing to pay for. And, I'm definitely planning to actually build on what made this company successful and expand our technical platform, the software we have at the very core of our business. And, there are four, let's say, areas, of course, that we will focus on in the, let's say, short term.
First of all, we will develop our software further, specifically around our professional services, anything that is related to object marketing, really the optimal display of images of the project, of the object per se. What we will also keep on strengthening is the quite vast distribution network that we have. So we have about 500 partners that we work with, and really holding up to our promise to our customer, the private host, to make him or her available in the digital space, give them the full visibility. Another thing that we are quite, let's say, proud of, is that we run a very good team of people that have direct connections to our host, that we have verified across the years, and that we support in over nine languages.
So within all the technology that we operate and run, we still have a very strong hold on that, you know, human and personal element. And finally, of course, we will expand into more digital products. Products such as insurances, anything that we see relevant in our mission of making the host more professional and commercially more successful, is what we will invest in. So ultimately, I would say, lots of potential at e-domizil and exciting times ahead.
Yeah, really exciting. So Yannick, can you keep up with this? Huh, that's the question. So, where do you see some of your biggest wins of the past year, and what is especially your focus moving forward?
... That's, that's a tough one now, but, I do think if, especially if I look at the past achievements, for me personally, and I now just dare speak for the team as well, the successful growth story overall for us in the past couple of years has been tremendous. So we've not only doubled our user base, but we also diversified our international footprint, not only in Europe, not only in our European core markets, but also outside of Europe, actually, quite a bit. And the nice thing, and what I really like and enjoy about this, we also did it in a very, very healthy way.
So if you look at the top right corner and see our software-as-a-service KPIs, you can see that this is not only extremely sustainable, but we also did this on a very profitable and very healthy basis, which I very much enjoy. And we've came there not only, or by doing a lot of different operational activities, we tackled different topics. So a couple of them you can actually see if you move the slide. So we've tackled a lot of different topics across the years also, and we keep doing this. So we not only improved the product by quite a bit and improved the user experience, tackling retention and acquisition rates, but also invested a lot in improving the organic leads performance of our business.
So, for example, working on our SEO professionalism and increasing the online visibility for us, or launching our own referral peer-to-peer program, so hosts can actively refer us from the product and anywhere else to people who also would enjoy using Smoobu. And then coming back to your last part, how do we actually move forward? So for us, moving forward is actually very focused on two main areas: A, we will keep investing in product, and B, we also use the advantage we have of being a truly international and truly global company, and leverage that. So for the product part, we are very much focused on now investing in the next year to really be able to drive this product-led growth throughout the next couple of years and potentially decades. So we'll launch a couple of new cool things.
In the beginning of the year, we'll finally launch our new native apps. We will keep improving the UX, we will deliver new features, and so on and so forth. So there, I'm actually really excited about because it's a very nice part of the business. And the second part, I'm not equally excited, but still very excited about, is that we can actually leverage these global opportunities and not only drive the growth in our core European markets, but also, for example, outside of Europe, in the United States, in Latin America, where we already do have a solid user base with Smoobu, but we can still grow so much more.
We basically grow horizontal and vertical, yeah, if I may, sum that up. So thank you very much, for all the insights, all three of you, especially into what the product does, what we are catering to in terms to which, customer bases and the brands you are actually leading within, HomeToGo Pro. As you know, HomeToGo Pro is one of our key growth drivers for the company, so we are really looking forward, to its next advancements and announcements coming up in the future. So keep up the great work. Thank you. And with that, I hand back to Sebastian.
Thank you so much, everyone. I'll see you later for the next Q&A. Dear analysts and investors, we are shifting gears a little bit away from the business to what we call enablers, and we start with technology. There is no one better capable in our organization than my dear colleague, Sai, to explain to you technology's role in the HomeToGo's vision and strategy. Sai has been an industry leader in its field for the last + 30 years, working for companies like Hotelbeds in the past. Now he's with us, enabling HomeToGo to prepare for the next phase of growth. Over to you, Sai.
