Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our TUI Capital Markets Day here in Madrid. I hope you had a nice evening yesterday. My name is Linda Jonczyk. I'm from the Group Comms team, and I'm responsible for financial communications, and I have the pleasure to be guiding you through the day today. We have a packed agenda, so I will not take up a lot of time, but also a warm welcome to our colleagues joining from the webcast. We have people in the room, but we have also people online. Very important to mention that. That's why we need to be very strict with the agenda today, with the timing, so our audience at home or in the offices, wherever they are, can join us and don't miss anything.
Also, one thing that is very important for me: we will have Q&A sessions for our colleagues here in the audience. If you want to speak, if you have a question, we have microphones. Please always wait until somebody comes to you with a microphone so our colleagues in the webcast can also hear what you are saying. We have charging abilities by your seats, so I hope that's all figured out. I will take you through the day, but I will not take up, as I said, too much of your time, and I would now like to welcome Sebastian Ebel, our CEO, on stage.
Thank you, so a warm welcome also from my side. It's great to be in beautiful Spain, especially in Madrid and in this wonderful hotel, and a warm welcome to everyone on the web as well. As Linda said, a packed agenda. We survived COVID together. TUI went into refinancing. We did a great job in getting that with the partners, and now it's all about growth, a new era of profitable growth. What I learned when I had the one or the other meetings with journalists, with analysts, is that the new TUI is not fully understood. Therefore, we thought it's a great idea to make this Capital Markets Day. Of course, Nicola always pushed us to do so, and we are very happy to do so. TUI of today is very different from TUI of yesterday, and TUI of tomorrow will be very different.
To recite a former colleague, we are on a journey, and we want to bring this journey to you today. How is the day structured? I will talk about the strategic update. David Schelp and Marco Ciomperlik will talk about Markets & Airlines transformation. Peter Krüger will talk about our growth ambition in Holiday Experiences. Mathias will summarize what does that mean in numbers. Then we have a lot of time for Q&A to answer your questions. We are in a market which is growing, which has been growing and will be growing. It's good to be in a market which is growing. It's also clear that a significant part of this growth comes from outside Europe. That's also something we have taken into account in the journey we are in. When we talk about an estimated growth of 5%, these are huge numbers.
And what we also see is, despite all the crises, and I mean, you never know which crisis will hit us today: Ukraine, the Middle East, I would almost say a crisis in the U.S. So a lot of things happening. But travel is the number one discretionary spending priority. People want to go on vacation, want to relax. And if you look into the details, also today, people want to travel even more. And why is that the case? The demographics support that as well. People are getting older, people are getting richer. There's a strong middle class, and they want to experience. It's not only about 10 days sun and beach, but they want to have experiences. They want to talk about what they are doing. And this also supports demand.
We've also seen, with all the uncertainty, the demand for packages, different kinds of packages, traditional kinds of packages, is rising a lot. Why? It gives cost security, it is convenient, unique experiences, and security, safety. Can someone help me? Doesn't? Okay. Thank you. You know TUI, we have 33 million customers. You may ask, why are you talking about 33? In the past, we were talking about 20 or 21 million customers. Because now, by integrating all the data we have, we know that we have 33 million customers: Markets & Airlines, and 13 from customer experience, from our hotel business, from our cruise business, from our Musement business. So we have five parts in our business. One, as said, is the hotel business. Above 400 hotels, growing quite significantly. We have 17 cruise ships with three brands.
And we have Musement, the activity marketplace, Musement, which we bought a couple of years ago, doing very well. And we have the marketplace, what we formally call TUI Operating, today in 14 markets, multi-channel distribution, and 125 aircraft. And this we are transforming into the TUI of tomorrow, the global curated leisure marketplace. This is a word you will hear quite often today: marketplace, leisure, curated, and global. And what also was important and is important for us are the synergies between the different activities. Today, one database, wherever the customer comes into our system, we try to sell them the products of the other activities, to cross-sell and to upsell. And we have seen very promising results there. What is the progress till today? We have achieved our financial targets. We have delivered growth, quarter by quarter.
We, as I said, have strengthened our financial and cash position, improved our rating. You have seen the new RCF, five years tenor. So we have become also there a normal company. We are successfully progressing on our transformation strategy. That's what we want to bring to you today. And we are achieving our ESG milestones. This, for what reasons ever, doesn't sound to be too popular anymore, but for us, it's not a fashion. It's a belief that it's good for the company, and it's good for the world, for the customers, for all stakeholders. And we want to reconfirm that we are on track to deliver our guidance for this year and also for the midterm targets. So we are ambitious. We fight hard. Whatever the market is, we want to grow, top line, bottom line. And now it's all about stepping up to the next level.
Because to optimize what we are doing is one thing, but growth is the other one. And we are putting a lot of effort in generating dynamic growth, driving profitability, building a global curated leisure marketplace. And on the Holiday Experiences side, it's different. It's about profitable, sustainable, asset-right growth, serving global markets as well. And on top of that, we are going for the benefits of the integrated business models. The Markets & Airlines, the Markets help to drive superior load factors, occupancy rates in the hotels, in the cruise ship. They help to get a lot of customers into the Musement product portfolio. And on the other hand, the unique content of our hotels, of our cruise ships helps us to make TUI the Markets unique, to give them what we call the curated approach.
And by doing this, we want to create, of course, shareholder value, but without creating increased risks to get more and more resilient for the future. What does it mean transforming into a global curated leisure marketplace? And David will talk about this a lot later on. Marketplace means a lot more products to the customer, not only packaged, traditionally packaged. It's about dynamic packaging. It's about accommodation only. It's about flight only. It's about car rental. So a lot of products. But it also includes leisure marketplace. Leisure means not only when you're on vacation, but also if you're at home. We want that the TUI App is your partner when you are also at home, when you want to book a ticket for the museum, when you pass by a restaurant to get a voucher, when you want to have an event.
So this should become part of our life. The location-based service, which we introduced, gives us this possibility. Curated, not another OTA, but curated product. Products, and this is not only the RIUs, not only the TUI Cruises. It's all about experience as well. It's the backdoor entrance of the Colosseum, where you pay more, but you don't have to wait. So a lot of curated products, also different levels of service, which also bring curated service products to the customer. And you will hear a lot more. And global. TUI has been, at least from the outgoing part, a European company. And if we are really honest, it had been a Northern European or Middle European company. We moved into Eastern Europe a couple of years ago, first Poland, extremely successful. And we are moving now into Eastern Europe.
We moved now into Southern Europe for the first time, significant growth, profitable growth in Spain and Portugal. And we moved into Latin America, which means South America and the Caribbean. And the year after, we are going to North America. We moved into Asia with the hotel business. So TUI is becoming a global company. And that fits very well where the growth is. I said the growth will be significantly higher outside Europe, and we will benefit from it. And this only works when you have global platforms. In the past, there were a platform here in this country, another one here, and so on. We built and are still building global platforms. So if we roll out to Latin America, which we did starting last November, it's on the same platform Spain has.
So we reuse what we have, and we have just to get the customer to it. But it's the same on the selling side, to have one platform to get access to the hoteliers, to the transport companies, to the activity companies. And above that, there is the TUI Central Customer Ecosystem, as I said, one database. Wherever the customer comes from, he's in the database, and we're starting cross-selling, direct contact to the customer to learn about his needs and to offer him the right solution. This only works if we have a highly motivated workforce. We put a lot of effort to strengthen our workforce, to get better management, better leadership, to get our people more qualified, getting the right people to it. So a lot of effort onto that, because that's what I've learned in my long life.
If you have the right people, you will be successful. And that's why we put so much effort on leadership, on our TUI people. And of course, operational excellence and performance is something which drives us. Doesn't help if we all have fun. You have more fun if you are successful, if you get the credit from the investors, if you get credit from all the stakeholders. And that's what we are working for. So, global curated leisure marketplace, you will hear about this a lot today. And you will hear a lot about our unique products. And you will hear a lot why the combination of both creates a significant value. You know, this is one of the very few slides from the past. You know the benefits of the vertical integrated model, the funnel model.
What is maybe new on the focus is that we try to, on the top, to enlarge the funnel, to make the funnel bigger. With more customers, it's easier to get the superior load factors in the airline, the superior occupancy rates on the hotel side, to fill all the cruise ships and to sell more activities to it. And therefore, to increase the funnel is the reason and gives us the assurance that whenever we invest also in Holiday Experiences, we get superior returns. And of course, on the hotel side, on the cruise ship side, it's all about more differentiated product. And this works very, very well. And we have one big, big asset. This is the TUI Smile. It's a unique signature. It's known in most areas of the world. Sometimes people know what it means in detail. Sometimes they just have a feeling.
It's a great, it's a smile, it's red, it is well known, and we can build on it. It's maybe not yet as iconic as the three stripes of Adidas, but we are getting there. We want to go there. And the brand is one of our core assets, coming along with a great reputation. David has the shoes with the TUI Smile. We do a lot in merchandising, but I don't like the merchandising. That sounds cheap. We are doing a lot of bringing this brand into the world. And as I said, customer growth, strong yields, and occupancy because of the integrated model. The integration should also give us the curation, the product which is superior to the broad range of other products.
If you look at the best third-party hotels, I'm not talking about the long-tail, the best third-party hotels, which we quite often sometimes have exclusive, their rate and the customer satisfaction 8.2, we are at 8.5. On the occupancy rates, we are well above the average of the best peers, and this is because of driving the capacity into our own products, but this only works if the product is superior. So this comes along. Two years ago, three years ago, when the new management team came together, we thought that the NPSs were okay, but not really good. That has changed tremendously. Every Tuesday, we look at the NPS, and we are today where we have never been before, record high, and that drives also occupancy and repeat rates.
If you look at EBITDA margin on the cruise side, the best peer we can find is below what we do. And of course, as said, the cross-selling is really important. And that's why Musement is such a great showcase. We are now well above 30% on the uptake level, which means 30% of our customers in the destination book Musement product. And this is growing because of the joint customer base. And this is a good showcase. We have now implemented the accommodation-only product into our app, into our web. And we are there at the starting point where we had been with Musement three, four, five years ago. And we do see how well we do. So this as a short summary in the beginning from my side, what do we want to present today?
David will present the market transformation into a global curated leisure marketplace, something really, really exciting. Peter will present the growth of the differentiated products, also serving global demand. You will see all over the place global. Third one, we do it on a global platform rollout. It's not about building something for Germany, building something for Belgium, building something for Argentina. It's about global platforms. And this has been and still is sometimes a painful process. And it's working. It means higher cost efficiency. It means cost to market is significantly lower, and rolling out into other countries is possible. Fourth, the central customer ecosystem to have all customers. I feel, and maybe this doesn't sound, hopefully it doesn't sound too arrogant, like when Amazon started, they put all the data into their database.
And then when they had started with books, they started to sell product A, B, C, and D. And that's what we are doing, getting all the data into one database, putting it customized, using AI to get the right product, the large product portfolio to our customers. And fifth, that is not part of today, but is for me, for us, as important because it lays the foundation to make sure that TUI is a great place to work if it's in Vietnam, if it is in Germany, or if it is in Brazil. And sustainability as a force for good, why is it so important for us as it became less popular in the last weeks? It is so important for two reasons. What we do see is it's a commercially sound business case. It's not altruistic.
It's commercially sound, which means that cost reduction helps to support that. The photovoltaic we build, everything reduces the cost significantly. It's important for customers, not for all customers, but for some customers. They want to be in an eco-friendly resort. They want to drive in an electric bus. They want to fly with the latest generation of aircraft to make sure that their ecological footprint is as low as possible. So there are customers for which these things are important. And the last thing is, as many of us have children, it's important for them that we move, especially when it's not so popular. And it's not for us only to reduce the carbon footprint. It's about building and planting big forests, millions of trees.
It's about taking care of people who are not on the sunny side of the world in destinations, education for single mothers, education for people who are handicapped, and so on, so I think this is something which is also part of our DNA in TUI, great place to work and sustainability, a force of good, and at the end, without numbers, I had been a finance guy before. That sometimes helps. You can tell the greatest story, but at the end, the truth will come, and then it's all about delivery, and if we have one thing which is really also creating a new TUI is that we are delivering ambitious long-term growth. We said 7%-10% EBIT growth. Yes, that is ambitious, and we are committed to it, and there might be times which are easier, and there are times which are more difficult.
At the end, it's about delivery. And we believe we are committed. We are convinced that what we are doing, we will deliver that. Thank you for listening. There's one special topic of today. Before David takes over, we have a lot of interesting special topics. One, I wanted to do an introduction. It's about Marella, our cruise activity in the U.K., which is doing extremely well. You should have in mind, the fleet is, Peter, 25 years old. It will go into 30 years old. And that I have learned, it's a British, British, British product. It's not an international English product. It's a British product. And as TUI Cruises is so successful being a German, German, German product, Marella is so successful, of course, as a British, British, British product. And it will see another great year this year.
It's fly-cruise, so a lot of synergies with the other activities. And there's one thing which kept us awake during the night is the age of the fleet, because you also may know that there are only three shipyards or four shipyards if you take Meyer Turku and Meyer Werft as two entities who can deliver ships. And they are fully booked out for the next five to 10 years, closer to 10 years. And we may secure a slot for two new ships, which would be a great step forward if we do it alone or if we do it in a joint venture. That's also something we're in discussion. But we wanted to talk about that. Peter will do it later on to make sure that we haven't talked about something which may or may not happen.
It's not a done deal, but we are confident that it's good to talk about it. So that was the slide I was waiting for. David and later on, Marco will do a deep dive into Markets & Airlines to show you how we want to improve the profitability there, because also this is very clear. And I'm really happy with the new management that we are not saying the others will have problems soon, but we have learned that we haven't done as good as we should have done. And I'm really happy with the progress there. Peter Krüger will give us an update on Holiday Experiences and the Marella growth case. And Mathias will put the numbers together so that hopefully the one or the other work you have to do is easier.
Once again, what I do here would not be possible with the great team I have. Therefore, hopefully you feel it a little bit when you're also with the colleagues, even if I'm not there, that it's a lot of fun working with you. A big thank you for driving it. It's a different mindset we have, and this only works with a team. So thank you, Marco, David, Mathias, and Peter. Now I got the names right. Thank you. And David, up to you. You're very much here. Oh, we exchanged the water. Thank you.
Thank you, Sebastian, for this introduction. Also from my side, a very warm welcome to the Capital Markets Day. It's a pleasure to be here. And in the next two hours, Marco and myself will take you through the Markets & Airlines transformation story.
As you saw on the previous slide, this is all about accelerating the transformation of the Markets & Airlines division and ensuring that we create value and ultimately improve the EBIT margins from 1.5% in FY 2024 to above 3%. You have two presenters here because Marco and I effectively with our teams driving this transformation together. I'm in charge of the entire division. Marco is in charge of the airline, but also the transformation of Markets & Airlines. So together, we will take you through the following three points. We'll start by giving you a bit of an overview over the division. As Sebastian said, so many things are changing. So many things are happening. And when we speak to partners, we sometimes find that not everyone actually understands who we are. So about 30 minutes of education, facts and figures. Who are we as Markets & Airlines ?
In the second block, then we'll get into the strategy. We talk a lot about transformation, the acceleration of our transformation strategy, so we'll talk about the building blocks of how we want to do two things. On the one hand, how we want to transform the tour operating business of the past into this global curated leisure marketplace, and we will explain a bit more what that actually means and the components of that, and that's the first thing. I will do that, then I'll hand over to Marco, who will then talk about the airline and the role of the airline in this transformation and how we want to create profitable growth for both the marketplace and the airline, and then Marco will, at the very end, talk about what does this then deliver, the value creation, and as Sebastian said, there's two elements of our value creation.
On the one hand, we create value by supporting the vertical integration. So Marco will talk a bit about that and how we continue to support that vertical integration. And then he will also talk about the building blocks of how we actually then also start addressing the low margins that we have in markets and how we start improving those over time. At the very end, we then have time for Q&A. So any questions you might have, please hold back until we are done with the three blocks. It is very sensitive. It's pressing hard. Okay. So this one we've seen, we're now talking about Markets & Airlines. So let me start by first introducing Markets & Airlines to you. I'll start with the slide on the source markets, the markets that we sell our holidays in. We have a strong presence in the big European source markets.
We typically talk about 14 core markets. That's where we are strong. We have around about 20 million customers, 20.3 to be precise, who booked a holiday with us last year. You see here also a bit the split. So the U.K. and Ireland is our biggest market, closely followed by Germany and Austria, which is our second biggest source market. And you see that we have a relevant presence in most of the big European markets, as I said, together 20.3 million customers who enjoyed a holiday with TUI in financial year 2024. What you also see on this slide, and we'll talk about that both in my presentation, but also in Peter's presentation, is this theme of global expansion. This slide, 12 months ago, 24 months ago, would have stopped at the 14 markets. We would have said we're a European company.
But as part of our growth and transformation plan, we want to create scalable platforms. And we are creating scalable platforms that we can use then to export our business into new countries. And you therefore see here 14 source markets +6 . So six new markets have actually been added in the last 12, maybe 18 months, Spain and Portugal, but also Latin America. So part of our plan is to grow our presence and extract, let's say, maximum value from existing markets, but also grow the number of markets that we operate in. From a destination point of view, we're a global business. So we effectively sell our holidays into the source markets that I described on the previous slide. And we then enable customers to enjoy holidays everywhere in the world, 180 destinations. And when we talk about destinations in this context, it's not countries.
It's actually destination airports. So it's 50 + countries that our customers actually holiday in. And you see on the right, you see a breakdown of the destinations. And actually, the biggest destination is Spain. You don't really see it at first sight because Spain is split into three regions here. But Spain, if you add the three regions together, actually accounts for about 6.1 million of our customers. That's about 30% of our customers that go into Spain. Second biggest destination for us is Greece, around about 15% of our customers, followed by Turkey. So Spain, Greece, and Turkey, the three big European Mediterranean tourism destinations are also our biggest destinations. But you then see that there's a lot of North African destinations as well in the top 10.
Long-haul overall accounts for around about 15% of our business, about 20% in the winter, about 10% in the summer, roughly. So overall, about 15% of our business. So customers that want to go on a holiday and want to explore the world will find a destination and a great product in the TUI ecosystem. From a product point of view, our core business is package holidays. About 70% of all our customers actually book a package holiday. And package holidays sometimes has a bit of a not so modern, let's say, connotation. It doesn't have the most modern, let's say, feel to it. I actually like to sometimes refer to package holidays as well as convenience holidays, right?
Or actually, other companies call this the connected trip because a package holiday actually is something where you actually buy a bundle of components, and you buy it from somebody, and you don't have to worry about anything. So it's actually a very modern, and I would say a very scalable concept, right? Because when you want to go on holiday, what you want is convenience, right? You want ease. You don't want to worry. So package holidays, also known as convenience holidays or connected trip, is our core business. Last year, about 71%, a bit more than 70% of our customers actually booked package holidays. And when you take a look at this small diagram, and we'll talk a bit about that when we talk about strategy, around about 50% of these package holidays are actually flown or the customers actually fly on our own airline.
On TUI fly, around about 50% of these package holidays are actually powered by third-party carriers today. We'll talk a bit about that in the strategy section of how that's supposed to grow. A package holiday consists of accommodation, flights, transfers, and other components, right? We've started now to not just sell all these components as package holidays, but also individually. You see that last year, we sold around about 2 million hotel-only stays. Customers booked just an accommodation with us. Around about 3.8 million customers booked just a flight. Then we have around about 300,000 customers who book another component, rent a car, tours, so other smaller components with us. Core business package, also convenience holidays, but also a growing part of our component business, which I'll talk about then again in the strategy section.
From a distribution point of view, we believe in multi-channel distribution. We believe that customers should be able to book our great holidays and our great products in the channel they want to book the holidays in. And you see here some facts and figures about our multi-channel distribution. This is across all of our 14 markets. You see that we are strong in all the relevant channels. Around about 50% of our sales come from the digital channels, so web and app. Around about 50% come from travel agencies and third-party OTAs. So that's around about 50%-50%. I think it's 51%-49%. And you see that we have some pretty big presences in the market. So you see that the app, which is at the moment still at a relatively low share, but growing strongly. Again, I'll talk about that in strategy.
We have a massive benefit, and that is that 22 million customers in Europe actually have the TUI app installed on their phone, which I think is a massive opportunity for driving that cross and upsell topic that I will explain. We are very active in the web. We have a lot of activities in terms of driving both paid traffic onto our website, but also have a very, very good non-paid portion of our traffic on the websites, in total 764 million sessions last year. When we look at the owned travel agencies, we have around about 2,400. Half of those are actually really owned travel agencies that we own and operate and run. The other 1,200 roughly are franchise operations. They operate under the TUI brand, but are actually operated by franchise partners. We also work and distribute through third-party travel agencies.
We have a lot of partnerships, around about 9,000 across all of our source markets. We also sell in some markets, at least, through online travel agencies. It is a very broad distribution setup. The percentages vary by market. I actually have a deep dive on the U.K. and on Germany, our two biggest markets, to give you some further figures on those two markets. Generally, it is multi-channel distribution where we want to strategically grow the app significantly going forward. Sebastian has already mentioned the brand, and I am wearing the brand. I have it here on my shoe. We have actually mentioned both Adidas and TUI. I have both here, the Adidas, the TUI Smile. It is an iconic brand. It is a well-known brand.
This slide actually shows that it's not just us who think it's a great brand and it's a known brand, but actually consumers in Europe who know the brand really well. This is the aided awareness. I mean, do you know this company? You see that in all of the markets, actually, we have 90% and more aided awareness. So the brand is extremely well-known. The brand stands for trust. It stands for quality. It stands for convenience. It stands for ease. And it's a great asset that we are leveraging as we're now also going into new segments and as we're going into new markets. I think we're new, not much, yes. That's when the slide actually changes. As I said, the brand stands for quality, stands for service.
We really have a very strong focus on customer satisfaction, on constantly improving the customer experience throughout that journey. The results basically give us or encourage us to do more. You see that here. You see a couple of data points based on customers. We invest a lot into customer experience, into customer service because we control a lot of the value chain elements, the distribution, the airline, the in-destination experience, the hotel, the cruise experience. We can also shape and manage that experience very well. We spend a lot of time on really trying to understand what do customers value and how can we improve that experience. We do that because satisfied customers become loyal customers, and loyal customers come back, and they basically help us to grow. Here you see customer satisfaction scores. That's on a scale of 0 - 10.
We averaged last year 8.5. That's 0.1% better than the year before. We have a loyal customer base, the retention rate. In our case, we measure our customers actually coming back within 24 months. So this 40% means that a customer who's booked today, 40% of the customers are booked today, will come back in the next two years. So the fact that we are creating those great experiences, the fact that we are serving our customers, that we are helping, that we are creating these convenience holidays for our customers, and they really like these convenience holidays means that they come back into TUI again and again and again. We also get the question a lot of, "Who's the TUI customer?" It's a difficult one to answer because if you have 20.3 million customers, you have a wide variety of customers, of course. We have young customers, old customers.
We have all sorts of demographics. But if you want to have some, let's say, indications as to who the more typical customer is, the average age is 47 years. We tend to have customers who are in the more medium to premium income brackets, more resilient in crisis as well. And we see that as well at the moment. And we have a higher proportion in the family and in the couples segment. And those are the segments, as Sebastian said, that are also very resilient, and they want to travel, and they want to continue to travel. So overall, very happy with the customer base and the focus on making sure that we constantly create happy customers that come back into the TUI ecosystem. I'm not going to say too much about the airline because obviously, Marco is the expert, and he can take you through this.
But just briefly in this facts and figures section, one slide on the airline as well. We actually have 125 owned aircraft in the fleet. And that means we actually operate and run the 10th biggest fleet in Europe. We're going through a refleeting process that Marco will talk about. I think maybe one data point that is interesting. Sorry, I'm conscious I'm maybe standing in the way of some of these numbers. When you look at the business from an airline point of view, 70% of the volume comes from package. 30% is actually seat-only business, so actually where we sell the seat without any other component. As I said, Marco will talk about that when he then also talks about the transformation of the airline. I said I'll give you snapshots of two of our biggest markets because we also get a lot of questions about these markets.
I mean, how do you actually what's your setup in both Germany and the U.K.? So this is a snapshot on Germany, as you see. In Germany, we're the number one tourism company, followed by DERTOUR, who's the number two, and a few medium-sized local tour operators. When you look at the product mix, Germany actually is already strong in the package, but also relatively strong already on the component businesses. You see here the accommodation share is already 23%. So Germany are already pretty advanced when it comes to not just selling classic package holidays, but also components. On the flight-only side, not so much. They're more focused on the accommodation side. And Germany also has a relatively high dynamic share. I'll talk about dynamic as one of the big drivers of our growth and transformation story in the strategy section.
