Right, good afternoon everybody. Welcome, thank you for joining us for our Capital Markets Day. I'm Gary Morrison, I'm CEO of Hostelworld. I joined in late 2018, and I'm joined by Caroline Sherry, our CFO, and Chris Berridge, our CTO. I'm going to take the disclaimers as read and move on to what we are going to be talking about this afternoon. We're going to spend about an hour and a half, and we're going to talk about five things. I'm going to start with sort of an executive summary overview. That'll take about 15 minutes. Then I'm going to start talking about the insights. The insights are basically everything that we've learned for the last three years that has informed our growth strategy going forward. The growth strategy section is divided into three parts.
I'll take the first part where we'll be talking about all of the things that we will do to strengthen our core business, create new capabilities. Those capabilities will enable us to attack a larger addressable market, and I'm going to ask Chris to talk about some of the bigger platform things that we're doing there. The third piece is Caroline will then talk about some opportunities that we've got to accelerate that growth into that larger addressable market using M&A. Caroline will stay on, we'll talk about the outlook, we'll look at some of the numbers, what we're expecting over the coming years. I'll come back, do a quick summary, and then we have half-hour Q&A. Thinking about the overview, this is all about ambition. We have a very ambitious vision for our company over the next 10 years.
We aim to be the world's leading social travel platform, and today we will be talking about the steps we are taking over the next three years to achieve that vision. Really, when we think about it, how we intend to do that is empowering a global community of travelers to connect, explore, and create unforgettable memories. We think this is obviously a very compelling vision for our customers, for our partners, for our employees, but we also think it is an incredibly compelling proposition for our shareholders. There are really five reasons for that. The first is this is a really highly differentiated travel product in the travel arena. We have first mover advantage successfully delivering against this unmet need, which is helping travelers find other travelers to hang out with. We have growing traction.
If I look at the stats since we launched in Q2 2022, moving into Q1 2025, we've now launched with 100,000 members in Q2 2022. We're now at 2.6 million members. We've seen phenomenal bookings growth from social members, Q1 2023 to Q2 2025, CAGR, 47%. Even faster growth in the number of messages that have been sent. The fact that the messages are growing even faster is really driven by the product innovation and the network effects that you get with social networks. Now, this business model comes along with really attractive unit economics. If you think about our social members, a social member is somebody who signs up to the network and makes a booking. If I look over the first 91 days, we consistently see since we've launched, they have twice the booking frequency, and they're three times more likely to use the app.
We are attracting the more valuable customers into our network. This app-centric network sits across a platform which is scalable and asset-light, and that is driving free cash flow growth. Today's story is not just about hustling. It is about ambition. It is about growing into a much larger addressable market. We already participate in the hustling category, which is essentially youth travelers. Our strategy is all about building out the travel product portfolio for the other travel products that we know youth travelers buy. Probably most importantly, we see that this business model has a compounding competitive moat. Because like any other social network, the more people that use it, the more valuable it becomes, the more data you create, the more proprietary data that you use to be able to train AI models to create new features, which brings more people into the network.
We already have a very successful network that's working. We talked about this. I now want to move on to two pieces, really. Why do we think that, why do we have confidence in the fact that this is such a great investment proposition? It's really founded in two parts. Let's look at what we've achieved since the last Capital Markets Day in November 2022. We've successfully built the world's first social travel network. There isn't another social travel network. It has 2.6 million members. We're operating that network in 3,000 cities. We have more than 10 million messages that are sent. It's very highly scalable.
Actually, one of the things we're really proud about is the fact that when somebody makes a booking, they use the social network, increasingly a greater proportion of those customers are then picking up their phone and they're going like this, and they're creating a selfie or a reel, and they're posting it to their followers. We couldn't wish for better customer testimonials about the value and the benefits that this network is creating for people. As I said earlier, it's also capturing the most highly valuable customers. First 91 days, these customers have twice the booking frequency. They're three times as likely to use the app. We're seeing a continual shift in our booking mix from web to app. If I look at since the network's launch, the growth rate in app is three times, more than three times the growth rate on web.
As a consequence of having this over an asset-light, highly scalable platform, it's delivering substantial free cash flow. That's because marketing as a percent of net revenue is now at the lower end of the range that I talked about at the last Capital Markets Day, which is 45%-55%. Last year it was 46%. It's across this asset-light, scalable platform, delivers great cash conversion. Since we've launched, we've generated EUR 21.4 million in adjusted free cash flow. What's that allowed us to do is to basically repay all of our legacy COVID debts and move our balance sheet into net cash positive. The other reason that we are very, very confident in this being a great investment proposition is we can see a clear path to leveraging those cash flows to fuel our future expansion and also start enhancing our shareholder returns.
That path is pretty much built on two blocks. Block number one, it's strengthening our core hostel business and creating new capabilities. We will continue expanding our hostel inventory. We'll enhance the social network. There's a lot of interesting things that we're going to be doing there in terms of leveraging AI, which we'll come on to. We're also going to be building a new social channel. As I talked about earlier, we have a growing army of brand advocates, people who are using the network. They're meeting new people. They're posting content. Today I'll be talking about how we intend to leverage that to create a new social channel, which will result in lower customer acquisition cost. We're also going to be talking about the things that we are building for our hostel partners, which will increase our marketplace commissions, our monetization.
Now, if I take a step back for a second, we already participate in the youth traveler market. We are building capabilities to be able to compete more successfully, and we intend to increase the travel products that we serve that existing customer base. We aim to do that in two ways. First, we will look at partnerships to get those products onto our platform, but we will also look at M&A possibilities, which we think will accelerate that growth. Secondly, given the network is getting larger and larger, we have more products on the network, we are going to be looking at new ways of monetizing that social network. Chris is going to talk about that later. The combination of these two things is going to yield stronger cash flow growth in the future.
