Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tongcheng Travel 2024 Q4 annual results announcement conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, please press star one and one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. If you could all kindly limit yourself to two questions so that everyone is given the opportunity to ask questions. Please go ahead.
Okay. Thank you. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Welcome. Investor Relations Director of the company. Joining us today on the conference call are our Executive Director and CEO, Mr. Hope Ma, our CFO, Mr. Julian Fan, and our Chief Capital Officer, Ms. Joyce Li. For today's call, our management team will provide a review of the company's performance in the Q4 . Hope will brief us on the company's strategies, Joyce will discuss our business and operational highlights, and then Julian will address the details of financial performance accordingly. We'll take your questions during the Q&A section that follows. As always, our presentation contains forward-looking statements.
Such statements are based on management's current expectations and current market operating conditions and relate to events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the company's actual results, performance, or achievements to differ from those in the forward-looking statements. This presentation also contains some unaudited non-IFRS financial measures. They should be considered in addition to, but not as a substitute for, measures of the company's financial performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. For a detailed discussion of non-IFRS measures, please refer to our disclosure documents in the IR section of our website. Now, let me introduce our CEO, Hope Ma. Hope will be presenting in Mandarin, and our colleague will provide the English translation afterwards. Hope, please go ahead.
好，谢谢凯莉。各位晚上好，欢迎各位参与我们2024年第四季度及全年的业绩的电话会议。2024年对于中国旅游业和我们同城而言是充满挑战、机遇和挑战的一年。在这一年中，我们看到了国内旅游需求持续提升，需求多元化趋势更加明显。公司也顺势抓住机遇，再次实现了快速的发展。在这一年中，我们鼎力前行，呃，勇攀高峰。公司的收入和经调整净利润均同比大幅增长，创历史新高。能够取得这些成绩，离不开我们团队的辛勤付出和高效的协作，充分表现了公司在战略执行和组织能力方面的卓越水平。同时，我们的年度的付费用户达到了2.4亿人，再创新高。这不仅体现了我们服务质量与用户体验方面的持续提升，也展现了公司在市场中不断增强的竞争力和品牌影响力。在过去的一年中，我们精准捕捉到用户出行行为的多元化趋势，以及对体验型消费需求的显著增长。面对市场的变化，我们通过双轨战略实现突破性的发展，一方面深化国内大众市场覆盖纵深，着力构建用户全生命周期价值管理体系。在扩大用户规模的同时，持续地提升用户价值，并积极深耕国内产业链，呃，国内供应链，以加强自身的竞争优势。另一方面，把握促进由市场需求释放和供给付出的共振机遇，落地市场拓展加供应链优化的双轮驱动策略，显著提升国际业务的渗透，渗透效率，实现出出境业务规模迅猛增长。呃，国人对旅游的持续热情与需求让我们对旅游行业和公司的未来发展充满信心。此外，在中国政府大力促进旅游业高质量发展下，行业正积极提升旅游产品的供给能力，丰富消费业态和场景，呃，以满足多层次多样化的需求。呃，进入2025年，在刚过去的中国春节假期，国民出游热情不减，旅游消费市场持续释放强劲活力。展望未来，我们坚信，随着国内旅游市场的持续繁荣与出境游市场的全面复苏，公司将迎来迎来更广阔的发展空间。我们将继续深耕国内市场，深挖深度挖掘用户需求，同时加速国际化的全球化的战略布局，抓住出境游市场增长的黄金机遇。在运营方面，我们进一步优化流量运营策略，同时通过技术创新和产品升级，为用户提供更加优质的服务体验，不断提升用户价值。基于AI技术的加速渗透及多场景延伸，我们将聚焦行程智能规划、实时预定辅助等多个个性化服务，通过AI驱动服务服务链条重构，加快AI应用的商业化进程。我们深知未来市场环境将充满变化与挑战，但我们也坚信，凭借团队对市场的深刻的洞察，对创新的不懈追求以及卓越的执行力，公司将在新的一年实现更大的突破，为利益相关者创造长期价值，为旅游行业的高质量发展贡献更多的力量。呃，接下来，赵医师会向大家介绍，呃，2024年第四季度及全年的业绩的表现和运营亮点，呃，也先请我们IR同事做一下翻译，谢谢。
Okay, good evening everyone. Welcome to our Q4 and annual earnings call. 2024 was a pivotal year for China's travel industry and our company, filled with both opportunities and challenges. Throughout the year, we observed a continued increase in domestic travel demand and a growing trend towards demand diversification. Riding this momentum, our company has seized opportunities and once again achieved rapid growth. We worked tirelessly with determination and strive for excellence during the past year. As a result, our company's revenue and adjusted net profit both experienced significant year-over-year growth, reaching historical highs. These achievements were made possible by the diligent efforts and efficient collaboration of our team, which fully demonstrated our exceptional capabilities in strategic execution and organizational strength.