Germany are already relatively dynamic, relatively strong on the accommodation-only side. From a distribution mix point of view, Germany is still very much skewed towards more offline, more traditional channels. You see that the digital share, so app and web, is about 25%. So 75% still happens in travel agencies and third-party OTAs. And that's, I think, another interesting data point in Germany. Germany is actually the market where we sell the most through third-party OTAs. So distribution platforms like, for example, CHECK24, which in the German market are very strong, we also sell through them. So the multi-channel distribution strategy that I mentioned before is always applied locally to how it best suits the local market. And in Germany, customers still like to actually book holidays in travel agencies. They like to speak still to a travel agent. And therefore, we are still relatively strong on these channels.
But of course, overall, we also want to, like in all the other markets, grow the app share. And also here, brand consideration is another data point where we ask consumers, "How likely are you to book with a certain brand?" with the number two. And we are actually compared to the more traditional competitors, the more tour operating type businesses or airline businesses, actually by far the most preferred brand in Germany. The same slide for the U.K. and Ireland, the other big markets for us. You see that here with the number two in terms of ATOL licenses, around about 5.8 million ATOL licenses that we applied for this year. You see from a product mix point of view, a slightly different picture compared to Germany. You see here a more integrated model. You see here a more package-focused model.
So in the U.K., we don't yet sell a lot of accommodation-only. It's more a traditional package holiday model where we also sell seats as flight-only. And you also see that the dynamic share in the U.K. is still relatively low. It's lower than the dynamic share overall. Last year's dynamic share was around about 15%. In the U.K., it was a bit lower than that. Distribution mix, again, is also very different from Germany. You see that the two digital channels on the left account for 68%. So web and app together are the main channels in the U.K. market. We have our own travel agencies and sell through those. We've also started selling again through third-party travel agencies. And that's also growing nicely. So the 7% share that you see here is actually potentially going to get bigger over time.
And in the U.K., we don't sell through any other online travel agents at the moment. From a brand consideration point of view, very similar picture to Germany with the number two from a brand consideration point of view. So customers actually really like the brand and consider going on holiday with us. And actually, a lot of the customers in the U.K. actually do that. So you see with these two snapshots that whilst the overall picture is, as I described at the beginning, the way the different markets look, they're slightly different. But nevertheless, the themes that I will talk about together with Marco in the strategy section are very similar. So the transformation themes and the themes of how we will transform the business and create profitable growth for Markets & Airlines.
This is the final slide of the facts and figures section because I also often get the question around, "Well, how do you actually compare to the tour operators or the OTAs?" I mean, where do you actually fit? What kind of company are you actually? We like to explain our position in the market by using this matrix. Actually, I'll stand over here so the matrix can actually be seen. It has two dimensions. On the vertical axis, it has something called distribution reach. What do we mean by that? We mean by that the number of markets we operate in and the number of channels we serve in those markets. Can you actually reach a lot of customers from few to many? The other axis is we've called it offer relevance. How relevant is what you actually offer?
Relevance is two dimensions. How much of this is actually me too versus your own? How broad is your offering actually? It's breadth and depth, so to speak, of your offer. When you think of a classic tour operating company, most of these are extremely good when it comes to offer relevance. Every tour operator will be able to source the components that are relevant for their customer group. They will be able to package them into a package holiday. They will be able to sell them properly. They're really good at picking products, choosing them, being relevant for their customer group. Most of them are actually operating in one or very few markets. The OTAs, on the other hand, are really good at reaching lots and lots of customers because they are global technology companies.
Some of our friends actually don't even call themselves tourism companies. They call themselves technology companies. Now, we built a platform, and we happen to sell touristic products. So we have a lot of reach. But we're not really good at picking and choosing the products that are in there. So effectively, I'm actually selling what everybody else does. I just sell it a bit better. So you have almost these two polar opposites. You have the more classic competitors that are relevant from an offer point of view, but not really scalable. You have the OTAs that are very scaled, but not really relevant from an offer point of view. And what we are doing with our approach of building the global curated leisure marketplaces, we're combining the best of these two worlds. We are tourism experts by nature. We've been in this business for 70 + years.
Our brand stands for quality, trust, service, quality, personalization, all the elements that you need in order to build and serve and produce great experiences, and we do this in the new approach, not based on local systems, local setups, and optimizing local, let's say, scenarios, but we actually are building this on global platforms so that we can really scale. And that's why we think that we have a really interesting market position where it combines being able to produce and deliver own curated experiences at scale and bring it to the world by actually having and leveraging global platforms. That was my final slide on facts and figures. As the questions and answers we'll do afterwards takes me into the strategy section.
So now that you've understood maybe a bit more who we are, we'll now start going into the question of, "What are we actually doing?" before we then answer the question, "How does this create value for our customers and also for all the partners that we have and all the other stakeholders?" And I'll start with a very simple conceptual slide, which shows the transformation journey that TUI Markets & Airlines have been on for quite a while now. On the left of this chart, you see the former way of looking at the business. We were effectively tour operating companies structured into several regions. And these tour operating companies had an airline, which was effectively the transport company for the tour operators. So the tour operator said, "I need to send X million customers from Germany to Greece.
Can you, dear airline, please fly on my behalf?", so the airline was effectively the transport arm of the tour operator, and we also had other businesses, so smaller businesses, growth businesses that were also managed by the different tour operators, so a more regional-led approach, a collection of markets, and the airlines were very much integrated into the tour operators, and where we are going with our transformation is we're looking at these two businesses as more independent businesses, but synergetic, and we're doing two big things, and these two big things will be what we'll talk about in the next 30 minutes or so. On the one hand, we're transforming the former tour operating organizations into the global curated leisure marketplace, and we are seeing how we can then see growth opportunities from an airline perspective by creating a more strong commercial acumen within the airline.
Both of these things are happening in a very synergetic way. That's why there's two cogwheels that work closely together. So this is not about separation. This is about finding the right balance to grow together, but also create growth opportunities outside the respective other business. And we'll talk about these two things, how we are transforming the tour operators to the global curated leisure marketplace on the one hand, and how we are making sure that the airline can commercially and will commercially stand on its own two feet in the future. So I'll talk about the first building block, the transformation of the tour operator into the global curated leisure marketplace. And we've heard a lot about this term already. Sebastian has already explained what it means. I've said a few words about it.
These are the six big initiatives that underpin this, and that actually underpin this transformation, and that will ultimately also enable us to create a more profitable Markets & Airlines division, and I'll briefly introduce them on this slide, and then we go through them because we want to explain to you, give examples to you of what this really means. The first three elements of this actually relate to the curated leisure marketplace. Now, it's all about making sure that we have a big and relevant set of products in our portfolio. It's about making sure we source them and produce these products and components in the most flexible way. And it's making sure that we differentiate through own products, so dynamic growth to create growth, which we call Ryanair, own products at the heart of what we do.
So the curation element of it, so own products with differentiation and margin, and more product categories to make sure that we have more opportunities for customers to book leisure experiences from us. From a distribution point of view, we have this multi-channel distribution that I mentioned at the beginning. We believe in managing the travel agency channels for value. Strategically, we want the app channel to grow. And we're doing a lot to make sure that that actually happens. So we really want to make sure that app becomes the channel of choice to lower our distribution costs. All of this is then enabled by global platforms that are AI powered and a very different operating model where we're going from a more regional-led operating model to a functional-led organization. That's a big enabler. So these six blocks we'll talk about in more detail. Why is this good?
From a customer point of view, it's good because we will be able to continue to offer great TUI quality products, but also more choice and more flexibility to our customers, more opportunities to book great, not just travel products, but also leisure products from us. It's also good for us because it enables us to also drive profitable growth. Marco will talk a bit about the building blocks of our value creation. We're very much focused on growth, but also managing the cost. Now, the cost in all three of our big cost blocks, the cost of goods sold, which is effectively our touristic input costs, our distribution costs, and our overheads. That's why this is an exciting journey.
It's an important journey because we very much believe that customers will be able to experience an even better TUI going forward, but also this strategy will also enable us then to deliver that growth on the margin side that we referenced at the beginning. So let me go through these six blocks, and let me take you through a few more data points, but also some case studies because we also want to bring this to life, right? Because some of this maybe sounds a bit theoretical, and we want to make sure we bring it to life. The first block I want to talk about is dynamic. And dynamic is a theme that you've heard about for quite a while. It's something we haven't started now. We started a few years back, but we're really accelerating our dynamic journey now.
What you see on the left is an illustration of what we call dynamic and wholesale. Maybe I should explain these two words, phrases, because I think everyone potentially has a slightly different interpretation of what that means. When we say dynamic, we refer to one of the components of a package holiday, at least one component is dynamically sourced, right? Wholesale means both components, flight and hotel, are actually sourced in a more traditional way where you sign a contract and you get rates and availability and allotments in advance of the season. In some of these wholesale contracts, we also have risk. So we actually also commit. So we commit to charter or we take charter contracts with flights. We have certain commitments in hotels to secure availability. So the wholesale, the dark blue part of our business, is where some of our risk also sits, right?
And when you now look at this chart, you see that we've traditionally been a company that's been very much centered around the wholesale package holiday model, where you sign a contract, you commit yourself now, you take certain guarantees, and you then trade it away in the next 12 months, and that is good because when I talk about curation and being differentiated and having higher margins, a lot of that sits in wholesale, absolutely, so we don't want to not be a wholesale package holiday company, but we want the growth to come and be driven through the more dynamic part of the business, so where we actually are much more flexible, where we actually buy flight seats and hotel beds on the spot, right, and we call it risk-light because it's not a pure dynamic model where you don't take any risk. Why?
Because if you're pure dynamic, you're just a me-too player, right? So if we want to be a company that has certain products exclusively that is really differentiated, we need to take a certain amount of risk and commitment. It's also good from a margin perspective. I'll show it to you on the next slide. But we want the growth not to depend on us having to take risk. And therefore, the growth is very much driven by the dynamic side of our business. And last year, around about 15% dynamic share. The ambition that we've communicated is to grow that with a double-digit rate in the next years, and you see that depicted here. So conceptually, we want the wholesale business to be optimized, managed for value. We want the growth to come from the dynamic business. And what are we doing to do that?
You see that on the right. You see that we are very actively connecting to both airline partners and hotel partners dynamically, and we do that directly where possible, so you see direct connects in both of these blocks. We want to go to direct connections where there's enough volume and where we see there's a big value creation opportunity for our customers, and where we don't want to go direct or can't go direct, we then use aggregators. We use bed banks. We use channel managers. We use aggregators, so effectively, we are extremely focused on getting more airline partners connected directly, more hotel partners connected directly so that we can then really start growing, so offering customers more choice, more flexibility, but also enabling this risk-reward growth. I've brought a case study that we also talk about every once in a while.
I just wanted to illustrate why this is good using the Ryanair case study. So we were one of the first distribution partners that signed a deal with Ryanair. And we actually have now, you see, last summer, really since December, we're now offering TUI packages with a Ryanair flight. And you see that from a volume perspective, this is a nicely growing area. This is the cumulative volumes that we've sold, so around about 123,000 holidays. That's from an airline perspective, you have to times it times two because it would be around about 250,000 flights. What's interesting about this is what you see on the right because that, I think, shows why we're doing this. First of all, new customers, 40%. So we've asked out of all the customers who booked a Ryanair package with us, how many of you have ever booked with TUI?
40% have said, "Never. I've never booked a TUI holiday before." So when Peter talks about when we talk about growing the business, new customers into the funnel, this funnel slide that you showed, actually being able to offer new types of products actually helps us. This is customers who potentially live in areas where we didn't offer packages before because we didn't have our own flights. It's potentially customers who want to book holidays for a different price point. So dynamic enables us to tap into new customers and therefore bring more customers into the funnel. Second data point, which I think is really interesting, is the product split. So where do these customers actually go to? And we classified it here into we've separated it into cities and sun and beach. Cities is a business that we're underindexed in as TUI. Why?
Because traditionally, we've thought we can only really grow destinations that we can fly to, right? And if you have only 125 planes and you can't fly to every destination, you pick the ones where you think you can make the most return on your investment. Cities weren't part of that decision before. So cities, we kind of do as a non-strategic byproduct so far. When you now work with players like Ryanair as an example, there's obviously others as well, all of a sudden, you have a very different opportunity to start growing these new types of destinations that you didn't fly to yourselves. And 18% of all of these packages actually go into city destinations. The biggest single city actually is Krakow. Who would have thought that, right? So it opens up the opportunity to enter into new destinations as well.
Give customers the opportunity to experience these great new destinations with the benefits of a TUI convenience holiday, package holiday. So we can grow without having to put commitment or own capacity onto certain routes. That's really good. Also, the sun and beach here, a lot of these destinations are complementary destinations that we don't fly to ourselves or complementary days when we don't fly ourselves. So even the sun and beach part is not cannibalizing our business. It's actually complementary. So new customers, new destinations. The other point that I think is also important because our brand stands for quality and because we invest so much into this brand equity, we also have to make sure that customers who book holidays that are not powered by TUI fly actually still have a great experience.
And you see here that the Net Promoter Score of the Ryanair packages up until now is actually on par with the Net Promoter Score of our classic holidays. So this question that we get a lot is, is that actually going to jeopardize the brand? Is it actually going to make TUI customers unhappy? Actually, the opposite is the case. If you explain it properly, if you still then help the customer, things go wrong, then customers are still very happy. So these data points, I think, show that this can create growth. It can create growth, attracting new customers. It will enable us to go to new destinations, and it won't jeopardize the overall brand perception and brand quality. The second block is owned for us. We've talked about that a lot, so I don't have to spend too much time on this concept.
This is just one data point to illustrate why it's important to us and why it's important not just to offer the same things that everybody else offers, but actually something that is unique to us. You see here on the left, TUI Hotels & Resorts. That's effectively Peter's portfolio of 400+ great hotels. And you see on the right, you see third-party hotels. And of course, as a marketplace, you have to offer choice. So we offer both. But we do like to focus and drive customers into our own assets. Why? Because on the one hand, customers are more satisfied. So it helps us with the customer satisfaction and with the loyalty scores afterwards. But secondly, it's also it delivers superior margins to us.
And that's one thing that we're continuing to focus on as we become a marketplace, as we broaden the number of categories we offer, as we also source more dynamically. We at the same time still want to keep this core of differentiated products. So it's there for differentiation. It's there for margins. It's there for quality. And this is the bit that I mentioned at the beginning, the curation element of it. It's all about owned products that drive superior quality and margin into the marketplace. More products as the third big block of our marketplace strategy. And this is a bit black and white, but I think it illustrates pretty nicely the kind of company we used to be and the kind of company we are building. You see at the top, you see the typical customer journey.
You say, "I go on this big package holiday, my main family holiday in the summer, but I actually travel a lot throughout the year." Now, I go on a city trip. I go on a business trip. I visit friends and relatives. I actually want to experience something when I'm at home. So there's a lot of use cases throughout the year where a customer can actually interact with a tourism and a leisure company. Now, in the past, we were a tour operator, a vertically integrated tour operator. Our focus was on making sure we sold these holidays and operated the holidays really well. So very transaction-oriented, right? The challenge with that is you interact with your customer actually once per year, right? Because most customers in Europe can actually only afford to go on a big holiday once per year, right?
So we were relevant once per year, but not throughout the rest of the year. With a new approach of dynamically sourcing components and being able to sell these components also individually, not just as packages, we can then start being relevant, and we are relevant in a lot more occasions for our customers. And that you see at the bottom, you see that for each one of these fictitious use cases, we now have an offer. Now, whether you want to fly to visit a friend in London, we can offer you a flight. A TUI fly? If we fly to London? No, we don't. But we can also offer you one of our partner flights. I need to stay at a hotel? Yes, you can just book a hotel with us. I want to do an excursion in my hometown. Absolutely. I'll talk about that.
Peter will talk about this, how we're leveraging the power of the Musement platform with the customer base of the marketplace. I want to rent a car. I want to do a tour. I want to book a train ticket, and I want to actually just buy a ticket to a concert. So all of these use cases are now relevant for us because we have platforms and we have offers that we can actually bring. So we're going away from being a transaction-based model into a more ecosystem-based model where we can really start looking at acquiring the customer once into the ecosystem and upselling them throughout the year, cross-selling, sorry, throughout the year, different types of experiences so that when they then next come back and think about booking the next package holiday, we don't have to reacquire them, but they're actually in the ecosystem.
This drives up customer lifetime value, margin up, cost down. Few examples. Sebastian, you've already referenced the accommodation-only platform. It's something that we do very well in Germany. The other markets, not so well yet. We sold 2 million accommodation-only customers last year. The interesting data point, first interesting data point here is actually 13% of customers in Germany that come into the funnel through accommodation-only actually end up buying a package holiday. You almost have on that first customer acquisition, you have an upsell opportunity, which I think is interesting already. In Germany, we've managed to already build a business that is known for being more than just package holidays, and there's a nice upsell opportunity. We are investing into global platforms, and we want these platforms to be built once and used in every single market. Here your accommodation-only is a really good example.
We've built this platform on new technology. So it's in the cloud. It's modular. It's everything you would expect from a new platform. It's actually the same in the web and the app. You see it's the same interface. So we actually build it only once. Instead of having to build it 14 times for the web, 14 times for the app, we build things once. So you can see how that delivers a significantly better, let's say, quicker route to market and also significantly less IT development cost over time. And you also see that when you actually invest into state-of-the-art platforms, you see that they actually perform much better. So a really good example, I think, on one side of all the things come together. We sell more accommodation-only. We build global platforms that we can reuse in markets and channels.
We bring them and we improve KPIs and the performance. Second example is TUI Tours. Sebastian, you've referenced that at the very beginning as well. We think that tours are also a really interesting market. It's a decently sized market. It's growing nicely. You have more classic tours, right? I mean, round trips is another word for this. So you actually go and explore a country. I think we had some American guests sitting next to us at breakfast today. They were actually doing a tour of Spain. Traditionally, this has been prepackaged and, let's say, a bit old-school, inflexible, or you had to do it all yourself. Those were the two options, right? You actually had to go onto platforms. You buy every single component. You basically organize it all yourself.
We've now launched a platform where we combine the flexibility of an individual tour with the convenience of a package holiday or the protection or the service you get, and this is the TUI Tours platform, which we've rolled out into three markets so far, and we're rolling out into more markets going forward, and I don't know if you can see it. You probably can't see it on the screens. But the beauty of this is it actually shows you the highlights of Thailand in this particular case, and what you do is you just change any element on the right. I want to stay a day longer in Chiang Mai, and instead of going by rent a car from place A to B, I actually want to take a train. You change those things, and all of a sudden, the whole platform recalculates the price right away.
but when you then book it, you have the protection of the package holiday, and you have the TUI service. so this is what I mean with package holidays are actually pretty cool because it kind of combines the flexibility that a lot of customers want with the protection and the service that you get. and we have that as a platform. We're rolling it out. We're testing and learning another approach. As soon as it's stable, we roll it out to the other markets and bring another product into all of our markets. Musement, we've referenced a few times. The Musement case study. I used to work for Musement, so this is very close to my heart. Musement in the past was the upsell product number one for the classic package holiday, right?
So we sell the package holiday, and we try to sell an excursion to the customer when they are at the hotel, right? And we do that really well. You see that on the left. This is still a big use case for the experiences platform. We still want to make sure that any customer that goes into a TUI package holiday, a TUI hotel, actually buys an experience. A bit more than 30% of our customers actually do that today. So that's really good. But what's strategically interesting is the other four blocks that you see here, the other four use cases. This is this marketplace idea, right? Rather than I just upsell for the package holiday, I create opportunities to interact with my customer throughout the year. So the first message that customers get when they get back home is, "Are you already feeling the holiday blues?
Why don't you actually book an experience near you?" That's the at-home one. Then if customers go into a city, location-based services, we'll pick that up. We'll send you ideas of what you can actually experience in the city you're in. At home, and Peter, you will explain that in more detail, we've now got a cooperation with Fever. So we actually have a relevant portfolio for things you can do at home, not just when you're traveling, but when you're actually at home, which creates another interesting use case for us. And throughout the year, we've interacted with you through the experience category, and we now know a lot more about you. So the next time you start thinking about your package holiday, we actually will recommend the places that fit to your experience profile. This is this CCE idea. Customer data going into one platform.
We use it to personalize and upsell and cross-sell. So I think a really interesting use case of how this works. So you can see both with the three cases, accommodation, TUI Tours, and Musement, how having more categories is going to enable us to be going away from being this transaction-oriented company, which can sell one package holiday per year to a company, a leisure company that can sell a lot more experiences in a lot more occasions to our customers. Distribution, our fourth block in our strategy. When I talked about the facts and figures about the fact that we manage the travel agencies for value. So we believe that customers that want to book in a travel agency should be able to book in a travel agency. And we're managing that channel for value. Strategically, we want the digital part to grow.
Within that, we want the app to grow the fastest. It's effectively the channel in your pocket, right? It's the channel you always have with you. And that's why we're spending a lot of investment into making the app better and into making sure that more customers use the app. I already mentioned that we have a big asset already. 22 million customers actually have the TUI app on their phone, which I think is a really good starting point. Now, in the past, customers would have downloaded the app to be served during the holiday, and they would have deleted the app afterwards, right? Because I don't need it anymore. Now we're using the app to drive this cross and the upsell story that I just said, right? So the app is the channel where we can send a lot of personalized messages.
A lot of the examples that you just saw on the Musement side actually are related to the app as a channel. So we're using the app to drive relevant messages to the customers to make sure that we put the right product in front of the customer at the right moment, and we retain them in the ecosystem so that best case, when they think about booking the next package holiday, we don't have to reacquire them and spend a lot of money on distribution costs, but actually they're already part of the app and a loyal app user and an app customer, and that's the idea of app-first personalization. You see that the app share of sales was 7%, a bit more than 7% last year. That's growing quite considerably as part of our plan, and it will ultimately enable us to play this customer lifetime value game.
So, the fact of keeping customers in the ecosystem and ultimately reduce distribution costs for us. Few screenshots. I don't really know where to stand. I probably stand better here, no? So I don't stand in the way. So we're investing a lot into making the app better every day. And you see that we're doing a lot. We're creating a new navigation home screen where you can actually see all the great product categories that we offer. So not just package holidays, but all the different experiences. We have ways of searching across categories. We have merchandising screens and the splash screens where we can actually show great offers and great benefits. And we're also experiencing some really good traction with our AI inspiration planner.
So an AI-powered travel planner, which is helping customers to find even better what they're looking for and help us to even sell more personalized products to our customers. So this is happening. Fifth block, AI-powered global platforms. I've talked about platforms and the need to platform everything because everything that's platformed takes out cost. It takes out inefficiency, but it also enables global growth. And here's one example of our global growth story. This is the Eastern Europe part of our growth. You see on the left-hand side some data points around the markets. They're relatively big, and they're growing faster than the core European markets where we are strong. So they're attractive for us. And we're now entering into these markets, not with the traditional way of actually going in and setting up a team and starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel.
We're going into these markets by actually leveraging the platform that we built. Now, in this case, it's the TUI Poland platform, low-cost platform connected already to relevant suppliers, both on the flight and the hotel side, and because we already have a lot of products in the relevant destinations like Turkey or Egypt, we can also enable these new markets to actually go in and differentiate from day one because they can sell products that are TUI-controlled and don't have to just compete on me-too. So it's a lot of synergies that we can generate, and you see the map. You see it actually here. Poland was the first market in Eastern Europe that we entered into some 15-20 years ago. It always used to be a bit of a challenging market for us. The team have done a great job of actually building a market-leading platform.
We're now selling more than 1 million trips per year, more than EUR 1 billion revenue in Poland. It's become a very substantial market for us. We're now using that team and that platform to go into Eastern Europe. Last year, we entered the Czech Republic. We generated around 50,000 customers. This year, we want to double that. The ambition is to replicate this model and export our success model into other Eastern European markets and actually go into one additional market at least every single year. It shows, again, that with the new platform that we have created, the growth opportunities exist both in existing markets but also in new markets. No strategy presentation nowadays without the word AI. Of course, we at TUI also do a lot when it comes to AI.
