行业和我们的公司均迈入高质量发展的新阶段。过去一年，我们看到国内旅游需求持续旺盛，多元化的趋势愈发明显，沉浸式体验型消费热度不断升温。在此背景下，我们深入洞察用户需求，全链路优化产品与用户体验。2025年内，我们的APUs再创历史新高，用户规模与用户价值双双稳步提升。公司业绩的健康增长，有力证明了我们的服务质量和品牌影响力在不断提升。2025年对于我们而言是充满挑战与机遇的一年。面对消费的多元化和个性化的需求，我们不断丰富产品供给。面对消费者对优质服务日益旺盛的需求，我们持续精进服务质量。面对AI带来的科技革新浪潮，我们秉持开放的态度，积极拥抱技术变革。这不仅彰显了我们灵活的组织能力和强大的执行力，更体现了我们坚持以用户体验为核心，实现让旅行更简单、更快乐的使命。中国政府将旅游业视为国民经济发展的重要支柱。在十五五规划中，政府明确提出要推进旅游强国建设，丰富高品质旅游产品供给，提高旅游服务质量。从多地试点的秋假、雪假，再到史上最长春节假期，日益丰富的假期安排，充分彰显政府对旅游行业的支持态度。需求层面，旅游已经成为人们美好生活不可或缺的重要组成部分。一年四季，春赏花、夏避暑、秋观叶、冬玩雪等各种主题出游层出不穷。新的一年，我们将继续深耕国内市场，深挖用户需求，巩固国内业务在大众市场的领导地位。同时，我们将继续把握出境游市场的增长机会，加速推进国际化战略。运营方面，我们将继续以用户体验为核心，不断创新技术和升级产品，并持续丰富会员权益与加深用户互动。2021年，我们开始部署酒店管理业务，经过过去几年的快速扩张，如今已初具规模。2025年万达酒店及度假村的加入，是我们酒店管理业务发展的里程碑事件，进一步完善了我们的酒店品牌矩阵和生态体系，极大提升了我们的市场竞争力和影响力。2026年，结合我们的互联网基因，我们将加快酒店管理业务扩张的步伐，为公司长期可持续发展奠定更为坚实的基础。在AI技术高速发展的今天，我们将坚定推动AI技术对旅游服务链条的优化与重构。我们坚信，凭借我们用户至上的价值定位、敏锐的洞察力和卓越的执行力，公司在旅游行业的护城河将持续拓宽。最后，我们将持续输出技术与经验，赋能合作伙伴与产业生态，切实履行企业社会责任，以构建可持续发展的行业环境，为利益相关者创造更大的价值。接下来，就此将向大家详细介绍2025年第四季度及全年的业务表现和运营亮点。先请我们IR同事做一下翻译。
In 2025, China's travel industry and the company entered a new phase of high quality development. Over the past year, we witnessed resilient travel demand with increasingly diversified trends as immersive and experiential consumption continued to gain popularity. Amidst this backdrop, we deeply dive into user needs and comprehensively optimize our travel products and user experiences. As a result, both our user base and our pool demonstrated robust growth in 2025, with APUs reaching a record high. The robust business growth reflected the ongoing enhancement of our service quality and the expanding influence of our brand. The year 2025 was the year of challenges and opportunities for us. In response to consumers' diversified and personalized needs, we continuously enriched our product offerings. Facing growing expectations for premium services, we consistently improved our service quality. Amid AI-driven technological revolution, we proactively embraced new frontier technologies with an open attitude.
All these showcased our strong organizational agility and exceptional execution capabilities, further reaffirming our commitment to our user-centric mission of making travel easier and more joyful. The Chinese government sees travel as a vital pillar of national economic development. The latest 15th Five-Year Plan has explicitly stated the commitment to expanding the supplies of high quality travel products and to enhancing travel service standards, with the goal of establishing China as a premier travel destination. From the pilot implementation of autumn and winter vacations in certain regions to the longest Spring Festival holiday on record, these expanding holiday arrangements underscore significant governmental support for the travel industry.
In terms of demand, travel has become an essential part of people's pursuit of a better life, with seasonal themes such as spring flower viewing, summer retreat, fall foliage tours, and winter snow activities continuously gaining popularity. In the coming year, we will remain focused on domestic market and deep dive into user needs, aiming to further solidify our leading position in the mass market. Simultaneously, we will make intensified efforts to capture growth opportunities in the outbound travel market to propel our global expansion strategy. On the operational front, we will continue to implement technological innovation and product updates centered on user experience while enriching membership privileges and deepening user engagement. In 2021, we tapped into the hotel management business. After several years of rapid expansion, it has now gained meaningful scale.
