Welcome to HomeToGo's Q1 2022 earnings call. I'm Jan Edelmann, HomeToGo's new investor relations contact. With me today are our Co-founder and CEO, Dr. Patrick Andrä, who will give you a strategy update, and our CFO, Steffen Schneider, who will walk you through the financials and share an updated outlook for 2022. As always, this call is being recorded and webcast live on our IR website, which will also be later available as replays on our website. Patrick, I will now hand it over to you. Please go ahead, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Jan, and a warm welcome to all of you from my side as well. Thanks for joining our call today. It's my pleasure to tell you about another stellar quarter of HomeToGo. Let me first tell you the strategic perspective. Our vision to make incredible homes easily accessible to everyone is enabling us to play a bigger and bigger role for both travelers and our supply partners every day. We set the foundation to continue our strong growth in the future. We delivered another quarter of strong financial performance. All of this is a testament to the agility and talent across our HomeToGo team, who I would like to hereby thank once again for their incredible dedication to both products, our travelers, and also the supply side with our partners locked.
Now let me share some of the key highlights of our first quarter 2022. We delivered strongly on all our initiatives, especially if we look on top line growth, transition to on-site, and our M&A targets. First, we remain focused on increasing our on-site business. During quarter one, we achieved 55% of our booking revenues via our on-site business, which is a year-over-year growth of +185%. On-site IFRS revenues even grew by more than 400% year-over-year. As a second highlight, we further enhanced our consumer products by launching new features using internal machine learning to increase choice for our travelers or a new side-by-side comparison in our app. Additionally, we improved the checkout experience by launching several new global and locally relevant payment options.
With this, we enhanced the overall booking and convenience experience for our supply partners, but also making the user experience for our travelers easier. Third, we delivered exceptional financial performance in the first quarter of 2022. We grew booking revenues by 39% to a new all-time record quarter of EUR 43 million, and IFRS revenues by an exceptional 98%, almost doubling our best quarter one ever. Last but not least, we are happy to upgrade our full-year 2022 guidance to reflect the strong top-line momentum in quarter one and the positive first-time consolidation of e-domizil as of April 1. As such, we now forecast IFRS revenues to grow by 40%-50% to EUR 133 million - EUR 143 million, and expect an Adjusted EBITDA in the range of EUR -22 million - EUR -32 million .
Before we start taking a closer look at our key platform dynamics, both on the traveler as well as the partner side, let me remind you about three key strategic levers to fill our vision to make incredible homes easily accessible to everyone. First, regarding our travelers. We want to create an unparalleled experience to drive return demand. We will achieve this by building an even more attractive and inspiring customer experience, especially across both our on-site experience and our app. Secondly, our supply to our partners. We continue to grow our global footprint and scale our diversified supply to offer our travelers unlimited choice on our platform and provide our partners, at the same time, a unique opportunity to grow their own business on HomeToGo. Third, our technology.
We are developing new tech solutions to enable growth for our partners and the entire alternative accommodation industry to become the industry's operating system, building services around our central marketplace platform. Let me now provide you with more details on the progress with regards to our consumer-facing or traveler-facing part of the business. Since HomeToGo's founding, we've been focused on creating exceptional experience to drive organic traffic to our platform, continuously investing into brand awareness, but also organic search visibility. With this, HomeToGo grew its visibility more than 37% year-over-year in the DACH region in quarter one, improving our already leading position. At an even faster pace in our home market, Germany, HomeToGo became the most visible vacation rental platform ahead of notable market participants, with a visibility growth of more than 43% year-over-year, according to Sistrix.
Next to our investments in organic, we are also investing further into scaling our customer acquisition following our proven ROI-based marketing approach. Recently, we saw a big success unlocking additional scale with our top-of-funnel channels, acquiring and activating customers with our own CRM activities, including especially our app. Diving deeper here, during quarter one, HomeToGo app installs more than doubled year-over-year. With customers active on app and other CRM channels like email, we observe a particularly higher pre-purchase behavior. Consequently, we increase repeat bookings. This is driven through a variety of factors. For instance, improved recommendations and push notifications, personalized content and offers, and delivering an optimized post-booking journey. As an outcome, we also saw a strong increase of returning visitors. Booking revenues from these visitors accounted for more than 60% of total booking revenues during quarter one.