With a strong balance sheet and a confidence in our plan, that means that we can start returning capital to shareholders. We are going to do that in two ways, both through dividends and also through share buybacks. If I draw this all together in terms of our capital allocation framework, you should expect us to see investing in our core business, investing to grow, to be able to create the wider travel product range to address that larger addressable market. You should also see us reinstate the progressive dividend. We are going to start that at 20% of profit after tax. The first interim payment will be made in September. We are also then going to pursue targeted M&A where we can see opportunities to increase that travel product range and accelerate growth.
Caroline will talk about the selection criteria and how exactly we're thinking about M&A. Finally, we will introduce a share buyback program. We see that as a means of returning excess cash to shareholders, taking into account other investment opportunities that we see in front of us, and also, of course, subject to prevailing market conditions. I am now going to start talking about what is it that we've learned over the last three years, which is the foundation for our future growth strategy. I thought it would be fun to start with a small video, if I may, from our hostel partners, because I wanted them to provide the perspective of how they see traveler needs evolving over the next few years, what are they seeing, how they perceive our customers, how they think about our social network, and finally, some thoughts on sustainability.
Just bear with me for a few moments.
They're not going to travel solo.
Yeah, just make traveling a lot easier for them.
Of course, we prefer hostel clients.
What international travelers as well as Brazilian travelers are seeking as of now is having exactly what we try to cater to them. Knowing people, having experiences, and meaningful experiences.
We have a very big hostel. We want hostel guests to be here and to have the experience they are looking for, because this kind of guests, they are looking more for experience than accommodation.
People are nowadays not seeking anymore only a room, only a place to stay. They're looking for a destination.
Of course, we prefer hostel clients. They want to join our activities. They want to hang out in a hostel more. They are looking to make friends in the hostel. This is what we want our clients to be like.
[Foreign language] Hostelworld [Foreign language] Hostelworld [Foreign language] .
[Foreign language] Hostelworld [Foreign language] Hostelworld.
When you want to book a place, then you can see the nationalities of the people or how many people are in the hostel, and that helps a lot. People are talking about it a lot, that it brings them the feeling that, okay, something is going on there. I'm not alone. I'm part of something. Also, the chat that you have there helps people to get to know each other or feeling this community atmosphere even before they come. They already talk with each other. Hey, how can you get there? Let's go there together. Or maybe planning a trip from there to a different place. All those things are completely related to what we do in the hostel. It helps us a big time, yeah.
You know, it's all about bringing backpackers together, about connecting solo travelers with other backpackers. What you guys have done with the inclusions of the Linkups and the chats on your app, we've seen great success with backpackers in Manila. They chat on the app and they meet in the bar. We got the walking tour. We've got the pub crawl. People chat about that in the group chat and then they attend together.
We love the fact that Linkups is not just for our hostel guests. We saw that so many guests from other properties came to join our activities, our events, because with Linkups, it's a way to reach more people. It's not just for our guests. It's for Venice guests.
They can write in the group chat and meet other people before they arrive. It just takes away that anxiety and that stress that can sometimes partner with traveling and hopefully make people feel a little bit more confident in choosing to book with Hostelworld, choosing to stay with Mad Monkey, and yeah, just make traveling a lot easier for them.
is a transition in the way that new generations look at holidays and look at accommodation in general. I think that Hostelworld, by providing all of these tools, is trying to play a bit ahead of the times and get ready for what is coming.
I think the trend is going to sustainability because I think people are concerned about the climate change more and its effect to many people in the world. It's very good that Hostelworld focuses on the sustainability. I like when you have the level one and level two. We need to submit all documents. It's very helpful compared to other platforms. It's just the hostel owner just says, "Yes, yes, yes, yes," and they get the level five. In Hostelworld, very strict. I like it.
Sustainability is very important for us. The backpackers care more about this now. As a business, we ensure that as many of our properties as possible are getting up to the level three Hostelworld sustainability ladder. We love working with you guys and give all of these travelers great long-lasting memories. Yeah, it's fantastic what we all do.
I hope you like that. It always gives us wonderful comfort when we're talking to our hostel partners like that every day and reinforcing our own perceptions about what our social network is doing for travelers and indeed doing for them. It's equally important. Let's hear from our customers. The punchline, social customers love our platform. When you look at the stats here, we have on the left-hand side, you have a group of what I would argue are fairly representative online travel companies. If you look at our Trustpilot scores compared to their scores, I mean, they are just outstanding. If you look at the app stores, the column in the middle there, that's the iOS store, or if you look at the Android Play Store, we have some of the highest app review scores delivered by our customers.
I think the other thing that really, really shines out to us is the NPS score. NPS, Net Promoter Score. You ask your customers a question, would they recommend your services to their friends and family? You look at the proportion of people who are advocates versus other people who are not advocates. You take one minus the other, and that gets you your NPS score. I can tell you from my long years in the travel industry, that is probably the highest score that I've ever seen. We know in a very data-driven way that our customers really love our platform. Not only do they love our platform, they are our best brand advocates.
As I mentioned before, we see people, they book on the platform, they then sign up, they use the network, and then a growing proportion of them are then posting, "Hey, I've met these great people on the beach. We're going for a barbecue, or we're going to this nightclub, or we're going," whatever it is, the activity that they're doing. They are posting it to their followers. A lot of the time, they talk about us as part of that post, #Hostelworld or #MeetTheWorld. From our perspective, you could not wish for authentic customer testimonials like this. Guess exactly what they are. Since we have launched the network, we have 660,000 of these mentions. In three years, 660,000 mentions on Instagram.
Without any stimulation on our own part, we are getting 3,000 new pieces of content that are being generated every month. Of course, this also helps to build our own followers. Later on, we'll be talking about how we can harness this, how we believe that we can harness this for a brand new channel. They're not just our best brand advocates. They are also our most valuable customers. On the left-hand side, you can see the proportion of bookings that are made by social members over time. You can now see that's now up to 84% in Q1 2025. As I've mentioned, throughout every single quarter since we have launched, we continue to run this analysis.
We look at the new customers that we've generated, those who have opted into the network, it's not default out, opted into the network, and we just observe the behavior. We consistently see they are more valuable. The social network is attracting these customers into our OTA platform. Twice the number of bookings compared to non-members in that 91 days and three times more likely to use the app. If you hold that thought in your mind, if you were to look at this on a steady state basis, going all the way back to July 2022 up until current date, we are attracting more of these valuable customers into our platform, which is the purple shaded area on the left-hand side.
