Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the HomeToGo second quarter 2024 earnings conference call. I am Judith, the Chorus Call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Mr. Sebastian Grabert, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, Judith, and good morning, dear analysts and investors, and welcome to HomeToGo's Q2 2024 earnings call. My name is Sebastian Grabert, and with me today is our co-founder and CEO, Dr. Patrick Andrae, and our CFO, Steffen Schneider, who will present our financial highlights of the first half of 2024. 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 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 today. Today, in addition to our fantastic figures for the first half of 2024, I also want to shed more light on our newly established segments, particularly our B2B segment, HomeToGo Pro, and explain to you the variety of its business models. As you know, HomeToGo consists of two distinct business segments that are delivering clear value to our overall growth. The marketplace segment. When we take a look at the marketplace segment, it's HomeToGo's AI-powered B2C platform, offering the world's largest selection of vacation rentals, including brands, brands like HomeToGo, Casamundo, and e-domizil, and loved by travelers globally, with local websites across more than 25 countries.
With strength in both our booking Onsite and advertising business, the marketplace drove more than EUR 1 billion in GBV in the first half of 2024, also driven by a strong growth in the number of Onsite bookings of more than 50%. This results already in a H1 of this year, in a growth of more than 100% of traveled IFRS revenues for booking on site. On the other side, HomeToGo Pro segment. HomeToGo Pro segment consists of our B2B, B2B software and service solutions for the whole travel market, with a special focus on SaaS for the supply side of vacation rentals. With HomeToGo Pro, we are aiming to solve the pain points for vacation rental suppliers and provide the best solutions to substantially improve their business.
In a nutshell, our vision for HomeToGo Pro is that anyone who wants to run a successful business in vacation rentals thinks of HomeToGo Pro as the solution. We already see strong results on our path there. Across both the subscription and the volume-based businesses, HomeToGo Pro drove more than EUR 1.3 billion in enabled GBV in the first half of the year, a remarkable 26% year-over-year increase. As a reminder, enabled GBV refers to travels that were enabled through a HomeToGo Pro solution, mainly based on data provided by our customers and partners that work with our solutions. Overall, during the first half of 2024, the HomeToGo business has driven significant growth that continues to outpace our peers.
Compared to the same period in 2019, our half-year 1 2024 IFRS revenues have grown 211%, and notably, 38% growth year-over-year. So in just our 10th year since our founding, we are proud to be the fastest growing public vacation rental player. This is also evident in our new record figures for any second quarter in terms of booking revenues and IFRS revenues, as well as the new all-time high in booking revenues backlog. We would like to thank our team, partners, travelers, and shareholders for their continued trust. We continue to deliver technology solutions that accelerate the global vacation rental industry and are building a leading European travel technology company.
Across innovators and AI, product advancements, creating experience that drives repeat demand, growth in our booking Onsite business, and accelerating our B2B solutions, our business keeps climbing to new heights. HomeToGo Pro, as a key piece of our business, is growing and evolving fast, and it's increasingly profitable. As our CFO, Steffen, will highlight later, HomeToGo Pro had more than six-fold adjusted EBITDA increase in half year 1 2024, with 504.4% year-over-year growth, reaching EUR 4.5 million. At the end of the second quarter, HomeToGo Pro now accounts for 30% of HomeToGo Group's IFRS revenues. This is a staggering more than 14x growth in IFRS, IFRS revenues since 2019, the pre-pandemic era. Before I dive deeper into HomeToGo Pro segment, a brief word on current trading.
HomeToGo's second quarter was outstanding, achieving new record values in our top line, with significantly improved profitability and free cash flow. Steffen will provide you with more details on this later. However, you may have already heard from the earnings calls of our travel peers that there are signs of slowing travel demand, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. While travel has continued to prove resilient for a long time coming out of the pandemic, we are now seeing more consumers being cautious about travel spending amid growing economic uncertainty. On the other hand, we also see the supply side becoming more flexible to attract guests, reversing a trend of continuous price increases in many regions. Though the willingness to travel this year persists, as observed by our record booking revenue backlog, we continue to track and monitor any travel-related slowdown and moderating growth outlook.
However, today, we reiterate our financial guidance for the full year 2024. And now, let's dive into HomeToGo Pro, a fast-growing and increasingly profitable segment. But first, we take a look at our path towards the marketplace and HomeToGo Pro segments we are operating today. Since our founding, following our long-term strategy, we've always evolved our platform to adapt to new and changing traveler behavior, as well as the needs in the industry. From our starting roots as a metasearch in 2014, in line with our long-term strategy, we evolved into a hybrid marketplace in 2017 by introducing our booking Onsite business. This particularly enabled smaller partners to generate more bookings with high conversion rates using our sophisticated technology and data solutions, as well as gaining access to our wide customer base.