Thanks, Sebastian. So as a 30-year veteran of the technology industry, you won't be at all surprised that I'm here today to talk to you about our journey of scalability, security, and how we're best serving our customers and hosts alike through the platform of technology. But as predicted and fielded with some of the questions in the previous sections, I'd actually like to start my talk today on the topic of AI. Fundamentally, when we approached this topic, as Patrick alluded to in the Q&A earlier, we knew that we weren't trying to do something different for the sake of a product direction. We were trying to do something different to extract the maximum value.
We weren't trying to do something different from the perspective of, "That's what everyone else is doing, and we're on a hype train, let's get on with it." We were trying to enhance the experience of our hosts and our guests and drive the efficiency through our business as a whole. As a result of that, our focus from day one has been to have a non-negotiable approach to certain specific AI topics, some of which were entered into conversation earlier today. Number one, our approach to data sovereignty and security. Our position on making sure that we have a safe environment, free from false information, free from misquoting, and not putting any of our customers, hosts, or in fact, our internal faculty, into any kind of difficulty with some of the crazy eccentricities. We've all heard a story or two of what's happening in the AI world.
Very important to note that we built our architecture from the ground up to be completely agnostic to the large language models available to the marketplace. Unless you've found a rock to live under, one of the many thousands you would need to hide from the topic of AI, you'll all be aware of what's happened with OpenAI and Microsoft, the duel then between Microsoft and Google, all of these large players and many other private and enterprises coming through with their offerings. We need to make sure that we are curating the right outcome for the right circumstance to provide the right value in the right situation, and we've done that at a foundational architectural layer. And lastly, but not least, and I'll talk a lot about this today, around our need to be horizontally and vertically scalable. We are a growing business.
We are a growing business in a really interesting, exciting, dynamic segment, where technology can be the key to opening so many doors, and therefore, we have to anticipate the growth and demand that we'll see and act accordingly. From day one, the proprietary gateway that we put in place has enabled us to create the architecture that I previously described. Taking this approach means that we are able to marshal the data, provide security, provide flexibility, have a very unique approach to extracting the maximum from the craziness of the hype train running at 300-400 miles an hour in the background, and then be able to focus our incredibly talented product teams, our incredibly talented data teams, and our incredibly talented engineering teams on what matters most, which is using technology to create value. On to what you would expect from me.
Fundamentally, when we look at our role in the organization and where we are from a market perspective, you guys have heard a lot today about what's going on in terms of the market trends as we see them, what we have in terms of regulatory changes, and also the demands coming from both hosts and guests alike. The regulatory dynamics are a really interesting one for us as well. Being a public company, we have responsibilities, and those responsibilities need to be handled. But underneath all of this, that we deliver through the means of software, our focus is and continues to be, to make sure that we are exceeding our hosts' and guests' expectations. We invest heavily in the development of our user-friendly interfaces.
Again, as you heard earlier, we have a huge demographic that we are supporting here, all the way from the young and the relevant to the people around my age, and all of the rest of the demographic in between. As a result of that, we need to focus on a huge dynamic of factors that go both into the user journey and design, but also the expectations of that user when they're operating on our platform. All of these things brought together enhance our user engagement and satisfaction and bring more people back to using our solutions, services, brands, and platforms. We have an extraordinarily talented data team. We're very proud of the sophistication of our platform.
Every single data attribute that's transacting on one of our systems, we track it, we trace it, we use it, and we use it to help guide our business decisions and inform the direction of travel. And leveraging that data and the analytical outcome for that is something that we do as a whole company together. We're really focused on improving our data literacy. We're really focused on using data as a topic to help us refine our journey and the direction of travel that we take, and data as an element for us is key to that success story. Heard a lot about AI today, including from my own mouth two minutes ago.
Fundamentally, the direction that we've come in from the start, especially when you look at topics like machine learning, our search engine, the meta journey that this company has come from to where we are now as a leading marketplace, all of that actually started with machine learning in place. This is not a new subject for us, and fundamentally, has always been a key differentiator for us. And as I've alluded to and my colleagues earlier, long may it continue. But it is important to note that we do all of these things in a considered way, not a slow way. My God, are we fast! But we do this in a considered way, and fundamentally, we do not use technology just for technology's sake. It is about providing value. And lastly, focusing on how scalable and secure we are.