We're continuing to see that the social members have a higher booking frequency, remembering that every one of these months, you've got a mix of new customers, there are existing customers, and that's what creates the little bit of volatility. Throughout, ever since launch, we have a consistently higher booking frequency from our social members. You take active customers multiplied by the higher booking frequency, and that's what generates the net bookings growth. That net bookings growth is actually really important because when you think about the growing proportion of social members, they're using the network and they're generating data. They're actually generating prodigious amounts of data. The social network, in terms of its scale and scope, if you want to put numbers around it, that's the unique social members growth. Started at 100,000 in Q2 2022.
It's now up to 2.6 million Q1 2025. If you look at the growth in bookings made by social members as a CAGR from Q1 2023 to Q1 2025, it's up 47%. The numbers that are most important is look at the messaging growth. What that signals, if your messaging growth is far faster than your bookings growth, then that means you're getting compound growth in the activity in the network. That is driven by the continued product innovation that we've put into the platform since we launched. Obviously, just network effects. The bigger it gets, the more powerful it gets. This is unbelievably valuable data. We are generating 2.6 million members, 3,000 cities, more than 10 million messages sent. This is extraordinary. It's our data only. Nobody else has access to it. It's incredibly comprehensive.
We have user identities tied to messages, tied to sentiment, tied to what people are actually doing on the network, who's meeting who, who's going where, and bookings. We have an unrivaled view of traveler intent, which is being updated on a daily basis. Secondary, it's ours. Nobody else has access to it. As a consequence, we're the only one that can train AI models to actually create features on it. I'll be talking about those features shortly. The third one, thinking about what I said at the beginning in terms of the compelling investment proposition, this is the long-term source of that compounding competitive moat because we're harnessing the compounding effect of the network with data that only we have to train AI models. We talked about the booking side. Social members, they create far more bookings. They create trips.
That creates more social network interactions, creates data, creates our vantage. Now I'm going to talk about the app side of the equation. As you may remember, when we launched the network, we only implemented the network on iOS and Android, only on mobile native app, which was a conscious decision to shift more of our booking mix over to the app. If you look at that, and I know you'll have seen in half-yearly and full-yearly results, it's the same slide, but the growth in app bookings Q1 2023 to Q1 2025 is up 18%. It is much faster than our global booking growth. What this has served to do is to put a downward pressure on marketing as a percent of net revenue.
In FY 2022, it is 58%, then 50%, 46% at the low end of that capital markets range that I talked about in November 2022, which is 45%-50%. This is what is generating our net margin growth. That net margin growth is now going over an asset-light scalable network. Over the last couple of years, OpEx has not really risen very much. That has generated the adjusted free cash flow growth. That EUR 21.4 million is what we use to retire all of our legacy debts, which now gets us into a EUR 2 million net cash position. If I were to summarize before I go on to this section, just to summarize the insights and the way we see it, social members love the platform. When they use the network, they generate lots of authentic customer testimonials. They also have the highest booking frequencies.
Those booking frequencies generate more usage of the network, generates data. That data is our long-term competitive moat. They also use the app more frequently than non-social members. That creates the downward pressure on marketing as a percent of net revenue. That creates net margin growth. Now, I took my net margin growth. That's over an asset-light scalable platform. That generates free cash flow growth. That's got us to net cash positive. Now's the time to invest. I'm now going to talk about what that investment looks like. Before I do so, again, I'm going to use an opportunity of a small demo, or actually a small video, to be able to show you what our products actually look and feel like because screenshots are a bit boring.
If you'll just bear with me for a few minutes, you'll see each of the product features that we have launched to date, and it'll give you a bit of a feel of some of the things that I'll be talking about.
Hostelworld is a great resource.
[Foreign language] Hostelworld.
Yes, Hostelworld literally became my Bible. I was obsessed.
Number one site is Hostelworld.
Everything you saw is live. We'll be talking about each one of them now because they're pretty cool. Let me talk about what we're going to do to expand our presence and grow share in our existing hostel category. It really boils down to four things. One, we're going to continue to expand our existing hostel inventory. Two, we're going to increase marketplace monetization.
What I mean by that is, in response to what our hostel partners are telling us about how they want to merchandise their inventory in their platform, we are giving them more tools to be able to price in a far more granular way. Also, if at certain points in time, certain hostels want to tap into certain pools of demand, they can pay more in order to get that visibility. Third, we'll be talking about enhancing the social network. We'll be talking about how we're extending the network for new use cases. I'll go into a little bit more detail about how some of those AI-powered features that we just looked at. Finally, obviously, more features on the network, more inventory to sell. That means we're going to be delighting more people.
We want to harness that user-generated content and build a new social media flywheel to be able to capitalize on that. If I start with expanding our directly contracted hostel inventory, in large part, this is a continuation of the things that we've been doing over the last three years. We're actually going to start increasing our local presence in some of the fastest-growing low-cost destinations. That would be places in Latin America like Brazil, in Asia, both the Southeast Asia Peninsula, where we've owned a small office in Thailand, in Japan. We're also going to continue to streamline our property sign-up process.
We have already made quite a lot of effort and quite a lot of progress over the last 12 months and just continuing to make it easier and easier for hostels to be able to provide their content, their pictures, their videos, and so on and so forth, to be able to start merchandising their content on our platform as quickly as possible. We are also going to increase the range of supported channel managers. Not just in the hosteling industry, but in the hotel industry more broadly, these properties use a piece of technology, channel manager, which enables them to connect to online booking platforms like ourselves. We just want to increase the number that we support. If somebody has already got an existing channel manager, they can connect directly to our network. We are going to continue investing in Linkups, which is that scrunch of screenshot.