The integration of Wanda Hotels & Resorts in 2025 marked a pivotal milestone in the development of our hotel management business. This strategic move strengthened our brand portfolio and ecosystem while substantially elevating our competitiveness and market influence. By consistently executing our strategy and leveraging our strong internet DNA, we are well-positioned to accelerate the segment expansion in 2026, laying a robust foundation for our long-term sustainable growth. Amidst the rapid advancement of AI technology, we are devoted to expanding the application of AI in our business process towards optimizing operational efficiency and enhancing user experience. Building on our user-centric value proposition, market acumen, and superior execution capabilities, we are confident that we will continue broadening our competitive moat in the travel industry.
Moving forward, we will continue to export our technologies and expertise to empower partners and support a broader industry ecosystem while strengthening our commitment to corporate social responsibility to foster sustainable industry growth and create greater value for all stakeholders. Next, I will hand over the call to Joyce. She will share with you our business and operational highlights of the fourth quarter and the full- year of 2025. Joyce, please go ahead.
Thank you, Hope . 2025 was a pivotal year of growth and achievement for our company. Beyond the steady expansion of our domestic business, our outbound travel and hotel management businesses made remarkable progress, contributing meaningfully to the overall growth momentum of the company. During the past year, we acutely grasped users' evolving preferences and precisely captured emerging demand. This enabled us to once again deliver solid growth across all business segments, highlighting our excellence in strategic execution, operational efficiency, and organizational agility. Throughout the year, our accommodation business sustained robust growth momentum and achieved a record high in room nights sold. In early 2025, we identified a notable shift in users' preference towards high-quality hotels.
In response to the changes, we strategically reallocated operational resources to meet this evolving demand, resulting in an approximately 5 percentage point year-over-year increase in the proportion of high-quality hotels sold on our platform. In the meantime, we prioritized enhancing user experience. We not only offer the best value for money products and services, but also provided faster and more responsive support to user requests to further strengthen our presence in the mass market. As for our international business, we continue to enhance our product capabilities by deepening partnerships with third-party providers, as well as expanding our product and service offerings. In addition, we leveraged our domestic user base to drive cross-sell initiatives and execute a precision marketing campaign targeting high-potential users. All these efforts collectively led to nearly 30% growth in our international room nights sold in 2025.
In terms of our transportation business, it continuously demonstrated strong resilience throughout the year. Over the past year, we placed a strong emphasis on improving both user experience and engagement. At the core of the efforts is our algorithm-driven pricing system, which leverages advanced algorithm capabilities to provide users with viable and accessible travel solutions. By utilizing a comprehensive range of transportation options, the intelligent system significantly enhances the overall travel experience for users. In the fourth quarter, we launched skiing-themed marketing campaigns and rolled out various benefits to skiing enthusiasts so as to reinforce our positioning as an experience-driven platform and further engage our user base. On the international front, we focused on improving operational efficiency by implementing a more disciplined subsidy policy and expanding our VAS offerings.
As a result, we achieved a balanced growth in both volume and revenue throughout the year, with volume growth of nearly 25% for 2025. As mentioned at the beginning of the speech, 2025 marked a milestone year for our hotel management business, with significant progress achieved. This year, we successfully completed the acquisition of Wanda Hotels & Resorts, a company that possesses a renowned portfolio of upper upscale and luxury hotel brands with strong market presence in China. In addition to its hotel management expertise, the company is the only hotel management firm in China with proven specialization in operating ski resorts. This unique capability can help us strengthen supply chain resources in the travel industry, thereby enhancing our influence and competitiveness.
Furthermore, Wanda Hotels & Resorts operates its own in-house design institute, which is recognized as one of the leading hospitality design teams in China and has received numerous prestigious international awards. The team possesses strong capabilities in designing and managing large-scale hotels, as well as convention and exhibition centers. Its design solutions serve not only its own properties, but also high-end hospitality projects across the industry. Following the acquisition, the Wanda Hotels & Resorts team underwent a seamless integration process, resulting in a significant boost to its vitality and optimized organizational capacity and refined strategic direction. This strategic integration has improved our brand portfolio, strengthened our market presence, and accelerated the sustainable growth of our hotel management business. Regarding our eLong Hotel Technology platform, we remain focused on expanding our geographical footprint while prioritizing quality growth throughout the year.