We have a huge amount of changes in the demand on our platform. Some of this is driven by natural seasonality, human nature. We have other elements that are driven by viral behaviors, destination-specific, entire city, town, area of a country specific. All of these create this need for elasticity in our platform. This is an area which we've always focused on, to make sure that no matter what time zone you're in, no matter what moment it happens to be that inspires you, any consumer or user of our platforms goes to one of our services, goes to one of our apps, goes to one of our sites, and it's there, and it delivers them what they want. On top of all of this, we're obviously focused heavily on the cyber topic and the cyber agenda.
This isn't just something that's a reflection of our position as a public company. This is also something that's important to us at our core and has been part of how we've been driving the technology journey. We're super proud of the leaps and bounds we've made forward in financial year 2023, and long will we continue. I'm a tech guy. You're gonna get a couple of stats. Sure, you were expecting it. Always talk publicly, we're hyper proud of our rapid product iteration. That's probably best reflected statistically in the fact that we run 100 experiments concurrently at the most amount of time. These are product iterations and changes where we are taking a data-driven or data-informed position on the success and capability to enhance the journey, enhance our product, generate more revenue, opportunity, and value through our product roadmap.
Running 100 of these, you might imagine, is a hefty job, but it's part of how we identify that fast to market, fast to decision, no fear, bold outcome that we drive throughout the whole of our product and technology org. I'm also gonna touch on coding standards. Fundamentally, we've driven from day one as a business to maintain a sustainable approach to how we are developing our platforms, and with that speed, you could well imagine there comes a degree of natural instability. But we mitigate that as part of how we manage our processes overall. And as a result of that, the technology team have managed to move our maturity, significantly increasing the platform availability by 4.5% in the last 12 months.
May not sound like a lot compared to some of the numbers earlier, but in terms of movement, that's enormous, taking our organization up to four nines, 99.99% availability on our platforms, which is an incredible achievement for a company of our dynamics, size, and in this market, specifically. One of the ways that we manage that approach and manage the surety and quality is our attitude, approach, and almost insatiable appetite towards automated test coverage. Without automated test coverage, the amount of human beings that would be required to maintain the quality that we need to achieve in order to stay true to what we're trying to fundamentally deliver, I'm pretty sure I can't work that out in my head. It would be a significant amount of people. And across all of our teams, automated testing is a way of life.
The max coverage we have in one of the teams right now is 49%, which is an incredible achievement. But we'll probably never, ever, ever get quit of pushing this and never get tired of driving for the outcome. But it really is key to how we drive that part of success. And then lastly, but not least, a little stat on our library updates. 1,146 library updates in the last financial year. Again, massive number in terms of the dynamic we do, and it's just a sign and indication of our commitment to the quality journey, how we approach continuous learning and improvement in the organization, and how we are trying to keep ourselves adaptive, conducive to the environment and the market that we are serving.
So yet again, to reiterate, our scalability strategy, we are cloud native, we are acknowledged by the majority of the CSPs, the cloud service providers, as being digitally native. We sit very much in that segment, and therefore, the delivery of seamless and efficient scaling is vital for us and how we, how we operate. And that scalability that we provide subsequently supports the growth and our adaptability in our business, which is key for us maintaining the relevance and market position that we've fought so hard for. And the growth and acceleration, powered by our attitude towards data analytics, the drive to use data as part of our core outcome, but always focusing on it from a productivity and value perspective, and making sure we're extracting the maximum amount of our learnings and applying it to our product through engineering at great speed.
Fundamentally, lastly, just back on the topic of cyber and fraud. Right at the front of our mindset, huge advancements in the last year, as I said, and as we continue to optimize and protect our marketplace and our users, we will not run out of energy on this topic, and as we grow and achieve our goals, that attention span will move with it accordingly. What are your key takeaways today? Our AI platform, not only were we first in the market in terms of AI-driven search, our platform is safe, it is secure, it is scalable. We built it specifically and deliberately for success. With anywhere that this particular hype train could end up having as its final mid-term, next 20 destinations, we are ready, and we've started that journey with the architecture from the ground up, and we're ready for the journey to continue.
We're super proud of where we've been from an engineering perspective and how we've got here over the last nine years, but we are not complacent. Our commitment to speed, speed of deployment, keeping ourselves market relevant, driving the value through our organization, remains at the highest possible level. Lastly, but not leastly, we do not do technology for technology's sake. We are lean, we are agile, and we are focused on the business goals. We are here as a partner to our business to drive value through our organization. Thank you very much for your time, and over to my colleague, Sebastian.