We are convinced that investments into our customer experience and on-site booking are a key lever to increase the amount of customers getting back to our platform and also booking again, which are key levers to improve marketing efficiency, supporting our path to profitability and long-term margin ambitions. Already today, we observe that the required marketing spend to drive bookings from travelers that have booked before is multiple times lower than the spend required to acquire new customers. With increasing repeat bookings, we expect ongoing improvement of our marketing efficiency over time. Supported is this by our ambition to constantly create deeper relationships with our existing travelers to become the go-to destination for vacation rentals. In Q1 2021, a number of new and impactful product innovations were launched, contributing to a mid- to high-digit increase in on-site conversion rate versus Q1 2021.
In the first quarter, these efforts can be shown in three particular highlights. Firstly, by leveraging our tech capabilities, we are now able to identify via machine learning more booking options. So for instance, other apartments in the same building, even if the original partner data lacks this information. As an outcome, we are able to offer an increased choice to our travelers by providing alternative booking options for the same property. With the upgrade of this selection feature, we increased clicked units and booked units in this feature by more than 70% compared to prior to the launch. Secondly, we made it easier for our travelers to compare their favorite accommodations side by side within our app. Comparing different properties is a key element of a user's decision-making process when booking an accommodation on our platform.
Travelers can now directly shortlist their favorite accommodations from the search results list and then compare them side by side in a single separated view. As a result, we saw consumer engagement increasing strongly. While these first two examples revolve around customers' on-site experience, we also continue to invest into our convenience proposition by launching several new payment options. In the first quarter, we launched Google Pay and Apple Pay as wallet payment methods and added giropay in Germany and EPS in Austria to improve the user experience, enhance conversion through launching locally relevant payment methods in two of our strongest markets for supply partners using HomeToGo Payments.
With all of this, we remain convinced that these and similar efforts targeted at deepening the relationship with our customers, we will further increase customer lifetime value by driving customer engagement, customer satisfaction, and thereby repeat bookings. On the partner and supply side, we currently focus on integrating e-domizil, bringing our partner base up to more than 45,000 partners. In total, we now work with more than 45,000 trusted partners worldwide across OTA, property managers, and other supply partners following the acquisition of e-domizil. Steffen will talk in the outlook section more about the financial impact of the acquisition on our business and the great successes we had with further broadening the on-site booking revenue share, especially looking at it from a year-over-year perspective to see our progress.
This concludes our business update, and that's where I would hand over to our CFO, Steffen, to guide you through our Q1 financial performance update. Thank you.
Thank you, Patrick, for this business update. A very warm welcome also from me to our Q1 earnings call. Looking back at Q1, we are particularly pleased to report that we were able to combine significant strategic progress with strong financial results. Let's first dive deeper into our strong Q1 top-line performance. Group top-line growth in Q1 2022 came in very strong. GBV grew 6% year-over-year to almost EUR 460 million. As expected, CPA GBV declined by 10% as we pushed for more on-site with a higher take rate, in particular in the U.S. On-site GBV saw hyper-growth of 154% year-over-year. In addition, we saw more traditional seasonal booking patterns return with booking revenues in Q1 primarily driven by our European travelers, whereas last year's Q1 was driven by U.S. travelers booking their holidays early.
Booking revenues, our key top-line metric, grew a very strong 39% year-over-year to EUR 43 million, a new all-time high for a given quarter. This growth was primarily driven by our strong on-site business, growing 185% year-over-year. Subscription and services revenues contributed with triple-digit year-over-year growth to EUR 33.2 million, reflecting a strong like-for-like growth, but also a sizable contribution of AMIVAC, which we acquired in early 2022. IFRS revenues grew an exceptional 98% and therefore almost doubled compared to the prior year based on strong subscription and services, CPC, as well as CPA, as consumers started to travel again in spring.
As per end of March, booking revenues backlog amounted to almost EUR 40 million, a new record which gives us good visibility and will be recognized as IFRS revenues later this year when travelers check in into their booked accommodation. The 12 month rolling average basket size decreased slightly while the year-over-year Q1 change was a bit more pronounced due to the following reasons. First, the average ADR in Europe has stayed more or less constant, while in the U.S., the already higher ADR has increased significantly compared to the same period last year. Second, the average length of stay in the U.S. has stayed more or less constant as consumers have mainly booked for the summer.