The platform also offers technology-enabled hotel management solutions featuring a proprietary property management system, a smart marketing solution, eLong PE, and service robots for automated in-room delivery. By the end of December, our total number of hotels in operation exceeded 3,000, with more than 1,800 in the pipeline. Looking ahead, we are committed to further expanding our asset-light hotel management business through network expansion and ecosystem enablement. This strategic approach will position us to achieve leadership in China's hotel industry and establish a second growth engine for the company. Traffic operation has been the foundation of our success. Leveraging the Weixin Mini Program, we have effectively reached a broad user base across China, in particular, those in lower-tier cities. Over the past year, the Weixin ecosystem continued to serve as a critical traffic channel, where we focused on enhancing operational efficiency.
At the same time, our standalone app, a key driver of new user acquisition, demonstrated strong growth momentum over the past four quarters. To attract younger demographics, we rolled out a series of innovative products and engaging marketing campaigns to enhance user mindshare and solidify our positioning as an experience-oriented travel platform. As such, the average DAUs of our standalone app posted more than 30% growth year-over-year in 2025. Additionally, social media has played an increasingly vital role in engaging users, particularly those younger audiences. During the year, we stepped up our efforts in social media platforms to connect with younger travelers and broadened our user reach. Through effective and targeted user engagement, we have accumulated the most extensive user base in China's OTA industry.
For the 12 months ended December 2025, our annual paying users climbed to 253 million, representing a year-over-year growth of 6%. In addition, the accumulated number of passengers served on our platform over the past 12 months continued to expand and reached 2,034 million, with an annual purchase frequency exceeding 8 x per user. Moreover, our annual ARPU for the year further rose to CNY 76.8, reflecting a year-over-year growth of 5.5%. Besides, our MPU also maintained a growth trajectory throughout the year and increased by 6% year over year to 46 million for 2025. As an innovation-driven company, we fully embrace new technologies such as Gen AI to transform our business.
In December, we rolled out collaboration with Yuanbao, enabling users to access our travel booking services via the Weixin Mini Program by searching travel itineraries on Yuanbao app. In mid-March last year, we introduced our AI-powered travel planner, Deep Trip, which integrates the supply chain capabilities and market insights of our platform with the reasoning capabilities of DeepSeek. Over the past few quarters, we have continuously refined its functionality, incorporating social features to enhance its shareability among users. In the fourth quarter, we embedded a map tool to give users a clearer visual representation of their travel destinations. By the end of December, approximately 6.8 million users in total have utilized Deep Trip. Additionally, we extended its application to some business scenarios by integrating Deep Trip into air ticketing service.
We aim to address users' pre-booking inquiries as well as helping them find competitive ticket prices, which not only improved operational efficiency, but also enhanced overall user experience. In customer service, AI now covers around 80% of user inquiries, demonstrating its important role in streamlining operations and enhancing user experience. Over the past year, we have consistently advanced the integration of AI in every phase of the customer service process, which not only reduced the workload of customer service staff, but also improved overall operational efficiency. Furthermore, we have made continuous advancements in AI capabilities to enhance its precision in identifying user requests and delivering timely, contextually relevant, and human-like responses. By leveraging AI-driven solutions, we aim to further optimize customer interactions, reduce response time, and maintain seamless user support as we continue to grow.
In pursuit of global excellence in ESG practices, we have achieved milestones in improving our ESG performance over the past few years. Notably, in 2025, our MSCI ESG rating was elevated to the top AAA level, surpassing 95% of global industry players. In addition, we were included in the S&P Global Sustainability Yearbook China for the third consecutive year, and were also honored with the Industry Mover Award for our remarkable progress in driving sustainable development within our sector. All these achievements have not only demonstrated our leadership in ESG performance among global peers, but also reflected our resilience and excellence in corporate sustainability in the face of market uncertainties, evolving policy landscape, and dynamic social development. We remain dedicated to further strengthening our ESG practices and contributing to a more sustainable future. I'll stop here and give the call to our CFO, Fan Lei.
He will share with you the detailed financials in the fourth quarter and for the year of 2025. Julian, it's your turn.
Thank you, Joyce. Good evening, everyone. Over the past quarter, China's travel industry showcased remarkable resilience driven by rising demand for immersive and experiential travel experiences across both traditional holiday hotspots and newly emerging destinations. Leveraging our profound understanding of evolving traveler preferences, we delivered another quarter of robust performance, capping off a highly productive year. In the fourth quarter of 2025, we achieved healthy growth in both top and bottom line. We reported net revenue of CNY 4.8 billion, representing a 14.2% year-over-year increase from the same period of 2024. We executed targeted marketing campaigns to strategically prepare for the 2026 Chinese New Year while upholding rigorous cost discipline to ensure financial prudence. During the fourth quarter, our adjusted net profit rose to CNY 779.8 million, reflecting 18.1% year-over-year growth.