... Thank you so much, Sai. Fantastic presentation. Please stay with me right now, and I also invite the entire HomeToGo team to come on stage again for the penultimate Q&A session. Get closer. Great, we're all set up. So dear investors and analysts, now you have the opportunity once again to ask questions regarding our newly established B2B segment, HomeToGo Pro, as well as regarding our amazing technology platform. As a reminder, you can either write your questions in the chat box, or alternatively, you can directly ask management via video or audio. Therefore, please click on Reactions and press Raise Hand. I will nominate you, and you get unmuted by the operator. Let me have a look if a first question has arrived. Okay, I see there is the first question coming from Volker Bosse of Baader Bank via audio. Volker, please go ahead, ask the question.
Yeah, thanks for... Volker Bosse speaking, Baader Bank. Thanks for the presentation, all the provided details so far, very interesting. I would have some question on Doppelgänger, which is a complete new offer, if I got you right. And for verification, I think sales and earnings of Doppelgänger will be shown in the subscription of services segment, right, going forward? And, if I understand you right, Doppelgänger should contribute incremental sales and earnings to the organization. Therefore, this leads me to two questions from the financial side on Doppelgänger. So first is, did you get a fixed fee for Doppelgänger, plus a commission on the transaction volume of the white label platform? Or how do you, yeah, generate sales here via Doppelgänger? And of course, interesting would be also the profitability of the Doppelgänger offer.
What does it mean in regards to margins? What is to expect here? And of course, as it's brand new, to perhaps, perhaps a mid-term view on what could be sales and earnings contributions out of Doppelgänger going forward, let's say 3-5 years, or however you want to phrase it. Thank you.
So shall I go? So first, for your first question, our commercial models very much aligned with what we also have on the partner supply side, right? We have a diverse selection of commercial models. The main commercial model is built on a revenue share, but in general, as you said, we also have fixed fee models and similar. So it's really depending on the individual partnership as well as the product, of course. Regarding your second question, could you repeat that one again, please?
I think it's what about the financial impact, which we can expect from Doppelgänger? So, sales, sales volume, EBIT contribution, EBITDA contribution, profitability, something around that. Thanks.
Yeah. So we are in the first stages of the product, so, I think we'll keep you posted in the next updates we have on our earnings calls, as well as the next CMD, potentially. But in general, bottom line is what we're looking at. So, high net contribution is what we see in the product in general, so looking forward to how it will grow.
Thank you.
Great. Volker, do you have a follow-up question?
Not for the moment. Thank you.
Thank you, Volker. The next question comes from Ben Kohnke of Stifel. How do you look at the cannibalization of on-site bookings by Doppelgänger?
Cannibalization of on-site booking. Well, I think the idea is really that HomeToGo wants to be present in the overall market, and HomeToGo Doppelgänger product is just extending to that mission, so we've always been opportunistic. And there might be some platforms or parts of the industry where our partners are better positioned to serve these users, and I think this is very much complementary in the end.
Thank you very much, Charlotte. There is a follow-up question on HomeToGo Pro. We quite often receive the question if the SaaS business model is very different from the marketplace in general. So is HomeToGo actually the really best owner of that kind of business? Maybe one for you, Patrick.
Yeah. It's a little bit connected to the question we already had on will HomeToGo become a software and service company in the end. So, as said, also during our IPO and trying to elaborate it also today, is that we see this network effects of the marketplace and HomeToGo Pro, especially if you look at a product like HomeToGo Doppelgänger, that you just heard how we built something that or took something that we built in the marketplace and now can sell it also on the B2B side to our partners and other industry players in the travel market.
So, in general, we believe that HomeToGo is a very good home also for B2B products and also specifically for SaaS products, because we can help obviously with our expertise in the vacation rental space. We are probably the ones knowing the vacation rental space the best, and also can have these network effects between the companies within the group, so that we believe in the end, HomeToGo will consist of these two segments, one being the marketplace and the other being software and service solutions under HomeToGo Pro.