Third, Europe, in particular DACH markets, booked on top of their summer holidays also again more spring holidays, in particular around the Easter and Pentecost holidays. These spring holidays tend to be shorter, i.e., more like a week, so a short break, and therefore the average length of stay has declined. However, the strong European business has led to an overall higher European share and therefore led to a lower basket size as the average U.S. basket size is significantly higher. Looking at the take rate. Average take rate continued on its positive trajectory, averaging at 9.1% in Q1, more than two percentage points ahead of last year's Q1 and ahead of our full-year guidance amidst increased on-site business and increased cost per click.
CPA averaged 9.4%, while CPC amounted to 8.4% in the past three months, appreciating by 2 and 3.6 percentage points year-over-year. Since we already mentioned our on-site progress, I will keep it short at this point. On-site share are increasing strongly, both in Europe and in North America. In total, and as Patrick has already mentioned, we increased our on-site share from 26 to 55% year-over-year. In the U.S., we have a large opportunity to capture more on-site share and are continuing to invest in growth there, as communicated in our financial year 2021 earnings call. Our first actions here are already starting to impact us positively, with on-site share increasing by a strong 17 percentage points to more than 1/5 in terms of booking revenue share.
In Q1 2021, on-site bookings grew almost 180% year-over-year to almost 200,000. Let's now turn to profitability. In addition to very strong growth momentum, we were able to improve profitability as measured by Adjusted EBITDA margin compared to Q1 2021 by 49.1 percentage points to -118.3% in terms of IFRS revenues, despite continued customer acquisition and retention investments. In absolute terms, Adjusted EBITDA amounted to EUR - 22 million compared to EUR -16 million in Q1 2021. This reflects the significantly higher booking revenues in 2022, as well as our continued investment in getting on-site customers to download the app. This significantly increases the likelihood of repeat business, which will be key for the next year.
As you recall, the profitability of a repeat customer is five times higher than of a new customer. It is important to highlight that the profitability in the first half of the year is lower than in the second half. HomeToGo recognizes the majority of marketing expenses in the first half of the year when travelers book their trip and as evidenced in the high booking revenues. Corresponding IFRS revenues are recognized upon check-in, with the majority of customers traveling in the second half of the year, usually in the summer. Let me now give you more color on cost line developments that drove group-level profitability. Gross margin decreased marginally by 1.1 percentage points year-over-year in Q1 2022 due to increased hosting costs reflecting the higher amount of bookings and offers.
Our sales and marketing cost ratio improved by 36 percentage points year-over-year, largely benefiting from strong organic and repeat demand and generally high business volume. In absolute terms, marketing and sales costs increased by EUR 12 million, reflecting our continued customer acquisition and retention. Our product development and operating cost ratio continued to improve year-over-year by almost 14 percentage points as a result of operating leverage and scale effects. Last but not least, admin improved as well, mainly as a result of economies of scale. Turning now to our cash-related items.
During a typical Q1, we are focusing our efforts on targeting and retargeting customers to visit our platform and convert into booking and therefore increasing our booking backlog to EUR 40 million, which causes an expense on our end, while the respective IFRS revenue and IFRS receivables generated from the traffic can only be recognized at a later point in time. Marketing payables reflecting our continued marketing efforts increased strongly year-over-year. Free cash flow in the period amounted to negative EUR 68 million, mainly as a result of Adjusted EBITDA loss and the payment for the acquisition of e-domizil as per March 31, 2022.
Our cash position of EUR 184 million, including cash and cash equivalents and other short-term, highly liquid financial assets at the end of Q1 remains robust, enabling further growth of our business through both organic and inorganic channels. As already mentioned and shown on the slide before that, we have a strong booking receivables of EUR 40 million, which if you would put it on top, shows that our cash position is even more robust. Let's now turn and look to our upgraded full-year outlook. When we shared our full-year outlook with you earlier this year, we expected a strong traveler demand for alternative accommodation and platform dynamics to remain in place. This expectation is very well reflected in strong Q1 results.
Additionally, we are specifying our full-year outlook for 2022 to take into account the positive consolidation effect from April 1st, resulting from the acquisition of e-domizil at the end of Q1 2022. As such, we are now expecting IFRS revenue growth of 40%-50% to EUR 133 million - EUR 143 million. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be in the range of EUR -22 million - EUR -32 million, corresponding to a margin of -15%-24%. This outlook shows our general confidence regarding our own financial and operational performance, but also that the positive market backdrop will continue. After two years of pandemic restrictions and investments in a new TV and a couch, people want to travel and they will travel. This additional consumer demand for travel and preference for vacation rentals to persist beyond the lifting of pandemic related restrictions.
