The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Sebastian Grabert. Please go ahead, sir.
Morning, dear analysts and investors, and welcome to HomeToGo's first quarter 2024 earnings call. My name is Sebastian Grabert, Director of Investor Relations and Corporate Finance. With me today is our co-founder and CEO, Patrick Andrae, and our CFO, Steffen Schneider, who will present our financial highlights of the first quarter 2024. As you might have noticed, we published the Q1 press release last night instead of this morning. Although this was not intended to happen, we understand that some of you appreciated the post-market dissemination. We will take that feedback into account for future releases. As always, this call is being recorded and will be made available later today on our investor relations website. With this, I would like to hand it over to you, Patrick, for an update on the business. Please go ahead. The floor is yours.
Thank you, Sebastian. Dear analysts and investors, thank you so much for joining us and for your continued support. I'm especially excited to welcome you today as we share the results of our first quarter of the year. So far, 2024 has already been a year of significant milestones for HomeToGo. This year, we are celebrating 10 years of delivering on our vision to make incredible homes easily accessible to everyone. So 10 years of expert matchmaking between supply and demand, 10 years of fast-growing repeat demand, and growing to more than 50 million offers of thousands of trusted partners. And 10 years of delivering an industry-leading business model that has evolved to an AI-powered B2C marketplace that today, on top, includes a strong B2B software and service solution business with HomeToGo Pro.
So in the past 10 years, we have really built a leading European technology company to make the global vacation rental industry better. The growth of the vacation rental industry since pre-pandemic has been staggering. No longer do travelers opt for hotels as their first choice of accommodation. They want places they feel like home, with the same amenities they are used to, space to travel in groups, and more privacy to enjoy their vacations in peace. They choose vacation rentals. In the short-term rental market, our business model is driving growth that exceeds our peers. Across strong advances in our product innovations, building repeat demand, supply growth, and developing leading professional solutions for the industry, our business has grown fast. In fact, HomeToGo today is the fastest-growing public vacation rental player.
Looking at our growth since the pre-pandemic year of 2019, already back then, a peak year for travel globally, we have boosted IFRS revenues more than 200%. Looking at an equally weighted average of key peers, that's significantly above the average growth rate of 69% for the past 5 years. In quarter 1 of our 10th year, so this year, we are proud to have continued this strong and industry-leading growth. In Q1, our IFRS revenues grew a staggering 66% year-over-year to EUR 36.4 million. Our peers sat at 14.14, year-over-year growth on average. On an organic level, that's roughly 2 times the organic growth year-over-year of an average of our peers.
Later, our CFO, Steffen, will give a more detailed view on our strong financial results for quarter one, including, for sure, a deep dive on the new B2C marketplace and B2B HomeToGo Pro segment reporting. But let me now first give you an update on a core piece of our business that drives the strong demand, our product. This past year has been one of rapid innovation globally. The recent advancements of generative AI have already propelled personalization in terms of travel inspiration, search, and booking, and the potential for future innovation is immense. We have already been working with AI since the early days of the company, evolving our platform significantly to adapt to new and changing travel behavior. We haven't just embraced AI because it's trendy.
We have always been committed to building tools, including machine learning algorithms, that will drastically improve how travelers can find and book their perfect vacation rental. So looking ahead, we are laser-focused on a product vision for the HomeToGo Marketplace to make it fully AI-powered. With AI, we aim to further inspire and attract loyal guests, which translates into more repeat demand. And in addition, we plan to innovate new solutions for our newly introduced B2B software and service segment, HomeToGo Pro. But let's take a look at the progress on our vision so far. Our extensive history with AI already gives us a competitive edge in our market to adapt to travelers' needs with unprecedented agility and insight. We believe we are leading the vacation rental market when it comes to AI.
We are developing and iterating on it fast, getting it to market, and not waiting for fancy, expensive product launch shows, notably absent of AI innovation from some players, to share our tangible progress with you all. Since the early days of the company, our built in-house ranking and machine learning algorithms help our users find the best accommodations for their individual needs with unmatched efficiency. Plus, we've been leveraging machine learning to increase image attractiveness and quality for years, and using in-house automated bidding tools to capture demand efficiently. On our product vision towards a fully AI-powered marketplace, we have already developed a central AI application that we internally call AA, AI Autobahn, as a nod to our German roots. This gateway unifies all product use cases for AI, while strategically remaining LLM agnostic.