Meanwhile, the amount of our annual paying users set a new record and have reached 240 million, reflecting the ongoing improvement in our service quality and user experience, as well as our increasing competitiveness and brand influence in the market. Over the past year, we accurately identified the trend of diversified user behavior and the substantial growth in demand for experiential consumption. In response to the evolving market, we achieved breakthroughs through a dual- track strategy. On one hand, we deepened our penetration into the domestic mass market by focusing on building comprehensive user lifecycle management systems, aiming to expand our user base while enhancing user value. We also delved into domestic supply chain opportunities to strengthen our competitive edge. On the other hand, we see the opportunity presented by the recovery of both demand and supply in the outbound travel market.
Through market expansion and supply chain optimization, we significantly improved the efficiency of our international business penetration and enabled exponential growth in our outbound business. We are highly confident about the future development of the travel industry, as well as our company supported by the sustained travel enthusiasm and demand. At the same time, with the government's efforts to promote high-quality development of the travel industry, China's travel sector is actively working to enhance its supplies and diversify consumption scenarios so as to meet emerging and diverse consumer demand. As we enter 2025, during the recent Chinese New Year holiday, enthusiasm for travel remains strong, and the tourism consumption market continues to unleash vitality. Looking ahead, we firmly believe that with the continued prosperity of the domestic travel market and the full recovery of the outbound travel market, our company will unlock even greater growth opportunities.
We will continue to deepen our presence in the domestic market, thoroughly explore user demand while accelerating the execution of our internationalization strategy to see the golden opportunities presented by the growth of the outbound travel market. In terms of operations, we will further optimize our traffic operation strategies while leveraging technological innovation and product upgrades to provide users with an even better service experience, continuously enhancing its value. Leveraging the accelerated penetration and the broad application of AI technology, we will concentrate on personalized services such as intelligent itinerary planning and real-time booking assistance. By driving the optimization of the service chain through AI, we aim to accelerate the scalable commercialization of these solutions.
We are well aware that the future market environment will be full of changes and challenges, but we also firmly believe that with our team's in-depth market insight, relentless pursuit of innovation, and excellent execution, our company will achieve greater breakthroughs in the year ahead, create long-term value for stakeholders, and contribute more to the high-quality development of the travel industry. Next, I will hand over the call to Joyce. She will share with you our business and operational highlights of the Q4 and the full year of 2024. Joyce, please go ahead.
Thank you. 2024 turns out to be another constructive year for us. For the second consecutive year, we achieved record highs in both user base and business scale , with a further elevated market influence in the domestic market and a fast-expanding market share in the outbound travel market. All these accomplishments showed our excellence in strategy execution, as well as the strength of our organizational capabilities. Our transportation business, which serves not only as a traffic hub but also the pillar of revenue and profit of the company, continued to expand in scale in the Q4 and hit a historical high in its annual revenue for 2024. As for the air ticketing business, it maintained its faster-than-industry growth rate throughout the year, achieving a record high volume with more than 20% year-over-year growth in 2024.
Meanwhile, our international air ticketing business continued its rapid expansion, driven by a competitive pricing strategy and effective marketing investment. As such, our international air ticketing volume for the year recorded a remarkable growth of over 130%, more than doubling the size of 2019's level. As the business scales up, progressive efforts have been made to enhance monetization capabilities through more targeted user incentive policies and a healthy revenue structure. Consequently, we saw substantial improvement in the efficiency of the business during the second half of the year. As for the transportation business, we've already built a very strong mindshare with a focus on delivering differentiated services so as to better meet users' underlying needs. Our algorithm-driven Huixing system provides users with variable and accessible travel solutions beyond a single ticket, which has facilitated the cross-sell within the transportation business, as well as greatly enhancing the monetization capabilities.