With our marketplace, we continued to build an experience where customers would love returning to book directly on HomeToGo. Today, in our core markets, thus, our Onsite share has grown to an impressive 85%, 10 percentage points growth in the past year alone. In addition, we launched our software and service solutions that we call HomeToGo Pro today, and propelled this side of the business with strategic technology investments as well as acquisition in the past four years. The decision to introduce our new business segmentation at the beginning of 2024 across both our AI-powered marketplace and B2B business, HomeToGo Pro, was a clear move to provide more transparency to the capital markets. A reminder that HomeToGo Pro combines the formerly reported subscription and services and the volume-based service offerings of the group.
As we grow our reputation as an industry innovator, and particularly our technology solutions with HomeToGo Pro, we are tackling clear challenges that are facing the supply side of vacation rentals. First, the market is highly fragmented. Let's look at Germany as an example. Thanks to our friends at the German Vacation Rental Association, we dug into some fresh data to give you a picture of how our core market, Germany, currently stands. Germany alone has more than 500,000 vacation rental units in total. However, four out of five of these accommodations are owned by individual hosts. This high fragmentation is a challenge in itself. Second, high complexity and effort to manage a vacation rental business, especially property managers that oversee multiple units, deal with high administrative load, complex distribution systems, and a frequent turnover of guests, and a shortage of cleaning staff. And thirdly, inexperience.
The vacation rental industry is moving fast alongside steadily increasing customer expectation, but that means a significant lack of professionalism in the space. Most vacation rental owners don't have sophisticated marketing or tech expertise. Taking a comprehensive view at these challenges, we have developed the solution HomeToGo Pro, our B2B software and service solutions for the whole market. Our key brands under HomeToGo Pro span from listing and white label solutions, as well as software as a service for the supply side for vacation rentals. These are unique core offerings to tackle the complexity of managing vacation rentals in order to support partners in professionalizing and growing their vacation rental business. Some examples of the core offerings under HomeToGo Pro include products that centralize multi-channel distribution across more than 100 booking platforms. This approach offers real-time price and availability synchronization across many platforms.
Partners can still take a multi-platform listing approach with the simplicity of our solutions. For those lacking technology expertise, we also offer intuitive software to build their own website, communicate seamlessly with guests, manage reviews, and have a full view on occupancy and revenue statistics. With our HomeToGo Doppelgänger product, we are easily connecting trusted travel and tourism brands to HomeToGo's unparalleled selection of vacation rentals, allowing them to monetize their traffic better. In this suite, we offer fast, scalable, and innovative software and redistribution solutions such as white label and API products. Doppelgänger is already in use by industry-leading players such as TUI, HolidayCheck, HolidayPirates, and many more. Now let's take a closer look at some of our brands under the HomeToGo Pro umbrella. First, we will take a look at Smoobu.
In 2021, we acquired Smoobu, a high-performing software as a service solution to easily connect self-service tools to our key partners. With Smoobu, we cater to a specific submarket and customer persona, hosts that want to be hands-on and stay in control of their own business.... Smoobu solves the pain points of multi-platform listing approach for these hosts, such as double bookings and multiple communication channels, through smart technology solutions such as synchronized price and availability management, or a central cockpit to control all guest communication. At the same time, hosting control and can personalize their listing on each OTA according to their preference. Smoobu basically just makes the annoying parts much easier, and that's for a great price.
Given our vision to make Smoobu essential operational tool for these hosts, we have developed it into an app store-like marketplace, that allows users to connect on top of the service that Smoobu provide themselves to more than 50 additional services, such as smart pricing tools or check-in services. The product itself can be tailored to their very specific needs. That's also increasing the stickiness of Smoobu as a software. Smoobu is very well regarded in the industry, loved by customers, and achieved and maintained Preferred and Premier Partner status from both Airbnb and Booking.com. The numbers speak for themselves. As of today, Smoobu is the software of choice for over 80,000 vacation rental properties. If we look at the Rule of 40, the combined profit margin and top line growth rate, Smoobu's 50% clearly ranks the company amongst the top European software companies.