So we look for the best LLM and solutions for our specific needs, and have an uncompromised approach to data sovereignty and protection when it comes to AI. In 2023, we were proud to be the first vacation rental focused marketplace to test and launch an AI product for travelers with our AI Mode. Now available both on the HomeToGo app and web. As a revolutionary mode for searching vacation rentals, AI Mode has benefited travelers who are looking for a more curated experience. AI Mode brings a personal touch to help them find their uniquely ideal vacation rental easier and faster than anywhere else. On top, at the end of last year, we launched additional AI products now in beta, to solve key pain points for travelers.
For instance, HomeToGo's Smart AI Reviews tap into the power of generative AI to summarize reviews from trusted guests. Smart AI Offer Summaries highlight the feature that matter most to travelers, ultimately enabling travelers to make fast, informed booking decisions, and that in a personalized way. In the AI landscape, there are winners with innovators and enhancers, and losers who will vanish due to AI. We are very proud to be an AI innovator and enhancer at the same time. So we look forward to next week when we will release an additional, more detailed product update with what's next in our extensive history with AI. On top, just in time for the upcoming business summer travel season, we have introduced two new and one updated add-on feature. We have officially launched a partnership with Komoot, the world's leading outdoor app, exclusively on the HomeToGo app.
This partnership offers adventurous travelers with world-class outdoor route planning and navigation tools for their destination for free, all within the vacation rental post-booking journey within our app. With our unparalleled selection in rural areas, this empowers our guests even more to discover stunning hiking and biking routes throughout their rentals. In addition, travelers can now compensate for carbon emissions associated with their vacation rental stay by our tailor-made product solution from our partners at SQUAKE, an end-to-end climate tech solution for sustainable travel. Originally launched in selected markets, this is now in beta available across all HomeToGo markets. Lastly, my personal favorite, German travelers can now protect their vacation rental getaways with a revolutionary weather guarantee. So ever booked a vacation home to enjoy sun at the Baltic Sea, only to be disappointed by wet, stormy, typical, unfortunately, German weather?
With Weather Promise, we are the first vacation rental marketplace to now offer travelers a full refund for their vacation rental if it rains. Yes, it's true. Really. Stay for free with HomeToGo if it rains. And all of these key product additions to our marketplace make it even easier for travelers to return to HomeToGo for delightful end-to-end trip planning this summer, and add more value to their stay when booking with HomeToGo. Before I hand over to Steffen, I'm happy to give you the first view of our new segment reporting, which aims to provide the market with higher transparency in our business operations and financial updates. The new segment reporting has a view on both the HomeToGo Marketplace, our B2C platform, as well as HomeToGo Pro. We introduced HomeToGo Pro at our last Capital Markets Day in December.
As a reminder, it's our new B2B brand and business segment that includes all our B2B software and service solutions, a key growth focus for the company. Our HomeToGo Marketplace is at the core. It's our B2C business that encompasses more than 50 million offers globally, and as of quarter one 2024, had an IFRS revenue share of around 70%. If we take a GBV view of the full year 2023, that's EUR 1.43 billion in GBV. Now, looking at HomeToGo Pro, we have our software and service solutions, including subscriptions for the whole travel market. This has a special focus on software as a service for the supply side of vacation rentals. HomeToGo Pro's key brand, Smoobu, has achieved and maintains preferred and premier partner status from both Airbnb and Booking.
SECRA is also a premier connectivity partner of Booking. HomeToGo Pro is a key growth focus for us and has shown strong momentum already. As of the end of Q1 2024, we have nearly 60,000 paid accounts using Pro services. That's more than 200,000 in inventory. It already makes up more than 30% of our IFRS revenue share, equating to an even more impressive over EUR 2 billion for the full year 2023, in what we call enabled GBV. So meaning travelers that were enabled through a HomeToGo Pro solution based on data provided by our partners that work with us. Before I hand over to Steffen, one last request of what is making up our HomeToGo Pro segment.