In terms of our accommodation business, both room night sales and the revenue hit new highs in 2024, driven by continuous efforts to increase penetration in the mass market in China, aiming at the resilient demand. Throughout the year, we put more emphasis on user experience. We offer the best value for money products and services. We prioritize the display of hotels with add-on service to provide users with easy access to their preferred hotel options. We also provide more timely and fast response to user requests. In the meantime, we strengthened our partnership with suppliers and work together to offer users with differentiated product services in an effort to enhance our product competitiveness. All these efforts contributed to strengthen the user mindshare and a record high in room night sales in 2024.
As for international business, consistent efforts were made to enrich product and services offerings by partnering with more international suppliers. Throughout the year, the business continued to outgrow the industry as a whole, with room night sales registering more than 110% year-over-year growth in 2024. Since 2023, China's travel industry has showed great resilience and sustained demand. We've been strategically investing within the industry trends to seize the growth opportunities. Our hotel management business has grown rapidly over the past years, and its store network has almost tripled since 2022. By the end of 2024, it has nearly 2,300 hotels in operation, with 1,400 hotels in the pipeline. WeChat traffic is a key component of OTA operations. We have sustained a profound and stable partnership with Tencent for almost a decade.
Through our Huixing mini program, we have successfully reached widespread users across China and remains a crucial traffic channel for us. In the meantime, we have been diversifying our traffic sources with our standalone app rising to strategic significance, through which we intended to reach new users' cohorts. During the year, we built app investments in our standalone app and launched a variety of tailor-made marketing activities to track new users. As such, the DAU of our standalone app more than doubled during the year. Prioritizing user value, we have been actively investing in our loyalty program. By offering comprehensive travel products and services, our OTA membership allows users to accumulate mileage points across a variety of travel products, which can be redeemed as a cash voucher for future bookings. This flexibility makes our program more attractive and rewarding.
Besides, premium members enjoy customized benefits such as price protection, free cancellation, VIP lounge, and exclusive customer services. Furthermore, our Black Diamond Members also have access to travel benefits around social events such as concerts and music festivals. As of the end of 2024, the cumulated number of Black Diamond Members approached 90 million, a big leap of 86% from last year. Through distinct user engagement initiatives and process marketing campaigns, we have accumulated the largest user base in China's OTA industry. For the 12-month end of December, our annual paying user recorded a historical high and approached 240 million, with a cumulative number of travelers through the Buyer Platform reaching 1.93 billion. This indicates that, on average, each user purchased more than eight times on our platform in 2024, a big jump from 5.5 times in 2019.
More significantly, our ARPU rose dramatically by 44% year-over-year and reached RMB 33 in 2024, a RMB 17.3 increase in 2024, mainly thanks to our effort to enhance user value. Besides, our MTUs maintained growth momentum throughout the year and increased by 9% year-over-year to 41 million for the three months ended December. As a tech-driven company, we are adept at reshuffling our business by advancing the application of frontier technologies. We proactively embrace new technologies to enhance efficiency, as well as improving user experience. We have built our own tourism-specific generative AI, Chengxiang, which recently has been upgraded by adding DeepSeek to its large language module. It not only can help users plan travel itineraries, but it can also recommend travel products based on their instructions. It also features a comparison tool that facilitates users' decisions in selecting hotels when they have difficulty in making choices.
In the upcoming future, users may directly turn to Booking once they find satisfying recommendations on Chengxiang, which we believe will enhance user satisfaction as well as order conversions. Furthermore, through Chengxiang, we have developed a digital assistant for several tourist destinations to enable human-like interactions with their tourists and recommend local, distinctive tours. On top of that, Chengxiang has also been embedded in several generative AI agents such as Yuanbao and Doubao, as well as mobile phones such as Rongyao and Vivo, so as to reach out to more users. Besides, efforts are also made to explore future applications of generative AI across various aspects of our business. We believe it will not be long before we fully realize the original vision of the company being an intelligent travel assistant.
In pursuit of the best practice globally, we have made great progress in enhancing our performance over the past few years. In 2024, we have received double A for our MSCI ESG rating for a third consecutive year. We have been included in S&P Global Sustainability Yearbook China for the second year in a row. In addition, we were also awarded the Best Program amongst small and middle cap by an Institutional Investor in 2024. All this demonstrates our leadership among global peers and our determination to excel in ESG. I will stop here and give the call to our CFO, Julian. He will share with you the detailed financials in the Q4 and for the whole year. Julian, your turn.