Let's switch to SECRA. While Smoobu targets hosts that want to self-service and manage their business themselves, there's a second equally prominent homeowner person in the market, hosts that completely outsource the work to property management agencies. SECRA, our second key Software as a Service brand under HomeToGo Pro, addresses in the first place professional property managers with full-service solution suite that offers deep integration and delivers high retention. SECRA's property management system helps professional property managers control large property portfolios from a central system. Through its channel manager and online booking system, it allows them to receive and easily manage bookings from a variety of distribution partners, such as Airbnb, Booking.com, or HomeToGo, the HomeToGo Marketplace. Like Smoobu, SECRA is also a notable player for major OTAs, including being primary connectivity partner for Booking.com.
SECRA's central cockpit allows property managers to steer their business end-to-end, to not only manage calendars and bookings, but also back-office tasks, such as invoicing. Additionally, SECRA supports the development of regional tourism by technologically enabling regional destination marketing organizations. As of today, more than 50,000 vacation rentals are managed via SECRA. If we compare Smoobu and SECRA side by side, these two conceptually similar solutions deliver high value and monetization for distinct target customer segments. To recap, Smoobu, largely making up our subscription business, is an all-in-one self-service for private hosts that want to be in control of their own business. So it's a powerful solution to grow a vacation rental business, automatic sync of booking channels for effective price and availability management, plus it connects third-party tools to an app store-like marketplace for hosts to tailor their support.
SECRA, driving our volume-based business in addition to some subscription, is a full service professional suite. It's especially targeted toward property managers to manage and channel thousands of vacation rentals simultaneously. In addition, SECRA has deep relationships and solutions for destination marketing organizations, offering a website builder, booking engine and market services, plus a channel manager for private hosts to connect them to any relevant OTA in the industry as a light version of the property manager product. Let's look on our third HomeToGo Pro solution we want to dive into today, HomeToGo Doppelgänger. With Doppelgänger, we are easily connecting trusted brands to our unparalleled selection of vacation rentals. Doppelgänger was developed in-house by our team and is a suite of fast and scalable innovative software and redistribution solutions, such as white label and API products.
It's already in use by many industry-leading players, such as TUI, HolidayCheck, HolidayPirates, and many more. Today, already more than 30 key brands use HomeToGo Doppelgänger. So what's the value for our partners? First, Doppelgänger allows our partners to better monetize their traffic by seamlessly connecting and selling HomeToGo's vacation rental inventory. Second, by offering our experience in-house customer experience and back-end services, partners can participate in the upside without having the operational hassle. And third, our modular and scalable technology enables fast integration of Doppelgänger into external technology landscapes, as well as the setup of a white label within a few days. So Doppelgänger is already boosting the vacation rental business of our partners. For our top three partners, it grew their vacation rental booking revenues by more than 90% on average in just one year after migrating to the HomeToGo Doppelgänger product.
And how does this translate into value creation for HomeToGo itself? Firstly, Doppelgänger is driving additional monetization of the existing tech and supply we have on the marketplace by connecting well-known brands, basically using what we made on the marketplace, available to our partners also externally. So secondly, this allows us to participate in bookings for other brands, thus capturing market share and improving our brand visibility. And thirdly, overall, it's a highly scalable business model that has attractive commercials and a high value add for our partners. As a result, in the past year alone, our booking revenues from the Doppelgänger business have grown more than three times, as we increasingly add new partners to the product. But let me sum up HomeToGo Pro. Overall, HomeToGo Pro today has more than 65,000 accounts, with more than 230,000 listings.
Since its inception, HomeToGo Pro has been growing fast, and in the first half of 2024, it contributed 30% of our IFRS revenues. Additionally, HomeToGo Pro enabled over EUR 1.3 billion in gross booking value across the industry in the first half of 2024 alone, achieving a strong year-over-year growth of more than 25%. The first half of 2024 favorably positioned us for sustained growth and improved profitability, and the positive margin contributions from HomeToGo Pro are a substantial contributor to this promising growth. So looking ahead, and as presented at our Capital Markets Day in 2023, we are also looking to value accretive M&A opportunities for HomeToGo Pro to provide solutions that can further propel the entire travel industry.
With that, I would like to hand over to Steffen for a closer look at our financials for the first half of the year. Thank you.
Thank you, Patrick, and good morning, and thank you all for joining today. Let's look at our key financial highlights for the first half, as well as the second quarter of 2024. First, we have seen solid performance in the first six months of 2024, with strong growth in both booking revenues and, in particular, IFRS revenues. Both metrics reached new absolute record values for a second quarter. As a reminder, besides the solid organic foundation, this positive top-line development was also driven by the consolidation of the majority acquisition of Kurz- mal- weg and Kurzurlaub at the beginning of 2024. This development is also reflected in our increased booking revenues backlog. As usual, the backlog reaches its peak prior to any quarter three, and therefore, a new all-time high, close to EUR 80 million, is providing high visibility for the remainder of the year.