HomeToGo Pro is our powerful B2B business segment, with software and service solutions, including subscription for the whole travel market, where we are aiming to provide the best solutions to everyone that wants to create a successful vacation rental business. With key and high-performing brands like Smoobu under HomeToGo Pro, we also have a special focus on SaaS from the supply side for vacation rentals. With these services, HomeToGo Pro solves the main pain points for vacation rental suppliers and provides new technology solutions to grow their business. And finally, with HomeToGo Doppelgänger, as part of HomeToGo Pro, we offer our suite of SaaS, scalable, and innovative software and redistribution solutions such as White Label and API products. This allow alternative travel and tourism websites to seamlessly connect with HomeToGo, and is in use by industry-leading players such as TUI, HolidayCheck, HolidayPirates, and more.
Today, already more than 20 key brands use HomeToGo Doppelgänger. So for example, if you go to TUI.com and want to search for vacation rentals, you will find a HomeToGo product there. Or if you visit most local TUI offline travel agencies and ask for a vacation rental, HomeToGo technology is used by the travel agent to find and book the right vacation home for you. To conclude, we are really looking forward to further growing HomeToGo Pro, to provide solutions that can propel the entire travel industry. And with that, I would like to hand over to Steffen, our CFO, for a closer look at our Q1 financials and the new segment reporting. Thank you.
Thank you, Patrick. Good morning, and thank you all for joining us today. It is my pleasure to summarize our key financial highlights for the first quarter, 2024. First, we have seen a solid start to the year with both strong growth in Booking Revenues as well as IFRS Revenues. From a purely organic perspective, this growth has been supported by an early Easter holiday season, as well as the successful rollout of new services. Second, the closing of the acquisitions in January this year has led to a first-time consolidation effect, resulting in extraordinary growth on top line and improved margin levels. Our new segment reporting, which we introduced today, allows for more transparency and will bring helpful clarity to our underlying financial KPIs. Third, we see continued margin improvement driven by further progress on our marketing efficiency, alongside the build-out on the On-site Take Rate.
Our HomeToGo Pro segment is already Adjusted EBITDA positive. This gives us comfort in reaching our confirmed targets for 2024, both on the top and the bottom line. And fourth, after the closed acquisitions and related payouts of the purchase prices during Q1, as well as typical seasonal-related high marketing expenses, we still possess a significant cash amount in our book by the end of Q1 of more than EUR 90 million gross cash. This comfortable financial health will enable us to reach our ambitious targets, especially combined with our booking revenues backlog of almost EUR 77 million. Moving over to the new segmentation of our HomeToGo Marketplace, B2C business and HomeToGo Pro B2B business, I would like to take the opportunity to explain to you again the reasoning behind it.
We first and foremost decided to take this step in order to increase the transparency in our reporting, but we also have strong advantages for our internal steering. By introducing the segmentation, we improve the alignment between how we steer operations to reach our KPIs, how we allocate resources most efficiently, using a customer-focused view, and this results in a better measurement of the underlying performance, which we can then report to you in a more transparent fashion. We are convinced that it will ultimately help us to increase shareholder value, and with that, to reach our overarching objectives. In effect, the marketplace reporting segment comprises and translates mostly in the formerly reported revenue activities of CPA on-site, CPA off-site, and CPC. Booking on-site reflects our on-site product that is one of the core strategic pillars of the marketplace.
This will remain an individually reported revenue stream together with the related performance indicator on-site take rate. It is largely comparable to former CPA on-site. On-site share, as part of the marketplace, represents the share of travelers that completed their booking journey entirely on the marketplace itself. CPA off-site and CPC will be aggregated as advertising going forward. With respect to HomeToGo Pro, it... subscription and services, and the volume-based service offering of the group. While subscription is mainly driven by our SaaS company, Smoobu, and is now presented as a separate revenue activity.... volume-based aggregates and reflects the whole volume-based service offering of HomeToGo Pro to all hosts, property managers, and other third parties, which in the past, was partially reported as CPA on-site and comprises, for example, the Atraveo business. This is defined as a usage fee, mainly bookings-based.
The partial reclassification of volume-based services under HomeToGo Pro illustrates best the economic and strategic steering of those revenue sources. Furthermore, it highlights the business of the HomeToGo Pro segment that is being served on the HomeToGo Marketplace. These transactions are being reported as intersegment in the consolidated financial statements. This slide serves as an additional illustration of the changes, the changes we will apply as a result of the new segment reporting from a contract-type view to a customer-focused view. It is based on Q1 2024 IFRS Revenues and excludes intersegment revenues for simplicity reasons. We will provide that detail later. Besides the split of booking and IFRS Revenues, we will also provide Adjusted EBITDA for these two segments on a regular basis.