You would have seen it in the video. This actually becomes really important when we think about expanding into that larger addressable market. We will also be talking about staircase to sustainability. We will up the investment in our B2B marketing programs. Typically, every week, we would get at least 100 inbound leads from hostels that want to list on our platform. Over the years, we've had a program of either hostel conferences, webinars, outbound sales that are generating these leads. Overall, we aim to get market coverage up to north of 80% by 2027. You might imagine right here, right now, we actually have all of the chains connected to our platform. The people that we do not have, 80% of the hosteling industry is single-owner-operated hostels. As a consequence of that, we are sort of now chasing a very long tail of very small properties.
As a consequence, because there is a continued churn in the industry, new hostels come in, old hostels leave, it just becomes a game of inches. We managed to move from 74 to 77. We're hoping to get it north of 88. It's just a continuous process. Alongside those efforts, we're also going to focus on providing hostels with more flexible tools to manage their inventory on our platform and also manage their visibility. In doing so, we expect that this will serve the purpose of increasing our overall commission rate. More specifically, when you look at those platform enhancements, it's really enhancing our rates and availability tools to make them more granular.
You can think about very surgically saying, "Well, if these are the circumstances, I want this price to show, but otherwise, I want this price to show." In that sense, they're managing their own yield. Last week, after months of development, we launched a brand new hostel ranking system. Really now, we're in the process of scaling it. It's now at 50/50. We'll scale it more throughout the rest of this year and indeed push for wider adoption as we get into 2026 and 2027. The key components of this hostel ranking system, you're really trying to balance three things. The first is, obviously, you want to make sure that you're still showing the best list of hostels, all other things being equal, in response to somebody tapping a search query.
You want to leverage your user conversion over a period of time to understand what that looks like. Secondarily, you want to incentivize the right behaviors. All other things equal, you want to reward hostels who are consistently giving you the best rates and availability versus what they give other OTAs. The new part is looking and providing the ability for a hostel who says, "Well, my occupancy is down next week," or "My occupancy is down next month," giving them an ability to be able to push their commission rate up to get a little bit more visibility. The key thing is the other two items that I have talked about earlier. I am fully aware when we get to Q&A, everybody is going to say, "Is this ELEVATE all over again?" The answer is ELEVATE was just the third thing. That is all it did.
If you were a hostel and you wanted more visibility, you just put your commission rate up. The problem is it affected the first two. Conversion rate would go down in the long term, and also you'd stop incentivizing the right behaviors. This isn't ELEVATE version two. This is a brand new platform. Let's move on to social network. Let's take a step backwards for a second. Recalling our vision, we want to be the world's largest social travel platform. How we think we are going to be able to achieve that is empowering a global community of travelers to connect, explore, and create unforgettable memories. The piece I'm focusing here is the connect. When you look around the web, you will see a lot of posts that look a lot like this.
Shelly is just sending a post out on her Facebook profile saying, "Hey, I've wanted to go to Peru for such a long time. Would love to make it reality this year. And unfortunately, a lot of the group tours are out of my budget. So I'm looking for a bunch of girls to do this with." Whether you look in Facebook, whether you look in TikTok, whether you look on Instagram, whether you look on Reddit, you will see a lot of content that looks like this. There are a couple of other sort of secular or structural trends, I would say. There is the rise of single-person households. If you look at that, for example, in Stockholm, 60% of all households are only occupied by one person. If you look at London, I think it's north of 50%.
As a society, more people are solo, and sometimes solo by circumstance, not by design. There is a growing trend towards solo travel, but a lot of the time, people are saying, "Well, I haven't quite got the confidence to do it on my own. I'd love to find somebody else to do it with." When you look at our platform, our social network actually comes into being, operates once you've made a booking. Currently, there is no global platform which enables people effectively who have this need to find each other. I was going to do a drum roll now, but that would be a bit naff. I'll just say until now. Last week, we launched a new global trip marketplace. I'll just explain a little bit about how this works. It was actually in the video as well.
I, as a traveler, I don't need to be a Hostelworld customer. I, as a traveler, can download the Hostelworld app. I have to make a social profile, and then I can fill out, let's call it a card. That card would have where I'm planning on going, what kind of people I would like to meet. I can put videos up there. I can put photos up there. I can put dates up there. Crucially, at the bottom of every card, there is its own miniature social network. You can either message the person directly, or you can enter in a group chat where a lot of people are saying, Shelly's going to Morocco in November. That'll be kind of cool. Now, the value for users when we think about this, this is a purpose-built solution for what is a global need.
Moreover, by building it on our existing social network, we already have 2.6 million members underneath it. It instantly has scale. The second thing is it's verified user identities. In terms of thinking, "Well, who might I be going on vacation with?" we build trust through that mandatory social profile completion. In the next quarter, meaning Q3, we are now going to put that content all into our AI platform as well. There are two reasons to do that. One, it's to help with discovery. You could either search through thousands and thousands of cards, or you could actually use the AI to surface the ones that might be most interesting to you based on what other people have searched for and what they've interacted with.
More importantly, if I'm Sally and I've put my, "Hey, I want to go horseback riding in Morocco in November," if Jill were to post a similar card, I would have no way of finding it. Now I can use the power of the AI platform to start creating those matches and just send a push notification. We anticipate that this is going to be a really, really interesting product for our customers. We only launched it on Thursday. Already, we can see hundreds of travel cards that have been created. Crucially, and I'm not going to give you the statistic, we have been amazed by the response rate, meaning the number of people who have already responded to these cards that have been posted. That is very indicative to us that there will be huge engagement around this product.
Now, why are we excited about it? If you think about a marketing funnel, you have research, consideration, then becomes booking. We have created a product that now works higher up the funnel. We are able to deliver value earlier in the research and booking phase before you have even made a booking. What that means is because you need to create a social profile, you need to download the app, we expect to see more app downloads, a lot of them, and bring these people into the social network. That will increase the propensity that they will make their first booking with us on the app. As I mentioned earlier, we will be putting all of this data into our AI platform. It is all our data. We are the only ones who can train models on it.