Second, we continue to improve profitability. After achieving adjusted EBITDA break-even for the first time in the second quarter in 2023, we have further expanded our margins, surpassing last year's threshold. This continued improvement was mainly due to a significant profitability increase in the HomeToGo Pro segment, which saw its adjusted EBITDA contribution growing six-fold in the first half compared to the previous year, reaching a 16.8 adjusted EBITDA margin. On the HomeToGo Marketplace, we saw once again an improvement in our marketing efficiency. This improvement was driven by strong repeat booking revenues, growing by more than 35% year-over-year, as well as a further increased Onsite take rate, which was primarily driven by the inclusion of the acquired short trip business.
Third, we ended Q2 with a significant cash balance of EUR 96 million in gross cash, reflecting a sequential growth compared to the end of Q1 of more than EUR 5 million. This increase was mainly driven by the increased business volume, leading to additional traveler advance payments and a slight change in cash flow pattern due to the acquisitions in the field of short trips. The free cash flow during Q2 2024 rose by 72% year-over-year to EUR 12.1 million. Let's look at the key financials in more detail. Booking revenues reached EUR 147.2 million in the first half of 2024, climbing to a new record second quarter value of EUR 63.8 million, both reflecting 27% year-over-year growth.
This growth was primarily driven by our strong booking Onsite business in our marketplace, which grew by 47% year-over-year in the first six months of 2024. IFRS revenue grew by 38.1% in H1 2024 and reached a record high of EUR 52.9 million for any second quarter, reflecting a 23.7% year-over-year growth. This notable growth was driven by both the HomeToGo Marketplace and HomeToGo Pro segments. We continuously improved our underlying profitability, with Adjusted EBITDA increasing by 19% year-over-year, amounting to -EUR 19 million in the first half of 2024. The significant improvement in our Adjusted EBITDA margin was mainly driven by strong margin expansion within our HomeToGo Pro business and supported by continued growth in repeat booking revenues.
Looking just at the second quarter, we increased adjusted EBITDA by 54.3% year-over-year, further surpassing the adjusted EBITDA break-even from Q2 2023. Free cash flow significantly improved both on a quarterly and year-to-date basis. For the first half of 2024, free cash flow totaled -EUR 10.3 million, reflecting a 21% year-over-year improvement. As already mentioned, this was mainly driven by increased business volume. In Q2, free cash flow amounted to EUR 12.1 million, reflecting a remarkable year-over-year growth of 72%. On the next slide, we break down the key P&L items per segment in the first half of 2024... The marketplace segment performed strongly, with booking revenues growing by 26% and IFRS revenues by 47%. Both metrics were supported by decent organic growth and the consolidation of the acquisitions of our short-trip business.
As a result, the booking Onsite business within the marketplace segment more than doubled its H1 IFRS revenues, recording a 114% year-over-year growth and a substantial 55% increase in the number of bookings year-over-year. In terms of profitability, the marketplace segment saw a slight increase in both absolute and relative terms, driven by ongoing growth in booking revenues from repeat customers and improved marketing efficiency. Our HomeToGo Pro segment continued its growth momentum, increasing IFRS revenues by 90% year-over-year to EUR 26.7 million, while booking revenues increased by 29% to EUR 40.3 million. Both our subscription and volume-based business activities contributed to this growth, with IFRS revenues growing by 18% and 19% year-over-year, respectively.
The segment accounts for 30% of HomeToGo's group total IFRS revenues in the first six months of 2024. In terms of profitability, HomeToGo Pro segment made a stellar contribution to the overall improvement of adjusted EBITDA, increasing its adjusted EBITDA more than sixfold year-over-year to EUR 4.5 million. Looking at the same data for just quarter two, looking again at the marketplace, the booking Onsite performed exceptionally well due to a substantially increased number of bookings. It experienced remarkable growth in Q2, with IFRS revenues increasing by 78% year-over-year to EUR 23.3 million. The main driver for the strong increase in IFRS revenues, the short-trip business with its peak season before and after the summer.
Advertising business, which includes the former CPA offsite and CPC business, was almost flat in terms of booking revenues due to efficiency steering towards higher margin business. In terms of IFRS revenues, we saw a 6.4% year-over-year decrease, mainly due to this year's early Easter, which shifted some IFRS revenues into Q1. This, as well as building up the backlog, is also a driver for the slightly lower adjusted EBITDA for the marketplace in Q2, decreasing from a positive break even in Q2 2023 to -EUR 1 million in Q2 2024. Looking at HomeToGo Pro, we saw growth in both businesses, with in particular, higher growth in booking revenues for the volume-based business and higher IFRS growth in the subscription business.