To facilitate an easy transition for you, dear analysts and investors, we have also included an as-if view, in that we provide here with the old reporting style. Please note that we have now intercompany consolidation between the segments. In Q1 2024, it was EUR 0.8 million IFRS Revenues to reflect volume-based HomeToGo Pro services, which were transacted on the marketplace segment. We will dive deeper into Q1 2024 results following the new segmentation logic in the following slides. Looking at the key financials of the first quarter for the HomeToGo Group, in a nutshell, we have seen strong growth on our top line, which came along with a substantial improvement of the Adjusted EBITDA margin. In more detail, Booking Revenues reached a new all-time high value of EUR 83.4 million, growing 28% year-on-year.
This development was primarily driven by our booking on-site business, which grew by 42% year-over-year, as well as by a record high on-site take rate of 12.8%, and increased by over 170 basis points compared to the same period one year ago. Our booking revenue backlog at the end of Q1 also grew solidly by 10% year-over-year to a new record figure of almost EUR 77 million. Revenues reached a record high for any first quarter of EUR 36.4 million, growing by 66% year-over-year. This extraordinary high growth was driven by both segments, HomeToGo Marketplace and HomeToGo Pro, and partially relates to the first-time consolidation of our latest acquisitions in January 2024, as well as an early Easter break.
The Adjusted EBITDA amounted to -EUR 21.2 million in the first quarter 2024, which reflects an improvement of 15% year-on-year and in absolute terms. The Q1 group-adjusted EBITDA margin of -58.3% is fully in line with the underlying seasonality of the business and represents an improvement of 55 percentage points on a yearly comparison, largely due to a substantially higher marketing efficiency. Free cash flow developed in line with expectations and totaled -EUR 22.4 million in the first three months of the year. This decrease of 11.3% compared to the previous year period was mainly caused due to a large VAT payment resulting from an acquired company, which had no P&L effect as the respective provision was booked. In addition, it reflects the higher seasonal working capital needs.
Let's take a closer look at the top line and adjusted EBITDA for our two segments. On the marketplace segment, the booking on-site business more than tripled its IFRS revenues, growing by 241% year-over-year. Both IFRS revenues and booking revenues were, besides strong organic growth, especially on IFRS revenues, driven by early Easter and also supported by the first-time consolidation of the recent acquisitions of Kurz Mal Weg and Kurzurlaub, that were closed in the beginning of January 2024. As a result, the booking on-site business within the marketplace segment has recorded an outstanding 39% year-over-year growth in booking revenues, alongside a substantial increase in the number of bookings by 53% year-over-year. Advertising business line also contributed to the overall very satisfying growth trajectory, growing by 28% year-over-year in IFRS revenues.
In terms of profitability, the marketplace segment also increased in absolute as well as relative terms, which was driven by a mix of the first-time consolidation of the accretive acquisitions, as well as further improvement in marketing efficiency. Our HomeToGo Pro segment experienced a continued strong growth momentum, increasing its IFRS revenues by 35% year-over-year to EUR 12 million, while corresponding booking revenues increased by 30% to EUR 23 million. Both our subscription as well as volume-based business activities contributed strongly to this growth, with 25% and 31% respectively.
The segment now accounts for 32% of HomeToGo's group total IFRS revenues in Q1 2024. In terms of profitability, the HomeToGo Pro segment delivered yet again a strong contribution to the overall improvement of adjusted EBITDA, also turning positive and increasing by around EUR 2 million on a year-over-year comparison to a Q1 2024 adjusted EBITDA of positive EUR 1.1 million. Turning our view back on the group level and taking a look at how the booking revenues trend has evolved. You know this slide. As already mentioned during our fiscal year 2023 call at the end of March, we have witnessed a competitive start into the first weeks of the year, which was followed by a return to unprecedented heights, significantly surpassing the figures of previous years, as you can see on the left-hand side. So despite the headwinds in the market, we have performed well.