The increase was principally fueled by the enhanced economies of scale and the optimized operations of our OTA business. Our core OTA business revenue registered a 17.5% year-over-year increase to CNY 4.1 billion during the fourth quarter of 2025. Our accommodation reservation business achieved CNY 1.3 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025, representing a 15.4% increase from the same period in 2024. The revenue increase was primarily driven by growth in hotel room night sold, coupled with a modest rise in ADR. In our domestic accommodation business, we proactively explored diverse accommodation scenarios to capture emerging growth opportunities, including themed offerings tailored to specific demands such as winter vacation and exam season space.
For our outbound accommodation business, we strengthened cooperation with third-party partners to expand product offerings as well as our destination footprint, catering to growing user demand. In the fourth quarter, our ADR once again achieved year-over-year growth, benefiting from growing consumer demand for high-quality hotels and our proactive adjustments to user subsidy strategies. Supported by precise and disciplined marketing strategies, our net take rate remained stable year over year. Our transportation ticketing revenue for the fourth quarter reached CNY 1.8 billion, marking a 6.5% year-over-year increase compared with the same period of 2024. During the past quarter, we heightened our focus on improving user experience. We actively expanded travel supply chains and enriched VAS offerings to deliver a broader range of mobility options and ensure seamless travel experience for users.
As for our international air ticketing business, it achieved balanced growth in both volume and revenue, which aligns with our long-term strategy. In the fourth quarter, our international air ticketing revenue increased to more than 7% of our total transportation ticketing revenue. Our other business segments maintained stellar growth momentum, with revenue reaching CNY 916.7 million in the fourth quarter, representing a growth of 53% year-over-year. This growth was mainly propelled by outstanding performance of our hotel management business and the consolidation of Wanda Hotels & Resorts. Our tourism business achieved a revenue of CNY 777.5 million, which was largely flat year-over-year, mainly due to our proactive reduction in pre-purchase business as well as softer demand for Southeast Asia and Japan.
In terms of profitability, our gross profit increased by 18.5% year-over-year to CNY 3.2 billion for the fourth quarter of 2025. The operating profit margin of our core OTA business remained flat year-over-year for the fourth quarter of 2025, while the operating profit margin of our tourism business has been affected by the one-off goodwill impairment. Our Adjusted EBITDA increased by 28.6% and reached CNY 1.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025. Adjusted net profit grew by 18.1% to CNY 779.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2025. Adjusted basic EPS for the fourth quarter of 2025 was CNY 0.33, with a 17.9% year-over-year increase compared to the same period in 2024.
Service development and administrative expenses in the fourth quarter of 2025 increased by 6.8% from the same period of 2024. Excluding share-based compensation charges, service development and administrative expenses in total accounted for 18.1% of revenue in the fourth quarter, compared with 18.6% of revenue in the same period of 2024. Selling and marketing expenses in the fourth quarter of 2025 increased by 22.7% from the same period of 2024. Excluding share-based compensation charges, selling and marketing expenses accounted for 32.4% of revenue in the fourth quarter, compared with 30.2% of revenue in the same period of 2024. Now, let's move to our results for financial year 2025. Our net revenue in 2025 achieved CNY 19.4 billion, representing an 11.9% year-over-year increase.
The core OTA revenue achieved CNY 16.5 billion, representing a 16% year-over-year increase. Our accommodation reservation revenue was CNY 5.5 billion in 2025, representing a 16.8% year-over-year increase. Our transportation ticketing revenue reached CNY 7.9 billion, representing a 9.6% year-over-year increase. Other business revenue for 2025 achieved CNY 3.1 billion, representing a 34.4% year-over-year increase. Our tourism revenue for 2025 reached CNY 2.9 billion, representing a 6.9% year-over-year decrease. In terms of profitability, our gross profit in 2025 increased by 15.7% year-over-year to CNY 12.9 billion. Adjusted EBITDA for 2025 improved by 26.9% year-over-year to CNY 5.1 billion.