In terms of profitability, HomeToGo Pro more than doubled its second quarter Adjusted EBITDA, achieving 144% year-over-year growth to EUR 3.2 million, and significantly expanding its Adjusted EBITDA margin by 11.7 percentage points to 21%. To conclude, we improved underlying profitability by more than 54% on a quarterly basis, reaching Adjusted EBITDA break even already in the second quarter, as we did in 2023. Turning our attention again back to the group level and examining the trends in booking revenues over the years. As mentioned during our Q1 call in May, 2024 continues to be characterized by very competitive commercials, in particular on the marketing side. Nevertheless, we significantly surpassed the figures of previous years, as shown on the left-hand side. Despite continued market headwinds, we performed well in the first half of the year.
As already highlighted, our booking revenues backlog reached an all-time high of almost EUR 80 million, providing visibility for the remainder of the year. Some additional context on our average basket size development. The overall decrease in basket size by 13% year-over-year was, as mentioned before, driven by the success of the short-trip business in DACH. The inclusion of these shorter trip business reduces the overall basket size due to a shorter length of stay, especially in the DACH region, while the average daily rate remains constant. Excluding the impact of the short-trip business, the basket size slightly increased year-over-year, similar to the rest of Europe. For the North American market, the basket size decreased slightly due to a lower average daily rate compared to last year's period, particularly in Florida, as the destination with the highest share in U.S. revenues.
Commenting on the evolution of our Onsite take rate. Here we see the flip side of the short-trip business contributing positively to the favorable development of the Onsite take rate. The Onsite take rate increased year-over-year from 11.6% in the first half of 2023, to 12.7% in H1 2024. This 1.1 percentage point expansion is a new record for an H1 and comes very close to our all-time high from Q1 2024, 12.8%. For Q2, the Onsite take rate increased year-over-year by 0.3 percentage points to 12.5%. Moving on to the development of our cost ratios that drove group-level profitability in relation to IFRS Revenues. We observed improvements in profitability across all major cost components in the first half of 2024.
Looking at the first half, the gross profit margin improved by 1.1 percentage points year-over-year in the first half, reaching 98%. This improvement is primarily due to enhancement cost efficiencies, driven by a disproportionately high sales growth. We made significant progress in one of the key contributors to our profitability expansion, our marketing efficiency.... The marketing and sales cost ratio of 85% improved by a notable 12.2 percentage points in the first six months of 2024, compared to the prior year period, driven by enhanced marketing efficiency, supported by a strong 35.5 year-over-year growth in repeat booking revenues and positive contributions from recently acquired subsidiaries.
In terms of the product development cost margin, despite a meaningful acquisition-related increase of 24% in absolute terms in the first half of 2024, we improved the margin slightly by 0.2 percentage points, driven by higher economies of scale. We also managed to improve our efficiency in terms of G&A expenses, reducing the ratio by 0.5 percentage points in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023. This improvement is again, mainly due to a higher economies of scale, despite an absolute cost increase as a result of the acquisitions. Overall profitability in terms of Adjusted EBITDA margin, improved in the first half substantially by 14.9 percentage points compared to the previous year. Now, looking at just the second quarter, we see a similar picture.
However, both cost margins for product and development and G&A expenses worsened compared to the same period last year. Absolute product development expenses increased by 40%, rising from EUR 7.9 million in the prior year period to EUR 11 million in Q2 2024. This increase was primarily due to a higher personnel expense, resulting from the expanded scope of consolidation from recent acquisitions and new services for the supply side. General administration expenses increased by EUR 1 million in the second quarter, driven by higher consulting expenses, increased third-party expenses, bank charges, as well as maintenance expenses for hardware and software. The sequential deterioration in both cost margins compared to the second quarter of 2023 is attributed to this year's early Easter, when corresponding IFRS revenues were recognized already in the previous quarter, leading to a significant improvement as reflected in the half-year results.
Overall, Q2 profitability in terms of adjusted EBITDA margin improved by 0.8 percentage points compared to the previous year. As always, we adjust the cost for expenses related to equity-settled share-based compensation, depreciation, amortization, and other one-off items to highlight the operational performance of our business and to arrive at the adjusted EBITDA. Looking at our cash position on slide 22, we continue to have a robust balance sheet with gross cash of EUR 95.7 million. This includes a EUR 17 million investment in the now money market fund. This is sequential increase in gross cash of EUR 5.1 million compared to the end of Q1 2024, partially results from the higher adoption of our HomeToGo payment solution and consequently, higher traveler advance payments.