Today, I'm pleased to report that this trend has continued throughout the month of April and early May. Our booking revenues backlog was built out further to an all-time high of around EUR 77 million. This outstanding result is even more remarkable, as last year's backlog was still including the Easter business. For some context on our regional booking revenues distribution, as well as basket size development: Driven by the latest acquisitions, those businesses are mostly concentrated in the DACH region. Our share of booking revenues from DACH has consequently increased from 55% during the first quarter of last year to 62% during the first quarter of 2024. Despite the acquisition-related shift, the North American business grew in absolute terms, and the share held up well as a result of our continued strength in the North American market, driven by attractive commercials.
Let us have a look at the development of the basket size, highlighted at the bottom of the slide. Overall, basket size was reduced by 29% year-over-year, which was mainly driven by the mix effect due to the first time consolidation of Kurz Mal Weg and Kurzurlaub, that are focused on thematic short trips. The addition of shorter business with shorter length of stay reduces the overall basket size, especially in the DACH region, while the ADR stays constant. The basket size, including--excluding the effect from those acquisitions, is stable on a year-over-year comparison, as is the case in North America. Commenting on the evolution of the on-site take rate on the next slide. The on-site take rate increased year-over-year from 11.2% in the first quarter of 2023 to 12.8% in the first quarter of 2024.
The expansion of 1.7 percentage points yet again marks an all-time high. As in previous quarters, the increase in the on-site take rate was fueled by negotiating higher take rates of new partners, as well as increasing take rates of existing partners, underlining the competition between partners for traffic and bookings. Looking at the development in our cost ratios that drove group-level profitability in relation to IFRS revenues, we observed that gross mark profit margin improved by almost 2 percentage points in Q1 2024, year over year, now standing at 97%. The main reason for the improvement was due to a decrease in amortization expenses as a result of the end of the amortization effect of e-domizil's booking revenues backlog. The amortization schedule lasted for a period of one year following the acquisition date in April 2022 and ended in March 2023.
As already mentioned, we have made further progress on our leading contributor for the expansion of our profitability, our marketing efficiency. The marketing and sales cost ratio of 114% improved by 41 percentage points compared to the prior year period, given an improvement in our marketing efficiency and positive contributions from recently acquired subsidiaries. Our Booking Revenues from repeat customers grew by 31% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the previous year period, and more than 10-fold over the last 5 years. In terms of the product and development cost margin, despite a small acquisition-related increase in absolute terms, we have improved the margin by almost 9 percentage points, driven by economies of scale.
We also managed to improve our efficiency in terms of G&A expenses, improving the ratio by 4.1 percentage points in Q1 2024 compared to the same period in 2023. The improvement is driven by lower expenses for third-party services as well as economies of scale. As a result, overall profitability in terms of adjusted EBITDA margin improved substantially by 55 percentage points on a quarterly level compared to the previous year period. As always, we adjust the cost for expenses for equity-settled share-based compensation, depreciation, amortization, and other one-off items in order to carve out the operational performance of our business and arrive at the adjusted EBITDA. As already indicated at our last earnings call, the closing of the acquisitions were in January this year, with the respective cash payouts.
In addition, we have our seasonal cash outflow as we invest in Q1 into new bookings, as reflected in the strong backlog. Looking at our cash position on slide 22, we continue to have a comfortable balance sheet with gross cash of EUR 91 million. This includes the investment of EUR 26 million in the loan money market fund. Deducting interest-bearing debt of EUR 18 million and restricted cash of EUR 0.3 million brings our net cash position at the end of March to EUR 73 million. Overall, our cash position decreased by EUR 49 million during the first quarter of 2024. The negative operating cash flow is a result of the seasonality in our business model, building up a backlog of close to EUR 77 million.
While the main expenses for performance marketing for continued customer acquisition and retention investments are typically incurred in the first quarter, the main cash inflows from the IFRS revenues generated with those expenses typically fall in the third quarter and the fourth quarter, following the summer travel high season months of July through September. Furthermore, the operating cash flow includes net payments received for traveler advance payments in the amount of EUR 6 million, stemming from collection services for the respective host. As part of the recent acquisitions, tax accruals for VAT were acquired by the group, resulting in net operating cash outflow of more than EUR 3 million. Cash flow from investing activities amounted to minus EUR 26 million and is largely explained by the minus EUR 24.5 million cash outflow for the payment of the purchase price for the recent acquisitions of subsidiaries.