Adjusted net profit for 2025 increased by 22.2% year-over-year to CNY 3.4 billion. Adjusted basic EPS for 2025 was CNY 1.45, with a 20.8% year-over-year increase. As of December 31st, 2025, the balance of cash and cash equivalents, restricted cash and short-term investments was CNY 12.3 billion. We highly appreciate our shareholders' consistent support and are committed to delivering sustainable capital returns. Our board of directors has proposed a final cash dividend of HKD 0.25 per share, marking a 38.9% increase from last year. This reflects our commitment to enhance capital returns to shareholders. Over the past year, China's travel industry has demonstrated increasingly prominent trends towards diversification and personalization as consumers place growing emphasis on emotional value and unique, experience-driven travel opportunities.
Notably, the 2026 Spring Festival represented the longest holiday period on record. During the nine-day holiday, consumers divided their holidays into multiple shorter trips, such as homecoming visits and vacation travel. Incremental demand from multiple trips during the festival has driven robust growth in our business volume. In addition, the pilot implementation of spring and autumn vacations, initially launched in Zhejiang and Sichuan, have been expanded to include more regions, such as Jiangsu and Anhui. We believe this initiative will help stimulate travel consumption and provide additional momentum to the growth of the tourism industry. Thus, supportive government policy, combined with sustained strength in user demand, fuels our optimism about the upward trajectory of China's travel industry in the coming year. Moving forward, we will remain focused on our core OTA business, providing users with diverse domestic and international travel products while sparing no effort to enhance user experience.
As we continue to improve operational efficiency in domestic OTA operations, we will actively expand our outbound business to bolster our global brand presence. Additionally, our hotel management business will enter a new phase of high-quality growth, building a solid foundation for the company's long-term sustainable development. Concurrently, we will continue to adopt technological innovations as well as deepening the integration of AI technology with our supply chain capabilities, striving to better meet user needs. Last but not least, we will strengthen our corporate social responsibility to support the healthy development of the travel industry and to create greater value for our stakeholders. With that, operator, we are ready to take questions now. Thank you.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please limit to no more than two questions at a time. If you have further questions, please request to rejoin the queue again. Once again, that's star one one for questions. We will now take our first question from the line of Jiawei Liu from CITIC. Please ask your question, Jiawei. Your line is now open.
Hi, management. I'm Jiawei Liu from CITIC. Congratulations to the company on a solid operating performance. I have two questions. The first about outbound travel. There have been many slight tensions between China and Japan recently. How has this impacted your outbound business? Could you share the regional breakdown of your outbound markets? And what are your 2026 targets for outbound revenue growth and profitability? The second about large model and AI strategy. The company has actually rolled out some partnerships with large models so far. In the long run, as AI model purpose become more important, how will the company position itself? Thank you.
Thank you, Jiawei, for the question. The first was in terms of outbound travel. We did observe a decline in Japan-bound travel volume given the current circumstances. However, the overall impact on our business has been limited as outbound travel accounts for only around 5%-6% of our total transportation and accommodation revenue. At the same time, outbound travel demand remains resilient, and we have been seeing users shift to alternative destinations rather than cancel their travel plans. During the Chinese New Year holiday, trips to middle-haul destinations within a 5-hour flight radius, such as South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Macau remained among the most popular choices. While demand for Thailand also shown signs of gradual recovery. In addition, demand for long-haul travel increased year-over-year with European destinations such as Italy and Spain seeing particularly strong growth.
We have been actively adjusting our product offerings and marketing focus to capture this demand shift. Overall, given the relatively small contribution of our outbound travel to our core OTA business and the substitution effect across destinations, we do not expect material impact on our overall performance. Looking ahead to 2026, our priority remains to further improve the quality of growth by enhancing pricing discipline, optimizing marketing efficiency, and strengthening cross-selling from air tickets to accommodation and other travel products. At the same time, we will continue to deepen partnerships with global suppliers to improve service capabilities and user experience. Overall, we expect the international business to continue expanding in scale and become an increasingly meaningful contributor to our revenue.
Over the next two to three years, growing business volume and expanding the user base will remain the key priorities while maintaining a strong focus on improving growth quality and profitability. We expect the revenue contribution from the outbound segment to increase to around 10%-15% with increasing operating leverage over the time. In terms of the AI cooperation, our AI strategy focuses on enhancing both user experience and operational efficiency as we continue to evolve from a traditional OTA toward a more intelligent travel platform. We see AI as a core capability that helps us better understand user needs, improving decision-making, and optimize service delivery across the entire travel journey. At the same time, AI-driven efficiency improvements are significantly enhancing staff productivity and optimize our cost structure, which we believe will be an important driver of margin improvement over time.