After deducting interest-bearing debt of EUR 3 million and restricted cash of EUR 15.9 million from collection services for respective hosts, our net cash position at the end of June 2024 stands at EUR 76.6 million. The increase in cash inflow from operating activities amounting to EUR 15 million in the second quarter of 2024 can mainly be attributed to the increased traveler advance payments and the positive impact of the seasonality pattern of cash flows from the short trip business. Cash flow from investing activities amounted to -EUR 7 million, largely due to a cash outflow for acquisitions and internally generated intangible assets. These outflows were partly offset by proceeds from the sale of a portion of our investment in the money market fund, amounting to EUR 10 million in Q2 2024.
Cash flow from financing and other activities amounted to -EUR 3.1 million, includes outflows of EUR 3.4 million for payments made towards the share buyback program and public share tender offer, as well as repayments of borrowings amounting to EUR 0.7 million in the second quarter of 2024. Before I close, let's revisit our outlook, outlook for the financial year 2024. Based on the solid first half of 2024, we confirm that we continue to aim for growth rates of more than 30% year-over-year for booking revenues and more than 35% year-over-year for IFRS revenues in the full year 2024.
We are also targeting a significant increase in Adjusted EBITDA in 2024 compared to the financial year 2023, and aim to expand our leading profitability KPI to more than EUR 10 million during 2024. With that, I thank you for your attention today, and we will now open the floor for your questions.
Thank you. 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 headsets while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question is from Mr. Bharath Nagaraj. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I have a couple of them. Please, could you provide us with the organic growth figures for booking and IFRS, please? That's the first one. And secondly, with regards to the bookings, backlog, the progression that you have shown compared to the previous years- .. is it possible to also understand how that would be if it weren't for the acquisitions? Just to see how your, how you're trending, because number of, as you said, number of peers have guided to a softer market. We'd just love to know how you are compared to the previous years without the acquisitions. Thank you.
Thank you for the question. Yeah, I think like the, as you know, we are not breaking out, organic growth rates, on, on the side. So for us, especially, it is also important that, part of HomeToGo strategy is, also an organic growth, via M&A, as you know. So basically, you can see that also from, the strategic pillars, where we have been seeing the right growth at the right, strategic angles. So especially if you look into, like, what we witnessed on the, on the booking Onsite, side, right? Like, where you see, for the first half of the year, even more than 100% in IFRS, booking Onsite revenues growth.
And you can also see, the other side of it in the HomeToGo Pro segment, where we especially focus, on the profitability side of it, with more than 500% growth and profitability there for the first half of the year. Yeah. So this is, this is how we basically look and also how we steer, yeah? So taking into account inorganic parts, organic parts, and then reach an overall top line and bottom line number, that we are steering towards. And if we look at the backlog, obviously, it's a record backlog compared to last year. You also can see that, our bookings increased more than 50% on the booking Onsite part for the marketplace. So we feel...
Also that, as you can see, like, we reiterated our guidance, so we feel comfortable on the future outlook.
Thank you. Just as a follow-up, in the U.S., like, what's your, how is your strategy evolving? Has it now moved from, let's say, more of a like a non-Onsite kind of approach to more Onsite kind of focus as well? Or has it changed due to the competition and given how your peers are kind of work there in the country? Any color on that would be helpful. Thank you.
Yeah. So like, I would say in the U.S., it's obviously like a market that is very big. Yeah. And you can also see it in our composition. It's a big part of HomeToGo. So if you look at North America as a market, but it's mainly driven obviously by the U.S. So like, if we see there, we still, and you can see that in our numbers when you look at overall Onsite versus Onsite in the DACH region, that we are still lacking the Onsite part there. But it simply takes also longer in such a big market that is even more fragmented than other markets. But also there, we see progress.
And secondly, what we also see, if you go to our U.S. site, you might also see that we started there also with My HomeToGo, so that you can list your property there. And you may find some interesting ways how we approach that market, especially towards maybe some bigger players with more a pink-red kind of brand color.
Okay. Okay. Sorry, if I may just ask one last thing. I think you mentioned-
Sure
... as well in your original commentary with regards to the outlook and why you're confident, whereas some peers have kind of got it guided to a softer outlook. Just wanna understand the reason behind your confidence for the full year, expectations. Thanks.