And we started that many, many moons ago, experimenting, asking teams, "What kind of ideas do you have?" I'm really happy that we're now approaching the next phase of our evolution, which is actually creating value from these AI initiatives and the AI platforms we're building. Three examples, and they effectively also summarize the three areas where we think AI is going to make a big difference for us. It's going to help us become a much better business going forward. First one is customer experience. We have a lot of customer interactions, and we invest a lot into making sure that we are always there for our customers. That is a pretty expensive investment, but it's important for customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score. AI is going to help us interact much quicker with our customers. For the customers, it's a better experience because they get responses even quicker.
For us, it's better because we can actually serve at a lower cost, or we can maintain great service levels at a lower cost, and one use case, one demo, one example here is email assistant. AI actually has reduced the handling time of a normal mail by something like five minutes, which doesn't sound a lot, but when you add it up times the customer contacts we have, that's a massive opportunity, and what's also good is with all the translation tools that you have nowadays, you can actually have an English-speaking customer service agent actually serve a Swedish guest, which wasn't so possible in the past, so customer experience and improving handling times and therefore creating a better customer experience while reducing costs is one big area where we're seeing already a lot of traction. Second big area is in pricing and yield.
I mean, we are a margin-thin business. And one thing besides the sourcing element and getting, let's say, or reducing the cost throughout the value chain is, of course, being able to increase selling prices. And that is a massive lever at the scale that we're at. And we are now using AI to help us predict prices better and set prices. Until now, we've used systems more to automate trading strategies. Now we're starting to actually use the power of the systems and the intelligence to help us set the prices. A very promising trial is the premium seat trial. So we started with a smaller ancillary. So how do we price the premium seats that we have on a TUI fly flight? That is promising because any improvement you get actually falls straight to the bottom line.
A 3% improvement in this particular use case would deliver a EUR 1 million bottom line improvement. And this is a very small ancillary for us. So you can imagine what would happen and what will happen once we start using the power of AI for pricing yield for all of our ancillaries and also our core components as well as the package holidays. And then last, but certainly not least, it's cost reductions. Also there, we have a lot of use cases. This is an airline example. This is an algorithm-based optimization of heavy maintenance. So how do you actually do that is a very time-consuming process and one where you can actually make a lot of mistakes. By using AI, we've actually been able to save up to EUR 2 million per annum.
So just showing that AI is becoming a reality for three things: better customer experience, better yields, better ASPs, and improvement in average selling prices, and cost reductions. And again, we do this in one place, and we can then use it in all places as part of our global platform strategy. Final slide on this first transformation block is then a big and important enabler. It's more an internal topic, but I think it's really important as well to share that here. The big enabler here is also the organization. And we're transforming the organization significantly in Markets & Airlines. From what used to be a more market-led, a more regional-led approach, we're going to a more functional-led approach where we actually say everything that creates scale and has the ability to create global scalability should become a central function and is becoming a central function.
At the same time, we realize that we still compete locally, right? We still have local competitors. So we keep commercial intelligence, sales and marketing intelligence locally and ensure local agility. Ultimately, we are deduplicating, if that's an English word, so taking out duplications. We're streamlining processes with this. So this will lead to a cost reduction, and it will also enable us to scale new businesses better. And one of these new businesses that we want to scale better is actually the airline business. And Marco's already standing there to take you through the second block of our transformation, which is the airline commercialization. Marco, over to you. Thank you very much.
Seamless handover. Warm welcome from my side as well to the audience in the room, as well as the community online.
Moving over from the marketplace to the airline, let's have a look at the fact base again, right? The airline within TUI consists of five AOCs in the four major regions that we have seen, what David described. We have a fleet of 125 aircraft, 106 narrow bodies, 19 wide bodies. If you look at the ASK, the available seat kilometer split, then we have 25% long-haul capacity and 75% short-medium-haul capacity, mainly sun and beach related around the Mediterranean Sea, but as well North Africa, Cape Verde Islands in the direction of the Middle East as well. Important is that we're here operating among the top 10 players in Europe, and our ambition is, of course, that we maintain to be a leisure champion from an airline perspective in Europe.
If you look at the destinations, then we serve more than 180 destinations, which, of course, goes hand in hand with the tour operator to provide and produce those connected trips David was talking about. I think the major topic you see on the right side, so we spent in the last years quite significant time and effort to form out of those regional operational steered AOCs, one operational airline. So as of today, since the last two years, we operate the airline as a multi-operator functional setup out of one hand. Important is this is so far the operation in itself. So we were able to generate scale effects by combining the functions of the airline. This is now the foundation as a major part of our strategy to move into the next layer that we are able to commercialize the airline.
So with steering it commercially, AOC agnostic out of one hand, we now can tap into a new chapter and leap it up to a level where we can say, "Guys, this is something we go in the direction of commercialization." And I think this is important when we look at the control wheel narrative, what David explained before. While the former tour operator regions move into a functional steered marketplace, the airline is tapping into new pockets of profit from a commercial point of view. And the foundation of this is, of course, that we are not starting here from scratch. We're building on quite a significant set of values and strength we have already as part of our DNA. So if you look at the left side, then obviously we have a strong base of 20 million customers within the airline.
This is customer counting, which means PAX one way, right? 20 million PAX. TUI is a major anchor customer, which obviously will not disappear tomorrow. This is something where we can build the future setup of the airline. As I said already, multi-operator setup, which is a tick in the box already. And of course, based on a brand which is known across Europe and across the world, as Sebastian laid out. When we look at how do we want to build this, there are three major components in terms of this strategic underlying. Number one is the commercialization itself, because in the past, in a regional setup, the airline capacity of the region, 20 aircraft here, 70 aircraft here, 50 aircraft here, has been shared and steered very, very focused and not AOC agnostic.
What we do now is to set up one departmental setup where we will develop one commercial approach which steers all the 125 aircraft out of one hand, even commercially, with a clear business and aviation acumen. In the past, and I think David said that, we consider the airline as a kind of a transport arm for the package. If you consider your airlift capacity as a transport arm for the package, then of course, you leave some elements which have come later too out of scope. And this is something where we see additional profit pools we want to tap. From a network and fleet positioning point of view, we are a full Boeing customer. Our fleet is, as you have seen, Boeing-related.
We have a network which is sun and beach related, but it has extreme high seasonality because, obviously, given our business model, the majority of holidays happens in the summer, so this is something where we look into are there new possibilities with partnerships, with additional B2B, and of course, with year-round flying to increase or lower our seasonal profile and increase the winter utilization of our assets. Okay? And last but not least, because airline is a business where absolute cost discipline is key, so cost rigidness is here the element which I will talk about briefly that we implement the next level of a lean structural operation. We have achieved a lot, but there are additional fruits to harvest. If you dive briefly into those three clusters, then commercialization is about focus and simplicity, and here I'm talking about what are we doing differently today.
When we talk about focus, then, as already mentioned, sales and distribution revenue management is something where we see additional benefit. From a sales and distribution topic, we will be able to focus differently on higher yielding seat-only elements, what we do not have in the dimension how it can be where we see a fair share in the market overall. This is related as well that the shares you have seen, what David shown, was rather, I wouldn't call it a windfall, but it was rather a buy business because this was the buy business for the package. What we are now aiming into is that we actively go for more seat-only routes as an additional element to drive the utilization of the assets, but as well generate additional margins. Revenue management here as a focus point of view is exactly the same.
In the past, we steered mainly our yields via the package, via the overall package. And the seat-only was dragging with the package deal. And at the end, especially, we had a philosophy that we have seen if we already achieve, for instance, give an example, 90% of a seat load, then everything else, the remaining seats have been sold at rather lower prices. And this is something from an aviation point of view, you do actually exactly the opposite. So focusing on a seat-only yielding will generate additional upsides for us. When we talk about simplicity, then we have been able to consolidate the airlines into one multi-operator, but still with quite a significant difference in the different regions. Since the regions have been steered commercially differently, the product, the setup, the in-flight topics have been differently as well.
So different weight of hand luggage, different, let's say, measures there, different products. This is something what we will standardize further. And why are we doing it? We will have obviously a local touch to it, especially when it comes to buy-on-board to food and beverages. But in terms of hand luggage, in terms of ancillaries, this standardization will lead to decomplexed operation, and it will lead to an opportunity, which is today quite tricky, that we will be able to tap as well into the reverse demand. Because when you see it from a destination point of view, then of course you have a variety of different routes, but you see different products today. So when you want to fly around noon on a normal weekday from one of the Canary Islands, then you have quite a variety of TUI flights.
So, I think usually Tenerife or Las Palmas, we have 10, 12 aircraft around noon in a row there. They fly all to different destinations, but with different products as of today. That's something what we combine, and this will enable us, this will enable us as well to sell those capacity in addition. So there are some niche elements where we will be able to generate additional product and profit. And this is quite important from an IT point of view. Commercially, the airlines have been embedded, and I think this is a bit what David said already, have been embedded in the landscape of the regions.
Since we are moving into an integrated platform way within the IT, from an airline point of view, we will introduce an off-the-shelf revenue management system, yield management overall, but an inventory as well, which will allow us to steer this completely out of one hand. This gives us the opportunity to steer the aircraft from a scheduling point of view as well, far less complex than we have it today. This opens up additional options for additional utilization of the assets. When it comes to the network, utilization of the assets as a buzzword here. We are currently running a network exercise with the following major aim: balance year-round profitability, higher aircraft utilization. This is something what I mentioned.
We think that we will be able between 5%-10% to increase the asset utilization if we are doing it right, especially by leveraging the winter underutilization of our aircraft as of today. AOC agnostic planning are already set because I think it's quite plastic. If you see, you steer 20 aircraft or you steer out of one hand 125, you have more variety how to do this. Profitable niches, I said already. We will look into not only sun and beach destination, but we will be able by focusing on additional seat-only to increase, for instance, the frequency of routes as well. Whilst today, based on a pure package focus, we see might be a weekly frequency or, let's say, twice a week here, by opening it up with more seat-only, we will be able even to increase the frequency of some of our trunk routes.
This is quite important, and therefore it fuels each other, right? The asset utilization in itself, but as well more focusing on the seat-only routes as in comparison with the past. Then, of course, connectivity is key. We have not been focused on partnerships, for instance. This is something with our long-haul network, mainly from the U.K., Gatwick, Manchester as a stronghold, and Amsterdam from a continental point of view. This is something where we need to look into partnerships. How can we fill these aircraft as well, especially when we talk about connectivity, when we talk about seat-only focus as well? So why? Question mark. And this goes hand in hand with the marketplace. We route our German customers today mainly via German long-haul carriers. But there is an opportunity if we connect our own flights. Why we are not routing them to the Caribbean via Gatwick?
Those are elements which show us that with, let's say, a more European global steering approach, there are additional opportunities to standardize and open pockets we haven't seen before. On fleet size and as well, because this is something which will come up as a question usually, we are very happy with the current, let's say, dimension of the fleet. Here's important. We have an order book with Boeing where we are in the middle of a fleet renewal to the latest technology aircraft. When I'm talking about that we want to increase scope and focus in for seat-only and increasing routes, this will go hand in hand with the better utilization of the assets. We will even, with the current size of the fleet, be able to produce more seats in the future. In terms of the delivery stream, I have been in Seattle two weeks ago.
Boeing made real progress. So we are positive about the agreements. We have Boeing in place to stick with the delivery plan we have agreed with them. Third part, as I said, quite important in regard to the cost discipline here. Why is there more in it for us than we see today? The left side, as already outlined, is the period of the last five years to consolidate the airlines into one operational unit. Now we want to lift it up into an interoperable carrier. What does it mean? Today, we steer all the functions out of one hand. If you talk about ground handling, purchasing, maintenance, etc., but from a flying point of view, you are quite bound to the AOCs, the air operator certificates in the regions, in the countries.
Our EU carriers are in the process to apply for EASA licensing, as EASA AOCs. This EASA AOC will be based on similar procedures and manuals, and this will be midterm the foundation for an ability to operate crew amongst different countries and amongst the different aircraft. We will be able that we can operate, for instance, a Belgian aircraft with a Dutch crew or with a German crew or with a Swedish crew. This allows you, especially in the destination, higher flexibility, how you exchange, for instance, aircraft and crew, which should drive as well the utilization of crew and assets, and therefore the unit goes down. We are at the beginning of this journey. It is a very early stage, but with midterm, we are aiming to operate all the European AOCs under EASA AOCs.
If we wrap this up, what we have seen from David and from my side, then you see here on this slide the key characteristics as a summary of what we are aiming for. Transforming the tour operator into a functional setup with risk-wide profitable growth. Risk-wide, just to recap, is quite important because it makes us more independent in terms of how do we steer in the future because dynamic obviously doesn't coexist with or doesn't have the same risk profile as our risk capacity, what we carry as of today. The scalability through global platforms, I think David described as quite descriptive, is something which will drive profits and reduce complexity within the business.
And then, of course, most important when we talk about global leisure-created marketplace, this is something we create as ecosystem which goes Markets & Airlines, which incorporates holiday experience as well, where Peter will talk about in a minute. And of course, as well that we increase the frequency why the customer should stick with TUI. Airline, major three points. We want to have new revenue streams outside the marketplace, given the character, the future character of the marketplace. This is a necessity as well. Network efficiency, drive optionality for the marketplace, but as well for seat-only customers. And of course, drive the utilization of assets and of our crew community as well. This together will create a profitable growth for the Markets & Airlines community.
When we wrap up in the next chapter in terms of the value creation, how will this look like to depict that a bit more? Then I summarize what David said, or I close the circle what David and Sebastian said in the beginning. What are the main value levers for Markets & Airlines? On the one hand, we support the vertical integration. We support the funnel in itself. It is the most important and unique setup for TUI. And we will deliver the transformation benefits to come into a region of 3% EBIT margin mid-term. When we dive into those two elements, because this is a question we receive quite often, there is always a question in terms of what is the, let's say, vertical integration worth. And we showcase this here.
When you look at the share of volume generated from M&A as a kind of a distribution engine, then you see in the TUI Hotels & Resorts, in the cruise business, Musement, there's quite a significant proportion fueled into from our own distribution engine. So we talk about 40%-47% in the different units. And what are the benefits for both sides? Obviously, the contribution distribution engine, as I said, occupancy in terms of a base load, which is quite important to steer the, let's say, upper demand then. And of course, providing with the airlines connectivity. This helps us not only to fill existing markets, it helps even to connect new clusters and build new clusters of activity for TUI as a group. The benefits we receive from holiday experience in itself is, of course, product differentiation.
This is extremely important to create superior margins, which is the second element. And I think you've seen it on David's slides before. And of course, that we have a superior customer satisfaction because if you are able to play alongside and control the value chain overall, then of course, you have an influence on the service element, which is one of the unique selling points for TUI as well to have this effortless, this, let's say, comfort level, the service element of TUI in itself. When we look at the element for Markets & Airlines in terms of value creation in numbers, this summarizes what David said before, what I said within the airline. We have three main building blocks overall. In the financial year 2024, we had roughly 1.5% EBIT margin. We are aiming midterm into a direction greater than 3%.
The building blocks mainly are obviously transforming tour operator. This is where we see the majority of additional contribution will be generated in the future. I do not repeat all the points, but you see this depicts or reflects what David said before, the risk-wide growth, which will increase significantly over the next years. Own products, investing more into it. We want to have more frequency drivers, more product categories. The app will drive obviously the distribution cost down in that regard and will drive more customers into the ecosystem if we are able to keep the customer going with the app, as outlined before. AI is something which plays out today already with significant contributions. You have seen this heavy maintenance tool. The service will really benefit in the future from AI.
This is something which will contribute from not only in EBIT, even in regard of a revenue point of view. And then, of course, the lean organization. If you shift four regions into one functional setup, of course, you are aiming as well to do things once and not four times in major functions. At the airline, new revenue at a minimum margin we have set. The network complete optimization, if we move into it up to 10%, this is our ambition level, 10% asset utilization. This gives you already a cost benefit in that regard, which we want to translate into profit. And then, of course, efficient operation will support that because it will enable a higher utilization of the aircraft if I'm able to exchange crews, just to give you an example. And of course, decomplex the product overall.
And then I think this is an absolute must because what we see here today is as well a lot of initiatives which keep costs not only stable, rather drive it down. This is what we call the operational excellence. This goes hand in hand with the strategic product. It's a kind of a side product with the scalability of the scale we aim for. We, of course, will be able to have better conditions in certain markets. We need to review our market effectiveness globally and not just regionally, right? The conversion rate improvement, as I said before, from an app point of view will be a side effect as well. And if I have a lean organization, I will have lean overhead cost as well. So this is connected to a certain extent to the two building blocks before.
Overall, last sentence on that target as an ambition level is a clear aim, greater 3% EBIT margin from an M&A perspective. Having said that, I think this is the last slide from David and my side, and we are happy to answer questions now. Thank you very much. Hello Linda.
Thank you Marco. I would like to welcome David back on stage. We have two colleagues who have microphones in their hands, so please raise your hand, wait till the mic comes, and then ask your question. I think you're the first one.
Thank you very much for that, Jamie Rollo from Morgan Stanley. I've got three questions, please, but I'll ask them separately because I appreciate you did have pen and paper. That was all very interesting, and the opportunities are clearly there. Could you just maybe explain why the margin is so low to begin with then?
Because you talked about the benefits of being vertically integrated and the content and so on. So when you look at yourselves versus the peers and benchmark Markets & Airlines, why was it only 1.5% last year? Is there anything between you and the other TUI companies in terms of transfer pricing, hidden subsidies, what you're selling, your commercial terms for hotels and cruises? Is there anything like that, or was it just inefficiencies and just a higher bed cost? That's number one. Number one.
I'm happy to start with. Mathias, you can chip in. So we operate at arm's length. I think that's important. So the question is, how's the commercial relationship between the Holiday Experiences businesses and markets? It's arm's length. So the low margins are not driven by any kind of non-market rates. I think that's really important for us.
What we're doing in terms of addressing this, as we said, we're looking at driving that transformation plan to address the three big cost blocks that we have. I think Mathias, you will show a bit the shape of the P&L and how these cost blocks actually look. But effectively, we have obviously the cost of goods sold as the biggest cost block that we have. That's effectively all the accommodation costs we get into the marketplace. It's all the flight costs we get in. Those are the two big cost blocks, as well as other costs that we get in. The Ryanair approach is going to help us address that because we can get the dynamic parts in. The current position sometimes is not delivering the superior margins that we want.
So by actually optimizing that, we can address the cost of goods sold block, as well as also through the initiatives that I explained on the pricing and yield. Distribution costs we're addressing through the app-first personalization strategy, and overheads we're also then addressing through the lean operating model. So we operate at arm's length, and we're addressing all three of our cost blocks through the transformation plan to make sure that going forward, the margins improve from the 1.5% we had last year.
Okay, thanks. I mean, this second question,
oh, sorry, Mathias. If I would just add, because that's something that we always also mention when we get this question, that in comparison to others, we have a European footprint. And this also includes markets. You mentioned Poland, one million customers, and I think that's for everyone who's operating in Eastern Europe.
You generally have a level which is in your profitability lower. At the same time, we are very happy with that because it's a market where we don't have own risk capacity. So we can accept this. But of course, if you then put our profitability for Markets & Airlines in total together, there's quite a big component of sales coming from these markets, and there are others like this.
And this might also be a question for later with the financials, but the case studies were interesting, particularly the German distribution differences with the U.K. and the higher accommodation. Are there any sort of distribution to sales ratios you can give us to compare those two countries, or maybe GP1 margins just to give us a feeling for the opportunity? Or is that something we're going to talk about later?
We'll have a look at the P&L for Markets & Airlines later. I think that it's probably look at the paper and then let's do it then. Thank you.
Sorry, one more relevant one then. Booking.com came out pretty high in those two charts, the customer preference. What can TUI offer to your customers that Booking.com can't offer? How about your purchasing as well? Can you buy better than them?
Yeah, I mean, Booking.com is obviously extremely well known for accommodation-only products and that component vertical, a clear leading company. They do that extremely well in that particular vertical. I think what we can offer is the breadth of the offering. We're not just an accommodation-only player, but we actually are a player that can offer a bigger variety of holiday products, but also leisure experiences. As I said, the package holiday is our core product.
That's, I think, unique at that scale. The OTAs tend to focus more on components. We tend to be strong in this connected trip area, so that's where we see our strength, but we then also see the opportunity, as I said, to also sell those components at the right moment to the customer base through our app and the other channels, so they have a different model. We're broader, I would say, compared to most of the OTAs, and this is, I think, the power that we can offer, the benefit we can offer to our customers, that they can come to us not just if they want to book a hotel or a flight, but they can come to us when they want to purchase any type of holiday product or also leisure experience, both in destination, but also near you.
This brings an additional level because while the booking is mainly focusing obviously on accommodation-only, one of our selling points, of course, the service as well we bring to the customer. So we take care of the customer alongside the journey. And this is something you, let's say, we sell actively, and we'll even sell more actively in the future, right? So usually, it's a very simple example. If you have an issue with the hotel you booked via booking, you would complain at the hotel, not with booking, because booking doesn't take care of you. In our case, it's different. And this is something that we need to, of course, monetize as well.
I think the next question was up here.
Good morning, Richard Clarke from Bernstein. Three of them here. Follow James' example of doing them one at a time.
You've obviously helped for giving us the target of 3% margin at Markets & Airlines. What about customer numbers? I think if you go back to pre-COVID, you used to talk about a line of sight of 30 million customers. If I look at your slide 32, it looks like maybe you're going to try and grow by about 20-25%. Is that about right? Is that what you're trying to get to? And I think you said that dynamic pricing is lower margin than wholesale. So how are you going to counter that sort of margin headwind as you grow entirely through dynamic packaging?
Yeah, I think in terms of growth, revenue growth, I think the guidance is 5%-7%.
So if you then think about volumes being slightly below that, I think that gives you an indication of the kind of customer growth that underpins our plans. On the margin question, yes, from an absolute margin for Pax, the dynamic customer price are slightly lower, but they're accretive because effectively we're entering and tapping into new customer segments. And therefore, that's one of the building blocks that you saw on the slide that Marco showed in this transformation to operate at a global leisure marketplace. One of the big drivers of that tour operator block creating value is actually this mix, right, the more dynamic packaging.
Thank you for that. And you noted in the U.K. that you're leaning in a bit more into third-party retail. Just what's the rationale behind doing that? And how should we think about your distribution mix changing?
Because you said that may still grow, apps going to grow. What exactly is going to shrink as a share of distribution going forward?
So when you look at it across the entire Markets & Airlines division, we have this 51% share in web and app, 49% in travel agencies and OTAs. We, as I said, think the travel agency will manage itself for value. So we're not strategically pushing this. We're managing this with our partners for those customers that actually want to book their products in travel agency. So strategically, we want the online part to grow. And within that, we very much believe that the app should play a more prominent role than the web. So you would expect the share of the digital channels, so app and web, to grow. And within that, the app channel should grow more strongly than the web.
I think we gave as a guidance that we expect the web share, or sorry, the app share, which was 7.3% last year, to grow by middle digit growth rate in the next couple of years. The strategic focus is on making sure that as many customers as possible have the app and as many customers as possible use the app without us having to reacquire them. Because only then are we actually going to be able to drive the distribution cost down, which is ultimately the financial lever we needed in order to help us improve those margins.
Okay. Then maybe just lastly, technology question. I guess the tech cynic would say you're investing in an app just as agentic AI is about to kill apps off. How are you thinking about agentic AI as a distribution channel?
How are you going to make sure that you show up if that's how the consumer is going to start their customer journey going forward?
Yes, I mean, we think about the future of search all the time. And agentic AI, of course, is on our radar. It's very high up on our radar to see how that actually works. I think it's still a model that hasn't yet found any kind of traction, but it's clearly, in our hypothesis, travel is one of the use cases where probably a lot of the pilots and the tests will actually take place. So we're doing a few things. On the one hand, we're testing our own AI, let's say, search, trip, inspiration planners. We are then also looking at how do these models, so how the agents actually, how will they recommend to their customers ultimately what to book?
Our belief is they won't actually become transactions. They will become search engines, just another source of traffic. And we believe that strong brands that have strong reputation actually have a very important role to play in that search. Because if you think about this from a consumer point of view, I asked ChatGPT or the equivalent, what should I book for my holiday? If the recommendation that the agent gives is wrong, potentially it's not going to look so good and actually have bad, let's say, repercussions for the agent. So they will look for the established brands. They will look for the brands that have high customer satisfaction scores. So we are making sure that we, on all these points, that actually will ensure that we get traffic through this source actually continue to score very well.