I think in the longer term, read the next 6 to 12 months, this notion of creating a product where finding somebody else to do it with is a prerequisite to booking is also a very interesting scalable merchandising platform for different types of products, perhaps subscription products. More to come on that topic. Now, we talked about the upper funnel pre-booking network. We now look at what we're thinking about doing with AI with our existing network, which is post-booking. As I mentioned earlier, about 12 months ago, when we were looking at the size of this data set that was growing and growing and growing, and if you sort of inspected one city chat, you could see, "Oh, that's really interesting. That Gaudi walking tour is getting a lot of traction.
A lot of people are doing that. You could see people who were meeting other people, but there was a huge amount of unstructured data. There actually was not a technology platform out there that we could think of about how to make meaning out of this. We just knew we had an awful lot of proprietary data. The advent of AI comes along. AI is fabulous for creating meaning out of tons of unstructured data. You can give it a book and say, "Write me a full-page summary." We are harnessing these technologies because they are now available to us. That allows us to do some pretty cool things.
When we think about matching people, people who might like to hang out and do stuff together, we can recommend traveler to traveler and traveler to group recommendations just by looking at millions and millions of connections and conversations that have been made in the network by understanding what the user profiles are and what precisely they talked about. We can also think about experience recommendations because, obviously, the network is there to help people facilitate to make plans and do stuff. When we can see that people are consistently doing the same things every single week, we can say, "Oh, that's interesting." If you go to Bangkok, everybody goes to the Sticky Waterfalls. That becomes a different kind of evergreen recommendation versus the next point, which is context-aware, which is understanding what are people going to do tonight.
You can, again, look at that content and infer, "Is this something that people are planning on doing this evening? Is it tomorrow? Or is it evergreen?" Finally, from our core business monetization perspective, we are now building that 360-degree view of traveler intent. Of course, this is what is going to be able to power our next generation of where would be the right property, the right hostel for you based on what kind of person you are, what kind of other people stayed at that hostel, and whether they reviewed it, five stars. There is a tremendous richness of things that we can do. Quite honestly, we are at the beginning of a very exciting journey. We are starting to build data products rather than web products. We have an enormously long runway ahead of us. Why do we do all of this?
Ultimately, the vision is about creating these benefits for travelers. That brings them back to our platform. As I said earlier, we know that satisfied customers, when they have a wonderful experience on our network, they pick up their phone and they create selfies. I should do this now. They create selfies and they go, "Here's a video of me with my friends. Aren't I wonderful? #Hostelworld." This is how we are thinking about it. This is how we are going to power this social media flywheel. If you look on the left-hand side, those gray circles, that's sort of the dynamic that we are seeing today. Every social action, when somebody's made a booking, they use the networks, has the potential to trigger a post with our hashtag on it. Those are the best tests.
They're better than any ad we could ever create because they're authentic. They're made by real customers. We can see that we're getting 3,000 new posts at the moment without doing anything. What we intend to do over the next 6-12 months is amplify it to take a very structured approach to use this content, which is all endorsements of the things that we do. We built a platform which is able to look at all of the new pieces of content, scan them, filter them. For the ones that the algorithm deems are getting traction, automatically send a request to license that content and then repost it on our own account. That is an automated process. What we also want to do is to look at the ones that we're reposting and saying, "Well, that one is working extremely well.
What can we learn about that? Then first, further boost it, then also started working with our influencers. Interesting to note, probably the biggest source of influencers that we're going to find is our own customers. We just have to look in the database and find the ones that are using the network the most. They will be our best influencers and best creators. The combination of all of those things, we believe, is going to amplify our audience engagement awareness. Of course, we intend to tag it and put links in it. Those links will drive us back to the site. This is something that we are starting to invest in. I'm thinking it'll be low single digit of our current spend. It's probably going to be an investment over the next 6-12 months until that flywheel gets going.
In the longer term, these are clearly the channels and the networks where our customers reside and which are going to have more favorable economics than some of the paid channels that we currently use, which is why we're doing it. Thinking about all of the things that we're doing in that core business, I would summarize it as follows. Our objective here, we want to grow that youth traveler customer base. We want them engaging via our apps. There are three ways that we're doing it, just summarizing the things that I've said. One, building market coverage. We'll have more properties. More properties, we'll have more answers for our customers. That will drive active customer growth. On the social network side, we talked about building that upper funnel pre-booking network, which will bring people into the app.
We also talked about what we plan to do with AI with the post-booking network to make it even more useful and delightful for our customers. We are then going to take, hopefully, more and more customers that we are satisfying, posting content, boost it to create a social media flywheel. You should look at these things as, yes, strengthening our position in the core business, but they are also sets of capabilities that we will use to grow into that larger addressable market. I am going to spend only another five minutes before I run out of time. I want to talk about that evolving towards our vision. Just a few slides to orient people on that larger addressable market. This is how I would describe it. Focus on the middle part.
When you look at the youth traveler market and you only look at solo travelers or solo travelers traveling with a friend, so ones and twos, there are a whole range of different activities and travel products that they buy when they go traveling, whether it's for a year out or whether it's for a semester. They may buy more than one. One year, they may buy one. They may buy different the following year. Broadly speaking, these are the chunks of the travel products. We are here, hostel accommodation. We participate in that market already, but just with one product. They also buy other budget accommodation. There are plenty of places in the world where there are no hostels, and we have no answer for them.
There are also plenty of places in the world, if I look at Europe, like Amsterdam, for example. Amsterdam in high season is booked out a couple of months ahead of time. We do not have an answer. If you look at digital nomads ever since COVID, working from anywhere, it is a rising trend. You will see lots of people posting on Facebook saying, "I'm going to be a month in Tuscany. I have a beautiful house. It has a pool. We're going to do yoga in the morning. Does anybody else want to take a room? It's X hundred." There are two which are quite similar. You have the organized trips like the people Kon-Tiki would do or Intrepid or G Adventures, those kind of organized trips. You also have what I would argue is quite a fast-growing segment, which is volunteering cultural immersion.
This is where you are bartering working, and you will get free accommodation and lodging. It is very, very on-trend for 18 to 30-year-olds who are seeking more culturally relevant immersion, like the feeling that they're really getting under the skin of something. Finally, there are things like study abroad or internships. That is the market. If you look on the left, that has been us for 25 years. We were always participated in this market. There are customers of ours who are buying these other products, but we only have one product to sell. Of course, this is where we see our future. That will be the capital markets day in 2028.