On the user side, we have integrated our proprietary travel-specific AI with advanced large language models to develop Deep Trip, which supports itinerary planning, travel inspiration, and personalized product recommendations. By combining AI capabilities with our real-time supply and transaction ecosystem, DeepTrip provides a practical and actionable solution and enables a seamless end-to-end booking experience. We will continue to iterate its functionalities to better support users across different travel scenarios. As positioning ourselves, I think that we have started exploring the partnership with select AI platforms and large model ecosystems. For example, we enable traffic redirection from Yuanbao to our mini programs and apps. Our strategy is to actively participate in the emerging AI ecosystem by positioning ourselves, our platform, as a trusted travel service partner with deep market insights and a strong understanding of user behaviors.
Leveraging our long-term accumulation of transaction data and operational experience, we are able to provide users with more accurate recommendations and practical bookable travel solutions on our AI platforms. Users who enter through AI platforms complete their bookings within our mini programs or apps, and the related user and transaction data remain within our ecosystem. This allows us to maintain direct user relationships, accumulate valuable behavior insights, and continuously optimize our product services and personalized recommendations. It also enables us to strengthen user engagement and lifetime value, which remains a key competitive advantage for our OTA platform. Going forward, we will continue to monitor the development of the AI ecosystem and expand partnerships where it makes strategic sense while maintaining our focus on strengthening our product service offerings, operational capabilities, and user experience.
Right. Thank you. We will now take our next question from Wei Xiong of UBS. Please ask your question, Wei. Your line is now open.
Sure. Good evening, management. Thank you for taking my questions. First, I wanna get your thoughts on regulations, because recently an OTA peer has been under antitrust investigation. How should we think about the implications to the OTA sector? Do we foresee any impact on OTA's business model, or lead to any change in the competitive landscape?
Thank you, Wei Xiong. Please go on.
Yeah, sure. Thank you, Julian. Second question is on the hotel management business, which is set to become our second growth engine. I wonder, could management elaborate your strategic focus and planning for this year? What are the key operational goals and financial metrics that we look to achieve in 2026 and in the medium term as well? Thank you so much.
Okay. Thank you for the questions, Wei Xiong. In terms of the investigations, as you mentioned, we closely monitor regulatory developments recently. At this stage, we have not observed any material changes that would impact our day-to-day operations. Tongcheng has always operated with a strong focus on compliance and fair cooperation with our partners. We believe a well-regulated market environment is beneficial to the long-term healthy development for the company and also for the industry. We will continue to adapt our business practices as required to ensure full compliance in the company. Overall, we remain focused on executing our strategy and delivering sustainable growth and profitability improvement. In terms of the hotel management plan, I think Joyce will have her words.
Thank you, Wei Xiong. Actually following the completion of the Wanda Hotels & Resorts acquisition, the integration has progressed smoothly and is better than our expectations. We have achieved rapid organizational alignment, revitalized organization and teams, and further refined the strategic direction of the business. Overall, the post-acquisition integration has been very successful. On the synergy front, we are beginning to see encouraging early results. The addition of Wanda's upscale and luxury brand has enhanced our overall brand portfolio and strengthened our positioning in the middle to high-end segment of our hotel management business. At the same time, the integration has enabled better resource sharing across business development, operations and membership, which is gradually improving operational efficiency. It also further reinforces Tongcheng's presence within the accommodation supply chain. From the other perspective, Tongcheng also empowers Wanda Hotels & Resorts through our technology capabilities.
By providing standardized system tools and digital solutions, we help improve internal operational efficiency while reducing research and development efforts and lowering system maintenance and third-party service costs. From a financial perspective, the acquisition has already delivered a positive contribution at the operational level as Wanda Hotels & Resorts is an established hotel management company with a solid operating track record.
The consolidation has enhanced our revenue scale, optimized the business mix, and strengthened the earnings visibility of the segment. As we move forward, our development strategy will remain disciplined with a focus on balancing scale expansion with operational efficiency and healthy returns, ensuring sustainable and high quality growth of the business segment. With the continued expansion of scale and improving operational efficiency, together with the contribution from Wanda Hotels & Resorts, we expect the hotel management segment to maintain strong revenue growth with a further improvement in profitability from 2026 onwards.
Thank you.
Thank you. We will now take our next question from the line of Brian Gong of Citi. Please ask your question, Brian. Your line is now open.