At the moment, we're seeing some volume come through, traffic that is, coming from these agents. And we are, I think, very well prepared for actually playing a big role in that channel as it becomes bigger. And we think it's a big opportunity because of the scale of our operation, the size of our brand, the reputation that we have compared to maybe some of the other platforms that might be recommended, but they're not trusted by the customer.
Makes sense.
May I?
Sure. Yep, go ahead.
Thank you. It's c onvenient to sit next to this one. Two questions on my side. I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand your point about when you talk on the slide where you talk about Ryanair, and you said 82% of these trips go into sun and beach destinations, and 80% of those 82% are not your destinations.
You said this is not cannibalizing our sales. Can you please explain why? And can you please explain how you imprint the TUI kind of service label that gets you these NPS scores also on these trips? I mean, it's maybe two aspects to one question. Tha nk you.
When we talk about the Ryanair flights into sun and beach destinations, we talk about a few use cases where there's no cannibalization. It could be a departure airport that we currently don't fly from into an existing destination. Today, we don't, let's say, a secondary airport in, let's say, Germany, where the catchment area around it we don't fly from today. That's basically a sun and beach destination holiday, which doesn't cannibalize. New departure airports.
Second dimension of that is we've called it all sun and beach, but a lot of the underlying destinations behind it are kind of hybrid types of cities, like Venice, for example, mainland Spain destinations where today we fly to, but we don't fly to with our own aircraft. So we're offering more connections to these types of semi-sun and beach destinations. And the third dimension of this is days that we don't fly on today, right? Marco already said in some cases we fly maybe once per week or twice per week. But what about those customers that actually want to fly on days that we don't fly by actually having partners like Ryanair? So I'm using Ryanair as an example. The other third-party flying, as we call it sometimes, is the same.
It gives us more options also to fly on days when we don't fly, therefore create more flexibility for customers. So customers don't have to then go only seven days or 10 days, but they can actually choose an eight-day or nine-day holiday. And that's why the sun and beach, so those are the three dimensions of the sun and beach. And it's not cannibalizing in that sense because we steer it in those three dimensions, and therefore it enables us to offer more optionality for customers and therefore more revenue opportunities for us.
And my second and final question has to do with the future of your shop network as you grow online and app. Are you still going to be having all these shops? And at what point will you start thinking about maybe changing that footprint, if any?
I smile because I would have answered 20 years ago, 22 years ago, 23 years ago. I started in corporate development in TUI AG at the time. And at that point, we were discussing what's the future of distribution going to look like. Now, as you would expect, a strategy department to always think about the future. And there was a very clear hypothesis. There won't be travel agencies. Everything will be digital. Here we are now, fast forward 23 years, and we still see that in some of our markets, more than in others, to be fair, but like in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, there still is a big, big proportion of customers who actually enjoy going into travel agent and actually want to book their holiday from travel agents.
And therefore, our approach to that is where that is the case, where there's a consumer demand for this type of channel, for this type of way of purchasing a holiday, we will serve that. So we're constantly then looking at that. We're also always optimizing the network. There's always portfolio developments there. But let's say we believe there is a role to play for travel agents in some of our markets at least. And as long as there's demand for this channel, we will also be in that channel and serve customers there. But of course, always optimize the portfolio. That's something we do as BAU, and we will continue to do that going forward.
Next question.
Thanks very much. Trying also three questions with a little bit of sub-questions on the app, first of all. Maybe some additional details. Obviously, first of all, profitability.
On average, the customer that used the app, how much more profitable is he or she vis-à-vis your normal average customer? Secondly, how many transactions did the typical app user do over, let's say, the last 24 or 12 months? And how did that develop over time since you launched the app? And the transactions per customer, obviously, yes. That's the first part of the question.
Okay. So that's the first question. It's already three, no? It's already three questions. It's a good way of saying I have three questions.
Sub-question.
Okay. So app, distribution cost on app, I mean, it very much depends on the amount of customers who use the app without us having to pay for that, simplistically speaking, right?
Because you can have an app strategy that's expensive because you buy app traffic, and you can have an app strategy that's relatively cheap because you actually make customers use the app. So the app per se is not going to help you. It only helps you if you are able to bring free traffic, right? So that's why this whole transformation is so important for that. Because if you only have one reason per year to go into the app, simplistically speaking, your main holiday, the likelihood of you having to reacquire the customer, even if he has the app, is pretty high, right? So first, we need to get this ecosystem, this sometimes also called frequency driving model up and running. That's happening as we speak. I showed you some examples now. The cost is it really depends on the actual, let's say, free traffic.
I would say medium double-digit lower than in the other channels, so it is lower if we get the free traffic right, and therefore if we get this ecosystem to run. Now, on the ecosystem to run, there was a little KPI, key performance indicator that I skipped across because I saw the time ticking. We measure what we call so-called cross-sell index, right? That's the KPI that we currently use, i.e., how many of our customers are actually booking that second product, and that has grown by 20% in the last 12 months, so we're starting to see more customers come into the ecosystem and more customers starting to actually stay in the ecosystem, and then as a next step, then hopefully book the package holiday without us having to reacquire them, so that's a KPI that we had on the slide, and those were the two.
There was a third one with a it's a challenge when you ask three in one. I don't remember if there was a third one.
I have to look them up myself here. The profitability you talked about. But coming back on that, obviously, you have free traffic and you have paid traffic. If we put a line underneath that and say, how much is the customer acquisition cost really? What would you answer?
It depends on the market. It depends on the product we sell. I mean, at the end, you can see, and I think you'll share the P&L breakdown of markets, I think, for the first time now today. So I'm spoiling some of your thunder, but let's say the overall distribution cost is 10%. So 10% of revenue.
If you then take the EUR 20 billion or so, EUR 20.3 billion, EUR 20.2 billion revenue roughly last year, you get into a size of the distribution cost overall at 10%. And then you can probably figure out what the customer acquisition cost is then.
Okay. Good. Fair enough. On the brand awareness, 92% in Europe. You're moving into new markets, Latin America, Southeast Asia. How is the brand awareness there and what are you doing to improve that?
It's lower than in Europe, but it already exists. And the interesting thing about the global expansion, again, another vertical integration synergy is that Peter, with his businesses, is already a global business, and he'll talk about that in a minute. He'll talk about the expansion of the hotel portfolio and within that, for example, the TUI Blue hotels into China. We go in as a group with that as an example.
We bring the TUI Smile to China. We don't go in as a distribution company, but as a product company. No. The Chinese love European brands. We sell them through the different channels that exist in China. Chinese customers come into the hotel. They experience TUI. We bring the brand into these kind of markets through the product businesses first so that when we then go with the marketplace, there's a brand recognition already, which is, of course, lower than in Europe where we've been for decades. But there's, I would say, in the relevant target groups through this kind of product-led entry into new markets, already a base understanding there, which we can leverage on. And that makes a big difference compared to somebody who just has to go in greenfield and basically acquire every single customer through paid traffic on day one.
Okay.
Next question. No questions. There's also, I think, no questions from the audience at home. I don't see anything on the screen. My colleagues are nodding, so no questions virtually yet. But of course, if you have a question at home, please raise it. We have one more question up here.
Ask one more. Just to follow up on your point about arm's length transactions with the hotel, the Holiday Experiences business, do you interact with those on a dynamic basis? Like, do you have some guaranteed availability to Peter's segment, or do you pick and choose it? And therefore, how do you kind of manage the maybe inherent attraction that the hotel may have a better customer somewhere else, but you're trying to get a differentiated experience through your line of business?
Yeah, it's a good question.
I don't think, Peter, you'll also talk about that when you talk about your growth strategies, also obviously trying to attract customers not just through the TUI channel, but also other channels. So we work in this hybrid model with each other. So we have wholesale contracts. We're also moving to some, in some cases, dynamic contracts. And we effectively have put together, Peter and I, with our teams, forums that actually look at the cases where one division potentially would like to do something outside the vertical integration. We look at these and look at, is it the better thing to work together from an end-to-end profitability point of view, or is it actually better to basically loosen the vertical integration in this particular case?
There are cases where we have taken the decision to actually take a very committed relationship, actually, and decommitted and give flexibility to both sides because for Peter, he was able, and the team were able to find customer streams outside the TUI channels. For the market, in some cases, it's actually also good to not have to sell away risk capacity in a competitive market. We work very closely. Our teams work very closely. Our number one priority is to create value for the group in any decision we take. In the past, we only had one model, which was the very, let's say, classic funnel that Sebastian showed. Customers come in through the tour operator and are funneled into the hotels. Nowadays, with the hotels, the cruise lines, Musement, but also the airline in the future, there's also other routes to market.
We want to tap into those at the same time, of course, protect the TUI profit pool and the TUI differentiation, wherever that is the better option from a group perspective.
Thank you, David. There's one question in the back.
Hi, there. It's Conroy Gaynor from Bloomberg Intelligence. Just a quick one from me. Could you perhaps talk a bit about the different demographics in your ecosystem, be that age group, household situation, and how those behaviors are changing sort of in a post-COVID world and how you're adapting your strategy to take that into consideration?
Yeah, I think we had a few data points on our customer base on one of the slides. So, as I said, I think we have 20.3 million customers. So you can imagine it's a pretty broad customer base. We have young, old. We have all sorts of demographics in our system.
The typical customer, if such a thing even exists, is on average, let's say, 47 years old. It's on average slightly more affluent in the markets that we operate in than the normal, let's say, typical household. And it's on average also we have a slight higher proportion in families and couples compared to other types of travelers. And what that does, it gives us, I think, a really good base to grow because these customer groups still have a lot of trips ahead of them. They have a lot of disposable income that they can actually spend. And therefore, we feel really happy with the kind of customer groups that we have and the demographics we have. And when you then remember the other data point that I showed on the customer, which was the 40% retention. So we also have a very loyal customer base.
So customers who actually, with the package holidays, come back to us on a very regular basis, 40% retention. So generally, we have a very good, strong, loyal customer base in existing markets. And what we're aiming to do with the transformation is create even better experience and more experiences for these customers, but also tap into those new customer groups in existing markets, like I showed you with the Ryanair case study, but also new markets, like I showed you with the Eastern Europe expansion.
Jamie, you had another question?
Thanks. Just a question on the airline, actually. So if I understand it correctly, you're becoming a bit sort of less vertically integrated and more of a standalone business. So how do you sort of manage the what percent of your seats go into the marketplace?
I think it's sort of 70% at the moment is sold, and it's 30% seat only, but it's going to become more seat only. So how do you manage that sort of internal balance? And also, doesn't that make you more exposed to low-cost airlines and sort of seat-only competition there? And how do your cost metrics stack up against low-cost airlines? Have you got some benchmarks there?
Thanks for this question. I think important is the airline will be still an integral part of the vertical integration as well.
As we have it with Holiday Experiences and Markets & Airlines today, the airline will be an element in it, which will be in the future as well steered at arm's length. I think this is the aim here. That's number one. Number two, it's important that the core of the airline capacity will be still related to the tour operator.
There will be a close relationship. So when we talk about, and that's why I said there are niche pockets of profit, we will develop into it in terms of giving accommodation and additional capacity to drive seat-only. So we do not expect that we turn into an LCC or into a point-to-point carrier to be competing against, for instance, other low-cost carriers in the market. In terms of how we manage it, as said before, extreme close relationship, even our network teams, we will have a consolidated network team, to give an example, will be close in alignment and even sitting together with the marketplace to plan and protect the core program. And out of this core program, we develop then the extension of it. In terms of the cost proposition, I think this is the beauty of the marketplace with the airline, what we will serve.
And of course, from a legacy point of view, our CASK is higher than compared with Ryanair, for instance. But when you look at the marketplace, to be able to combine exactly those flights that we leave a flight to Mallorca, where there's a high competition existing already, we leave this to easyJet, Ryanair, and so on, sending it via the marketplace, looking into our trunk routes and using our capacity for trunk routes and increasing there, the frequency and protect the element. This is something which will drive then the yield. And of course, as you see it between the low-cost carrier and the network carrier, as well balance out to a certain extent the different cost propositions.
Thank you very much. We have one question in the webcast. I will read it out to the room so you are all aware.
Eva Bielfeldt is asking, can you help us to identify the major contribution of each building block in taking the margin to higher than 3% and what timeline you have in mind to reach that?
Yeah. Thank you very much for that question. I will take it. I think if you go back, we show you illustrative building blocks and we are, as I said before, on the journey, and David or Sebastian said it as well, we are on the journey. So we are aiming to reach this within a midterm, so something between three and five years, because some of the elements, of course, like implementing a new IT system for the airline, etc., take some time.
Some of the initiatives will come very, very fast already in the current financial year and within the next one, and we are aiming for a steep ramp-up, but overall, the journey will last longer. If you look at the dimensioning here, then you see already, of course, subject to change figures, we expect roughly 50% out of the marketplace and the other 25%-25% out of excellence as a cost-driven measures and out of the airline. When we talk, for instance, that's the reason why I say this is not finalized yet. When we look at the airline element, there is a certain ambition level as well, obviously based on the assets we operate there. Important here is we will drive additional customers in with revenue and a certain expected margin contribution, but how fast and what is then the precise network? This is exactly what we're currently working on.
So, I think this gives you a direction of, let's say, contributors in terms of dimensioning. As said in the marketplace, and I think this is the important thing, of course, we're aiming for new customers as well, but as well driving the cost down, having a margin improvement as well by lower risk capacity. And I think this question was before, if you steer it right, there is not a margin difference between or a disadvantage or an advantage between risk capacity and dynamic. I think the opposite is the case. If you steer it right, the dynamic is like the cherry on the cake in regard of additional margin without capital employed i n that regard.
Question from the webcast would be about the margin growth. Can you expand on the contribution by region when you talk about the growth?
This is something which, let's say, let me counteract on that because this is actually how we want to steer it in the future, that we don't steer it by region anymore, so that we steer it rather from a, let's say, global point of view. So when we look at the additional, for instance, starting with the airline, when we look at the additional network, right, the network is completely will be independent as of today from the regions. We see more opportunities, for instance, in the U.K., but just based on the fact that our biggest proportion of the fleet, so more than 50% of our fleet, is located in the U.K.. So we see some opportunities there, but there will be opportunities as well in Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany. I would not say it's 50-50 then as per the proportion of region.
It's rather to see how developed and matured are the markets and then to see, okay, where can we contribute and generate additional traffic. That's from an airline point of view. I think from a point of view of the marketplace, David, and chip in, happy to chip in. When we look at destination-related, where can we use our scale, how we, let's say, for instance, purchase third-party hotels? This is regional, let's say, independent. It's rather how you source it then. And then, of course, distribution-wise, there is an element of how will the multi-channel distribution strategy develop. And there are some markets which are already rather online, like the Nordics, and there are other markets which will see a different profile if you drive more into the web. So this is something which you can derive even from the characteristics you have seen on the slides before.
Thank you very much. We're coming to an end, but I think there's one further question. So one short question, hopefully, and one short answer.
Hi, Karan Puri from J.P. Morgan. I have a question on the U.K. and Ireland snapshot that you shared earlier. So just looking at the brand consideration, it seems like you're ahead of Jet2, but in terms of market share, slightly behind in terms of what sort of explains the differential and when does that better brand consideration or recognition translate to that leading market share in the country?
Yeah, I think all of the things we talked about in the transformation and the plan that we showed will, of course, have an impact on all the markets, including the U.K..
I think the U.K., if you have it in front of you, I've tried to remember what's on there, is at the moment a very, let's say, vertically integrated model. So in the U.K., we are 80-something% package, and the rest is seat-only, which is, as Marco said, at the moment almost a byproduct of the package, right? I can't find a customer to book a package for this seat, so I basically sell the seat-only. So when we actually apply this transformation, I think the U.K. has a lot of opportunities to grow in a risk-right way. When it comes to the, let's say, dynamic part, U.K. and the Ryanair case study is driven by the U.K. and Ireland market. So the data points that you see on that is actually very much U.K. and shows the potential.
So being able to offer more flight options, more holiday options, not just in the existing sun and beach destinations, but more frequencies into existing sun and beach destinations, semi-sun and beach destinations like the Venices I just mentioned, as well as cities, I think there's a lot of opportunity to sell a lot more packages that are dynamically produced. But also when these platforms are then actually really rolled out and working in the U.K., which is the case as we're speaking, we're rolling these platforms out, there's the opportunity then to really get this ecosystem play up and running, which is different from how an airline or tour operator would think of this. And that's where we think that the U.K., like other markets, as Marco said, will see benefits come through from the transformation and drive growth and higher margins.
Thank you.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, David. Thank you very much, Marco. Round of applause for them both. For our participants joining us via the webcast, it is now time to step away from your desk, make yourself a cup of coffee, enjoy a little break, and for those of you in the room, we have coffee prepared and drinks over there to my left, to your right. Very important, we will be back at 11:30 A.M. sharp, so please be here in the room at 11:30 A.M. so we can continue with the webcast, and yeah, see you in 30 minutes. Welcome back, everybody. I hope you enjoyed your coffee and your little snacks, and everybody is back energized for our last session before we then head into lunch.
We started off with Markets & Airlines, and now we are heading into our Holiday Experiences business, which comprises our Hotels and Resorts, Cruises, and also Musement. And for that, we have Peter Krüger with us today, who will talk us through hotels first. Thank you.
Thank you, Linda. Yeah, so this morning we discussed Markets & Airlines. We discussed how we address our 20 million customers in Europe, how we're growing in Eastern Europe, Southern Europe. By the way, great presentation. Well done, David and Marco. And now we switch the perspective. So now we should switch the perspective to the destination business, right? So we look where our customers are going to, right? And as Linda said, we will talk about hotels. We talk about cruises. We talk about Musement.
Now we will do the hotels before the break, then you have lunch, and after lunch we talk about cruises and Musement. But as Sebastian said earlier, you can have the best strategy, but numbers don't lie, right? So we will start the session here today with numbers. So what we put up here on this page is actually the performance of our Holiday Experiences business. We put down a 10-year cycle so that you can really see that this is a business where we obviously have some sort of a winning formula. You can see it's growing, it's growing profitable. Of course, you see the impact from COVID, and we will talk about the COVID years as well as part of the presentation.
But last year we achieved a record profit in Holiday Experiences, almost EUR 1.1 billion, and we come from a profit base of EUR 200 million 10 years ago. So constantly growing and very strong and profitable growth. So we start with the hotel business as the biggest one within Holiday Experiences. You can see what we're working on is building a global, global, again, you heard it before, global hotel platform, right? So we don't talk about the hotel business. We also talk about a platform business. So that is very important because, as I said, it's a winning formula and we have a very scalable model. So same chart for hotels, what you've seen for the whole segment, Holiday Experiences, this is hotels only. So you see again, constantly growing, record profits last year.
But what I also want to highlight is if you look at the two years in between the COVID crisis, we had losses of round about EUR 550 million accumulated in two years of global shutdowns, right? So this was the biggest crisis for the tourism business ever. And this led to EUR 550 million losses, which we actually earned back within one year. So what does it tell you? The hotel business is a very resilient business. So even in the crisis, we managed to reduce the losses to an amount that we actually can earn back very quickly. And what you can also see is that we were very back, very quickly back from the crisis. So within one year, after the crisis, we actually managed to get up to EUR 480 million of profits. So the hotel business is a very, very resilient business.
Now, the second observation on this chart is you will see that in the last year, 2024, we actually had a very strong growth year-over-year, right? So from 550 to 668. So what also has changed in between pre-crisis and post-crisis, before the crisis and after the crisis is the way we distribute our products. So we work with Markets & Airlines with the vertical integration to get the base load in. But we have started, in particular for hotels that are long-haul hotels for Europe, to also tap into more local source markets around. And that's why the distribution part is driving profitability in the last two years significantly. And that's why you will see our business on hotels, as David said before, is already a very global business. So again, some KPIs, we put it in the context of the last 10 years.
So you can see EBIT up by a factor of 2.3. You see we have a lot more hotels. So we are up from 330 hotels to 433. We will talk about hotel growth beyond the 433 in a minute. We are up in destinations. So we have 20% more destinations. We have 60% more passengers in our hotels. So you can also see there's a lot more customers in our hotels. The occupancy is still very high with 82%, above the competitors. And you can see the rates are up significantly, 72%, also driven by leveraging more distribution and more source markets for our hotels. And then what we said before, what we're very proud of is our quality, right? So we need to have the best product. We want to have the best product that sets us apart from competition.
And that is also a very important element to drive yields. Now, if we look at the global hotel market, it's a very strong market, right? So you can see it's growing a top line with 5%. The market itself consists of city and leisure hotels, right? So if I start to unpick the big picture of 5% growth, and I only look at the leisure market component because we are specialists in the leisure segment, not in the city segment. Yes, we have some city hotels like this one, but our key focus is also with this hotel in Madrid on leisure customers. So the leisure focus remains also for big cities. Then we talk about what about 30% market? 30% of the global hotel market is attributed to the leisure market.
And if you look at this subsegment of leisure hotels, it's actually growing a bit faster with 6.5%. So the fundamentals are very strong. Of course, there's a lot more flight connectivity that helps, of course, you know, for hoteliers to build more hotels. When you build a hotel, you invest in a real asset, right? In real estate. And typically, you know, the population of this world is growing. The amount of land is not growing. So it tells you if in the right micro destination, there's a big mega trend on where typically you have a value accretion for your investments. That's a very important element as well. That's why the hotel investment is a good investment opportunity. And driven by more connectivity, you get more customers, you tap into the growing middle classes, in particular in Asia. So there's more demand.
And then, of course, because you have an asset, you get very attractive debt financing from the banks, right? Because you have a collateral to pledge against your financing. So there's a few fundamentals that make the hotel market really, really interesting. So when we look at our position in the hotel market, and here I look at the leisure market only, right? So you will find, you will not find, the big American city hotel brands here because our competitive set is really in Sun and Beach, and it's a very distinctive customer base. But the message is we are the largest, right? We are the biggest, we are leading this space. We have 433 hotels. We have a pipeline of another 70 hotels.
I will talk about it in a minute, and I'll show you where we are growing, how we are growing, because that is important for you to understand. But we have a signed pipeline to get to 500 hotels within the next two and a half years, right? So these are all, and this is what I'd like to emphasize, signed contracts. So we are not including any MOUs or soft agreements in our pipeline. These are signed contracts where the owners have already agreed with us that we will manage, or we have a franchise agreement for the hotel the moment the hotel's repositioned or open. So it's a very solid pipeline. Now, when we look at strategy, so this was a little bit, you know, the introduction to the business. If you look at the strategy, our strategy is very, very simple.
First of all, we want to have the best products, which means we want to have differentiated products. We need products that you can only get at TUI and nowhere else. That's number one. Number two is if you have good products, you want more products. So we need to grow the capacity, right? And if you have good products and more products, we need to look at the distribution. We need to find customers for our hotel rooms, whether it's a hotel in Zanzibar or in the Caribbean. We need to look where is the next customer coming from? Is it coming from the U.S., from Canada, from Europe? So we tap into the local source markets outside Europe as well. That is very important to understand because this way, of course, with more demand, we drive more yield.
So we want to create a shortage of demand, an over demand and a shortage of supply, and therefore drive our yields. Now, let's start with the capacity growth. So we will talk about our hotel portfolio, where the next growth opportunities are. We will talk about Asset Right because Asset Right is not asset light. It's also not asset heavy. It's Asset Right. And we will talk about it, what it means specifically. And then we talk about the vertical integration clusters. So this is also a very important group synergy that we have, and I will talk about it in a minute. So let's start with the capacity growth. So here you can see our hotel portfolio globally. So what you can see is, I mean, today we are sun and beach specialists. So that means we bring people from non-sunshine countries to sunshine countries. Very simple.
Which means in this world, as of today, from north to south, right? So we look at the Southern Hemisphere. That's our playing field. If you look at it, you see in the Caribbean, we are very, very, very strong, right? We have a lot of bed capacity in the Caribbean. We did some benchmarking, and it looks like that we are the leading hotel bed company, also in the Caribbean. And that sets us apart from competition. And of course, it allows us to tap, as I said before, into the customer base of the U.S. and Canada. Of course, you know, if I can go to the Caribbean, to Mexico on a two-hour flight from the U.S., it's like going to Mallorca from Europe, right?