The cash flow from financing activities amounted to -EUR 1.7 million and includes repayment of borrowings in the amount of EUR 1 million. Moving on to our share buyback program, which is also responsible for EUR 500,000 of the financing cash flow, which we started in September 2023. To increase the efficiency of the ongoing program, we have successfully completed a EUR 2.5 million tender offer in April as an integral part of the overall up to EUR 10 million buyback program. To date, we were able to buy back almost 1.9 million shares, which we continue to hold as treasury shares. One of the topics we are frequently asked about is share-based compensation, which we adjust in our adjusted EBITDA. Our underlying share-based payment programs are mainly equity settled.
On this slide, we show the potential effect it has on dilution and on the number of shares outstanding in general. Upfront, the value of all, including legacy VSOP, prior IPO program, vested share-based compensation is below EUR 4 million, despite being accounted for at higher values and easily covered by existing treasury shares. The respective total amount of shares we would currently need is below 2 million - 2 million shares. Go in more detail. On the left-hand side, you see a more detailed simulation on the total needed shares for all vested equity incentive programs in the HomeToGo group in relation to a simulated share price. As you can see, 525,000 shares are needed for the legacy VSOP program, or VSOP, as we call it.
As a reminder, this program was settled as part of the IPO for a price per share of EUR 10. In addition, there are 1.4 million shares needed for vested restricted share units or RSUs. Shares needed for the complete settlement of the claims from the old VSOP and the RSUs do not change with the share price. The shares for settlement of vested virtual share options, or VSOs, however, increase with the share price. For example, an increase of the HomeToGo share price to EUR 4 would lead to an additional 1.2 million shares required to settle vested VSO claims. As you can see on the right-hand side, we have a comfortable position of treasury shares to settle all claims from vested share-based compensation.
Before I close, let's look again at our outlook for the financial year 2024, which we introduced at the end of March. We confirm today that we continue to strive for growth rate of more than 30% for Booking Revenues and for more than 35% for IFRS Revenues. We are also aiming for a significant increase of the adjusted EBITDA in 2024 compared to the financial year 2023, and look to expand our leading profitability KPI to more than EUR 10 million during financial year 2024. With that, I thank you for your attention today, and we will now open the floor for your questions.
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use only handsets while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. Our first question comes from Silvia Cuneo with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Thanks. Good morning, everyone. My first question is on the HomeToGo Marketplace segment, where the number of bookings for the on-site business increased by over 50% year-on-year, partly thanks from acquisitions. So I wanted to ask if you could please comment about the underlying demand for travel, perhaps by region, compared to the end of last year, that seemed a bit softer in Q4. Is demand improving, and what does the booking backlog tell you about the upcoming peak summer season? Then secondly, if I could ask about the new disclosure, good to see the Adjusted EBITDA of the segments separately. And in the release, you mentioned that the Adjusted EBITDA of the HomeToGo Pro segment should remain relatively steady through the year. Does it mean in terms of margin, percentage terms for 2024? And then just final quick question.
In the slide on the AI product, we noticed that you mentioned an AI product update on the 22nd of May. What shall we expect? Thank you.
Thank you, Silvia. I will answer your first two questions. Patrick will answer the AI question. So, in terms of the number of bookings, as you rightly say, the number of bookings went up, supported by the acquisitions because of the short trip holidays from Kurz Mal Weg and Kurzurlaub. So as I mentioned, the ADR of these bookings are pretty comparable to our legacy business. However, the length of stay is significantly shorter. So while our, you know, length of stay is more towards seven days, so it's all legacy business, it's all our business. This is more the what someone called so nicely, the 57-hour holidays, and that reflects pretty much that.
What we have seen in the bookings in Q1, but also what we see in the backlog, is that it's a healthy development across the acquired business as well as the legacy business. We have that specialty and, you know, it helps us on the IFRS Revenues side with the early Easter. So we have more check-ins already in March as people traveled towards the holidays, Easter holidays, and therefore, IFRS Revenues are a bit higher, which helped us also on the Adjusted EBITDA. But the counter effect is, of course, that the backlog is a little bit lower than because all these check-ins has already been reflected in the IFRS Revenues.