Thanks very much for taking my question. Two questions here. First is, how is the travel consumption trend for the industry in the first quarter, considering recovery on hotel ADR? We still expect 10%-level room nights growth this year. Second question is that recently TCOM has been under government's investigation. Do you think this will impact their cooperation with us and their stakeholding on us? TCOM is adjusting their hotel business to comply with government's requirement. How will this impact the industry and us? Thank you.
Okay. Thank you for the questions, Brian. In terms of the first quarter's performance and also the industry outlook, actually during the Chinese New Year holiday, as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, China's travel market continued to demonstrate a very solid demand. According to the Ministry of Transport, national passenger throughput during the nine-day Chinese New Year holiday reached a throughput record, 8.2% year-over-year growth during the holiday, with decent growth for both long-haul and short-haul travel. Passenger throughput of railway and airline increased by around 10% and 7% year-over-year, respectively. Meanwhile, according to the industry statistics, overall hotel ADR increased during the Chinese New Year holiday among all segments.
With demand for family reunions concentrated in the pre-holiday period, we observed a pickup in passenger throughput during the latter part of the Chinese New Year holiday this year. In response, we promptly adjusted our operational resources, strengthened supply quality and coordination with our partners, and enhanced the targeted marketing efforts to capture the rebound in travel demand and improve conversion efficiency in the latter part of the Chinese New Year holiday. We continued to outperform the industry in the first quarter and also during the nine-day Chinese New Year holiday, with especially strong momentum in our accommodation business. Average daily room nights sold increased by 30%. Specifically, room night growth for three-star and above hotels significantly outpaced that of lower tier properties.
This reflects our ability to respond effectively to changing user preferences as more travelers place greater emphasis on higher quality accommodation experiences. As a result, our hotel ADR in quarter one maintained a positive trend during the period and once again exceeded the industry average. For transportation business, we continue to focus on improving monetization while average daily air ticket volume was broadly in line with the overall market. For the room night growth in the full year of 2026, actually, I cannot provide a very clear numbers here because of the short booking window. As we mentioned, looking into 2026, we continue to view the long-term fundamentals of China's travel market positively. Consumer preferences are increasingly shifting toward experiential arranged spending, with growing interest in event-driven and themed travel, such as concerts, exhibitions, and outdoor activities.
At the same time, travel is becoming more integrated into everyday lifestyles, supporting more frequent and diversified travel demand. In addition, supportive policy measures aimed at expanding domestic consumptions and promoting high-quality tourism development provide a favorable backdrop for the whole industry. Also for the second question about the investigation, actually, we don't monitor any change on the cooperation with Trip. Also, we don't monitor any change of the shareholder structures or potential change of the shareholder structures. Currently, as I mentioned in previous question, we're just focusing on our own execution and long-term competitiveness improvement. Actually our strategy remains very consistent, focusing on enhancing our user value, improve the ARPU, strengthening our product and service capabilities and deepening cooperation with our suppliers through a mutual beneficial approach.
At the same time, we will continue to take a disciplined and prudent approach while monitoring the industry regulatory developments. Thank you for the question.
Yes. We will now take our next question from Yang Liu of Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question, Yang. Your line is now open.
Yes, thanks for the opportunity. I have two questions. The first one is also related with AI. Could management elaborate more about the Deep Trip's contribution to the business, especially on the overall business volume and also cross-selling side? My second question is regarding the marketing intensity this year, given the geopolitical risks in both China and Japan, and also Middle East this year. Will management adjust the outbound business marketing intensity? Yeah, that is my second question. Thank you.
Thank you. The first question concerning our Deep Trip. As I mentioned, Deep Trip is our AI-driven travel planner that uses reasoning power of DeepSeek and our platform supply chain advantages to create personalized travel itineraries. Since launch, Deep Trip has served about 7 million users, with orders placed through the platform steadily increasing over the past few months. Over the past quarters, we continued to enhance Deep Trip with the goal of strengthening user awareness and building long-term trust. We have been continuously upgrading its user-facing capabilities to support more comprehensive travel planning. Key enhancements include the integration of train transfer data to enable seamless multimodal itineraries. The addition of social sharing features to improve engagement and introduction of a map tool in the fourth quarter to provide a more intuitive visualization of travel plans.
In addition, Deep Trip has been embedded into our editing service to help users address pre-booking inquiries and identifying more competitive fare options, delivering a more seamless booking experience. Beyond user-facing applications, we have also extended Deep Trip into different business scenarios to improve operational efficiency. We integrate customer service agent capabilities into Deep Trip to respond to customer inquiries directly within Deep Trip and guide users to human support when needed. For corporate clients, we pilot a travel booking suggesting tool customized according to travel profiles, business travel policies, and past bookings. In the future, Deep Trip will continue to serve as a platform for understanding and addressing users' comprehensive travel needs across diverse scenarios. We will further leverage our AI capabilities across various business segments to provide valuable solutions to users, thereby strengthening our competitive advantages.