... Fantastic! We're currently waiting for a final question. If that arise, we will post them. If not, we will move on. Maybe waiting for a few seconds. So this concludes the penultimate Q&A session. Thank you so much for coming on stage again, and we're moving on. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So, dear analysts and investors, we have come to the final part of our CMD 2023, and saving the best for last, we have positioned our dear CFO in this position. No introduction is needed, as he's well known by all of you, dear analysts and investors. So, without any further delay, I'm handing over to you, Steffen.
Thank you, Sebastian. To start with a quick reminder about the key drivers of our first nine months of 2023. Just a few information, and don't worry, I will not repeat our last earnings call. First, we have improved our marketing efficiency as well as realized economies of scale. Second, main driver of the higher share of repeat customers was driving that marketing efficiency. Third point, we continued to increase our take rate, now above 10% for the first nine months. And finally, we continued to increase our on-site share. Let's start with adjusted EBITDA, or as one of you investors told me this year, "Oh, that's the number with the five footnotes." We are very transparent about the adjustments we make, and everyone can decide for themselves if a certain adjustment should be made or not.
The biggest adjustment is share-based compensation, which is a non-cash position, and the resulting claims of the beneficiaries are covered by existing treasury shares, therefore, no dilution to shareholders. Share-based compensation includes the pre-IPO legacy VSOP program when we were still a venture finance company. The impact of this old program had been included in the valuation at the time of the IPO, and the amount of shares was calculated on the basis of EUR 10 per share. This program is closed now for new beneficiaries since the IPO. However, since the vesting runs over four years, there will be a decreasing impact in the P&L until 2025. The post-IPO share-based compensation is called LTI and includes both restricted share units or RSUs, as well as virtual share units or VSOs. The LTI program is fully virtual.
Employees who qualify for LTI can choose between the two alternatives, however, have to take at least 30% of either, i.e., 30% RSUs and 70% VSOs, or the other way around. I will show you more details about the IFRS accounting impact, as well as the required shares on the next slide. The second group of adjustments are one-off adjustments. For example, under IFRS, we have to show a deferred consideration to the sellers of one acquisition as contingent payment with service conditions. Since the owners are now employees of the group, and therefore any payment is seen under IFRS as a kind of salary. If they would not be employees, it would be an earn-out and not part of the P&L. Therefore, for us, it is similar to share-based compensation, and that's why we are adjusting it.
Other items are transaction or reorg-reorganization-related costs, which we are adjusting. However, we are not only adjusting cost, we also adjust income, i.e., from government grants, as we also consider these grants as one-off items. In every quarterly reporting, we break down the various items line by line to enable you to come up with your own opinion and to enable you to adjust for yourself in case you have a different view. Let's have a closer look at the maximum number of shares needed to fulfill the vested programs. As you can see on the left side, there are about 350,000 shares required for the vested VESOP, so that's the old pre-IPO program. 736,000 shares for the vested RSUs, and up to 1.8 million shares for the vested VSOs in case the share price reaches EUR 6.
If it's lower, then we need less shares. That would be, assuming the EUR 6, about 2.9 million shares in total. However, as you can see on the right-hand side, we have 7.7 million treasury shares, and given our share buyback program, this number is even growing. Let's look at the accounting impact according to IFRS 2, and I would like you to focus on the EUR 8.4 million P&L impact for the old VESOP program. This EUR 8.4 million more or less corresponds to the 350,000 shares you see in the left graph. Since employees and members of the management board get the shares on a certain day and also have to pay taxes and social security, we offer the cash option like in the IPO.
This is the reason why you will see next year, again, directors dealing, buying shares at EUR 10, which reflects the fixed valuation for the shares when settled as part of the VESOP, and sold at whatever share price is when the shares are transferred to the respective beneficiaries. When the vested claims for 2023 for the pre-IPO VESOP are settled, beginning next year, all in all, including payroll taxes, we look at an economic net impact of EUR 1.8 million using the share price of 250 as of last week. That is significantly deviating from the P&L impact in our IFRS financials for the period that is about EUR 8.4 million. So why is the P&L impact EUR 8.4 million if the real impact is like EUR 1.8 million?