As we look at this now, there are three reasons why I think this is really the best opportunity for Hostelworld in terms of expanding its addressable market out of all of the options that we have open to us. First is we already know these customers. They already know us. They already purchase from us, but they do not purchase from us all the time. The second reason is, which is a really important one, we see when we look around the web, these youth travelers who are buying these different products also share a need for connection. I gave three examples here. If you set up ChatGPT or Gemini with the right prompt, you will find billions of them. The bottom one is actually a pretty interesting one where it is an American person. They are studying in Italy, in Rome, I think.
They're on an Erasmus opportunity, but it's summer. The college is shut. The issue is they have no way of meeting other Americans because one of the other things we always see in the social network, the two biggest determinants of people wanting to connect together are age and nationality. If you're wondering why it's the same nationality, it's because you enjoy the same funny things. It's a sense of humor, compatibility. We think that the second reason why this is a really interesting opportunity for us is we can leverage our existing social network capabilities in this broader market to create competitive advantage. We just need to stretch our social network around these travel products. Last but not least, this is a growth market. We worked pretty hard looking at all different data sets that were out there to form a view.
If you were just looking at solo travelers and two travelers, 18 to 30, and these travel products, what's the growth rate look like? The answer is it's about 4% growth on travelers. If you allow a little bit of price inflation on the products, it's about 5%. Three reasons. We already know these customers. Their aim, to a large part, many of them will already be our customers. We just don't have the travel products for them. Secondly, we can create competitive advantage using our social network because they have common social needs. Third, we're tapping into a growth market. I'm going to pause now, and I'll come on for the summary. Chris is going to tell us about some of the great things that we're doing on the platform.
Chris is our CGO in terms of tapping into that larger travel market in terms of how we intend to partner with some segments. He'll also talk about some exciting things that we're thinking about monetizing our social network. Today, that's only monetized through the sale of hostels. Tomorrow, we see some really interesting possibilities with an expanding social network to create new revenue streams. Caroline will come on, and she'll talk about how she thinks that we can accelerate that process with M&A. Chris.
Thanks, Gary. Yes, what I'd like to sort of talk about is a couple of initiatives, our biggest initiatives, you might say, that we've got in terms of product. The first one addresses the, in that stack of different opportunities in the youth travel market, addresses the other budget accommodation, so accommodation that isn't hostels.
We see that accommodation, that size of that market, of being at least three times as big as the hostel market, which effectively makes it a huge opportunity for us. The way we're thinking about the design of the product is we want people to be able to buy that kind of inventory from us in a sort of branded Hostelworld experience. We also want to give them the opportunity to add themselves to our social networks in the same way that people who buy our own inventory does. That is the sort of the design of the product, you might say, that we're going to build or we've started building. The way we're going to do that is with a partnership with a global inventory provider who we've got a revenue share deal on a non-exclusive global basis.
Like I say, the work's begun. This will be live in the last quarter of this year. Next year, we'll be basically scaling it up. The idea, the reason why we like this is we see it like a huge opportunity for customer growth and improving our conversion rates. Thinking about how much inventory is there, how will this appear, just to get our sort of heads around that a little bit, we did a little bit of a simple kind of test simulation. We looked at 750 locations where we have hostels. We know roughly what budget accommodation means in those places because we know the price of hostels. Then we looked, okay, what budget accommodation would be available in those places? We looked one week out for one night.
You can see from the graphs that actually this would expand our range of inventory options available that we could offer quite considerably in those places where we have hostels. As Gary said earlier, actually, there are plenty of places travelers want to travel to where there are no hostels. Adding this kind of other budget inventory would allow us to play in this space of very long tail of places without hostels. We kind of hit two notes there, you might say. We definitely see this as like a major improvement to the platform. I guess we're excited by it for another reason, which is that we see that it creates value for all three stakeholders involved in the picture here. Clearly, the travelers get more inventory options.
They can also, our social network is available to them, but also the social network gets more dense because we get more people in it. There are more people to hang out. Mentioned before in the hostel video, the importance of Linkups, the hostel-organized events. People can join and participate in those events even if they did not stay in a hostel, if they are staying in some other kind of accommodation in the same city. For the hostels, they will get more bookings because we will have people come to us this time around for whom a hostel is not appropriate. We do not have one, for example, there. They will come back a second, third time, and then maybe book a hostel. Also, obviously, for the hostels, the market to which they can sell their Linkups to is bigger.
Of course, we can provide richer insights to them because we know much more about the local accommodation market because we just have more data. For us, of course, we get a much more dense social network, and we get increased revenue from selling more inventory. That is the first initiative we have going this year. It is probably our biggest initiative that will require the most amount of effort. I would like to just sort of put that aside for the moment. Caroline will talk more about other opportunities in the travel space and talk about the social network and opportunities to monetize the social network. Just to give a bit of context on this, we started our social network in 2022. It is going pretty well. I mean, as Gary talked earlier, we have 2.4 million people using it.
We're now in a phase whereby we have this enormously rich data set, and we're using AI to, we're leveraging AI in order to provide really valuable and interesting features around that. That's a big focus for us this year. Now the network's getting to a size and complexity where it gets to be really interesting that we look at monetizing it. That's our goal for this year, is to get going with that and have a pilot for that running by the end of Q4 of this year. Now, there are different ways we can think about how we might monetize this. Other social networks use a number of different methods, approaches. Nearly all of them use some form of advertising or brand partnership. Few of them use some sort of premium subscription model.
For example, Snapchat, Snapchat Plus, you pay GBP 4.50 a month extra, and you get all sorts of features that you did not get in the free version. Some go for some more kind of e-commerce type integration. For example, white label shop where members of the network can sell their wares to other members of the network. We sort of have that in a way already in the sense that we provide a white label site for hostels to sell hostel inventory. Emerging as well are options for data licensing. An example of this is Reddit, for example. They reportedly have a deal for about $60 million a year selling the richness of their data to Google in order to allow Google to train their AI models on that. All these things at this stage are definitely an option for us.