Additionally, we have begun the cooperation with Yuanbao to acquire more traffic. We're also actively exploring potential collaborations with our AI agent platform to further broaden our reach and engagement opportunities. I will remain committed to leading AI innovation, continuously increasing the investments in this area and delivering cutting-edge user-focused features to elevate our user travel experience. In terms of the current circumstance of outbound business, you know, we have seen considerable growth potential in the outbound tourism market. As travel habits evolve, more travelers are eager to explore international destinations. The number of outbound tourists is still significantly lower than the domestic travelers, revealing a substantial opportunities for expansion in this area. At present, we believe that there are only a limited number of Chinese OTA players have the capabilities and the resources to actively drive outbound business.
The situation placed us in a favorable positioning, facing relatively low competitive pressure and allowing us to fully capitalize on the growth potential of the market. Again, our strategy and confidence are anchored in the long-term growth prospects of China's outbound industry and our competitive advantages. While we remain vigilant in our short-term tactics in response to the market conditions, I think our business momentum remains unaffected. Thank you.
Thank you. In the interest of time, we will take our last question from Thomas Chong of Jefferies. Please ask your question, Thomas. Your line is now open.
Hi, good evening. Thanks management for taking my questions and congratulations on the solid set of results. My first question is about our future growth driver and the take rate trend for accommodation and transportation. My second question is relating to margin. How should we think about the 2026 margin trend as well as the margin driver in the future? Thank you.
Thanks for the question, Thomas. For growth, actually, the company's focus remains on achieving a high quality growth in 2026 by balancing scale expansion with operating efficiency improvements, while continuously enhancing our user value and ARPU. In the first quarter and also the second quarter, we will prioritize healthy and sustainable growth across our core OTA segments, supported by improved operational efficiency and more refined resource allocation. At the same time, we will continue to strengthen our competitiveness, positioning, and capture growth opportunity to further expand our market presence. Within the core OTA business, we anticipate that the accommodation business will grow faster than transportation business through the whole year. For accommodation business, we believe that the growth will be driven by volume expansion and ADR improvement, as we mentioned a lot of times.
Our volume is expected to continue outpacing the market growth, while our ADR will benefit from the ongoing upgrade in hotel star mix, driven by shifts in user preference. We think it's enough to support a very nicely growth for accommodation business by these two reasons. This year, in terms of the take rate of the accommodation, we expect that the take rate may be stable year-over-year as 2025. For transportation business, volume growth will be in line with the market and still one of the reasons of the revenue growth for transportation. While our take rate improvement, driven by cross-sell and VAS, will continue to contribute to the revenue growth of the transportation segment.
Also, we expect that the hypergrowth for other revenue mainly due to our data consolidation since the middle of October last year, and the hypergrowth of our original hotel management and PMS business and also our Black Whale business, the membership business. In terms of the profitability, as we promised, the margin improvement is one of the very important strategic priorities for the company. For one, for our core OTA business, the improvements in operational efficiency will continue to be an important driver of profitability over time. In particular, we are leveraging AI technologies to enhance both customer service automation and R&D efficiency, which help improve staff productivity and overall operating efficiencies.
For the development of our hotel management business, including eLong hotel technology platform and Wanda Hotels & Resorts, we will continue to support its high-quality expansion with a near-term focus on scaling the business, while the return profile is expected to improve progressively as the business matures. For our international business, we will maintain a very prudent approach as we continue to build the foundation for future growth and cultivate the company's next growth engine over the coming years. Last, in terms of the marketing investment, our marketing dollars may fluctuate slightly depending on market opportunities. For example, in quarter four last year and quarter one this year, we identified strong early booking demand for the nine-day Chinese New Year holiday period, and therefore increased our marketing investments to capture early demand and gain market share.
At the same time, we will continue to strengthen ROI management across different marketing channels. Overall, we will continue to balance growth opportunities with disciplined cost management while focusing on improving operational efficiency across the business and improve our margins. Thank you.
Thank you. That's the end of the question and answer session. Thank you very much for all your questions. I'll now like to turn the conference back to Ms. Kylie Yeung for closing comments.
Thank you. We're 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.
For your participation in today's conference, this does conclude the program. You may now disconnect your line.