Thank you, Joyce. Good evening, everyone. As 2024 drew to a close, the travel industry has demonstrated resilience throughout the Q4, marked by travelers' growing pursuit of culturally enriching experiences across both traditional festival destinations and emerging local. Building on this momentum, we have not only kept pace with but consistently outperformed evolving industry trends thanks to our foresight in addressing the evolving priorities of travelers. In the Q4 of 2024, we achieved outstanding results for both top line and bottom line. We reported net revenue of RMB 4.2 billion, representing a 35% year-over-year increase from the same period of 2023. We proactively prepared for the 2025 time-skew year through effective marketing campaigns and advertisements while maintaining discipline to control to ensure financial prudence.
Despite the impact of the consolidation of our tourism business, we achieved a remarkable adjusted net profit of RMB 660 million, with an adjusted net margin of 15.6%. This performance was notably attributed to enhanced operational efficiency and effective execution of refined marketing strategies. Our core OTA business revenue registered a strong growth of 20% year-over-year and recorded RMB 3.5 billion, driven by growth across our transportation ticketing, accommodation reservation, and other business segments. Our transportation ticketing business registered significant growth and achieved RMB 1.7 billion in revenue, representing a 13% increase compared with the same period of 2023. This growth was mainly driven by the increase in both domestic and outbound ticketing volume, a testament to our persistent efforts to expand our market share. Our outbound business continues to maintain strong growth momentum and now accounted for more than 5% of our total transportation ticketing revenue.
Additionally, we drove revenue growth by continuously optimizing our VAS offerings and enhancing monetization capabilities through efficient cross-selling strategies, which unlocked a more diverse demand among our users. Our accommodation reservation revenue stood at RMB 1.1 billion for the Q4 of 2024, representing a 29% increase from the same period in 2023. We continued to execute our cross-selling strategy and further diverted traffic from our transportation business to develop our accommodation segment. Besides, our international accommodation business also experienced substantial expansion, adding to the growth of the business segment. Our ADR demonstrated strong resilience and remained stable in the Q4 of 2024, mainly thanks to our extensive presence in China's mass market. Our blended take rates saw a year-over-year increase, largely driven by more precise and effective marketing strategies.
Our other business segment once again delivered solid performance, with revenue reaching RMB 599 million in the Q4, representing a growth of 15% year-over-year. This growth was mainly propelled by the robust growth of our hotel management and online package tour business. Our tourism business achieved a revenue of RMB 780 million thanks to the continuous recovery of the industry and our efforts to seize the market opportunity. In terms of profitability, our gross profit rose by 24% year-over-year, reaching RMB 2.7 billion, with a gross margin of 63.5%. Although the integration of our tourism business had an impact on our overall margin on the year-over-year basis, we further improved the margin profile of our core OTA business. In the Q4 of 2024, our core OTA business achieved an operating profit of RMB 983 million, with a margin of 28.4%. This reflected a great improvement from 23.6% year-over-year.
The margin expansion was primarily driven by our effective execution in enhancing the efficiency of sales marketing investments. The operating profit for the tourism business achieved RMB 18 million, with 2.3% margin. Our adjusted EBITDA increased by 39% year-over-year and reached RMB 997 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 23.5%. Adjusted net profit improved by 37% year-over-year to RMB 660 million, with a 15.6% margin. Service development and administrative expenses in the Q4 of 2024 increased by 36% from the same period of 2023. Excluding share-based compensation charges, service development and administrative expenses in total accounted for 18.7% of revenue in the Q4, compared with 16.9% of revenue in the same period of 2023. The increase in the expense ratio was primarily driven by the consolidation of our tourism business due to different business models and culture structures.
However, it is important to highlight that the efficiency of our core OTA business was continued to improve during this period. Selling and marketing expenses in the Q4 of 2024 increased by 14% from the same period of 2023. Excluding share-based compensation charges, selling and marketing expenses accounted for 30.2% of revenue in the Q4, compared with 35.4% of revenue in the same period of 2023. As of December 31, 2024, the balance of cash and cash equivalent, restricted cash and short-term investments, was RMB 11.1 billion. We value our shareholders' continued support and remain committed to delivering sustainable shareholders' capital returns. Our Board of Directors has approved the proposed payment of final cash dividend of HKD 0.18 per share, making a 20% increase from last year. Now, let's move to our results for the fiscal year 2024.