But all in all, we look very comfortable into the future, and everything we see is going according to plan. With regards to the adjusted EBITDA of the Pro segment, you are right, it is a pretty stable business. There will be, of course, also fluctuations, so you should not just take Q1 times four, but it's a much more stable business compared to the marketplace business, where we have the very typical seasonality of negative EBITDA in Q1 and very high positive EBITDA in Q3.
Great. Hi, Silvia, Patrick here. So, on your AI question, obviously, with the update, I don't want to preempt what we want to show, in our update, so you have to stay a little bit tuned for that. But actually what we will obviously showcase there is further development, AI development ahead of the summer travel season. Yeah, and also the progress and our vision towards fully AI-powered marketplace and what that means. Yeah. So what are the next steps that we will follow? How we envision parts of the product to change along that, and how we will call these things in the future, yeah. But if I would tell more, then I would already preempt that today. Thanks.
For sure. Thank you all.
Our next question comes from Bharat Nagaraj, with Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for the presentation. Just two questions for me. Vacasa, the property manager in the U.S., is, has, I think, has a layoff round as well, following a decline in gross booking value. Just wondering how that affects you. Is that, like, kind of positive for you, given what you said about competition for traffic among property managers? Maybe I'll go one by one. Start there.
Thank you for the question. So, obviously, we don't comment on market participants, and in particular, in this case, on a partner that might have a difficult phase on the business side there, as the reports sound. But like the thing for us, we usually, with the HomeToGo Marketplace, and the large amount of inventory that we have in there, so on a general note, it's always like that, we have inventory that's generally like can replace other partners' inventory and so on. And these inventories and performance on the marketplace is also all the time, like being basically judged on by our ranking algorithms.
Yeah, that you know, are working with machine learning, understanding what is the right property, what people pay for, for getting a booking from us, and, and so on and so on. So there's always a fair kind of competition in the marketplace within. So, we would not expect anything to happen from this specific layoff round, but if there should be, yeah, obviously, this would be reflected in our marketplace automatically. And we don't expect actually, like, any upsides from us when a partner struggles. We usually try to help them overcome these situations and have, so also in the past, throughout, from a global, global time of perspective.
Yeah, sure. Makes sense. Thank you. Thanks for that. The other question I have, Patrick, also is on, like, I guess one of your peers as well, who are entering into the experiences kind of business as well. Is that something that you have considered in the past, or considering in the future? Sorry.
You mean, creating houses for a lot of money that only a fraction of people can visit and make this your front door experience?
Yeah, and other activities as well, I guess. Like, they have this new, experiences kind of like, option. Yeah.
Yeah. I think they had it already... So you're referring to Airbnb. They had it, they had it, obviously already prior, prior Corona. Also hard to comment on that, but, I think, like the, it, it, it now comes back because there might be new growth areas that need to be like, untapped. And for us, we won't move into experiences as a core product, but we see obviously experiences as an addition, when people can book on HomeToGo. So we also have this, a partnership with, with GetYourGuide, for instance, and, are looking always into how we can make basically someone that's, that booked with HomeToGo, give them, additional opportunities.
Like you also saw today with the official launch again of the Komoot partnership, where you get a free map from Komoot if you book with HomeToGo for your destination, or with a weather promise, like insurance, where you can basically ensure yourself against bad weather, which is very revolutionary in the space. So we more have a general look on these kind of additional topics that we can offer to our customers. But we won't in the near future build out our own experience business, rather do this together with strong partners.
Yeah, absolutely. Makes sense. And the Weather Promise is certainly a very good addition as well. Am I guessing right in saying that you obviously won't have any liabilities for, for your business, mostly an integration with another business, Weather Promise?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, that's a partner that takes the liability. Exactly.
Thank you. Thanks.
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, you may press star and one. Our next question comes from Christian Salis with Hauck Aufhäuser Investment Banking. Please go ahead, sir.
Hey, good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking also my questions. I've got three, please. And so the first one is again on the AI topic, so thanks for providing this update on your initiatives and the pipeline. Could you maybe talk a little bit about how this already affected your KPIs positively, maybe in Q1? So like higher conversion, maybe, for example. And secondly, second question on the take rates expansion to 12.8%. So probably you won't share a specific number, but could you provide an indication how much the take rate would have increased without the acquisitions in Q1? And also, could you provide an indication how the off-site take rate has developed in Q1?