The answer is simple: when the majority of the VESOPs were granted, the valuation of HomeToGo was around EUR 10. This value is now being used over the course of the vesting period of four years, leading to an IFRS P&L impact, which does not reflect the current valuation. The current post-IPO LTI program is also equity settled. However, the underlying valuation is closer to the current valuation. Nevertheless, the same effect can apply if employees received LTI at EUR 4 or EUR 3, and the share price is now lower than that. Therefore, we adjust share-based compensation as the P&L impact is not reflecting the real economic impact. I hope by now I have convinced you about the reasoning of our adjustments to the adjusted EBITDA.
However, even if you are still not convinced, let's compare apples with apples, as we look at the improvement of about EUR 20 million from -EUR 21 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2022, to adjusted EBITDA break-even in the midpoint of our guidance for 2023. These numbers are estimates as the financial year is not finished, so they might change. However, the general picture is very clear. First, given our cautious spending in Q4 2023 to ensure adjusted EBITDA break-even, we will likely end up the year with a slightly lower backlog of around EUR 1 million. We have another EUR 1 million + impact as we have capitalized a bit more R&D than in 2022. However, still relatively low overall capitalization rate compared to similar companies.
The biggest impact, however, comes from an increased marketing efficiency, realizing an improvement of EUR 17 million due to higher share of repeat customers, more subscription and service revenues with the higher profitability, and in general, a better contribution margin per booking. Finally, there are various other effects, including economies of scale. Another question we heard a lot during last year, and you might see now that I keep on answering questions which we got during all these investor meetings this year. So I really hope that is also helpful for all the ones who asked these questions to ask me before. So another question we heard a lot during last year was: well, adjusted EBITDA is all nice. However, when are you actually making cash?
Well, the sooner, the better, and as our co-founder, Wolfgang, always says: "Free cash flow means freedom." We are not there yet, however, we are also not too far away. If we leave the intra-year working capital requirements aside for a moment, as I will explain this on the next slide, we have four relevant buckets: CapEx, one-off items and other adjustments, interest income, and taxes. The numbers you see on the slide are actual numbers for nine months, and will look a bit different for 12 months. However, the current sum of about EUR 6 million gives you an idea of the order of magnitude we look at. Therefore, for the full- year, free cash flow is only about EUR 10 million away from adjusted EBITDA. Looking at working capital, Q1 is our most important quarter. You heard that before from me, from Patrick, from all of us.
As we generate the most booking revenues, which provide us with the visibility for the financial year. Q1 is also the quarter where we have the lowest adjusted EBITDA, as we have relatively few check-ins while we have to pay Google, Bing, et cetera. We are building up some receivables along HomeToGo Pro and some Q1 check-ins in the marketplace. In case we do also payments for our partners, we receive partial prepayments from the travelers with the bookings. In Q2, these prepayments become bigger as the travel date approaches, and travelers are paying the vast majority of the basket size. Receivables go up with more check-ins, and with higher check-ins, we also recognize more IFRS revenues, leading to higher profitability in Q2. This year, it was already adjusted EBITDA positive.
In the third quarter, our nice quarter, profitability reaches its peak as most check-ins are happening, increasing the receivables while we pay out the prepayments to the respective partners. In the last quarter, where we are now, check-ins go down, and therefore receivables, leading to cash inflow. Profitability is again negative, as we are building up the backlog for the next year, and along with the bookings come the first prepayments. This illustrative graph shows you that the higher share of customer prepayments has eased the working capital requirements in Q1, and even led to a net inflow in Q2 this year. On the flip side, Q3 2023 has seen a net outflow, which was historically a net inflow quarter. However, in summary, we are making progress and require less working capital during the year.
Bodo has talked a lot about our M&A goals and targets, and luckily, we have a very strong balance sheet. Of the roughly EUR 135 million of net cash by the end of Q3, there are about EUR 9 million earmarked for the share buyback program. Given the current progress, we do not need the full amount, however, have earmarked it. As I have explained, the bridge from adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow, we will need some operational cash in 2024. Although we require less working capital during the year, I can sleep better if we have mid-double-digit cash cushion to make use of any operational business opportunity that arises. This leaves more than EUR 70 million to spend on profitable M&A, to accelerate growth and profitability, and that even excludes any additional funding from shares or even debt.