Our net revenue in 2024 achieved RMB 17.3 billion, representing a 46% year-over-year increase. The core OTA revenue achieved RMB 14.2 billion, representing a 22% year-over-year increase. Our transportation ticketing revenue reached RMB 7.2 billion, representing a 20% year-over-year increase. Our accommodation reservation revenue was RMB 4.7 billion in 2024, representing a 20% year-over-year increase. Other business revenue for 2024 achieved RMB 2.3 billion, representing a 36% year-over-year increase. Our tourism revenue for 2024 reached RMB 3.1 billion. In terms of profitability, our gross margin in 2024 was 64.1%, compared with 73.5% in 2023, primarily due to the integration of tourism business. The operating profit for our core OTA business reached RMB 3.8 billion, with a margin of 26.9%, compared to 25.4% in 2023. The tourism business contributed an operating profit of RMB 87 million, with a margin of 2.8%.
Adjusted EBITDA for 2024 improved by 30% year-over-year to RMB 4.1 billion, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 23.4% in 2024. Meanwhile, adjusted net profit for 2024 increased by 27% year-over-year to RMB 2.8 billion, representing an adjusted net margin of 16.1% in 2024. Looking ahead, we will continue to invest in traffic diversification and global expansion to drive business growth, while placing an even stronger emphasis on improving efficiency, laying a solid foundation for long-term margin improvement. Over the past year, China's travel industry has seen a clear trend towards diversification and personalization. Consumers are increasingly seeking unique and authentic experiences that go beyond traditional tourist attractions, driving the creation of more diverse travel scenarios.
At the same time, the Chinese government has introduced a series of supportive policies to expand the supply of travel products and enrich consumption experiences, aligning with the goal of establishing the travel industry as a key pillar of the national economy. Given these factors, we remain optimistic about the long-term development of the travel industry. As we move into 2025, the appetite for travel remains robust nationwide. During the Chinese New Year holiday, we saw strong travel demand on our platform. Domestic destinations such as Yunnan, Beijing, and Guangzhou remain as top favorites among users, while outbound travel to destinations including Japan and Southeast Asia also proved highly popular. We find ourselves at the heart of a vibrant and evolving era in the travel industry. We are committed to strengthening our core OTA business by enriching our service offerings and delivering greater value to our users.
At the same time, we will prioritize the expansion of our outbound business to seize emerging market opportunities and bolster our global footprint. We will also continue to advance our footprint within the industry to strengthen our influence and competitive edge. Furthermore, we will continuously seize the opportunities of technological revolution and utilize cutting-edge innovation to become a bellwether of change in the industry. Through these strategic initiatives, we aim to achieve sustainable growth and deliver long-term profitability for our stakeholders. With that, operators, we are ready to take questions now. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. As a reminder to ask a question, please press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Once again, please press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced.
To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. If you could all kindly limit yourself to two questions so that everyone is given the opportunity to ask questions. Thank you. We are now going to proceed with our first question. The questions come from the line of Wei Xiong from UBS. Please ask your question. Your line is opened.
Hi, thank you. Good evening, management. Thank you for taking my question. Two questions here. First is, I noticed that GMV and revenue growth showed a meaningful gap again this quarter, which implies continued improvement in the take rate. Could management help us to understand the drivers behind, and how should we think about the take rate trend of our ticketing and hotel businesses going forward? Second, it's great to see sales marketing expense ratio continue to optimize on better marketing efficiency.
Could management please elaborate on our marketing strategy, key focuses, and investment plan for the year, and how much leverage we could see from this line to drive margin expansion? Thank you.
Thank you for the question. The first question is about the gap between the GMV growth and the revenue growth. I think the reason actually is the same as we talked in quarter three. In quarter three this year, since quarter three this year, hotel ADR and also the air ticket ATV faced an extremely downward pressure due to a high base effect from the previous year, 2023, because at that time, the demand was still huge. At the summer vacation and the national holiday in 2023, the supply still had some shortage. At that time, it drove the ADR and also ATV, the price up.
That means that is the key reasons why the ADR and ATV dropped a lot since quarter three. Also, in quarter four, the ADR declines have already narrowed to middle to high single digits for the market. As we mentioned in our conference call, for the ADR in our platform, it is quite stable. It is just a very, very low single digit drop compared with 2023. For ATV, the drop still followed the total market and still has a 5.2-10 percentage points year-over-year drop for the ATV in quarter four. That is why you can see that our GMV growth is still not very good compared with our revenue. For hotel side, we are starting the accurate marketing and also the coupon reduction since very early of the 2023 and 2024. Nowadays, we still keep our very prudent investment on our couponing.