So it's a very, very strong nearshore market to the U.S., and, and you have very strong customer demand from the U.S. and, and likewise for Canada. And we combine it with the flights from Europe, right? So we combine long-haul and short-haul demand. So if I have a hotel in the Caribbean, some of our hotels have 1,000 rooms, so twice the size of this hotel. So imagine this hotel next door again. This is the whole capacity we manage for one hotel in the Caribbean. So there's enormous economies of scale, enormous power, and they all full because we've managed to drive the distribution from different source markets. Now, the second cluster we have is, and we have so many logos that you can see in the, the map no more.
We are very strong in Western Med. Sorry, in the Mediterranean Sea, in Western Med, in Eastern Med, in Northern Med, in Southern Med. We have hotels in Spain, as you know. We have hotels on Canary Islands, Balearics. We have hotels in Greece. We have hotels in Turkey. We have hotels in Egypt. We have hotels in Tunisia. We have hotels in Morocco. We are very dominant in Turkey as well. We are very dominant around the Mediterranean Sea, right? In the north, in the south, east, and west. Based on cluster, and we've recently started to grow on the east and west coast of Africa. We just take it further down. We have clusters in Cape Verde. We have clusters now in Zanzibar. We have a hotel in Senegal.
We are growing also on East and West Africa, which fits very well to our portfolio. It's pretty much the same time zone. You get very good quality for your money. It's not a long flight. So it ticks a lot of boxes. The political stability has increased a lot. So therefore there's a lot of opportunities for us, and of course we are also already well represented in the Pacific area. So we have hotels in Mauritius. We have hotels on the Maldives, but now we have started in the last two years to really grow into Southeast Asia. So the big growth strategy right now is very much driven towards Southeast Asia. So here we talk about hotels in Thailand. We have own hotels in Thailand. We have hotels in Vietnam. We have hotels in Indonesia. We have hotels in China now, right?
So I'll pick for you a little bit this growth on the right-hand side, but I wanted to give you this big picture. So when you look at this big picture, there's not a lot of white spots no more. So let's assume for a moment that we are successful in this expansion into Southeast Asia, and it looks very promising. Then the next, the last white spot we see is pretty much Latin America. So we will not talk about it today, but this is then, of course, one of the white spots that is left. Otherwise, we are very dominant already in the Sun and Beach space. So let's look at the pipeline, right? So we have recently announced at ITB, the signing of our 500th hotel.
So we have now, including the 433 hotels we have today, and a pipeline of more than 70 hotels. We have exceeded now the number of 500 hotels. We want to grow to 600, right? So if we had 400, we managed to go to 500. Why can we not go to 600? We have a winning formula, as I said, and therefore our ambition is very strong in the midterm to grow further. Now, if you look at the growth, 70 hotels, it's not only Asia, right? So of course, 44% is in Asia, but you can see we are also growing in Africa. We are still growing in the Mediterranean Sea. We are still growing in the Caribbean.
So we don't, when we say we have a push for Southeast Asia, it doesn't mean we stop the growth in the destinations where we already have a very strong foothold, and therefore, the growth is not only Asia. That's one of the messages, but of course, it's predominantly Asia. Now, the second graph that you can see in the middle, we are growing very much asset-light, but not only asset-light, right? So you can see we also have 15% of ownership growth, which is very important because our asset-light strategy really goes down on a hotel-by-hotel level. So the way we look at the opportunities is not a dogmatic assessment to say we only go for one contract form or investment.
We look at the investment opportunity itself, and we, when we think it's a good investment opportunity, then we go for ownership. We also work in a lot of partnerships with our joint ventures, but we also, of course, grow our portfolio by management and franchise. And you can see that the growth is dominated by management and franchise. So it's more asset light growth at the minute than ownership, but also ownership. Now, when you look at the growth of the brands, there was always a perception that we are only growing the TUI Blue brand, which is also not true. Yes, the TUI Blue brand is the brand that is growing the fastest. By the way, great success story in China, where the Chinese hoteliers are really looking for a Western European brand, and they perceive TUI as a very, very strong Western European brand.
So our brand recognition and our smile logo goes beyond Europe already, which is really great to see. But we are also growing RIU. We are also growing Magic Life. We are also growing TUI Suneo. We are growing Robinson. We are growing all of our brands, right? So yes, in summary, yes, Asia, most of it. Yes, asset light, most of it. And yes, TUI Blue, most of it, but not all, right? That's the important message. Now, I've included one case study here. So, as I said before, I think, I truly think there is, we are one of the only companies globally because of our vertical integration that can develop destination from scratch, right? So if you think about the strength and the power that we have end to end, we can start a business at a beach, right?
Cape Verde is one example. All we need is a nice beach. We buy the beach, ideally directly from the governments. We work with the governments. We build the hotel. Now, it's great to have a hotel on the beach, but if you have no customers, it's not so great. For us, not a problem, right? What we do is, okay, we need to fly to Cape Verde because we need to bring people from Europe to Cape Verde because we have our own airline. We can fly our own aircraft. We're not dependent on somebody else, you know, to believe in the same business case. We can deliver it in-house. Now, the next question is, how do we get customers on the aircraft?
Then, of course, because we have a very strong setup in Markets & Airlines, we have a huge sales funnel where we can include this product, promote this product, make it attractive to our customers, and then we have the distribution also embedded, so what you get is really everything you need to build a new destination. We have a great scouting team. We find a plot of land. We have our own architects. We build our own hotels. We have our own transport buses in the destination. We have our own aircraft. We have our own distribution, so we don't need to go outside. We build it ourselves, and this is a really big strength of TUI and a big synergy from the vertical integration, and the cluster we've built in Cape Verde is very, very profitable for us, right?
So if you look at it, it's not only the hotels. We have nine hotels now, one pipeline hotel, maybe a few more, but it's not signed yet. So I won't talk about it. We have 26 buses in the destination. We have 42 jeeps for excursions in the destination. We have one catamaran in the destination. So we have a lot of destination assets, things to do in the destination. And then we have 15 annual port calls from our cruise business, right? So of course, we also bring the cruise customers to the islands to do excursion, to do sightseeing, to do activities. And most of the customers are coming on our own airline. So you can see this vertical integration can be really powerful. Cape Verde is one example. Second example we will see in a minute is Zanzibar.
So again, new destination, not as well known yet, but very strong upcoming. We are the first movers. And of course, the first mover advantage plays to our strength because if we bring more customers and even later on competitors to the islands, of course, we have been the first ones investing there and therefore we really benefit from the additional demand. We said before, capacity growth is great, but we need a great product that is differentiated, right? Let's talk about the product. Now, the product for us on the hotel side is, we said we have a great brand, the TUI Blue, absolutely one of our biggest assets, but we have even more good brands, right? So if you look at the hotel side, we have now a portfolio of 12 dedicated brands. A lot of people ask, why do you need 12?
I tell you why. Because we want to have a brand for every customer segment. I mean, the one thing at TUI we are really good is we are sun and beach specialists as of today, and we are really good at customer segmentation. A lot of people don't know, but we have products for everybody. We have products for couples. They don't want any kids at the hotels. We have, to the contrary, below, like a controlled budget hotel for families where people, you know, the couples with or families with three children, three small children have absolute cost controls, still get a very good product. So we have, from economy to luxury, a set of brands that we can apply to the right situation. Again, the hotel business, the playbook for the hotel business, very important is on a case-by-case basis, right?
So we have a framework, but then we look at the opportunity and we look at the way of financing the hotel. We look at the brand that we need for the hotel. We look at the distribution, and all these decisions need to be made on a hotel-by-hotel basis to be successful. But we have the right framework. So we have a brand for everybody. You will also see that we have brands that carry the name TUI in it, right? So we have, for example, TUI Blue, very important, as we said before, for China because people in China love TUI as a brand. So if we go there with a brand that doesn't carry TUI in the name, we will be not as successful. At the same time, we have brands that are more discreet.
They don't carry the name TUI in it, but they really differentiate it already and have a strong attraction and pull power. For example, RIU, for example, Robinson, they have a fan base already. So it's very important to also build these distinct brands. Now, what I will do is you can see here we have put down in the presentation all the differences across the brands, right? Because sometimes we get the question, why is The Mora different, for example, to Atlantica, right? And I thought before I now spend five minutes to read out all the bullet points to you, I leave this as a backup for you, but I play you a little video, right? So the little video hopefully explains what you have on this page in a bit more fun way, but this is in the presentation for you to read up.
And maybe we can start the video. Thank you.
Welcome to TUI Hotels & Resorts, where every stay is something to smile about. TUI Hotels & Resorts, brands of unparalleled leisure and with a history rich in smiles. More than 400 hotels and a presence in over 40 countries. Step into the soul of elegance, where luxury transcends the ordinary. The Mora welcomes you to laid-back luxury with unscripted service and elevated experiences. Immerse yourself in the world of RIU luxury resorts. Experience all-inclusive luxury. At Robinson, we don't just offer a stay. We offer an experience that remains in your memory long after you depart. Experience the world in more than 100 hotels worldwide, one culture at a time with TUI Blue, where each holiday transcends the ordinary and becomes a personalized experience.
From the bustling streets of cosmopolitan cities to the tranquil shores of secluded islands, RIU is your passport to the ultimate relaxation experience. TUI Magic Life, where your dream vacation comes to life without ever having to reach for your wallet. Atlantica offers experiences that redefine the art of hospitality by inspiring unforgettable experiences that captivate the senses and enrich your soul. With Grupotel, you can discover the essence of the Mediterranean soul and the authentic Spanish hospitality inspired by their own local character. Beyond staying in Akra, you become a part of the Turkish culture where you will experience the magic of the Mediterranean. From the desert to the coast or the banks of the River Nile, when you holiday with Iberotel, it's not just another vacation. Discover TUI Suneo, the resort where affordability meets leisure and comfort.
Experience the essence of hospitality with Akra, where thoughtful comfort and genuine care converge to create a memorable stay. TUI Hotels & Resorts, where every stay is something to smile about.
So that was the presentation or the video. So I hope there's one brand for you as well. If you want to make a booking later today, talk to David. We'd be happy to take your booking. So I really like this because I really like also the way that our product development team is doing. So we have a really dedicated team that is very much focused on really driving differentiation. And I really hope that one day you can experience one of our hotels in reality other than this hotel here with the great rooftop terrace. By the way, we're gonna be decided yesterday.
We will open another rooftop terrace in Mexico, Guadalajara, in the RIU Hotel. So if you happen to be in Mexico, you will see something amazing like that also there. So, so we do a lot on product innovation. Now, product innovation and product differentiation for us goes beyond, you know, what people experience in the hotel. So one of the important elements that we are really driving hard as a differentiator is ESG. So we have a plastic policy in our hotels. In a lot of our hotels, we produce our own drinking water. We reduce waste. We're very environmentally conscious, but we also started to produce our own green energy. And this is a showcase that I wanted to bring to you today, to your attention today in Turkey. So what we do in Turkey, you can see the solar fields.
We now own solar plants in Turkey. So in the first place, you think this may be weird because we are a tourism company, but it has, of course, a very strategic rationale for us. So we have now four of these solar plants in Turkey, and we're taking the energy that we produce with our own solar plants. We put it into the grid and we take it from the grid at the hotels in Antalya and Dalaman where we have our hotel cluster. So we're producing now our own green energy for our hotels, and that sets us apart from competition. Now, what I really like about this showcase is it's great for product differentiation. It's great for the environment. It's also great for investors because the payback on these investments is five years, right?
So basically, we have a really winning formula here again where we, with own production, undercut or produce the energy cheaper than the non-green energy we can buy from the grid. And therefore, we have a saving and therefore we have a very strong investment case. So this is really a very attractive model in Turkey and in Turkey, and we are trying, of course, to work with the governments in other destinations to replicate that success. Okay, so let's move on to distribution, right? So distribution, very important. We put down an example here, Zanzibar. This is a few data from our new hotel, The Mora in Zanzibar. And what you can see here is that the customer mix is very, very international, right? I mean, in the first place, to be clear, on an island like Zanzibar, the most important point is how to get people to Zanzibar.
So the flight situation and the flight connectivity is the most important point and the first one we look at when we talk about new destinations or development in destinations. Now, what you can see here is, there is, of course, flights from Europe, but there's also a lot of flights from the Middle East. There's flights from South Africa. There's even a flight from China, right? So I was at the hotel in Zanzibar myself, and I walked through the hotel, and then I asked the general manager, "Do you have a lot of Chinese guests here?" Because you noticed, right? And then he said to me, "Yes, I know." And I asked him, "But where are the guests coming from?" And he said, "Well, we can't stop them coming because there's a direct flight from China.
They come to the island, they look for hotel capacity, they look for a good hotel. The Mora is really, it's our new luxury brand in Zanzibar, so they look for a good hotel, they come to our hotel, we can't even stop them, right, and of course, you know, with this additional flight from China, we create demand from other source markets that we're not tapping into before, so you can see from a distribution perspective, it's very important from a destination perspective and point of view to look for the customers even outside Europe. Of course, it's very important when we talk about the business from Europe. This is coming from our great tour operating business , right, because they're the biggest in the market and their people come to us for trusted and curated holidays.
So this is a very, very important source of customer base for us, and it brings actually a very good base load in more seasonal destinations. It's also very important to cover the shoulder seasons, which are a bit more challenging for us from the hotel side for direct distribution. But this combination of base load and good demand from Europe, plus demand elsewhere, more source markets, direct distribution is a really, really good and winning formula. Now, it only works if you have the right setup, right? So what we did in the last three years is really work hard on repositioning our hotel setup, right? We talk a lot about markets and transformation, but we also had a Hotels & Resorts transformation, which is not as big, but still important. So what we did is actually harmonized all of the IT systems, right?
We've started to build a platform business. So you can see here, we work, of course, now with the same property management systems. Before, we had different systems in different hotels. Now we have one or two channel managers. So it's also streamlined on the distribution side, prepared for dynamic distribution. We have a common revenue management system. And then, of course, we apply all of the brands we have to our IT stack, right? It's a bit more complicated in our case because you know that we have a lot of joint ventures as well, and these are separate legal entities. But by and large, this is the stack that we're rolling out across the company. And the whole reason is then to be able to have a very lean, efficient, scalable structure.
If we're adding 20 more hotels, people know exactly what channel manager, what system they need to be on, sign up for, and then we can scale it up. It's not any different to what the big city hotel companies are doing, to be clear. But this is something new for us and very important for us to set the basis for growth and scalability. And then, of course, we have three routes to market, as we discussed before. We're growing our own app and web channel. So, of course, you have a Robinson app, you have a RIU app. I hope you downloaded the RIU app when you came here. If not, do it. Because yesterday, we actually won the prize for the best hotel app in 2025 with the RIU app. So it's a really good app and a really good showcase. But we have our own apps.
Of course, if you ask how do people, why do people download the app, a lot of our people, they stay in resorts for 10, 14 days, and they want to understand things to do in the resort. So the in-hotel use for the app is very high. Without the app, you cannot book any restaurant, you cannot book any activity in the hotel. So basically, every customer coming to the hotel needs to download the app to find their way in the hotel. And then, of course, we reposition this app now from a service app in the hotel to a more selling and sales-driven app, right? So this is the new push, and we're working on this very hard. So we follow also the app strategy similar to Markets & Airlines.
Of course, same on the web page where we have a lot of direct traffic. The stronger the brand is, the more direct traffic you get, the lower your distribution costs are. There's also a very, very winning formula around strong brands. Then, of course, we have Markets & Airlines growing further in Europe and then, of course, also one day globally. This is the base load I was talking about. I mean, this is very important if you think about building a new hotel, right? Let's take the example again. We build a new hotel in Zanzibar, right? Then you go to the bank and you say you want to have 30%-40% debt financing on the hotel.
And then the bank will say, "Yeah, but you know, you have the hotel, but you have no customers, right?" But the moment we come and say, "Listen, we have a contract with TUI, right? We sign up for 40% on distribution. It's basically guaranteed by the tour operator. You get the debt financing immunity, right?" So from an asset-based financing perspective, it's very, very important to have these contracts and these distribution finance channels into the tour operator as well. So there's a real value added from the vertical integration. And then we, of course, as I said before, we're also working with other distributors, in particular in markets where the TUI brand on the distribution side is not yet as strong. There we need, of course, support from our distribution partners.
Now, if I sum all of this up, what you can see is we have a great hotel business. I know you guys are very number-driven. So I thought I put, you know, as a last item, I put up some numbers. So let's look at them because I think there's a lot in it, right? So in total, we have 433 hotels. This is excluding the pipeline. We only look at 2024. Now, what you can see is we have round about 100 hotels in RIU, right? This here is one of them. All of the RIU hotels are managed by the RIU SA Company, which is a subsidiary of TUI. So these are the numbers that we fully consolidate in TUI. But, of course, as you know, the family, the RIU family, has a 50% share in the business.
Therefore, the EBIT that we report in our numbers of EUR 465 million last year, only half of it belongs to the TUI shareholders. The other half belongs to the RIU family because they own 50% of the equity. So if I strip that out, what is left is actually EUR 233 million, right? This is now on EBIT level. The details are a bit more complicated, but because the minority share also will exclude interest, we report it under the EBIT line. But if I just look at a pro-rata EBIT comparison, this would be the right number. So 99 hotels, EUR 233 million profits for us as a 50% owner. It's a very good number. And when I look at the return on invested capital, that's a very good return, right?
I mean, very important to point out, this is a return on capital employed, which means before leverage, right? So if I look at equity returns, of course, you know, with asset-based financing, the return can even be higher. So 20%, very impressive. Why is that? Because a lot of the hotels of Rio, we started to grow very long-haul hotels very early, right? So we have now a very high share of very large hotels. We talk about 600, 700, 1,000 rooms. I think the biggest one has 1,001 rooms. So I asked the manager why this one room, and he said, "We wanted to be the biggest. We built an extra room." So it's 1,001 rooms. It's the biggest one, right? So really big operations, economies of scale. And then it's particularly in year-round destinations. So it's not a very seasonal business.
We make money year-round because we have customers year-round, and, of course, if you have the same building costs, why should you invest in a destination where you can only operate a couple of months when you have the same building costs somewhere else where you can operate year-round, then, of course, it makes more fun and it's more attractive, so this is a very proven model. Now, when I look at the joint ventures, here we have also a very, very strong platform similar to the RIU model. You can see the return is very similar. The one thing I want to point out is this return on invested capital here is actually a return on equity, right? Because we account our joint ventures off balance sheet, so as an at equity. And therefore, this 20% is not comparable to the RIU 20%, right? Because this is after leverage.
But still, very impressive number. I mean, in how many businesses can you earn 20% return on equity? Now, if you look at these joint ventures, this is a mix of long-haul and medium-short-haul destinations. So also the hotel sizes are partly big, partly smaller, and also the destinations are partly seasonal and partly non-seasonal. So a mixed and balanced portfolio. And then we look at our 100% business. Now, the first thing you will notice, it's a lot of hotels, right? It's 147 hotels. If you look at the split, it includes more and more concepts, management, and franchise contracts, right? So basically, hotel management, asset-light investments without our own investments. That's why the number of hotels is high.
But of course, if I manage a hotel, the profitability I get from the hotel is lower versus a hotel where I put down equity in an investment and have a return on equity. So that's why in the first place, the hotel number is higher. Second is, if you look at the number of EUR 90 million, we're achieving right now a return on capital invested or ROIC of 10%. So this is, again, pre-financing, so comparable to RIU. This is fully consolidated, so it's not an equity return. It's an unleveraged return, which is great, 10%. But in comparison to the other business we have, it looks low. Why is it low? Or why does it look low?
Because, first of all, if you look at the portfolio in terms of ownership that we have, and it's predominantly ownership and lease contracts, we operate in very mature and seasonal destinations. So a large split of our hotels is actually Turkey. It's not a secret. We have a really big footprint in Turkey. There we don't have a year-round business yet, not everywhere, right? But at least today, it's a very seasonal business. And then we have, for example, hotels in Austria, which are also very seasonal, right? They're high demand in winter, more and more in summer, but summer is still low season for these hotels. So the hotel mix is very much driving this return profile. And the other element you should not forget about is, for example, in RIU, of course, we have invested in destinations 15-20 years ago.
Now, the property prices in these destinations have doubled in some instances, right, so this is an accounting return on capital employed, so this means this is the number that is in our books. It's not the market value of the hotels, right, if it would be the market value, then, of course, the return on capital employed would be lower, and therefore, you can see at the end of the day, we have a lot of hidden reserves in our business. If you look at it from that perspective, you also understand why it takes time to increase the return on capital employed. Because with more time, the hotels will be worth more, and then, of course, when you look at market-standard returns, 10% return on capital employed, if I've acquired at half the price, my return is already twice as much.
So we're very confident to develop this 100% business into an even better return on capital employed business. And we're working hard. And the levers we have is actually to work with the portfolio, to invest in more long-haul destinations on our own, what we're doing, to grow more the asset-light part of the business. This would also improve the return on capital employed. And then we have the one or the other lease contract that we look at because it's not very favorable, but we know what we're doing. Now, if you look at the building blocks for growth, Mathias will talk about it in more detail later. We had a fantastic year last year. Of course, we want to achieve more. If you look at the building blocks from the pipeline, we will have 15 hotels more in financial year 2025.
This is now the pipeline starting to materialize in real hotel openings. And then what you can also see is in financial year 26, we have 25 more. So the pipeline of 70 is now starting to come online and to convert into real operations and then into real income. And you can see as a guidance, we talk about roughly EUR 300,000 per hotel. So this is one of the building blocks. And then, as I said before, selectively, we're also investing in assets, and this will also drive returns. So we've set the basis for really good growth. And that's it for the hotel presentation today. I think we have a Q&A section now.
Yes, we do. Left. Not a lot, but maybe one or two questions. First one, Jamie.
Hello, Jamie Rollo, Morgan Stanley again. Three questions, but I'll be quick.
So individually, what are the distribution channels and how do those change over time? I think 40% is the total operator, but I assume that's falling each year as you're going more global. How are OTAs and other channels?
Yeah. It depends. Again, what David said before depends by destination. So if I look, for example, at the market in Mexico, where we have a lot of hotels, we have long-haul demand through TUI. We have distribution channels of local OTAs. I mean, the third-largest customer base in our Mexican hotels are Mexicans. So there's a strong domestic market. So we work with local OTAs. Then, of course, we have a strong, very strong direct business. So when I look at Rio, the share of direct traffic, likewise Robinson, is already very high because the brand has a very strong brand recognition already in the U.S. and Canada.
In other words, a lot of people are booking the RIU hotels directly. And then, of course, we work also with OTAs in other markets.
Thanks. And what do you see on key money and how much is TUI spending on key money?
We don't spend any key money. That's the beauty of our brand. Because if you look at the city hotel space, Jamie, it's very much competitive, right? Our hotel space is leisure hotels. And of course, it's also competition, but the competition is less. And what really attracts people is our brand combined with the distribution. So there's not a lot of companies in our field where you can have brand and distribution embedded with the power that we have. And that is very convincing to a lot of owners.
So from the pipeline, I cannot remember one hotel where we had to pay key money to get the contract.
Thanks. And then finally, what uplift did Blue Diamond see when it joined the Marriott portfolio? And would you consider something similar for maybe RIU?
Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. So I have a very clear opinion on this. So I think the smaller you are as a hotel company, the less strong your brand is, the more value added comes from these partnerships. So in other words, if I have a strong brand like RIU, 100 hotels, very, very known in the U.S. already, the benefit will be smaller. For a brand like Royalton, which is only a sub-brand of the Blue Diamond portfolio, if you only operate 10 hotels, then the value added can be higher, right? And that's why I think our strategy is very clear.
We want to own our own brands, our own distribution. I think we're big enough, we're strong enough. We're also working on a concept how to consolidate all of these brands under an umbrella brand. But this is not for today. It's just something we're looking at. And then, of course, one of the opportunities we have started to speak about in the past and that we're also looking at is loyalty. Because one thing is to buy the customer, to get the customer in the hotel. But we have a very loyal customer base already, and we can do more on loyalty. So to your question, we're thinking about the same concepts, and we don't necessarily need partners. It doesn't mean that here and there we do some partnerships, of course, to optimize. But in general, strategically, we want to own our brands and our own distribution.
All right.
Thank you, Richard Clarke from Bernstein. Yeah, three quick ones if I can. I guess you're probably best positioned to comment on the U.S. consumer, with that being a large share of your Caribbean business. Just any comments you've seen, any kind of slowing in booking windows, different bargain hunting coming into the season?
I think it's across the board. It's very, very strong, sir. I mean, we also discuss it from time to time on the cruise side with our partners. And you can see the U.S. spending is just very, very strong. And the demand remains very, very strong. What we do see, to the contrary, is, for example, our Canadian business. So from Canada, we bring customers to the Caribbean as well through partnerships.