It's all on the table for Hostelworld. This is the year we're going to be experimenting and looking at these things in detail. You might say, why don't we go for advertising, which is the sort of most obvious one, just get going with that? One of the reasons why that might be the least promising in the short term is really scale. Instagram have 2 billion monthly active users. Life360 have 40 million. That's probably the smallest on there. We have 4 million. The scale for that is probably the thing that makes it least attractive in the short term. Obviously, as we grow, that's going to be a more and more attractive way of monetizing the network.
If I'm going to summarize our roadmap for growth, you might say, Gary talked about the first four things here in this chart about how we're improving, and we've already got some of these things underway. For example, the hostel inventory, improving the amount of hostel inventory we have. We're already doing that. Our first version of the marketplace monetization is already live. We have the new AI capabilities. Some are already live. We saw also the pre-booking feature showed earlier. We're going to be rolling more and more out later this year. Of course, getting that social flywheel going has begun, and we'll really start to get traction with that next quarter.
Like I said earlier, the two things that I'm adding here are the budget travel pilot, which starts at the end of the year, scale up next year, and the social monetization, which is the same timescale, starts this year, scales up next year. That's our kind of growth plan. I'd like to hand over to Caroline now, who will talk about M&A.
Thanks very much, Chris. Hello, everyone. Afternoon. Lovely to see you all. I am going to talk about M&A. We see a significant opportunity to expand our total addressable market through selective M&A. If you look at the chart, which you'll have seen earlier on one of Gary's slides, you can see that the independent youth travel market is vast.
Focusing on just solos and groups of two, it comprises approximately 120 million youth travelers and is worth approximately EUR 90 billion. While it is vast, it is very fragmented. There is no lead youth travel brand out there at the moment. The budget accommodation segment of the category is well consolidated. The others are not, however. What we really like about expanding the youth travel market and expanding our brand within it is that there is immense opportunity to acquire these fast-growing marketplaces. These are very attractive for us because they are online marketplaces. They have unique inventory that is additive to our own, that is difficult to replicate. They have products that really resonate with the youth traveler and so are naturally aligned to the needs of our existing customer. They also have strong networks.
As Gary talked about, community is so important to these travelers, and that's something that we know incredibly well. We see a great opportunity for us to integrate these opportunities into our network, to integrate our social network with them, and to, of course, harness cross-selling opportunities and to generate margin efficiencies. There are lots of value creators for Hostelworld if we were to progress with an inorganic growth opportunity. When we look at this and we're thinking about targets, I want to chat about how we assess these targets. We look at targets under four different lenses. First, we look at the target and we think, is this a really great business? Is this an online marketplace that's going to accelerate our own? Have they relevant products? Do they have the unique supply that we're looking for?
As we said, is there a strong community there? The second we are looking at is, does this business align strategically with our own? Do they have the types of customers that we want? Do those customers exhibit the same characteristics and have the same motives as our social network members? Really importantly, do they sell products that are at a higher booking value than what we have currently that will really supplement our average booking value? The third is value creation. Can we add value to this business? Do we have the potential to cross-sell? Can we integrate our social network? We have seen the transformative impact that the social network has had on our business, and we want to replicate that with any online marketplace that we acquire. Of course, cost synergies.
Post-integration, are there meaningful cost synergies that we can generate, either through operating efficiency, headcount, etc.? The fourth and final one is, of course, does this target have attractive financial returns? Is this target generating revenue and EBITDA currently in a sustainable way, having a strong track record? On consolidation, will it be additive to our top line and our bottom line? If we find targets that meet these four criteria, we will finance these targets with debt. We expect to maintain a net debt- to- EBITDA ratio of one times through the cycle. Now it's working. There's always a gremlin somewhere. Turning to outlook and taking together everything that we have gone through for the past hour plus, we do appreciate it. It is a lot.
I want to talk about what this strategy is going to deliver in terms of financial performance and shareholder returns. We expect our growth strategy to yield stronger cash flows through the cycle. We are making a number of investments, but these investments are going to enhance our existing business model. You can think of that in three blocks. The first one is revenue. This is a growth strategy. We are focused on growing our customer numbers. We're also focused on improving our customer retention. We're going to do that by having more travel products to sell. More to sell will generate more revenue. The second block is margin discipline. We have been very successful in our marketing strategy, and we're going to maintain that marketing efficiency with our app-centric social platform.
Everything you have seen since the launch of the last capital markets day is going to continue. We are also going to enhance our marketplace with increased monetization. What Gary and Chris have talked about in terms of looking for further ways to monetize the marketplace, increasing that ABV. The third, then, is, of course, our operating model. Our app-centric social network sits across a scalable asset-light platform that will continue to scale and grow as this strategy delivers. That, of course, is going to continue to deliver strong cash generation, which is going to improve over time. Building on that, our capital allocations are focused on creating long-term value for shareholders through a number of multiple initiatives. We are going to invest to strengthen the core. Gary has talked about this in quite a lot of detail earlier.
We're going to expand into adjacencies. Chris has spoken about how we intend to add additional budget accommodation to our platform through partnerships. Really important because, as we know right now, we have customers who want to book with us, but we do not necessarily have accommodation in that location. We are also going to monetize our social network. Importantly, now with our debt cleared down and being in a net cash position, we are generating strong cash flows. With the conviction and belief and confidence in the strategy, we are really pleased to announce that we are reinstating our progressive dividend, which is 20%-40% of adjusted profit after tax. The fourth incremental M&A, I have just spoken to you about how we see a significant opportunity to expand our total addressable market through inorganic growth and M&A.
Of course, the benefit that that will have on our ABV, our average booking value, as we increase our TAM. Finally, buybacks. Buybacks will form a part of our capital allocation approach, and we will use them appropriately to return value to shareholders. Moving on to what this means from a financial performance perspective, and focusing first on 2025 before I move into 2026 and 2027. What we have said this morning is that the trends we are seeing right now are informing our viewpoint of where we think 2025 will close. The trends that we are seeing to date really relate to ABV performance. There are two main factors that have influenced ABV so far to date. The first is the persistent demand for consumers to book low-cost destinations.