We pay the coupon very accurate users by users. That is why you can see our blended take rate for hotels is increasing quarter to quarter since, I think, the second half of 2023. Also for ATV, for the air revenues, air ticket revenues, the revenue is not related to the ATV's volatility because the VAS and also the additional service and the product attach rate is quite stable quarter- over- quarter. That is why, although the ATV dropped, our blended take rate increased for the air tickets as well. That is why the GMV and revenue growth showed a gap in quarter three and also in quarter four.
Also, in terms of the sales marketing expenses ratio, yes, it has been dropped for the expense ratio as of revenue, I think, since quarter three because, as we mentioned in the very beginning of 2024, we launched a sales marketing spending investment reallocation program. We invested more on our existing user marketing instead of the new user acquisition because the new user acquisition is very expensive and the ROI is relatively lower than the existing user marketing. For example, the cross-selling, we mentioned a lot of times to improve the frequency and also improve the RPU. Also, Joyce mentioned our RPU increased 50% year-over-year from only RMB 50 per person to RMB 73 per person. That also helped our sales marketing dollar ratio, expense ratio as of revenue dropped a lot. That is the first reason.
The second reason is our outbound and international investment. Since quarter three and quarter four, our air tickets and also the accommodation room nights, outbound room nights and outbound tickets have already scaled up. Since the second half of past year, we pay more attention to the ROI improvement for the outbound and international investment. That has helped a lot for our margin improvement and helped a lot for our sales marketing efficiency optimization. These are the two questions of my answers. Thank you.
Great. Thank you, management.
Thank you. We are now going to proceed with our next question. The questions come from the line of Brian Gong from Citi. Please ask your question.
Thanks, management, for taking my question and congratulations on the solid results. I have two questions. First of all, first one is regarding our top line output.
Regarding year to date, travel demand, do we see the whole industry demand performance in line with our expectation or slightly weaker or better than our expectation? How has our performance been? What's our expectation for the core OTA revenue growth for this year? The second is regarding the margin for core OTA business, which was pretty decent in the Q4. How should we think about trajectory for Q1 and 2025 full year? We know that in the first half of 2025, we may still have easier comps because of the risk take rate and due to marketing spending optimization since, I think, probably mid of last year. Beyond that, any other drivers could continue to drive our marketing expansion? Thank you.
Thank you, Brian.
In terms of the YTD performance of the total industry or the market, I think during the Q1, or even especially on the Chinese New Year's holiday, because there's a lot of news and data in the market, the Chinese travel market continued to demonstrate a very resilient growth. According to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the travel traffic and industry revenues increased by 6% and 7% year-over-year during the Chinese New Year holidays. Besides, the Ministry of Transport reported a 6% year-over-year growth in national passenger throughput. In terms of the expectation of the performance in our platform, in the Q1 of 2025, we expected a continued growth momentum across all segments of our core OTA business. As usual, the growth rate will double into triple of the market's growth. Within the core OTA business, we anticipate that the accommodation business will grow even faster.
This will be driven by the strong room nights sold, supported by new channel contributions, for example, the Xiaohongshu , and also the cross-selling initiatives, alongside a continued improvement in take rate year-over-year, as I mentioned in the past questions, due to the prudent control over user subsidies. ADR on our platform in this quarter is expected to be very resilient and remained flat year-over-year. For the transportation business performance in the Q1, we expect its revenue to maintain a very solid growth. We continue to expand our market share for air ticketing and anticipate significant volume growth in outbound air tickets, just like the result for the year of 2024. Additionally, we are also focused on optimizing our VAS offerings and enhancing monetization for transportation business.
Meanwhile, we started to put more efforts to drive cross-selling from long-haul transportation to a wider range of short-haul travel options, offering users comprehensive travel combo solutions. For other business segment growth, we also grow nicely, mainly contributed from our hotel management business and membership business, which also helped drive the total OTA revenue growth. For the full year of 2025, while the short booking window limits our visibility into a long-term performance, we remain highly confident that the strong growth momentum observed in quarter one will carry through the whole year. In terms of the margin outlook, as your question, the second question, as we have already highlighted this time and in a conference call of past several quarters, the margin of core OTA is expected to consistently improve in quarter one and throughout the whole year of 2025, aligned with our improvement in RPU.