Now, speaking about growth and mid-term goals, we continue to be a growth company, and in 2024 want to grow more than in 2023, when the focus was on reaching adjusted EBITDA breakeven. When we have reached this goal in a few weeks, we have improved our profitability by EUR 20 million. We will continue to make progress on our profitability. However, we will reinvest into future growth, in particular in the HomeToGo Pro segment, and we want to invest into 2025 backlog. How much of that profitability we will reinvest will depend on the opportunities next year. However, if we are in a similar market, like in Q4 this year, we want to have the firepower to take advantage of high profitability bookings. It is important to ensure you that adjusted EBITDA breakeven is the floor in 2024.
Looking at 2025, we want to grow even more than in 2024, and aim at the next level of profitability, and aim at free cash flow breakeven. M&A can accelerate and enhance this plan, and will support our long-term growth and profitability goals. Speaking of segments, a quick reminder of the quarterly segment reporting we will start with in 2024, to provide you more transparency with the Marketplace and HomeToGo Pro. These numbers are numbers for nine months, 2023. On the left side, you see our current booking revenues breakdown. In the middle bar, the new segments, and on the right side, the additional breakdown into booking revenues. In the case of HomeToGo Pro, the EUR 45 million break down into EUR 30 million of volume-based and EUR 15 million of subscription-based booking revenues. The Marketplace includes the advertising business, which includes the old CPC and off-site business.
The on-site booking revenues slightly decrease, as some booking revenues are now part of the volume-based booking revenues. Please also note that we will have minor intercompany consolidation effects between the segments, as part of the volume-based booking revenues are generated on the HomeToGo Marketplace. If we now look at the IFRS revenues, it's pretty much the similar picture. With regards to EBITDA, we are still in the final stages of aligning with our auditors some cost allocations, therefore, no hard numbers yet. However, as you can see, the HomeToGo Pro segment is already profitable. For 2024, we expect improved profitability for the Marketplace segment, with the goal to achieve profitability in the next years. For the Pro segment, we expect initially lower profitability due to the beforementioned investments into the subscription business. Key takeaways. 2023 was all about reaching adjusted EBITDA breakeven.
We have provided full transparency on our adjustments, and have shown that we will have improved profitability by EUR 20 million in financial year 2023. The working capital requirements... Just quickly repeating, as I hear that the microphone is not working. 2023 was all about reaching adjusted EBITDA breakeven. We have provided full transparency on our adjustments and have shown that we will have improved profitability by EUR 20 million in financial year 2023. The working capital requirements are going down during the year, and we are not that far away from reaching free cash flow. The new segments will provide more transparency, in particular, with regards to HomeToGo Pro. Now, I'm happy to take any questions you might have.
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Steffen. This actually opens up our final Q&A session for today, and it's all about financials. So if you want to ask Steffen a question, you can either write your question in the chat box, or alternatively, you can directly ask Steffen via video-audio. Therefore, please click on Reactions and press Raise Hand, and I will nominate you, and you get unmuted by the operator. Let me have a look if there's a first question which arrived.
Okay.
One question has arrived to us in writing. It says: Looking at your indicative sources and uses cash for 2024, I guess the EUR 70 million in cash for M&A is fairly conservative, especially given that you would like to turn free cash flow breakeven in 2025. A related question to this, what is your additional debt capacity you could take on?
Yeah. So, you know, being the conservative CFO, it's always better to be on the safe side. And, as I mentioned, we want to have the opportunity to make use of any operational opportunity which is arising, and therefore, it's just good to have a good cushion. Overall, the question on debt capacity, it always depends on the kind of target we are looking at. So, you know, if it's a high profitability case, there are opportunities to include some debt. We also have, as I mentioned, a lot of treasury shares we could use. So we are flexible there, but as Bodo has outlined, it needs to be value accretive and good for our shareholders.
Fantastic. Thank you very much. We have a question from the audio side. Christian Salis of Hauck & Aufhäuser. Christian, please go ahead with your first question.
Yeah, hello, again, thanks for taking my question. I've got, one, please. So you mentioned that, your long-term targets or you reiterated basically your long-term targets. So could you please remind us again, what are these targets exactly, and, what is going to be or what are going to be the moving parts to get there? Thank you.