Then finally, could you please talk a little bit about the regional development in the U.S. and Europe, apart from the acquisitions, and how did the share of repeat customers develop in Q1, please? Thank you.
Hello. So, Christian, I take the first question on AI, not surprisingly, quality. So, how does it affect our KPIs, right? Like, so, in the first place, we elaborated a little bit on that, also on the ITB. There are different parts of AI that we can leverage. Obviously, one is internally, yeah, that you might anyway not see, so how we can make our processes better and so on and so on, and we make a great strides there. On the other side, it's around what we have been already doing, yeah? So for instance, like mentioned before, like machine learning on the ranking side or machine learning on making pictures better, understanding the content of our properties better, and providing better tools with that.
And that is something that where you with better models can always like leverage even more, either on the cost side, but also in terms of better results, and that usually lead also to higher conversion, so better KPIs. So to give you an example, like, with the AI summaries of reviews that we tested or the AI summaries of descriptions, we saw a nice uplift in terms of conversion and so also revenue per user through these like very helpful tools for the user experience. So that you can imagine, right? You don't have to scroll through 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 reviews, but get already a quick glimpse on what is important.
And so it helps you with decision-making on a property, and the quicker you can make a decision, obviously, that helps also with conversion. And it's the last part of more, you could say, inspirational parts, like the AI Mode, where we also gather customers that prior may have done this inspirational part on Google or on another website. So basically earlier in the funnel, get the customer to the website with as a consequence is also like getting people to the HomeToGo product that might not have used it in that depth of their travel journey or their booking journey before, which also increases for us certain KPIs. Yeah.
But as we pointed out before, so for us, we look on every step of the booking journey to see what we can do, and also internally with our processes with AI. You will also hear more of these, especially around how we envision that for the future, even further, next week when we reveal a few of these additional topics in the AI update.
All right, thank you, Christian. On your question on the take rate. So, we will not split out in detail, but if you take the increase in take rate, compare Q1 2023 to Q1 2024, about 2/3 of that increase of 1.7 percentage points comes from the organic improvement, and the other third comes from the acquisition acquired businesses. So, and that is also what we see on our offsite take rate. Basically, as we described before, it's the competition on the marketplace where our partners compete for more traffic, and that helps us to increase the respective take rate. So, that is working out quite nicely.
You then asked about the repeat business. As I mentioned, repeat booking revenues have increased by 31%. And when we look at that on a more regional basis, we see the strongest growth in rest of Europe. And that is, you know, basically what we have seen in many instances before, was it the on-site business, et cetera. So, you know, when we always start a product in DACH, then see that it works in DACH, and then the rest of Europe follows, and then followed by North America. And that's also what we see in the repeat business. The strongest growth in repeat business is in rest of Europe, but the other regions are performing well as well.
Overall, regional split, as mentioned, due to the acquisition effect, and given that the Kurzurlaub business is only a DACH business, the share of DACH has increased from 55 to 62%. Although we have growth on absolute terms in the other regions, as well. In particular, in North America, as before, we continue our strategy to really look for attractive contributions coming from the respective partners, and that continues to work out well. I hope we got now all your questions. If we missed anything, then please speak up.
Yeah, thank you. Very helpful. I have maybe one follow-up question on the... A little bit nitty-gritty. On the IFRS revenue in the marketplace segment. The booking on site has increased by EUR 9 million. So this was obviously also significantly driven by the acquisition. So could you confirm that also the that without the acquisition, the 3.7 number from last year would have increased the double digits year-over-year?
You are? Sorry, again, you are at the marketplace, IFRS revenues, you said.
Yes. For the booking-
Yeah, yeah.
For the on-site bookings.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The organic, that's what Patrick already said at the very beginning in his part, that our organic growth was like more than, well, not more, almost double what the average IFRS growth rate or U.S. GAAP growth rate of our big three U.S. competitors is. So that was a very nice organic growth we have seen there. That, again, of course, as I mentioned, was supported by an early Easter holiday, but then again, that's also the case for every other travel company in the world.
Yeah, excellent. Very helpful. Thank you, guys.
Ladies and gentlemen, this was our last question. I hand back to Sebastian Grabert for any closing remarks.
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