Our sales marketing expense ratio will be continued reduced due to the ROI improvement and precise marketing investment. Meanwhile, our COS and G&A expense ratio will also decrease due to the improvement in operation efficiency and scaling effect. Additionally, very important, our strategic execution of standalone apps and outbound business development has been very successful over the past year, 2024. We have already launched a margin improvement program for these two businesses since the beginning of 2025, as we promised. This initiative will further support the overall margin expansion for our core OTA business. One thing I would like to mention, we will expect a break-even or profitable for the whole outbound business for this year after we launch the margin improvement program. That is the expectation for our margin side. Thank you for the question.
Thank you.
We are now going to proceed with our next question. The questions come from the line of Yang Liu from Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question. Your line is opened.
Thanks for the opportunity to ask questions. First, congratulations on the solid growth. Two questions from my side. The first one is regarding the recent cut of the domestic flight volume going into the second and Q3 of the spring-summer session. How will this impact Tongcheng Travel's business from this kind of airlines' domestic volume cut? My second question is regarding the outbound. It has been growing nicely. You just mentioned it will have a margin break-even target this year. Could you please update us in terms of what should we expect in terms of the growth? Last year is almost like triple-digit volume growth. What should we expect for 2025? Thank you.
Okay.
Thank you for the question. The first question, we also observed that the flight volume or the supply end has been cut since the end of March. As we always mentioned, that may cause the ATV going up because the supply end maybe causes some kind of shortage. The ATV may be going up. As we mentioned a lot of times, the ATV is not related to the revenue because more than 50% of our revenue is from the VAS, the Value Added Service and Product. Also, the take rate is a fixed amount from the air company. That may have a very limited impact on the performance for the transportation ones. In terms of the outbound business, I think Joyce may have more colors.
Sure. Thank you, Leo, for the question. I think we have mentioned a lot of times before.
Over the past years, we have accumulated the expansion of our international business. We are continuously enhancing our outbound travel offerings through strategic partnerships with the leading global OTAs, hoteliers, airlines, and various overseas TSPs. We have already significantly strengthened our supply network. Additionally, we have increased the investment in research and development to improve the service capabilities and provide a seamless booking experience for our outbound travelers. With a well-established user base, we have actively captured the increasing demand for outbound travel. Our primary focus has been on international air tickets, where we employ a competitive pricing strategy to expand the market reach, attract more users, and reinforce their brand association with our platform. We see significant opportunities to further develop this leisure and business travel market, which remain relatively underpenetrated.
Additionally, a notable portion of our outbound users consists of workers and international students. We are leveraging various marketing channels to offer tailored travel products that meet their unique demands. Given that a large portion of our users are based in lower-tier cities, we have launched a specialized international transfer solution in the Q4 to improve the connectivity between different transportation modes. This includes seamless transfers between flights and high-speed rail, as well as domestic and international flight combinations, making it more convenient for users to access the major airports. This initiative aims to enhance the overall travel experience and address a key pain point for outbound travelers from these regions. Our outbound segment has delivered exceptional growth, consistently outperforming the industry. In the Q4 last year, we saw particularly strong demand in key destinations such as Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore.
For the Q4 of 2024, the revenue from our outbound air ticketing business accounted for more than 5% of our total transportation ticketing revenue. Starting in 2025, we have implemented a margin improvement program for our outbound business, as Julia has mentioned a lot of times before. Additionally, the cross-selling from outbound transportation to accommodation this year presents another opportunity to drive both revenue and profit growth. Looking ahead to the next two to three years, our priority remains on scaling business volume and building a solid user base, while also focusing on profitability. We're confident that this segment will become a major growth driver for the company and ultimately achieve higher margins than our domestic business. Thank you.
Thank you.
We are now going to proceed with our next question. The questions come from the line of Leo Yu from CLSA. Please ask your question.
Hi. Good evening, management. It's Leo from CLSA. I have two questions. First is on the AI. How do you think AI will transform your daily business and the OTA industry in our view? In order to capture the great opportunity, how much incremental investment will you spend on AI? How do you evaluate the ROI of such investment? This is the AI question. My second question is on the user strategy for 2025. We saw that the transaction frequency has reached above eight times. Do you see further room for the user transaction frequency growth? How would it translate to GDP growth going forward? Thank you.
Thank you. Very good questions. First, I'll answer the question concerning AI.