You can see that actually the demand from Canada has increased because a lot of people have chosen not to do their holidays in the U.S. but come to the Caribbean. So there are some effects. But right now, the booking patterns, I see no weakness in consumer confidence on the hotel side in the Caribbean.
Okay, thank you. You mentioned there are some challenges because of the many joint venture structures you've got. Is there any plans to try and consolidate more of those, get it into one coherent ownership structure?
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, we have done a lot, I think, in the last three years to really start running also our joint ventures as part of the group, more integrated. So when it comes to scouting, we share all the information.
So basically, we have a scouting team not only in TUI, but all these joint ventures. We look about the growth opportunities. We discuss the growth opportunities together. We have a clear financial plan in place. We talk about all the investment decisions jointly. We have leverage targets for our joint ventures that are off-balance sheets. We make sure they're not incurring too much indebtedness and only running the company in indebtedness. Most important for us and our shareholders, we also have clear dividend policies in place. We have a clear idea with our partners how to operate and run these businesses. Where we don't interfere, where we don't help as much, is on operations yet. A lot of the joint venture companies, they run the hotels with their own platforms. I think this is an area to look at.
We talked about central purchasing if we cannot have an economy of scale there as well. But where we also have synced up a lot is on the distribution models and on the distribution side. So everything you've seen here with this push of direct distribution and more source markets, all of these decisions are taken very much aligned. So I think the whole setup has become a lot more one while it's still different legal entities and where we still have, of course, also local experts. And that's very important as well because sometimes the decision-making in Egypt is different than it is in the Caribbean. So you need local partners that also have good inroads to politicians, good inroads to the local infrastructure. And that helps a lot.
Okay, great. And just last one, just remind the concept hotels. What is the fee structure for those?
And then on your franchise and management contracts, can we think about those fee structures being very similar to the IHG and Hiltons of the world? Are they slightly shorter contracts? Any differences?
So the fee structure for our franchise is absolutely market standard in Sun and Beach Hotels. So we get a decent fee. It's a bit different model compared to the city hoteliers. But we get fees on the top line. We get fees on profits. So there's also an incentive for us to steer profits, right? But this model is very much market standard. And what we can see, sometimes we get really good contracts, even above market, because we also think we deliver a lot. I mean, it's a give and take.
On the concept hotels, so these famous concept hotels, these are contracts from the past where basically the tour operator had a very high share in distribution of the hotels, sometimes close to 100%, right? So very much end-to-end linked up with the tour operator. And in the past, for the Hotels & Resorts division, there was no income. It was all embedded in the rates for the tour operator. Now, what we've done is we've started to convert these concept hotels into franchise contracts. So because as we have started to build a distribution platform, which is Tour Operator Plus, right, there's a benefit for these hoteliers because now we can also offer Distribution Plus, which helps to start yielding their hotel inventory more. And therefore, we have already converted from right now 66 concept hotels. We have already signed 44 franchise agreements instead of the concept hotels.
So these concept hotels will be gone soon. They will be all franchised with fees.
Thank you.
If we sell, that's it.
Thank you very much, Peter. I have to play the bad cop now because I don't want to steal your well-deserved lunchtime. But you will be back on stage, and if there are any questions, of course, we will be able to answer those. So thank you very much, Peter. Applause for you. Thank you. So as I said, lunch is being served shortly. It is being served in the breakfast room that you hopefully had breakfast in this morning. It is on the same floor here. For those of you joining us virtually, it is time for lunch now at home as well, and we will be back sharply, as I said, at 1:30 P.M. to start the stream again. So please be back in this room by 1:30 P.M.
And then we'll hear again from Peter about our cruises and also the TUI Musement business. Thank you very much. And we are back. Welcome. I hope everybody had a nice lunch and you are energized for the last stretch of the.
Markets Day. Just a few people that need to get seated. Thank you very much, so thank you also and welcome back to our colleagues joining us on the webcast, and I will not say a lot because I will hand over straight to you, Peter, because you're now here to talk to us about cruises and Musement.
Thank you, Linda.
Okay, so I hope you can hear me. I hope you had a good lunch break. So we talked before the lunch break. We talked about a winning formula. David just reminded me, right? So winning formula in hotels, right? Now we're going to talk about the winning formula in cruises because apparently also here we have something that we do right. If you look at the title of the cruise section, one important distinction is we talk about the hotel business being a global business, right? Now we talk about the cruise business. In the cruise business, our strategic positioning is way different. We don't play on a global scale. We play in niches, right? And that's very important to understand. So we really focus on product niche markets and therefore we have a really differentiated position. Now, if we look at the financials, it's the same setup.
You know, here we went back eight years ago because before we didn't have Marella excluded from our markets operation. So we can't go back further than 2016. But what you can see is again, it's a very much ramp-up profitable business that we have built in the last 10 years. If you look at the COVID crisis and you compare it to the hotel business before, you can see that the cruise business was also resilient to the crisis, but it took longer to get back, right? So of course we had, you know, people living on a small space on the cruise ship in a very dense area. They were a bit skeptical in the beginning and therefore you could see that the recovery took longer. But now we're back strongly. Last year, again, record profits in the cruise business, so more money than ever before.
If you look at the split, you know that we have basically two companies. One is TUI Cruises with the brands Mein Schiff and Hapag-Lloyd. Then we have our Marella business, which is a 100% business, but I will explain the differences again. So what you see here, important at EUR 233 million, that's the share for our shareholders. This is only 50% of the profits in TUI Cruises, okay? So this is all on a like-for-like basis. Now, if we look at the key financials, again, a bit more long term, what you can see is we have significant EBIT growth. We doubled our EBIT. You can see we have more ships, so we had added more capacity. We've added more beds, more berths. We've added more pax, more customers. We've kept our high occupancy. I mean, sometimes we get the question, how can the occupancy be above 100%?
So we calculate the capacity 100% on the use of two people in a room. And if there's children and an extra bed, then of course you exceed the 100%. So that is sometimes the question. But you can see we also operated in 2024 very close to the 100% mark. And then we've increased our ADR significantly. And of course the CSAT, so the customer satisfaction is very, very high and we're very proud about it. Okay, so how do we next one? So how do we look at the market, right? So if you look at the cruise sector, it's a really interesting sector because if you notice what Sebastian said this morning, there's only four yards in the world building the big cruise ships, right? So you have pretty much a constrained supply.
So basically, if as an operator, as an owner of cruise ships, if you have a slot for a new build, that already has a value in itself, right? Because it's very much slot-constrained shipbuilding industry. So therefore the limited supply is one factor. The other factor is, and we will talk about it later in more detail, typically in this sector you get export credit financing, right? So basically you get bank financing that is linked to a government guarantee of the countries where the ships are built in, right? So it's a government-backed business. It's a government-supported business. So you get export credit agency support and therefore it makes the debt financing, of course, quite attractive because it's not against TUI risk, it's against government risk. And then the second element is you get high financial gearing.
Typically these guarantees go up to 80% of the value of the ship, right? So you get 80% debt financing at very attractive rates. So that's another lever. And then, as you know from our reporting in Europe and across the globe right now, you pay tonnage tax on your business and not taxes on income, which also, of course, makes the cruise business and the cruise sector very attractive. And then, of course, we will talk about the demographics. And another element is also you have a movable asset that itself has a high strategic value as well. So in other words, if we cannot go through the Suez Canal, okay, then you move the ship from Asia to the Caribbean, right? So basically we can react to local shocks. We're not bound to one destination.
It's a movable asset and the destination itself is the ship. So this is a few factors that make the cruise market so interesting. You can see at the same time the demand is super strong. We have six%, 6.6% growth on the global cruise sector. But for us, as I said before, we're not playing the global game here. We're playing a local and a niche market game. And that's why for us it's so important to look at two markets. One is Germany and the other one is the U.K. because both products that we have are heavily geared towards these customer base, right? So they're highly tailored to our source market customer needs. And we don't play with the big cruise liners out there that they're focusing on products for everybody. Our products are really specified and tailored towards certain markets.
And that's why it's important to look at the U.K. and Germany. And what you can see here is while the cruise market overall is growing strongly, the penetration in the U.K. and in Germany lags behind the U.S. So that suggests that more and more market share or more and more people will book cruises in the future also in the U.K. and Germany. So therefore the market dynamics are very, very strong. And that is, of course, very attractive for us because it means we should be able to add more capacity, right? We talked earlier about the hotels. If you have a great product, you have to maintain, you have to nurse your great product, you have to make it better every single day. But if you have a good product, you just need more of it, right? And then you grow.
Now, when we look at our positioning, you will see here our competitive set. So the first observation is we have three different brands. The three different brands stand for three different products. And the second observation is we don't see a lot of competitors, right? I mean, when you look at the hotel side, you had more competitors. When you look here, of course, there's a lot more cruise lines in this world. But from a product perspective, if we look at the TUI Cruises product, it's so much tailored towards the German market and its positioning on relaxation, on sports, on wellness more, than on party and other elements. And that's why it sets us apart from the competition. And that's why this product is so much loved and in demand by German customers. In other words, we have found and created a product that Germans love, right?
And nobody else is offering the same product. Of course, there's AIDA, which comes closer from a market positioning. But still, when we discuss with our customers and also internally, we feel that the product of TUI Cruises is still very different. Now, when we look at Hapag-Lloyd, Hapag-Lloyd is our luxury brand in ship cruising. We have two segments. We do ultra-luxury cruises. These ships, or the brand is very old. It's a very traditional brand. It was, in fact, the inventor of luxury cruises in the world. So this is a very high-end product. It's very much in demand with a very specific, you know, luxury cruise segment target customer base. And we have a lot of repeat customers, so very well-positioned product. We also have three expedition ships. So these are smaller expedition ships that go to very, you know, exclusive destinations, Galápagos, Antarctica.
So really lifetime experiences you don't get every single day. So not mainstream at all, but really, really targeted towards the more luxury segment and driven by excursions and exclusive destinations. So Hurtigruten comes somewhat close. Again, different product. Now we look at Marella. Sorry, we have five ships in Marella today. Marella is a product that is highly geared towards the U.K. market. So if you go on the ship, you feel a bit like in London, right? You see a red telephone box somewhere. You have the pub, you have the Guinness beer, you have, you know, all of the food that appeals to U.K. customers. So it's a very U.K.-centric product, right? And that is, again, a winning formula. So we don't compete with the global cruise liners. We compete with some of the local cruise liners. You can see here on the list.
On the other hand, it's also important to mention that 100% of our cruises in Marella are fly-cruises. So fly-cruises means not a single ship of our fleet is leaving from the U.K.. We fly every customer out to the destination. So let's say Mallorca or Canary Islands. We fly the customers to the Canary Islands. They come on the ship, they do the tour, and they fly back. And of course, we've started also to play around and we have stay-and-cruise. So we offer combinations of, you know, few hotel days in the destination. You spend a bit of time there, then you go on the ship, you come back, you spend again some time in the hotel, you fly back. So there's a lot of elements that we put in our packages as well. And maybe in the future also more attractions.
We can really bundle a lot of the ingredients we have in the group in a different way. But it is a fly-cruise product. That's very important because that again sets us apart from competitors. So we don't compete with all of the others leaving Southampton. We compete on holiday packages. And the most loved routes and itineraries in Marella is now in winter. It was Barbados. So we had two ships homeporting in Barbados. So we fly people to Barbados. They go on the ship, they do a Caribbean sail, they come back. And then we had two ships in the Canary Islands. And in summer, we will, of course, do the Mediterranean Sea as well. And we bring some of the ships back from Barbados. Now, when we look about the strategic levers, the cruise product is nothing else than a hotel.
It's a floating hotel, right? So basically we have rooms, we have seat capacity that we need to sell. So what do we do strategically? We do exactly the same on the hotel side. We need good differentiated brands. Again, a bit different here because not global brands, local brands, or brands for local market. But brands, differentiation, super important. Number two is if the demand is strong and you have supply constraints, you add in more capacity. That's what we're doing. And then the last element, of course, is distribution. Again, of course, you know, in Germany, in the U.K., we have very strong distribution, of course, as you know, with our Markets & Airlines business. But of course, we're looking also in markets for Marella where we're not operating in to also tease some of the customers for our assets here.
It's a bit harder and less pronounced as on the hotel side because not everybody in Spain would like to go on a U.K. ship. Maybe some people, not everybody. So it's not as big an opportunity on the hotel side, but it's still important because every additional customer is helping us to yield our risk capacity. So when we look at the capacity, right? So we have here our Mein Schiff fleet in TUI Cruises on the left side. We have eight ships. We had a new build delivered last year. We had a new build delivered just a couple of weeks ago. And we will have a new build delivered next year, right? So we have basically three new ships. It's not a secret that these ships are in the area of EUR 1 billion investment per ship. This is typically what you see in the market.
So you can see that we have added significant capacity to our fleet in TUI Cruises. Now, the one thing that is important, of course, is the market ready to absorb the additional capacity because we play, again, in a niche product. We're adding more assets to a niche product. So we need to be super confident that we can sell the additional capacity because otherwise you have a problem for the whole fleet, right? Now, what you can see is that the bookings are holding up well. There was a bit of guidance given by Mathias, I think, for Q2. And in Q1, you saw the numbers. It's also fair to say and very important to understand that, for example, the Mein Schiff Flow that is only being delivered next year is already on sale. So the booking cycle for cruises is very long, right?
So we talk about one and a half, two years in advance before we actually go on the ship. People start to book. So right now, when we look at the booking situation, we're not only looking at the existing fleet of eight. We look at the booking situation of nine ships already, even though the last ship is not even being built. I mean, it's currently being built, but it's not ready, right? So it's very important to understand that the full capacity is already on sale. And that is very important when we look at the latest booking numbers because, of course, we need to sell more than eight ships. Now, five ships in Hapag-Lloyd. We just added three expedition ships before the crisis. So this is a good new fleet. It's a good size. We feel it's a very good business we have.
So that is already reflected. But the big opportunity now for us is Marella, right? So if you look at Marella, we have five ships. We have a fantastic product. We had record profits last year. People love it. There's more demand. The market is under-penetrated. So what we're looking right now, as Sebastian said this morning, we're thinking how to refleet the business because the one thing for Marella that we need, the one issue we need to solve is old ships, right? These ships are 25 years old. So if we continue to run them for another 10 years, they're going to be 35 years old. So one day the product will deteriorate so much that we cannot sell it to our customers no more. Of course, our customers want to have great products, right?
If you look at the ships today and we've been on the ship many times, you can see the ships inside. They look really good, right? Inside, everything is renovated. Then all of the technical equipment and the technical setup of the ship we also need to invest in. The dry docks are getting more and more expensive. Therefore, it is very important we look at the refleeting. Before we come to Marella, quick detour for TUI Cruises. Here you can see just a snapshot of our Mein Schiff Relax. This is the new delivery from a couple of weeks ago. It has more balconies. It has more outdoor space. Of course, it follows the same product positioning. German product. We have done a lot on the ESG side as well. This ship is LNG ready.
We have shore power, which is very important. Of course, then we don't need to run the engines in the harbor to produce energy. We can just plug into the grid, and then you can see it's also much larger, right? It's 4,000 lower berth. All of the previous ships that we have were significantly lower. So we have now this year and next year two new ships of a new class, which are bigger, and that's additional capacity. So beyond the ship count, you know, 8 + 1 , you also have to look at the capacity, which is also increasing significantly. Okay, let's look at Marella. So I said U.K.-specific business, right? Now let's look at the U.K. market. So before we were talking the global market, the penetration, now we look at the U.K. market only. Very interesting market on the cruise side. So look at this.
GBP 5.3 billion market, only U.K.. It splits roughly 50-50 into fly-cruises and, you know, ships leaving from the U.K.. So we play in the lower 50% here, the fly-cruise market, but the overall market is 50-50. And then it is expected to grow significantly. So we look at 9% CAGR until 2030. So for the next six years, significant market growth. And it goes back to the under-penetration that we have seen before. What you can see is that it is expected that the non-cruise flight market is growing less, 7%.
And the fly-cruise market that we play in is even growing by 11%, right? Now, all of these numbers, of course, we looked at. We also were supported in a really comprehensive analysis from one of the big global consulting firms. So we did not make up these numbers. These numbers have a lot of substance.
We really went into detail. We went into surveys. So we really looked at the market very, very thoroughly. And what you can see is that also at the same time, while the demand is growing strongly, if you look at the order books of the competitors, then you can see that there's also the demand is growing faster than the supply, right? I mean, I have to caveat it a bit because you can see the data and the order books until 2028. So not the full length until 2030. But you can see that there is some sort of supply constraint as well. So the market is very strong. Now, we said the product is very strong. You see a well-established product. We have the leader in cruises, record profit, aging fleet. We discussed. You see the record profits again in the timeline here.
And that leads us to a new consideration that Sebastian raised this morning. So we're indeed thinking of ordering ships for Marella, right? Now, if you look at what we have in mind is, we, of course, are in discussions with the yards. We think about two ships initially. We're also thinking about larger ships. All of our Marella ships have now roundabout just under 2,000 lower berth. We're thinking of a ship of 3,200 lower berth, so significantly bigger per ship. So two ships in total would be 6,400 lower berth. So more capacity, ship count for the same ship count. And then, of course, it needs to follow our U.K.-specific design, right? Because this is the winning formula that we have. So we have to maintain this and grow it.
We look at, and we would expect actually to also be eligible for this 80%-20% debt financing that I explained to you before, which is very, very value creative, of course, for us as an owner. And then overall, you can see the business case on the left-hand side is very attractive. So we talk about a profit potential of EUR 130-150 million per ship, right? So if we do two ships, it would be in between EUR 260 and EUR 300 million of extra profits, right, that we can generate with two ships because we think the market situation is so strong. So we would double, more than double the profits of Marella. Today, we have EUR 140 million, right? Of course, we keep the three old ships. We exchange two ships by two new ones. And then you can see we will more than double our profits in the midterm.
Now, what I have to say is, of course, the return on capital employed, again, 11%-12%. This is return on capital employed. So before financing, after financing, again, with the leverage, 80% debt financing against government credit. This is an extremely interesting case from a return on equity perspective. So from a shareholder perspective, the leverage returns are much higher. Now, the one thing that I need to tell you is, of course, when we talk to the yards, right now there are no slots available. So we cannot just go out, you know, and buy a ship. We can also not buy it within the next three years. So when we talk about slots, we talk about 2031 and onwards, which means we have to also have our ships in operation, of course, for the next six years. That's why we're maintaining the ships well.
We don't compromise on the product. We're also not over-investing because we know it's going to be end of story one day. And therefore, we have to maintain the ships at least to make it to the refleeting. And the refleeting will only come a couple of years down the road. So it's not a very immediate opportunity for the refleeting, but it's the earliest in the market. So in other words, if we don't do it now, these slot dates will move out further, right? So it's very important for us to look at it right now. Now, we have one more slide on product differentiation. Most of it I explained already, so I skip this slide. And then, of course, on distribution, we follow exactly the same logic that any asset business would do, right? So you have different distribution channels. You have Markets & Airlines.
You have our own app and web, so direct traffic to the product brand. And we see typically that some of our product brands are so strong that we have a very high share of direct traffic, which is really good because it keeps our distribution costs down. And then we also selectively work with B2B and OTAs. There is a bit more work to do on basically creating the technical capabilities and the APIs that we need to connect dynamically into dynamic distribution. This is what we're currently working on, but it's pretty much exactly the same what we do on the hotel side, right? So we create a scalable platform where we add more capacity and then we plug it into the distribution. Having said this, caveat again, niche product for U.K. and Germany.
It also means in two markets where we are the strongest on the Markets & Airlines side. That's why these businesses have a very high vertical integration as well. That's the last slide for cruises. Again, similar to hotels, I just want to put up some numbers. We have Marella, five ships, record profits, currently high return on invested capital, of course, because it's old ships. We make a really good profit on the old investment. For TUI Cruises, we have 12 ships. We have EUR 233 million contribution from net income, 50% ownership. You can see if I would look at the return on capital employed on a 100% basis for TUI Cruises, then we talk about 14% return.
When I look at our equity investment and the net income we get against our equity investment, so return on equity, we are at 38%, so twice as much. So you can see how attractive the cruise business can be. Of course, if we add more capacity, we need to be 100% certain that there is more demand. But this is why we're looking at the demand and the market potential in so much detail. And that's it on cruises, right? So I think we have a Q&A now for cruises, or do we do it later? You want to do it combined with Musement? Okay. Then I'll continue for Musement. So hopefully, you bear with me for a few more minutes. So Musement is our excursion business, right? So we talk about experience, excursions, ticket attractions in the destination.
That's where we started, but we would also talk about how we take this business again more global. So I want you to think of this business again more global. So hotel global, cruise niche, and then Musement global. How we take this on a global basis, also tapping into the city market much more. So if you look at Musement, we acquired the business in 2018. You can see here, we had a very good profit in the first year. We had higher profits before the crisis. Then the crisis came. We had to restart the business. It's fair to say that the experience business overall was lagging quite behind in terms of recovery from the crisis. So it's a bit different than hotels and cruises. So people were less willing to spend on experiences for a long time, but now it's back strongly.
So you can see last year we had EUR 49 million of profits. This is the only chart where I also included a 2025 bar. I didn't measure it, so hopefully it's directionally correct, but it's higher than last year. This is what we expect, right? Now, when we look at the KPIs, you can see we have EBIT growth. We have ASP growth, so price growth. We have a very high share of own products. We will talk about it in a minute, why that is so important for us. Again, this is something very different than others in the space, and we will talk about it. We have a high customer satisfaction. So this is across all of our asset or all of our product businesses. We want to have the best product, as I said before, right? So super, super important for us.
We have more than 10 million excursions sold last year. We have more than 30 million transfers organized last year. And we have sold 165,000 tours. So these are pretty much day tours. So you go out. This morning, I saw a group from the hotel leaving, I think, to Córdoba. And then they go for a trip, maybe spend a night, come back. And these intraday trips, something like that is one of our core businesses. Now, the market itself is very strong, right? So you can see the growth is 8%. So within the Holiday Experiences markets, this is the fastest growing market. So there's a desire for people to experience the things. We always say experience is the new luxury. So you can see very strong growth. It's also a market that is still highly fragmented. There's a lot of mom-and-pop shops and offerings, right?
There's also a lot of offline business still. So it's a huge opportunity in terms of online, in terms of consolidation on the product side. So this is a really interesting market to be in, and that's why it's so important for us to be there in this market as well. Now, let's look at the competitors' positioning or strategic positioning of TUI Musement. So as I said before, our strategic positioning is way different than our competitors. It's very important to understand. So because if you look here, you see some of the bigger experiences, OTAs, right? You heard David talking this morning. We don't want to be another me-too product in OTA where you can buy anything. We're following pretty much exactly the same approach as we do in Markets & Airlines. We want to be a curated partner, right?
That means we want to have products that are different to the products of the OTA. We don't play the OTA game in TUI Musement. We position our business more as a product business. Of course, when you look at experiences, you know it's not 400 hotels or 17 cruise ships. We have 45,000 experiences, right? Of course, the choice is much wider, but we have 45,000 and not 4 million, right, to put it in perspective. We follow the same playbook, but of course, we talk about a different scale. If we have 45,000 experiences, of course, we have a lot of experiences that we don't own that are third-party experiences. But we have 55% share of the experiences we sell. We also produce. Think of what we discussed this morning.
We've seen in the Cape Verde case study, we had 42 jeeps in Cape Verde. We have one catamaran in Cape Verde. So we have assets in the destination that we use for tours and excursions. So we're not selling a third-party excursion. We're selling our own excursion. And by doing so, we also tap into the production margin and not only into the distribution margin. So if you look at this competitive set here, a lot of our competitors, they go for the distribution margin. We go for distribution and product margin. And so again, it's a highly vertically integrated model, very similar to what we do on a group level. We do for Musement. And that is a different strategic positioning. And that is why our business is profitable, right?
If you look at other businesses in the segment, they're growing very fast, but they're not necessarily very profitable. We are growing fast, maybe less fast, but we're profitable. Now, how do we run this business going forward? Exactly the same playbook, right? More own products, best products, curated products, more products, capacity, and then, of course, distribution, and I will talk about it in more detail, so let's look at the products, right, so first of all, we look at own differentiated products. So it's not a coincidence that you see the TUI Smile logo on this catamaran because we own it. It's our own, right, so we have many of these now, and we will have more in the future. We will have, as I said, jeeps in the destination. If you come in the future to the safari business in Africa, you will find our jeeps.