You know the slides and gives you already a hint how our Q2 has started. In April, we saw an all-time high in terms of booking revenues. Even if you would exclude the first-time consolidation effects of e-domizil, it was a very good start in Q2 with a year-over-year significant growth, which should become a new record quarter as we continue to observe elevated growth levels driven by strong demand for vacation rentals. What we see already for May is that it will be on the same level as in 2021, and therefore we continue to be very confident about the progress of the year. This concludes our presentation, and let's now go into Q&A.
Dear ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin our question and answer session. If you have a question for our speakers, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If you find your question is answered before it's your turn to speak, you can dial zero and two to cancel your question. If you're using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selection. One moment please for the first question. We have a first question. It's from Volker Bosse of Baader Bank. The line is now open for you.
Hello, gentlemen. Volker Bosse, Baader Bank. Congratulations on the very strong start into the fiscal year 2022 and to the guided upgrade well received. I would have three questions. First is on the take rate. You came up with 9.1% here in Q1. How do you look at the take rate going forward to guide us regarding the potential volatility which we might see in upgrading sales? Does it also mean that you upgrade your take rate guidance, or what is the underlying assumption here in regards to take rate for the year? The second question would be on the cancellation rate. Perhaps a word here on that topic, especially against the background of the war in Ukraine, which started end of February.
Did you see any increase in cancellation in March related to the start of the war and how that developed in April and beginning of May? Perhaps it normalized or the range of the elevated levels. I'm curious to get more insight here regarding cancellation rates. Last but not least, the third question is on the consumer behavior. We see the inflation rate is rising. I saw you upgrade your guidance. What makes you confident that the consumers are not going to cut back travel expenses in the course of the year, potentially planning for a two weeks vacation in summer after having been on the couch, as you said, for two years.
Yes, now with the increase of energy costs and increasing uncertainties, as we all know, they perhaps cut back the three weeks to the two weeks now or so, or cut back the number of city trips which were originally planned. Just how do you think consumers will deal with inflation, and how will that impact the growth outlook? Have you baked in some headroom, so to say? Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks, Volker, for your questions. Let me start with the take rate. As of now and what we also see now in terms of booking in Q2, that strong performance in terms of take rate is continuing. If we continue with the high on-site share, then this should support the higher take rate for the end of the year. The only thing which might have an impact on it is if we now see strong Q2 U.S. booking behaviors. As you know, our on-site share in the U.S. is not as strong as in Europe yet.
We made big progress, but if we would have more off-site bookings in the U.S., this could have a slightly negative impact, but it will not change the overall picture. We look very confident into the future when it comes to the take rate development. Your question on cancellation rate.
Can I just jump in?
Sure.
Did you re-confirm your take rate guidance? Is it 7.7%? Please remind me on the take rate guidance for the full year.
Yes. Yeah, yeah. The 8% at this point in time, we will easily beat.
8% is the guidance.
If it continues as of now, we will beat our take rate. It's just.
Okay.
At this point in time, given that we have seen the return to traditional booking patterns, it could be that Q2 sees more U.S. off-site bookings, and that, as I mentioned, could have a slight impact on the take rate. It will definitely stay above the guidance. At this point in time, we are very confident that this will stay at the high level. In particular, as we have mentioned in our earnings call last year, the new partners we signed up there we had an average take rate of the last 250 partners of almost 14%. Rather, going even further up on the take rate.
Perfect. Thank you.
Second question was on cancellation rate. As you have seen, our cancellation rate has improved significantly when we had in Q1 2021 a cancellation rate of 23.4%. That has improved to a cancellation rate of 15.7% this year. There we clearly see the return to almost pre-COVID levels. We are not there yet and you know continue to monitor it carefully, but it becomes very clear that travelers want to travel and they are traveling, and therefore, we expect the cancellation rate to be on that improved level.
Mm-hmm.
Effect from the Ukraine war, we don't see.
Okay.
As already mentioned, when we had our last call, the direct impact of our business to Ukraine and Russia are really minimal. We were talking a very low 5-digit EUR amount, but that was about it. There's basically no indirect impact.
Yeah
in our business. Clearly we see that consumers, I don't want to say they don't care, but at least it doesn't seem to have any impact when it comes to booking and traveling. That also brings me to your last question in terms of
Mm-hmm
of inflation. We don't see any impact of inflation. We have, as I mentioned, seen in the U.S., ADRs going up and there, you know, you could make the case that part of that is driven by inflation, that the landlords are increasing the prices, but it is by no means has any negative impact. For us, actually, it's a positive thing as we are getting our take rate and if the prices go up, we are participating with our percentage from the higher prices. At this point in time, we don't see any impact of inflation.