Sure. So, as we have mentioned before, our long-term target is to reach that EUR 1 billion of booking revenues by the end of this decade, and we still are confident and sure to reach that. And as part of reaching that, we will also increase our profitability significantly by further increasing the repeat share, further decreasing the sales and marketing costs, and also realizing the economies of scale, in particular with regards to G&A as well as R&D. So by the time we have reached the EUR 1 billion booking revenues, I would also see our EBITDA margin around the 30%-35%.
Christian, do you have a follow-up question?
Yeah, maybe one follow-up. You said 30%-35% of EBITDA margin, so that would be basically the level of Airbnb, right? But as far as I'm concerned, Airbnb is a pure on-site platform, while you guys also have a large share of off-site. So is there any reason for a lower EBITDA margin for you guys than for Airbnb?
Well, so I personally feel comfortable with these margins, and of course we have to deliver. But also keep in mind, we have a strong software subscription business, which is helping, and that is something Airbnb, for example, does not have.
Thank you very much, Christian, for your questions. We are switching over to Felix Ellmann of Warburg. Felix, please go ahead. We can't hear you yet, Felix.
Unfortunately, it doesn't switch on. I always have to switch it on again manually. Sorry for that. With regards to the separation of your two business lines, if I could say so, into HomeToGo Pro and Marketplace, are these business lines also separated legally? Meaning, could you sell one of these business lines tomorrow from a legal perspective, or are they, is this just in numbers?
So, as you know, we have within the group various companies, and some of these group companies are clearly in one segment, and others are clearly in the other segment. Nevertheless, there are some group companies which have both parts of the business. That is, for example, one of the reasons why I said we are still in discussion on how to finally do the cost allocation. Answering your implied question, there are no plans to sell off either one of the businesses or the segments, as we see them as important to work together.
Thank you.
Felix, Christian, thank you so much for your questions. We don't have any further questions left. And with that, the official program of the Capital Markets Day 2023 has come to an end. Before I hand over to Patrick for some closing remarks, I want to personally thank you for all the interactions we've had in this year. I look very much forward to continue the interaction in 2024. I wish you a very happy festive season. Now over to you, Patrick, for final remarks.
Thank you, Steffen. So if we look again at the HomeToGo CMD 2023, so first of all, obviously, also thank you from my side for joining us today, and also all the great questions that we received throughout the day. Again, let me remind you of our key takeaways for today. So on one hand, consumer trends, huge market we are operating in, is like underlying our long-term growth path for our marketplace model, and we are more than ready to lift this opportunity together with our supply partners, and to utilize what we see as an opportunity with our product and especially in becoming a fully AI-powered marketplace. So just that you remember what we revealed today, right?
So not only an upgraded AI Mode, but also a lot of new AI features in the product, thinking of HomeToGo Smart Reviews, smart offer descriptions, and thinking of what we will soon release with our chatbot, Sunny, being upgraded to our own AI tech infrastructure. Second, you heard it the whole day about HomeToGo Pro. HomeToGo Pro, our new segment for our software and service solutions, including especially subscriptions and our focus on SaaS for the supply side. So, with HomeToGo Pro, like what was witnessed already with subscription and services in the past, we will continue to make this one of our key growth factors for the whole company and invest into that, as you just heard also from Stefan. And with that, obviously, utilizing also the network effects that we have together with the marketplace.
Thinking of also utilizing modules that we created for the marketplace in the HomeToGo Pro suite of products. You also saw today, we have revealed as one of the topics newly to you, HomeToGo Doppelgänger. And thirdly, and lastly, but not least, so obviously our focus on growth for the next year and the years to come, while being profitable and also increasing our profitability, and that all bolstered by M&A to accelerate on top to reach our long-term targets. So with that, I can only say, I hope I see you next time at our CMD as well. Probably you will do the next CMD in person. We don't know have a date yet for when we will do it, but if we will do it, you might enjoy some of our properties that also our customers enjoyed.
So we might make this on-premise somewhere in a vacation rental at sea. Just to give you an idea, right, these are also like properties that got booked throughout this year. So for instance, the longest stay in Mallorca with 171 nights in this property. Our priciest stay with almost EUR 7,000 per night in Florida, or the largest group that traveled this year with HomeToGo, with an amazing 52 travelers in Idaho, in Fish Haven, Idaho. So you see, also, as versatile the market is, is also the people that are booking on HomeToGo and finding their properties for their personal use case. And with that, thank you again, and see you next time. Goodbye.