You will find our guides. If you come to Cancún, you find our adventures. So we basically have started to also run or continue to run the production business in the destinations. We had a very good footprint already from the past. And this is pretty much sun and beach destinations. So that's what we look at first. But then, of course, we also want to grow in the cities more. So our field of play is not only leisure destinations and Musement. It's also cities. So we also want to offer things to do in Madrid, things to do in London, things to do in Paris. We want to be there where our customers are and offer also local products, right? So the product catalog, we will expand a lot more. One of the latest things we have done is a cooperation with Fever.
Fever plays exactly into this strategic target area that we want to have things to do for locals. If you're in London and you want to do something on the weekend or during the week, be it like a Candlelight concert, right? For example, one of the attractions they're selling is you can go to a Candlelight concert that is set up in one of the churches nearby where you live. They put up the candlelights. They have classical instruments, and they play the Ed Sheeran songs on the classical instruments. It's really a nice experience. If you're a couple, you have a date night, you go out on Wednesday, Thursday, you book one of the experiences. Why can you not book these experiences with TUI? Why not, right? Because, I mean, it's not a hotel. It's not a flight. It's not a package.
But we said we want to be a curated leisure marketplace, right? So leisure is more than just a hotel. So it basically stretches our brand more. As David said this morning, we stretch the brand more towards also leisure activities and experiences. And of course, this one helps us from a business perspective to stay in touch with our clients, right? We saw the app downloads this morning. So we have to do something with it. We have to have constant customer interaction. I mean, don't worry. We will not take it as far to sell pet food, right? Because that's not close to our business, but anything that is related to leisure. This is something where we feel quite strongly. We can actually extend our product offering, stretch it a bit more. So there's also a lot of immersive experiences. The Van Gogh exhibition I've done myself.
It's amazing. I can only recommend it. So if you live in London, please book a ticket through TUI. You can now buy these experiences. They're already live. We have the same in Berlin. And we have started with a catalog of 50 local experiences, but it will grow up to 3,000 in the future. So this is really a strong setup in the local markets we have. Now, here you see the route to markets. Same thing, B2C business. We have an own app for TUI Musement, in particular for the markets where we don't have the marketplace or Markets & Airlines business. We have the TUI Marketplace in Europe. We have a very strong cooperation. The TUI business is selling a lot of the excursions. We also think it's beyond frequency driver. It's important to have the experience as an ingredient for package.
So what it means is we can now start to bundle packages with the attractions being the main cause for the purchase and not the sun and beach hotel necessarily. So instead of having seven days in Crete where we say it's a sun and beach holiday for you, we say, "Why don't you do an adventure holiday this year? You walk the Samaria Gorge. You go canoeing. You do bungee jumping. And by the way, you stay in a very nice sun and beach hotel. And you come on the same aircraft, right?" So we sell the same product ingredients, just mixed together in a different way. And this way, we can also address more specialized markets. And what we also see, there's a trend of customers that the experience becomes the selling point rather than the sun and beach destinations.
And then, of course, Musement, we also supply a wide range of B2B partners, in particular the cruise lines. Our business is very global. So if there's port calls from Royal Caribbean or Carnival or even from Viking, we're also selling our experiences on easyJet. So there's a lot of B2B corporations, and our partners really value our product offering. So if we have done this successfully with experiences, what's next, right? Next could be, as you can see here, why don't we look at the verticals, transfers, and tours? Because these markets are also, in particular, tours very similar. So the question is the playbook that we have for experiences and the strategy we have, we think we can replicate also for transfers and tours to a certain extent.
Therefore, we're working on a strategy right now that we also can digitalize the tours and transfer business more and really position it more as a product business, in particular when it comes to tours. I see I'm running out of time. These financials you've already seen, and now it's time for Q&A.
Thank you very much, Peter. First question.
Oh, no. We do their first question. We'll switch it up this time. That's fine.
Slide switch up. Thanks. Richard Clarke from Bernstein. Yeah, I guess a couple of questions. The one bit on the cruise that you didn't look like you addressed was the bit in the press release about potential partnerships on Musement. Is that an either/or with the ship, adding the ship? So will you either spin it off or add the new ship? And what is the sort of timeframe here? When do you need to commit to that ship in 2031? And obviously, it would be probably about EUR 2 billion of additional debt for two extra ships. So what does the balance sheet need to look like before you kind of commit to those?
So, we said this morning the financial impact Mathias will present. So, we have a whole section on the Marella re-fleeting, what it does to our numbers. So, I leave that question to Mathias later. The other two questions, I would say the most important point for us to take the right strategic decision. And the right strategic decision is to re-fleet because you can already see these ships are getting so old. The business, at a certain point in time, will be no longer in existence. So, the re-fleeting is the number one decision. If we then and if we should think about partnerships, that's still something that we are exploring in parallel. So, it's nothing where we say it's the final decision taken. But the one decision we want to take is really on the re-fleeting. Now, as you rightfully say, unfortunately, it's not our decision only.
If it would be our decision only, we would just do it. But of course, we need the availability of the slots. They also need to come at the right price. We want to have a good price too. And therefore, we're currently in discussions, but I would say that it's rather a decision we want to take in the short term than in the long term.
Okay, makes sense. And given you're saying you can't get a Marella ship till 2031, can we assume no new Mein Schiff or Hapag-Lloyd ships before?
Right. I mean, we're constantly looking for the joint venture TUI Cruises as well. What we do in terms of capacity, I mean, it's fair to say for Mein Schiff, we have added 55% more capacity with the three ships. We've gotten over a three-year cycle now, right? So right now, I would say let's wait for a while for more capacity in TUI Cruises. Let's digest the additional capacity first. But then, of course, when we look at Hapag-Lloyd, let's see if there's maybe an opportunity or not.
Okay. And then just lastly, I guess if we look at what's hot in the cruise industry at the moment, it's the private islands, the private destinations. You've got hundreds of resorts in the Caribbean. Is there some synergies so you can employ that product in some way?
It's a very good question, Richard. So I would say Sebastian and I, we've seen CocoCay from Royal Caribbean. It's very impressive. We would love to do something similar. If you look at the competitive landscape, a lot of the cruise liners have these private islands in the Caribbean already. But where we see a lot of strength is nobody has it yet in more Mediterranean destinations, for example, or then on the coast of Africa. So alongside our hotel growth, we're also constantly looking at opportunities there. And maybe it's not a fully owned island. Maybe it's a peninsula, right? But there could be some opportunities. Now the lights shut down.
The lights off, but we're still here. And I think people can still hear us, so I'm hopeful.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Jamie?
Thanks. Jamie Rollo from Morgan Stanley. Just back on the capacity growth, I mean, why haven't you ordered new ships till now? I appreciate it does take five or six years, but most of the other cruise lines were ordering ships in 2023 and early 2024. Was that because Marella was sort of still for sale, or was it just the balance sheet was just simply too high?
Can I give you an honest answer? So the honest answer is I think we needed a bit of time to come back from the crisis. If you look at our balance sheet, right, we still had quite a high gearing. Now we have improved on the rating side quite a lot thanks to the great work of the finance team and of Mathias. And now we're slowly getting in a position of strength, right, where we can also afford again to look at bigger investments. I think that's the full truth.
Thanks. I assume the other answers were also honest as well. But anyway and then on the aging fleet, as you said, it'll be over 30 years in a couple of years' time, and there'll be additional costs, maintenance, dry docks. Can we expect profits to be held roughly where they are at EUR 140 million for Marella, or could they decline over the next year?
It's getting harder every single day, to be honest. I mean, there's some precedent in the market. We're always surprised how well these products are holding up. If you look at one of the competitors we have in the deck, it's a small cruise line called Ambassador. So there is precedent in the market that suggests that even older ships are profitable. Of course, we're doing our utmost to keep the profitability at the levels we have. But the longer it lasts, the harder it will get, to be clear, right? Because, of course, the product is getting older, older, and older. But the timeline we're looking here, five years, six years, seven years for re-fleeting, maybe up to 10 years, is still something we think we can manage quite well. So we're very optimistic on it there.
Thank you very much. Any further questions? There's one in the back.
It's kind of two related questions, and I apologize if it's a bit of a dumb and basic one. But is there any consideration to secondhand market instead of build? And also, what are you thinking on residual values of the existing?
So we look at the secondary market, of course, as well. So we're currently exploring, or we're constantly exploring, to be honest, what re-fleeting opportunities there are. One thing is clear. The economics of a new build are something else, right? Because on an old ship, of course, you don't get the 80/20 debt financing and so on. So from an economic perspective, if you have the choice of new build versus secondhand tonnage, the secondhand tonnage needs to come at a very attractive price to make the economics work, right? But we're looking at it. It's certainly an option. And again, to Jamie's question, I would also not rule out that maybe one of the other ships we need to re-fleet by a secondhand ship just to make it to a further re-fleeting further out. So we're always exploring all of these options in parallel.
Thank you very much. There's a question on here right there. Thank you.
Yeah, hi, Conroy Gaynor, Bloomberg Intelligence. So just going on to Musement, you mentioned, I think, about companies that are perhaps growing fast but are not profitable. So are there any sort of horizontal bolt-on opportunities for you there?
Can you say the last part?
In terms of M&A?
Yeah. You mean?
Any small M&A opportunities from the companies you mentioned?
Yeah. I mean, if we look at our company and if you look at Musement, right, then I would say, I mean, typically, in general, when we talk about M&A in TUI, we think about solving a problem, a strategic problem, or addressing a strategic problem and driving synergies, right? So when I look at Musement, then I look at the product side, and I think we have a really good product setup. So if we think about consolidation, then the only synergy that could come is more differentiated products, right? So it must be something that adds to the products because otherwise, why should we buy it, right? Now, when we look at the production systems, we have a great production system. So not sure we need to do something to buy a company to solve the production issue.
That was the reason for the acquisition in the first place. And then on the distribution side, I mean, we have a very strong brand, and we have a very strong customer base. So would I pay for another brand? I'm not so sure either. So we go about these questions in a very strategic way, and I would not say yes or no. But you can already see if we do something, it needs to really fit and be value-creating for our shareholders.
Thank you. Ivor Jones from Peel Hunt. What proportion of Musement now is the transfers business? It was a big number of people, but what, say, a proportion of revenue? And secondly, to grow, does it need more catamarans and more sailors? Do I think about this as a risk business in the way you describe the group? Is it building a bigger and bigger cost base?
Yes.
Thank you.
I would say to the latter one, it's a risk business, but it feels like we compensated for the risk big time. Because when I look at the catamarans, for example, the payback time is very, very quick. I mean, sometimes it's under three years, right? So I would say, yes, it's more risk. On the other hand, it's a lot of reward. So I think the risk-reward proposition works quite well. Then the first question, sorry, was on the share of transfers, right? Yeah. So the transfers is still a big part of Musement today. I mean, we're organizing. Sorry? No, less. I would say it's less. But it's still a big portion of what we do. And it's pretty much driven and linked to the Markets business because, of course, all of the investment operations in Musement, we do for the Markets.
But we're working on a strategy to also get the other parts, growing the other parts so much that we also, over time, have a more balanced profile, transfers versus excursions.
Thank you. It's Leo Carrington from Citi. Could you just help us a bit more on the shape of the P&L and also between 2018 and 2024 in terms of the mix? And perhaps take that across your 2025 column. Prices were up significantly, volume was up significantly, EBIT flat-ish. Just help sort of fill in the moving parts.
For the group, you mean?
For Musement specifically, sorry.
For Musement. Yeah. So for Musement, you can see profits are not down. They're up, right? So I go back to this page here. So this is the only year where I included financial year 2025. So we expect profits to be up, right? So in terms of P&L structure, you can see, of course, in 2024, we were lagging behind what we had in 2019. There were some one-offs in the 2019 number as well, by the way. So it's not 100% one-to-one comparable. But by and large, you can say that it took the experiences business, not only us. If you look at the competitors, same thing. It took us a bit longer to get back to pre-crisis levels. But now we're going to exceed it. And as I said before, this chart, I put up the bar with no number to illustrate it's more.
Let's see how much more it is.
Great. Thank you very much. We're coming to an end. Thank you very much, Peter. You're excused for now, but we'll have a Q&A session later. So if there are any further questions, we'll address those. Thank you. So we have talked a lot about TUI as a company. We have talked a lot about strategy. We have seen figures here and there, but I know that, of course, most of you are interested in the detail, into the figures. So therefore, we have the best men to do that from the business here. So Mathias Kiep, our CFO, stage is yours.
Thank you very much. And thanks very much for being here also from my side. I really appreciate your time, also for everyone on the webcast, to be part of our Capital Markets Day. A lot of information today. A lot of the things that I will summarize we already discussed in all our meetings. So what I wanted to achieve with these summaries is to have these 20%-25% of each of our meetings, that the fact bases are clear, and then we can focus on the way forward. So a bit of an introduction on the group, vertical integration. What's the theme from a financial perspective? How can you look from my function on the group? Second, just summarize up what we've just heard about the segments, more or less two slides, each also something on the Marella re-fleeting.
What's the path to the re-fleeting, which is, I would say, equally important to the re-fleeting and the opportunity that Peter just presented? And then on the group financials, P&L, cash flow, and balance sheet, each of them with some elements to point out going forward. In summary, Sebastian and I would do that together later on. And there's, of course, the question about capital allocation that we want to have there as well. Now, how do I look at TUI? And I think vertical integration, that is the kind of core theme of the business. And if you look at the segments, what you heard today, product, Holiday Experiences, I think the benefit of vertical integration, the strong profitability, the attractive growth potentials, and this all in a de-risk way. I mean, what we just discussed about Marella re-fleeting is a very good example.
We're not talking about a new venture excitement in terms of in a negative way; there's something coming. It's more about what is the best structure to wait to get there, and I think that's something which accounts for everything in Holiday Experiences. In Markets & Airlines, and there was, I think, a very detailed explanation of the way forward. I think for me, very clear that this business has changed to a much more flexible business model and is going to change to a much more flexible business model, and what goes through both of these segments is, of course, the differentiated product, and that's something when I was in operations, you could always see both sides, so when a hotel was opened, you can immediately see that in your trading numbers for the next day and the other way around.
When a hotel opened, you could always see. I've never seen one of these hotels not working because the base load was coming from the tour operator. And these are the vertical integration statistics. They've all been mentioned today. I think this is for me just to save some time in our meetings going forward. I think as a rule of thumb, there's 50% of clients are served from the left side to the right side from markets into Holiday Experiences. Around a quarter of the Markets & Airlines clients are in a product of holiday experience in terms of hotel. I often get the question, so what is the right number? Is it 60? Is it 100? Is it 30? Is it 10 in terms of the vertical integration? I don't think there's a right number, to be honest.
I think about it, there needs to be the right level of integration, and this is different unit by unit, destination by destination. It's also different in terms of if you have a management contract, Peter just presented the expansion in Asia, there's naturally a lower degree of integration compared to a, let's say, core tour operator hotel, which is in ownership in Spain, but I think you always look at this. You have a business with a very strong home base, home market, and that's for every business, that's a core of success, so I think while the vertical integration numbers, they vary, the theme doesn't, and that's what I like on this picture. That's why I like personally, from a financial perspective, on TUI. Now, let's come to the segments.
I will just summarize based on the structure that we have today, two pages each. The hotels, for me, are important just to look a bit ahead. 2025, we've had our first quarter. How do we look at the pipeline that was presented? And how can we look at the CapEx investment? Cruises, important, the dividend concept from TUI Cruises also in connection with the Marella re-fleeting. Musement, we just looked at Markets & Airlines. We'll introduce now also a P&L for the segment to give you more transparency on an operational level. Also, there the way forward has been mapped. And I think that's something to look at in the summary. All in all, I think for me, very clear if you go through the day today, everyone could talk about the opportunities in each of these segments, each of the units.
So I think, again, this should be not a surprise that we commit to the 7%-10% and that we see them materializing this year. Now, starting with hotels, Peter just had it. It's one and a half times the result compared to 2019 and 2024. And what is important is you can tick the box on the growth. You can tick the box on the returns. You can tick the box on the profitability. And you can tick the box on the dividend streams for the joint ventures. So I think this is all embedded in the 2024 numbers. And the way forward, there's a clear framework on that. What is important is the way forward. And again, fact-based between the slide just for you in terms of what's the ownership, Peter already presented that.
And I think when we look back at this, there's always like a third of ownership which we have. If it's our own business, the partnerships, if it's RIU, and the same is the growth and management contracts. And that's something going forward you should also expect to prevail. So if I look at the growth of this business, and it has been grown in a very continuous way over the last months and since 2022. This year, 2025, we have already seen a good step in the first quarter. We have some strong comparables in the summer. So maybe it's not the same pace, but this will, of course, be a clear pillar to fuel this growth of 7%-10% for the group. Going forward, you just learned about the pipeline in management contracts. And I would say this is something we can be really proud of.
When this business started, a lot of people externally told us, "You will never succeed this." We've just heard a question about key money. You've heard about the questions about what are the barriers to entry in management contracts to build that up. But I think we have now, for the first time, really a tangible portfolio, TUI Blue contracts, other contracts. We see, okay, this gets momentum. It starts to become tangible. Of course, with EUR 300,000 per contract, you need a lot of contracts that it starts to move the numbers. But at the same time, this is a signed pipeline. This is, of course, a key pillar to growth going forward. And secondly, if you think about the ownership structure, this one-third of ownership will also prevail going forward. There will always be opportunities.
While we always have to balance, in particular from a finance perspective, how much CapEx do we spend and how much return do we then at the same time get? It's a question rather from opportunities rather than it's a question of do we find something at all. So we really need to rather downgrade on how many opportunities we take than I would say there's nothing to do. When we look at our CapEx, this is to give you an example. This year, if you just look at our guidance for the full year, you can see how much is coming from hotels, around half of this. And in the hotel CapEx, around 60% is coming from growth. In the past, the CapEx for hotels was smaller. This was also because we had more proceeds from disposals. That's something with the portfolio as it is today.
I wouldn't expect bigger things to happen on short term. At the same time, that's something we're constantly reviewing. Is there something that we can dispose and reinvest? Now, looking forward at the profit, when you look back how the business has developed, these management contracts will start to generate tangible returns. And secondly, this CapEx, these investments with the returns that have been presented that Peter just presented, you can also expect once the CapEx is spent, two to three years, that these hotels are up and running and yield the same return on invested capital. And that fuels then our EBIT growth going forward. So I would say this, there's a clear framework for further continuous growth in hotels set by these initiatives. Let's come to cruise and then Musement before we go to the markets.
And then cruise, again, we talked about this, profitability now above 19%. Important financially is that the dividend stream from TUI Cruises started. And now with this year, we expect that we at the minimum reach the level that was paid in 2019. So I expect the dividend of at the minimum is the EUR 170 million that you can see here, which was paid in 2019. At the start of our journey on this dividend, we said we expect a dividend for 2025. We didn't exactly know with the TUI Cruises team how the business would ramp up for the new ships, how it would work. They had some structural measures to do. But now I think that's something we can expect from them.
That's, of course, a key part if we talk about the cash flow of the group and the missing element in terms of translating EBIT from Holiday Experiences into cash. Going forward, what's the path forward? 2025, also great contribution in the first quarter from both Marella and TUI Cruises. And Peter, you just said it in terms of what can be expected from Marella. It's really, really encouraging how they do with the oldest tonnage in the market in the current market environment and even increased profit in the first quarter. So I think it's a good foundation. Again, that cruises will be a key pillar to contribute to our growth for the group this year. Going forward, what I brought to you is just to visualize how much the new ships are really in the fiscal years.
And Mein Schiff 7 was delivered 2024, first time fully in our numbers 2025. Mein Schiff Relax will be delivered soon in the coming weeks. Full year number, full year contribution then in 2026. And the same then with the last ship on order, Mein Schiff Flow, full year contribution then in 2027. So you can see there's also a clear track in terms of how to generate further growth from cruises by purely this order book and the annualization of the ships because we don't take capacity out.
And you have seen the fleet plan of the 8 + 1. Again, important for us is the dividend from TUI Cruises, this element of EUR 170 +. And then secondly, I think on Marella, while the performance is really good at the same time, one thing is with the operations of the old ship. I think, Peter, that's what you also mentioned.
The regulation is costly sometimes. That's something we need to work against. I think this year is working fine. At the same time, this is, of course, something we always need to look at on a year-by-year basis. Musement, before we come to Musement, just on the re-fleeting because that's really important. Again, I said in the beginning, we talk about a re-fleeting. It's an existing business and a growing industry. It's not a new venture. That's why I would say this really ticked the box again on this concept of a growth with a lower risk profile, a de-risk growth opportunity. It's well established. This U.K. dedication is clearly where we found a successful niche. Now, in terms of partnership, we discussed it's still an option. Peter mentioned the slots still need to be confirmed on that basis.
However, we have in front of us the scenario that we do it and that we commit to these deliveries in 2031 and in following years of these two ships. What is therefore very important is the way to this re-fleeting. How would it look like? I think one is this concept of 80/20 customary financing, which we would expect to achieve. That, of course, once the ship is there, would allow us to get this credit and kind of mitigate this significant investment. I would say once the ship is there, that's probably not kind of the big challenge because the operations are running well today already with the old ship. You can imagine on that basis. I think it's a fair assumption that a new ship will be equally successful. It can equally carry that amount of additional invest.
What is with the 20% that we need to contribute as funds and which will need to be paid partly upon delivery? And there we would expect a very much higher level of dividends from TUI Cruises because we see that they come to a level where effectively a lot of the amortization on the existing fleet is done. And we can upgrade substantially again the dividends from that. And that's why we think this fully fits our capital allocation and doesn't have an impact on our targets until the re-fleeting. And when I go through the capital allocation framework, I think, yes, the strong balance sheet metrics and get leverage down for everything which is not Marella until the re-fleeting totally prevails and is a core target of us. On an analyzed basis, also with the ships on balance sheet, I would say leverage remains under control.
We will, in terms of with this, given the concept of additional funding, not, I think, have an impact on our capital allocation and capital return strategy. So I think that remains untouched. And that, I think, is very important because these 20% until delivery, you have to pay. And that's something which is also fair. You probably will see a phasing of having the down payments and then seeing additional dividend levels, which is, I think, for us not a problem, but something we would like to make you aware of. On that basis, I think there's a good strategy to get there without having a negative impact on the group of today and having the opportunity to take this opportunity. With that, to Musement, and I think for me, it's very clear they have a target and the task to grow with the rest of the business.
The second thing I always look at is how much conversion is there, how much do we convert our guests into excursions. I think this is an early on indicator of whether leisure [is] still prioritized. With the 30% stable conversion, I'm sometimes really amazed that while you read in the press [that] everyone needs to save money, economic environment is not great, here you have a very stable [conversion] that people spend something on top and our guests spend something more. That's why I also think what has just been presented, whether it's a catamaran or whatever we need to do in order to have the assets on our own, it's the same with the risk because these 30%, even today, are] very stable. I think the second part, how I look from a financial perspective of Musement, is the strategic value of it.
I think that's something if you look at the business five years ago compared to today, very different, much more scalable, much more flexible, very different. That's something I would say is untapped in our numbers. With that, I would move over to Markets & Airlines. I talked about this in December. From my point of view, we're doing the same volume with much more flexible basis, much less indebtedness. The reduction of the fleet in the aircraft side, very important. To grow the business with third-party flying and dynamic is a key tool to make sure we use what is in the market anyway and don't need to invest more into our airline, but for the re-fleeting of the MAX. That, I think, is fair and is important. Everyone has the most efficient aircraft.
We also, if we want to be competitive, need to have efficient aircraft capacity. That's what I meant before I come to the way forward. This is the P&L of Markets & Airlines. And that's something I would like to have and share on a regular basis. And this is for 2024. David, you already mentioned some of these numbers. Distribution costs around 10%. This is for the full of Markets & Airlines. And of course, the big part of costs is an accommodation and an airline. And on that basis, I think it will become more transparent for you what are the movements. And we probably have more or easier discussions going forward on some of these elements. What is also important is the mix of how these regions that underlie Markets & Airlines have contributed to the result. And you see this light blue is Western Region.
You see, for instance, there, it's a wider change. Why do I point this out? Because some of the entities that we have, I would say it's rather something I would call it a turnaround. It's a focus required. Then this is directly linked to growing them, adding more volume or more margin on the top line. France is a very good example, now half the size, but profitable compared to what it was, and it was really difficult in the past, and Nordics, we already mentioned this, for instance, something where we feel we have the same journey ahead of us, and it's promising for the summer, but to be fair, last year we had the same issue, too much capacity, and then in a market which is competitive, which is probably fair for Markets & Airlines overall.