Okay. Perfect. Good to hear. Thank you very much. Crystal clear and all the best. Thumbs up. Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question is by Silvia Cereda of Deutsche Bank. The line is now open for you.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. My first question is on outlook. You've raised the revenue guidance range by about EUR 13 million - EUR 18 million at the lower and higher end. Can you please talk about the positive contribution of e-domizil within the mix versus the organic upgrade, thanks to the strong first quarter? Also same question about the increased Adjusted EBITDA guidance. Secondly, about the cost of sales that increased more than revenues in Q1 leading to a small gross margin decrease. Can you please talk a little bit more about the impact from increasing hosting costs and whether this is going to still be the case in the next quarters and if there is any other moving parts?
Finally, I just wanted to ask if you could comment again on your capital allocation strategy, the investment level. Obviously, Q1 was quite skewed to inorganic with the e-domizil acquisition. Just wondering if you could share an update as to what sort of targets going forward could be of interest. Thank you.
Sure. Hi, Silvia. Thanks for your questions. Let me start with the outlook. As you recall from our last earnings call, we expected the impact of e-domizil between EUR 10 million - EUR 15 million in terms of revenue and a positive EBITDA contribution. When we look at the upgraded guidance, it's about on average around EUR 15 million, which comes from the e-domizil acquisition impact, and the additional is coming from our organic. There we are really seeing the strong impact and gives us the confidence to increase the guidance on top of the impact from e-domizil.
In terms of the profitability impact, the impact is mainly driven from the acquisition because as you know, the e-domizil business is already profitable and that has given us the opportunity to stay on the investment side from the old HomeToGo business. Looking at your question on cost of sales, there it's the same reason as we had it already when we presented the full year numbers. There we had to increase our hosting capability significantly to reflect basically the growing business.
What you always have to keep in mind is in particular, when you look at the Q1 numbers, that the real impact is the higher booking revenues, which is driving the higher hosting costs. That is reflecting that increase, and it will stay on that level. You should not expect any significant impact from further hosting costs in increases. Last question on the capital allocation. We main focus is on growing the operating business. However, as we have already mentioned in the past, as you know, we own a 19% in SECRA, and that is something which we want to at some point increase to 100%. That is where we would allocate our capital.
Thank you.
Sure.
The next question is by Wolfgang Specht of Berenberg. The line is now open for you.
Yes, hello, good afternoon. Two additional ones from my side. First one, once again on the U.S. business. Can you give us some more flavor how your targeted push from off-site to on-site is working, not only with, let's say, new property partners, but also with existing ones? The second question is, let's say if you can shed some light on the early outlook for the autumn or winter season. You probably have a pattern from the past years that some people are already making early bookings for this two seasons. Can you shed some light here, if you're already receiving some or if it's, let's say, merely a black box, what's happening in autumn and winter?
Hi, Wolfgang, this is Patrick. Thank you for your questions. First in regards to the U.S. business. We, as you have seen in the slides presented by Steffen, we make great progress on the increase in on-site share, on the U.S. side. If you go to compare it, especially year-over-year, like in increasing by from 4% to 21%, which is obviously a huge increase. This is mainly driven by additional partners switching to on-site and onboarding additional partners in the U.S., in various sizes. Also by the focus on, as you pointed out, yourself as the focus on, creating also like demand for this inventory that we onboard newly and switch to on-site.
To your second question around the outlook beyond summer. Yeah. HomeToGo business is still small, but we see strong demand currently for summer. Yeah. Booking periods will start later for autumn and winter especially. Given the trend from the summer, it looks like a normal season or like more normal season like you would expect it from pre-pandemic, like 2019 and from a booking pattern.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
As a reminder, if you want to ask a question, please press zero and one. For the moment, there are no further questions, and so I hand back.
Thank you all for dialing in again and listening to our Q1 results call. In case you have any further questions, especially around modeling, feel free to reach out to us. We are more than happy to help you. We're also looking forward to meet some of you around at our next investor marketing activities. For more details about this, please have a look at our earnings call presentation in the appendix. There is a detailed list of our upcoming marketing activities. Really looking forward to catching up soon. Thank you and bye-bye.