First, I would say that from our point of view, AI has the potential to create new traffic channels for OTA by becoming the key entry point for users. We do not think that AI will replace OTAs. First of all, our advanced and extensive travel insights play a very crucial role in delivering accurate and personalized recommendations to users. Secondly, our strong connections and close relationships with supply end enable us to secure the competitive pricing and high-quality products to satisfy the diversified traveler needs. We will stay at the front for AI advancement, continue to strengthen our investment in this area, and introduce innovative user-oriented features to enhance the travel experience of our users. That is why we have our own tourism-specific generative AI, Chengxiang, as I mentioned. Chengxiang has already fully integrated with DeepSeek, making us the first OTA to incorporate the DeepSeek model.
As an integration, the Chengxiang AI will leverage its powerful reasoning capabilities to further enhance the precision and intelligence of its decision-making service. DeepSeek's high-accuracy answer generative capabilities will help Chengxiang overcome the limitations of the traditional travel recommendations. Now, our self-depth Chengxiang has already been applied in multiple areas. Let me elaborate. Chengxiang assists users in planning travel itineraries and recommending travel products based on their preference, providing seamless access to a wider range of choices on the platform. It also features an intelligent hotel comparison tool, as I mentioned, helps the user to make the informed decision while selecting accommodations. We have continuously optimized the itinerary planning feature with the goal of achieving seamless closed-loop booking. Moving forward, this feature will continue to evolve and be updated very quickly.
Beyond the user recommendations, Chengxiang powers digital travel assistance for various destinations, enabling human-like interactions and suggesting local experiences tailored to tourists' interests. Thirdly, Chengxiang also helps improve our customer service efficiency and reduce manual work. It can provide 24-hour, 7-day support by answering frequently asked questions, assisting with bookings and resolving issues in real time. It can also detect user needs, place orders, and offer human-like response, enhancing the user experience and lowering the customer service costs. To expand its reach, Chengxiang has been integrated into leading generative AI platforms such as Yuanbao, the Doubao I mentioned, as well as the mobile ecosystems. A key advantage of Chengxiang is its access to high-quality tourism and cultural industry data, which enables more precise recommendations and enhanced user experience. This unique strength allows it to deliver highly relevant travel insights, improving both itinerary planning and personalized services.
Our commitment to technology has been instrumental in enhancing operation efficiency and improving user experience. In terms of the incremental investment, I think the main investment at the current stage is investing in talent and experts. In terms of capacity, operational expense is quite limited. It is still at a very early stage to evaluate the ROI, but we strongly believe that outcome will be very fruitful. Now I move the next question to Julia.
In terms of the user strategy, actually, although we have some confidence that the user base will still have some room to enlarge in this year and next year, we think the output improvement or the user value improvement will contribute more, have a bigger contribution to our revenue growth in the future.
By the end of 2024, as our conference call prepared remarks, our user purchase frequency exceeded eight times a year, making a significant increase of approximately 45% from around 5.5 times a year in 2019. Meanwhile, our RPU also increased by nearly 50% from less than RMB 50 in 2019 to around RMB 73 in 2024. We are very confident there is a large room improvement for this number, 73, this number. Notably, the proportion of users with an RPU over 100 increased from around 7% in 2019 to around 13% in 2024, while such user base grew from 10 million to almost 30 million, highlighting our strong growth in high-value users and also the high-value user RPU improvement. Why do we think there is still a lot of room? Firstly, because we will leverage new technologies, just like Joyce mentioned, the Chengxiang AI technologies to enhance user experience.
This will drive higher user engagement and encourage repeat transactions, ultimately boosting our RPU. Secondly, we will refine our recommendation algorithms and user-tailored promotions to encourage cross-selling within different business segments, especially from transportation to accommodation, aiming to increase revenue per transaction and overall take rate. Thirdly, we will continue to promote our VAS products and services that cater to our users' travel needs. For example, we will further optimize our intelligent travel solution Huixing system so as to improve our monetization. Moreover, we will continue to introduce innovative products and services across different scenarios to improve user satisfaction. We will continue to expand our products and service offerings on our platforms so as to enhance user purchase frequency and also user value on our platform. Thank you for the question.
Thank you, Julia. Thank you, Leo.
Because of time limitation, we are closing the call now. If you wish to check out our presentation and other financial information, please visit the IR section of our company website. Thank you, and see you next quarter.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you, and have a great day.