So I would say while I get always the questions, how do we do this volume and how does it relate? There are some areas where it's different. It's a bit of a turnaround. Of course, turnaround is easier if there's tailwind when the market is growing. But at the same time, I think there are also clear elements and there's a clear pathway to do that as it was done in France. Let's look at 2025 and then on the way forward. 2025, this is also something we already explained. First quarter, we had to invest some further costs for the winter that we expect to get back in the summer with a return. We will see the Easter impact. It moves between second quarter to third quarter. So a lot of the increase in profit is expected to be in the fourth quarter.
This is quite important because this Easter shift we will see relatively in short term. And then on the way forward, I think with the 3% margin target and the transparency that we can now give on the segment level, I think that's really something where you can then see how these transformation initiatives play into that. David, Marco, you explained a lot and in detail what is ahead of us. And I think on that basis, in particular, what the additional scale that dynamic brings, the initial initiatives on the airline and to be leaner overall, I think this is where I would also clearly expect they need to yield, they need to return. And this gives us good expectation and confidence that this is an achievable target.
And with that, I would just summarize on a group level what does it mean to our P&L, to our cash flow, and to a balance sheet before we come to the summary. Now, P&L, there's not much to highlight. But what I really like, and I would like to reiterate this, is the revenue. The increase that we see year on year in revenues, that is my short answer to the question, whereas the consumer, how do consumers look at holidays? Do they still spend? This is now EUR 23 billion. And this is a massive increase versus 2019, which all our guests have elected to do in order to go on holiday with us in a decision framework, you would say it's around three-to-nine months before departure.
Even we talked about what is important to me is interest expense because the question is sometimes what is ahead of us there. We have successfully refinanced and upsized our core banking facility, the revolving credit facility on Friday. Corwin is here. Thank you very much to you and your team for this. And now this is in much better terms compared to where it was before. At the same time, we have received quite some rating upgrades. At the same time as well, the RCF in terms of interest costs is quite small. And you see it here after the refinancing we've done last year, which was already more or less on the terms that are equivalent to the rating that we have now. And the big part of our interest costs sits in the lease portfolio and the asset financing portfolio.
So all the benefits that we will still see from rating upgrades and doing better, they will only over time have an impact here because the RCF as such is actually quite small in our interest costs. And also we expect to draw it less and less given the development of the company. I think that's something I just wanted to leave with you as a fact. Now, cash flow, because the translation of our operating result into cash flow, that's of course a key question. And if you look at the EBITDA, a key component that will return this year is that this EBITDA includes cruises, but also a cruise dividend. Just to reiterate this point, when we look at our cash flow statement, what we always do here, we deduct the equity income.
So what is coming from joint ventures, and we add back the dividends that we receive. And last year it was around EUR 70 million. Again, three cruises missing with a big normal amount. And that's something which will change in 2025. The other elements is very important, working capital. We always expect a positive working capital contribution as long as the business is growing. And even if it's just inflation and not volume, we'll see a positive impact. Interest, we just talked about pensions. We announced in Q1 that our U.K. deficit is now filled. And in 2026, we will not have those costs again. So this will also materially go down. Then there's the question, of course, what happens to net invest and lease amortization. Lease amortization, because it's not so dependent on whether you do this additional one lease or not in a year, is quite stable.
Invest, let me come to that. This is 2024, and we just talked about hotels. Hotels will always remain opportunity-driven in terms of doing one or not, having phasings between years. Maybe there's a disposal, but at the same time, I expect also to see this number over time slightly increase profits because this one-third ownership seems to be a concept which seems to be successful. At the same time, more management contracts, obviously not in hotels. IT, I expect this to remain rather stable. Cruises, upside and the re-fleeting, also kind of, of course, there's some volatility due to dry docks, but roughly that area. Now, the question is what's in the airline, and the airline has a Boeing delivery portfolio, which has quite an impact. That's why we really need to do this on a yearly basis.
I think the CapEx will slightly, because of the hotels, slightly increase. On Boeing, we always have to see what is really directly ahead of us, and there's also an impact of doing a financing mix. We've just started some months ago to go more into non-leases, and Marco, I think you've done quite some success in terms of enabling this with our partners and the execution I really like. At the same time, whenever we do, we now see the effects on our CapEx from having aircraft effectively outside lease because then we switch a bit on the accounting between other cash and investments. What I wanted to say is this is something, unfortunately, we need to guide on a yearly basis what is ahead of us because it's a bit moving, but the key components, that's something we feel comfortable that you can work with that.
The impact on the balance sheet, I think, again, if we take a step back, what does it mean? We expect that the leverage further goes down. We also expect an improvement this year. I got sometimes the question as part of Q1, why don't you expect more than a slight improvement in net debt? And again, this aircraft delivery portfolio, whenever we take leases directly on balance sheet, you see an impact on that. And in Q1, just lease portfolio went up by EUR 0.3 billion. That's EUR 200 million of additional lease, EUR 0.1 billion of FX impact. And that's something you work against when you improve your cash flow position. So that's why we only expect a net slight improvement. But I think all you have in terms of rationale that we discussed is actually fair.
The only point is that the balance sheet as such moves whenever we have the deliveries coming. As we discussed rating, we discussed, and I think this is the right basis to also talk about capital allocation in a minute now. That's what is coming in the summary. Again, two words on the summary from my side before I hand over to you, Sebastian. One is I just talked to you through the opportunities that we see everywhere. That is why I think we can be very confident on the 7%-10% this year. That's why also going forward, there's a good corridor of 7%-10%. Now, capital allocation, just to align on where we are in our journey to define a capital return strategy and to communicate this end of the year.
We have clearly embarked on a framework quite some time ago to make sure that this is a supportive way to do this and that all the refinancing, the rating work, the RCF refinancing, this is all within this framework. And this is a mutual supportive discussion. And first of all, for us, it was growing the business to a level where we feel, okay, this is now the base for growth. I think, Sebastian, this is what you clearly said at the beginning of today. So I think that's something we can agree we have achieved. Second point is we wanted to have a balance sheet which is robust and fit for growth. That included the rating upgrades to get back to the territory we had prior to COVID. And we wanted to hand back everything also formally to the state.
And now we also have the pension cleaned up. So I think also there it's fair to say we can tick the box. And now it's about the defining of the strategy, what is the right strategy? And I think I brought this chart with me because this is exactly the same chart that we will use with our Supervisory Board because that's exactly what they asked us to do first before we have the discussion on what exactly can be the strategy. And that is something we will enter into now. My personal view is the company is better off and needs to pay a dividend. At the same time, Sebastian, maybe you get something also from your side where you are in the discussions.
And on that basis, I would say we are well on track to define this, the strategy, how it will look like in detail end of the year. And with that, maybe some final words from your end. Thank you.
Thank you. Final words. You may add for today, please. Of course. Okay. Great. Thank you very much for all presenters. Thank you very much for all the questions. It's always difficult to summarize again and not saying the same thing once again. What I would like to point out, the great result on the holiday experience part is also the result of transformation. Because what Peter said, building, looking at the streamlining the portfolio, we had hotels which were doing well, others were not doing well, selling them, buying new ones, something we do every year. Going for one infrastructure to have all the systems the same.
Going for one distribution system and way into the markets. It's nothing which came for granted. It is the result of hard work. On cruise, we also something not to forget. I remember the first Mein Schiff, three newbuilds 2014, the yard just had gone bankrupt and so on and so on. So the refleeting in a way was a transformation. The new ships are kind of transformation because it's not, what is it saying? It's not something of the same, more of the same. It's something really new. Now the refleeting project for Marella. And again, I would like to add, we are not yet decided on our own or in a partnership, but coming soon. Musement. I remember that was the former remit of David when we boarded. A lot of transformation because bringing it into the TUI ecosystem.
I mean, when you do see that we expect an increase in profitability also compared to 2019, it's because the cross-selling is working. Otherwise, we would be in a position to buy every customer newly. So this is all transformation. David, in a way, had the luck and the bad luck that he had done such a good job in Musement that I thought we thought he's the right person to do the transformation for Markets & Airlines. And I remember the question from Jamie a couple of hours ago. What about the others who are doing better? Yes, we haven't done the things which we could have done and should have done earlier. So that's why it's a catch-up mode to do the things right and to do it better.
The good thing is that by discussing it internally, it was not about doing this better, doing that better, learning from this competitor, from that competitor. But what we thought was that there is a big opportunity to build what we call the curated leisure marketplace to become the provider who supports the customer with his needs all around the year. If he is at home, she is at home, or is on travel. And what we also had seen is that the TUI brand is capable to bring this into the world because in a lot of countries, it's known and curated, of course, with the products we have to have not the next OTA, but to have something which is built on curation.
With this, we feel very confident that the Markets & Airlines, and by the way, in the past, we Markets & Airlines. Today, we talk about Markets & Airlines because it's one airline, two AOCs, interoperability, one selling platform. Today, you couldn't buy any product from Spain because, I mean, if you compare that with others, it's ridiculous. So we are changing that. It will be one airline with all the benefits. So by doing that, we feel well on track to deliver the midterm ambitions. I think I'm a little bit used to it. If I look in today's world where a lot of companies struggle, this is a great way forward. It's a great opportunity we have to deliver it. How do we want to do it? Just Markets & Airlines become global through scalable platforms.
Very, very important, the scalability, curated leisure product, dynamic growth, dynamic and component growth because we believe very much that accommodation only, the experiences is something which really drives value. And of course, the app and AI first approach. Again, we believe, and David was saying, we run the retail for value because we sometimes ask, what about your position to retail? We love retail. It's running for value. And we want to have the shift from web to app and to get the benefits from there. And how do we steer it? It's about increasing revenue and the margin because you can't calculate a ROCE because if we grow, you will get a working capital inflow. And it has also the impact on cash flow beside the result. On Holiday Experiences, it's just the other way around. Of course, they benefit from the Markets & Airlines distribution.
Markets & Airlines distribution benefits from the unique products. It's run by the return on invested capital. We have, and this is a little bit, we have hundreds of options today. The good thing is we can pick the best one. The bad thing is there might be even some more outside. But it limits us very much into getting the right things done, and that works very well. And then you have the cycle in between. I said the broad customer base helps us to get outstanding asset utilization, load factors, occupancy rates, and the differentiation of the product helps us to create the higher margins in tour operating and the reasons to go there. And the absolute new thing is this is what we call the Central Customer Ecosystem. The task there is to maximize the customer lifetime value. What does it mean?
The customers we get, we work with it with the data of the customer to sell as many products as we can do and therefore to maximize the value. So it's hard work. It's tough work. We are dedicated. We are happy to do it. We see the positive results. There is a lot to achieve. The price is high. And for that, we fight. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Sebastian. And I think it's worth, while we have everybody in the room, to bring everybody back on stage again for our Q&A. I'm sure that there are a couple of questions still left. So Mathias. I mean. Let's start with Mathias. Okay.
The answers then.
Exactly.
Or went to give the answers. Question is, oh. Jamie.
Now it's your turn. Brenda's coming.
Jamie Rollo from Morgan Stanley.
Can we just go back to some of the questions earlier in the presentation about quantifying the transformation of the tour operator? So you've given us the 1.5%-3% margin target. It looks like about half the upside is from the marketplace. And I asked the question earlier about gross GP1 margins. You've given us the group at 15%. You've given us, thank you for the distribution costs. Well, where do you see that 15% GP1 and 10% distribution costs sort of at the end of the program? Obviously, your revenue is going to be much higher. We've got the top of the P&L. We've got the bottom of the P&L, but a bit of help on the bit in the middle will be quite helpful.
Should I try and you stop me? I don't want to give you the numbers, but some general thoughts.
One is, the more we go into different countries, we will see different numbers. The Polish example was mentioned. On the other hand, we've seen now the margins in Latin America, a market which is less developed, so margins are higher. So this is not easy to say. If you have sourcing on one platform and production on platform means that the platform will lower the cost and the sourcing should help us to buy better. On the other hand, it would be too moody to. Too brave. Too brave to add this all on top of it because at the end, the market will see competition and others are not sleeping on trees, as we say in German. So we will see a lot of benefits there. And the question is how much will the market heat up?
I'm a very strong believer that on the distribution cost, there is a big prize to win. When does the prize come in? I mean, I think the 7%, 9% last year has increased now significantly this year. But if I would say 50% is a great number, there's a lot to do. And as David said, with the customers you gain, you get the benefit, but you still have to buy a lot of customers. So the question is, is it a three-year period, five-year period to get the full benefit? Because I very much believe that the app could have half of the distribution costs you have. And if it's half of the whole, it's a quite significant amount. So this is for me the biggest driver. The second biggest driver is for me if we get this cross-selling even better.
And we have seen that now with Musement. You will see it at the end of the year that the cross-selling with Musement from the Markets & Airlines has improved a lot. And that's what I would expect for accommodation, especially for accommodation-only as well. And the global reach should also give us an increase. Where does it end? Very difficult, but it's very clear. We don't want to overpromise, but at least to deliver what we have promised to deliver. And of course, we would say the double, and we would just be slightly below, then everybody would be disappointed. So I think it's important that we stick and deliver what we say, even if there are more opportunities. On the other hand, very clearly, you have a world where you don't know what comes next. And I think the economy is where it is.
The tariff situation is as it is. There are a lot of things which make life more difficult. And again, to work as hard to be on the safe side, if that doesn't go well, then doing other things, making other things well is important. So that's why I think the 7%-10% is something which we commit, hopefully in a world which stays as unstable as it is, but not getting even more unstable. And then we take it from there. And that's about delivering every year. Does that help a little bit?
Absolutely. Yes. Thank you. And just one more on the cash side. I mean, I appreciate you're going to talk about the cash return later this year. Is there anything you can say in advance in terms of just sort of parameters behind that? What the earliest in theory could be for a dividend?
I assume it's got to be a minimum reasonable size. Anything like that would be helpful, Mathias.
Yeah, indeed. It's a fair question, but unfortunately, there's not more detail than we can share at the moment. Again, that's something we need to discuss with the board first and then take it from there. I appreciate the question.
Thank you very much. Next question.
Thanks, Linda . Three if I may. Just on the Marella fleet, I guess you're announcing today that you're potentially going to buy a ship. So what is the decision-making process? Why would you or wouldn't you buy it? Have you still got to discuss that with the ratings agencies as to how they think about such a sizable commitment, albeit a few years in the future? What is the decision tree from this point?
The situation. Yeah, thank you.
The bad thing is, or the good thing is, there are almost no slots available, and if there might come up today the opportunity that there are two slots available in our network, then we would take it immediately. So this, I mean, we are very convinced and we discussed it in the board. Peter presented, Mathias looked into what does it mean for the group. So we would love to do it. The trigger point is, are there slots available or not? Which in a way, if we would, through the network we have, get the slots, it would be great because it means that there are no other slots available, which makes the market less competitive in the future. So this is something where we are waiting for our slots available or are they not available?
Okay. Makes sense.
Maybe just a couple of questions for Mathias on the shift to dynamic packaging and what it means for accounting. I presume this shifts some of the working capital flow. We're used to seeing lots of cash in Q2 and Q3 and then out in Q4 and Q1, if I've got that the right way around. With dynamic packaging, presumably Ryanair aren't going to be waiting to be paid for these flights. So does this change your working capital flow through the year? And is that why you've extended the RCF? And then maybe just sort of part B there, as you move towards that dynamic packaging, have you looked at shifting to sort of OTA accounting where you just have your spread as the revenue and you could report much higher margins, which would probably be pretty good for the share price?
Would it be good for the share price? I think it would help.
No, it's both fair questions. One is I would say now dynamic packaging as such is around 15%, maybe in some peaks, 20% of the business. So even if you assume, okay, we have to pay the airline first, maybe the payment terms change a bit compared to the hotel side. At the same time, we don't need for this growth piece to pay kind of the operations on the ground that you would normally have. So I would say generally, there's not a big movement. I wouldn't expect it over the next kind of foreseeable two, three years. Then, of course, we have to take stock, is there something changing in the dynamics? So working capital, I personally plan to remain unchanged in terms of the trajectory.
On the accounting, I mean, that's something we continuously look at. At the same time, dynamic for us is also sometimes or often that we have a dynamic flight and an Acco wholesale contract on the accommodation side.
Okay. Makes sense. And maybe just last one. I know this is a long-term event, but just any comments on the situation in Turkey? Is that making any difference to your demand there? And Peter mentioned a little bit of weakness from Canada going into the U.S. Are you seeing that from Europe as well, less Europeans wanting to travel to Disneyland at the moment? Anything to comment on that?
So lower demand for the U.S., I think, is slightly good for us because the customer will still travel.
As we have hardly any assets in the U.K., and I think you said one Riu hotel in Miami, if the demand goes then to the Dominican Republic or to some other place, it's slightly, slightly better to us. Turkey is more of an issue, not so much about the demand, because that's also what we have seen is that we have enough flexibility if the customer doesn't want to go to Turkey to offer him something in Spain, in Greece. And normally this has a positive impact on the margin. As we don't fly to Turkey, I think we only have, David, a handful of flights. This is not something which has a negative impact. The only thing is we have some hotels there. I think we have 15 or how many hotels there.
And then the question is, how much can we fill these hotels with locals, with people from the Middle East and so on? So if there is the worst-case scenario, which I don't assume, I mean, we have seen this crisis there once in a while. It feels like every two years. So there was a hit for eight weeks and so on, and then the improvement. But if there would be a significant pushback from customers, they would go somewhere else. Turkey is not a cheap country anymore. It's as expensive as a lot of other countries. So that's why the demand has gone to Egypt, to Tunisia, to Bulgaria. So it's more the load factor of the hotels. The only other thing is that normally the Turkish lira devalues. And it's what is it, 41 today? It came from 30.
Maybe when there is a big crisis, it would be not unlikely that it goes to 50 or 60, then there would be a counter effect. So it will have a significant impact, but not something where, I mean, I don't want to give a number, but I've never seen that it's above 30, 40, 50 million.
Okay. Thank you.
We have a question from the webcast. I will read it out so everybody in the room knows it as well. Jean-Marc Müller is asking, given that you expect dividend income of at least 175 million from the Cruise Joint Venture, should you not adjust your guidance for net debt from slight improvement to significant improvement?
I think I can understand the question. Thank you for that. Again, we need to work against this additional lease debt, which is on the balance sheet.
This is, if you compare Q1 2025 versus Q1 2024, it's around EUR 0.3 billion alone. Again, given the aircraft are now on balance sheet, we expect this to be rather stable. And on that basis, cash flow generation works against this. And I think that's why we are currently looking on something which is a slight improvement.
There's a question in the room.
Hello, Ivor Jones from Peel Hunt. You've talked a lot about transformation, the app, the platform, technology. I realize I don't really know if you're saying that process is now complete and your business is usual for technology investment, or is the transformation still continuing and there's a date in the future when you think of the business as fully integrated on one tech stack, a real platform?
Transformation is never over, but the question is, when do you have the maximum?
I think we are now in the maximum. We will need another 12 months where we put everything together. We have to decommission a lot of other systems. I would say then in 2026, we are coming closer to where we want to be. I think that is very obvious, but still a lot to do decommissioning old system, rolling it out to other countries.
That's helpful.
What is good today is that a year ago, one and a half years ago, I was not 100% sure that everything what we were developing would work. I think I can say, David, that we are very convinced that things work because if it works in one market, it will work in the other market. Then it's just a lot of hard work and with lower risk than if you have started to develop.
So I would say that in the next 12 months, we will keep the peak of what we have, and then we should see less IT. And we are also changing a lot of things going into lower-cost countries and so on. And then that is also interesting. In the past, the marketing people quite often say, "We don't have the product to sell." Now they have more and more of the product to sell, and we can ask the marketing, the salespeople, "Sell it." So the focus will get from IT, will always focus on IT, but it will move into marketing and selling the product.
That's very helpful. Thank you. You've made a very good case then and through the day for the value of the ecosystem, the value of the platform, the brand driving customers.
When we come back to the CMD in 2026, should you be talking about a business that is just less capital intensive because you've brought the value up into the platform that you didn't have before?
What happens in 26 is up to Nicola, like always. And I think all what we do is to see the growth, Markets & Airlines, on a variable part with less risk, less capital intensity. Not that we reduce the fleet from 125 to something else, but maybe there's even one or two aircrafts more, but it's a broader customer base, which also brings a lot of working capital. And I mean, if we would be an airline or a hotel company only, the question about debt would not be so strong because it would be asset-based debt.
And what we sometimes forget is that in summer, the RCF is not needed and so on. But there's more to do. And the more we grow and the more we grow asset light, the better it is.
Okay. Thank you. And last one, the income statement for Markets & Airlines is really helpful. And Jamie talked through some of the numbers there. There's EUR 600 million of overhead Markets & Airlines. What is it? And is that not quite a large number for a platform business? So does that start to come down? Thank you.
Yeah. No, thank you for the question. I appreciate the labeling. Overhead is probably more like a two-year accounting label rather than a description of what it is. It's more the production. So it's the own people of the two operators primarily.
So everyone who works in product, everyone who works in kind of making actually the business is also accounted there.
One thing is right, and David is working in the team Marco very hard on it. We are addressing very much also the overhead cost in a way which we haven't done before. And maybe this is the only thing where when I think what we have here presented, this maybe we and maybe for good reasons, we have been not so aggressive telling what we do because we think with the platforms, there is a great opportunity to take cost out.
There's one question up in the front. Thank you, Brenda.
Thank you. Just a follow-up question on generally trading update. We've heard a bit on the U.S. We've heard a bit on Turkey.
And if I can remember correctly, at the end of Q1, there was a bit of a rotation because of some stats going down in the U.K., I think. Can you give us an update of how everything is selling into summer? If you're seeing an improvement, a stable situation versus what you told us in Q1 or an improvement?
The first quarter number, that was not because the market had been a setback. It was that we had cost, which we haven't had the year before or in later quarters. So that's why this is important to explain. Of course, I know the trading numbers, but I think we are not giving new ones here, right?
I think we are not providing a trading update.
I think what was important in Q1 and also to your question is that we saw a very strong start of the season, like we saw effectively all the seasons before, and then a normalization. And just mathematically, because then you're trading more or less in line year on year for quite some time, the kind of cumulative numbers go down. And that's something we've seen now. I think, David, it's the third season in a row that you have this very strong start, then flattish, and then towards departure date, it gets up again.
There are others which do very well. There are others which are weaker. Easter is three weeks later, which means there's also for the summer a shift into after Easter. So I think the only thing we can say, we don't feel uncomfortable.
And one thing is also for clear, as we have been very conservative on the risk capacity. We don't need to sell for just the sake of selling because we have empty capacity. The load factors are okay or good. And it's better not to sell the last 5%, but to sell them for a reasonable good margin. And what is important, if there are growth opportunities, we want to do the growth with dynamic products.
Thank you very much. Any further questions in the room? I cannot see any in the webcast. No.
So Nicola, when do we have the next capital market day?
Exactly. So half-year results in May.
Thank you very much, Sebastian. Thank you very much, Mathias.
Thank you, Linda.
A big thank you also to the team behind the scenes that was working on site here, but I know that a lot of them are also watching from the comfort of their home because they've been preparing slides, preparing us to be at our best today. So thank you very much for all those colleagues.
Technology was working. That was not always.
Technology was working as well, which is great. We just had a little bit of switch off of the slides, but everything else was running smoothly. So a big thank you and a big applause for all the, yeah, arcs.
For ourselves.
Yeah. And a big thank you, of course, to those participants joining us on the webcast. I know that it can be quite tricky or quite difficult to join such a session a full day online. So appreciate you tuning in.
Of course, we appreciate our participants here in the room for traveling to Madrid and being here with us. I think it was very, very valuable, very, very good to see each other in person. Thank you very much for that. Just some closing things. We have coffee and everything still over there. If you feel like having a drink, that's fine. I know that some of you have transfers to the airport quite quickly, so happening right now, but some of you are traveling back home later. For those who are going back home later, you can have a drink in the lobby bar downstairs after the conference. The important thing is to keep your badge because this is how the staff will know that you are from the TUI Capital Markets Day.
Then you will have no problem with the bar and the bills and everything else. So when you want to, yeah, just mingle and stay a little longer, you can do that in the lobby bar downstairs. So thank you very much. It was a pleasure, and we'll see each other hopefully soon. Thank you.