Yeah. I think, like, on one hand, we know what we have as a backlog. And on the other hand, obviously, we have moved, as you can, as you have also seen in, in, basically my part of the presentation, right? That we have been capable, to actually show the strongest results in the industry. Yeah. So, overall, from what we know today, right, we feel, good about, like, pertaining our expected guidances of more than 30% growth and also on the Adjusted EBITDA line. Obviously, we have to monitor that going forward as well, like we always do.
But, as you can see from the results and also like the backlog we have, we have some good kind of visibility into the future that makes us very confident, and especially looking positively on the... If you see, like, what we have witnessed on the Booking Revenues side as well. Yeah.
All right. Thank you.
The next question is from, Christian Salis, Hauck & Aufhäuser. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, everyone. Christian from Hauck. Thank you for the helpful presentation. I've got three questions, please. The first one would be on the development of the Onsite take rate. So could you please talk a little bit more about why the improvement in the Onsite take rate in Q2 was lower than in the first quarter? I think in the second quarter, we've seen a 30 basis point improvement year-over-year to 12.5%, while we have seen almost 2 percentage points improvement in the first quarter.
... And the second question, just quickly on the regional performance, have you seen any differences in Q2 in terms of top-line development, demand in Americas or compared to Europe? Or is it that people are more saving a little bit more in both destinations, basically? Word on current trading would also be helpful, please. And then final question on HomeToGo Pro. Of all your products you offer in this segment, could you maybe provide a little bit more color? Which has been the most successful product or service that is contributing most to the strong growth you've seen in the first half? Thank you.
Hi, Christian. Steffen here. So on the Onsite take rate, you know, it's the quarter is always one thing. So we had... When you look at the first half-year numbers and the strong improvement there, you also have the very strong improvement we have seen in Q1. As you know, in Q1, there's the majority of the booking revenues are happening, and it always depends on where the respective travelers are coming from, where they are booking, and therefore, we had very strong improvement in Q1, and that is the main driver for the high improvement in first half of the year.
In Q2, we already had a, let's say, a pretty high benchmark from Q2 2023, and therefore, that additional improvement of 0.3% is. Doesn't maybe look so strong compared to the 1.1 percentage points in H1, but still it's a major step forward. So, you know, we shouldn't, and all investors shouldn't expect that we just increase the take rate each year by more than 1 percentage point. This is a process which goes step by step as we and as our partners compete on the marketplace, in particular, for traffic. Therefore, we are very happy with the development. On the second question, on the regional performance, that is basically going in line with what we have seen in the past.
The only major deviation is that the DACH business, as a share of the total revenues, has become more important, and that's the main driver for that is the short-trip business, as already mentioned before, because they are mainly active in Germany and Austria. There's a little bit of a DACH business which would become rest of Europe, but we are not active at all with the short-trip business in the North American market yet.
Yeah, and if I may answer the question on HomeToGo Pro. Obviously, we are, we are generally. And that's also why we wanted to also, like, give a little bit more details on the segment itself in this call. We are actually very proud that our strategic, like, kind of, pillar with HomeToGo Pro and the strategy we set out, saying basically, yeah, we made people more professional on our marketplace, and now we want to help with what we experience on the marketplace, making smaller suppliers, especially more professional, that we can also bring that to the outside. So outside of the marketplace with HomeToGo Pro and professionalize basically, and help professionalizing the market there.
So, having said this, obviously, like, and there's no surprise, right? That, if you look at our businesses that we have below, if you look at Smoobu, which is basically a pure software as a service business, almost 100% running on subscriptions, with a strong ARR increase over the time that we have been in charge after acquiring Smoobu.
So we have a multiple times increase of ARR since we acquired the company, basically, bringing in our expertise from 10 years of running the largest selection of vacation rentals at the marketplace on a lot of topics to help them build, like, basically, and so that there's a great business into new heights. We are obviously very, very proud of that product, and it's probably also in the niche it operates, which is a big niche, like self-service host. So they basically want to take care of everything from themselves. Basically, a really unique product that caters exactly to this group of people, and that's for the best price, what we assume in the market.
Therefore, it's simply a seller product that we... If I need to pick one, which is hard, I would pick Smoobu to answer your question.
Great. Thank you. All the best.
The next question is from Wolfgang Specht, Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Yes, hello. Good morning. Two additional ones from my side. The first one, on the Onsite business, can you give us some more information? How do you see the development of the moving parts to the basket size? What do you believe lengths of stay should develop, price per day, and finally, the take rate? That would be interesting. And then, also on your Onsite business, can you shed some light on the development of your collection? So onboarding of inventory, is it the similar speeds than in prior quarters, or is it slowing or even accelerating? And finally, remuneration for advertising. We learned over the past years that there are good times and that there are bad times regarding payments from your partners. How do you see the trend for the second half of this year?
Hi, welcome. So on the basket size, the basket size continues to be really, really stable. So there's always a little bit fluctuation here and there, but all in all, ADR stays the same, length of stay stays the same. If we leave out what I already mentioned before, the impact of the short-trip business. And the way we look at that is that it shows how adaptable the consumers are, because... And it's not so much this year like we had it last year, but when you look at a object, so the individual property, there is inflation, but the ADR is basically the same as in the years before.
So the consumers are adjusting to it by. I always make the joke that last year, they were booking directly watching the sea, and this year, maybe they are 500 meters towards the city, so a little bit further in. But it shows just the breadth of our inventory and that the consumers can really adjust to it. We have had a little bit of a smaller ADR in North America, and we were spending a lot of time really trying to dig in deep into it, and there was no clear picture. So we could finally decrease it down to Florida, but when we looked within Florida, we couldn't really see that there was like a significant...
So it was really a mix of people booking maybe some smaller places for, you know, less children than the year before, so no real clear message. So you can be assured we wanted to provide you more detail here, but there's not a clear picture. And with regards to the take rate, the take rate doesn't have much of an impact here. So the take rate is more relevant for what is our share of the booking. So there we would see an increasement—increase from a higher take rate, but the basket size is pretty much irrelevant for the take rate.
Good. On the Onsite business, right, like, collecting more, more supply, obviously, that's an ongoing topic. We always connect new, new partners, but especially, what we see and, maybe, as a, as an additional side note, so you know that, that we launched also, last year, during our CMD, basically what we call, My HomeToGo, so where you can directly list on, on HomeToGo, which I just mentioned also, especially in U.S., we recently launched a, a specific product there, where, where you can, like, list your property. And this is obviously, where we also now get access to, to supply that we prior might wouldn't have gotten because, like, people are not utilizing, property managers, for this.
So there we also see an increase in people that are onboarding with HomeToGo directly, actually on the supply side. And then on the advertising part, obviously, as you know, like advertising and rightly spoke out, it depends on what partners want to spend also on the advertising side, because they obviously, like, compete within the marketplace with the advertisement placement with also like the Onsite bookings business.
And so there we obviously, as you can see, like, in the first half of the year, advertising was not as strong in terms of growth as the booking Onsite business, and so we simply need to see how our advertising partners look at it in the second half of the year. But obviously, this is nothing we can comment on in the first place. So far, we don't see anything that we should give you an additional trend figure on. But obviously, that's a general market sentiment. And as growth in the whole market, if you reflect again to the beginning of our presentation, you know, it's lower than on HomeToGo. There might be a good opportunity for people to spend more, but that's not on us to decide.
Thanks a lot.
And finally, on the payments, so the... Let's say the bigger partners, they always pay on time. There is, and I'm sure it's just a coincidence, at least for some of the stock-listed companies, you see some trend for window dressing, so sometimes it can happen when there's a quarter end, that the payment is happening the first day of the next month and not on the last day of the current month, but I'm sure it's just a coincidence. All in all, the payment is working out well there. You always have some from time to time, but that's mainly smaller partners who are sometimes a little bit slower, who need a little bit of a reminder.
But we have a pretty good process by now, where we also can tell them, "Okay, you know, you're not paying us, and then you don't get much more traffic," and that usually helps to get the payment in.
Okay, thanks a lot.
The next question is a follow-up from Mr. Bharath from Cantor. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Sorry, just a quick one follow-up from me. You might have mentioned this before, but with regards to individual hosts, I think in your CMD, you said you were trying to target them as well. Is there like... Is there a proportion that you can provide us as to what proportion of your revenue comes from property managers versus hosts versus OTAs, et cetera?
Yeah, we don't provide that, as a split, yeah, as no one does, right?
Yeah.
So, neither Booking.com, nor Airbnb, nor Expedia break these things out. And obviously, as we just started with it last year, nonetheless, what I can give you as an information, it's obviously, like, not yet, yeah, the major part of our revenue. That's a business that, a part of supply that obviously steadily will grow, but will also take some time until it's a bigger part of the overall supply or revenues that are connected to supply on that side. But we don't break that out. Yeah.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Grabert, for any closing remarks.
Thank you so much, Judith. The analysts and investors, thank you also very much for your attention and questions. Should there be any additional questions, please feel free to contact us. We wish you a great day, and hope to see you soon.
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