Asia has had a record year last year and the year before and is continuing to grow at a rate of double digits. That persistent shift to low-cost destinations is a headwind in our ABV. The second is in regards to the U.S. dollar. We have seen a reaction and weakening of the U.S. dollar following the introduction of global tariffs. That has been a headwind for us for the past month or so, a headwind that we did not have last year, of course. Collectively, that headwind means that we now expect revenue to be in the mid-single-digit range for this year. In saying that, it is early in the year. We have limited visibility. 60% of our volume comes within seven days, so you can never be too sure.
That is why we are guiding at this level for now as a target or as a trend, I should say. Marketing, we are keeping that marketing range really narrow, 45%-50%. You will recall last year our marketing was at 46%, 50% the year before, as Gary showed in an earlier slide. Keeping our marketing very tight, of course. When we look at adjusted EBITDA margin, we expect this year that we will have an adjusted EBITDA margin of circa 20%. This reflects some investments that we are making this year in our platform capabilities, laying the groundwork to grow and scale this business even further. Cash conversion of a range of 60%-70%, similar level to what we saw last year.
Moving on to 2026 and 2027, we've talked a lot today about our growth strategy, about the investments we're making, but also about the initiatives and how they're going to scale and grow the business. Some of those initiatives we've already launched, some like the trip plans we have just launched last week, and others, significant ones, we're going to launch later on in the year. Collectively, they're going to drive our top-line revenue for us. We are expecting our top-line revenue to grow low double digits in 2026 and 2027. Really important to note, of course, that that target is pre any M&A that we bring onto the platform. That is a target that will come from our core business. Marketing as a percentage of revenue, again, going to keep it tight within that 45%-50% range.
We are not expecting to increase our marketing investments. Adjusted EBITDA margin is going to be greater than 20%. You'll recall last year that margin was 24%. We will easily get back to that level. Cash conversion improves. Really benefiting from the investments we're going to make in 2025, how that's going to scale, grow the business, 2026 and 2027 then benefiting the full year run rate of those investments and our top-line growth. I just want to look at the near term again and 2025 and what you all can expect from a capital allocation perspective. The first one, warehouse payroll taxes. As you are all aware, we have an outstanding liability with the Irish Revenue Commissioners for payroll taxes we warehoused during COVID. We are repaying that in line with the standard terms.
We have a monthly installment that we will repay over a period of three years, 0% interest accruing on that. That facility will be repaid in full by May 2027. As we said, we're going to reinstate progressive dividend, and we plan to pay an interim dividend in the second half of this year. We are very actively assessing incremental M&A opportunities, and we'd hope to have something to say on that later this year. It's very much forming part of our capital allocation plans for 2025. As to the final block, share buybacks. We will use that opportunistically to return excess cash and, sorry, reduce, return excess cash and value to shareholders. That brings me to the last part of my presentation. Thank you.
Great. Two minutes summary. What this represents, it's a very differentiated investment, which is both social and travel.
You can't find that combination. I hope, if nothing else, we have given you the confidence and the excitement about our longer-term vision and what this could mean in terms of a compelling proposition. If I were to make it into the simplest story possible, it's a really highly differentiated customer-led strategy. I remember at the last capital markets day, I talked about this being a very powerful and prevalent need. We have learned over the last three years that it indeed is a very powerful, prevalent need, if nothing else, through the growth in apps, the growth in active customers, the growth in usage, and the growth in people posting on the network. It is anchored in a real solid travel need. We have a really unique social travel proposition that addresses that need. We've built, this isn't pipe dream. We've built this network.
It's working. It has 2.6 million members. It's expanding. It also has a wonderful, powerful business model and strong network effects. The app-centric delivery model is delivering that lower market unit cost, improves the net profit margin, but it also sits atop a very asset-light, scalable platform that drives the free cash flow growth. Today, we've talked about not just about hustling as our future. We've talked a lot about what this bigger addressable market is, which we are going to access both through partnership and through acquisition. We are actively progressing this plan. As Caroline said, there are things that we are already doing. We started doing at the beginning of the year, growing our inventory. Chris and the product team have been working on building that budget accommodation platform, which touches every single part of our stack since the beginning of last year.
We've been doing extensive work in thinking about social monetization. All of these things are in train. Some of them are going to deliver this year, and more of them are going to scale up in 2026. I think both Caroline and I have touched on the capital allocation, but I think crucially, it does provide near-term returns in terms of the reinstatement of the dividend, the first payment in September. I hope you'll agree with me that it really does support the long-term value creation for our shareholders. That concludes our capital market day presentation. Thank you for listening to us. I hope you're as excited about it as we are. We'll open it up for Q&A. I'll invite my two colleagues to come with me. Tim, can you make sure you speak up because I'm deaf as a post?
Hi, everyone. Tim Barrett from Deutsche Numis.
I had a few questions, but starting with two, a 2025 question and then a 2027+ question. On the latter, what you've told us about the inventory plans, the commission plans, that gets us almost to high single digits, yet you're talking about double-digit revenue growth. How do you think about how much more you can go for? I think specifically, there's a very big increase in the total addressable market. How does that flow into revenues? Would be the first question.
Do you want to take it?
I think on the total addressable market and how that flows into revenues, the numbers we've given today doesn't assume any of that coming into our numbers. It excludes M&A. All the numbers today are purely organic from the business, the core business as it stands at the moment.
I do think there is upside opportunity there. Anything that we bring into the platform, of course, is going to be additive to those numbers. That is maybe kind of one point on 2027.
Does it include the alternative accommodation that you have launched, the budget accommodation that you have launched?
We have quite a slow start to that. Normally it builds up. I think a lot of this is new. It is absolutely the right way for us to go. I do think it represents there is probably upward pressure on the numbers. I think there is an element of watching it go live, seeing the appetite.
Maybe I will build on Caroline's point. In Q4, we will launch an end-to-end platform, but it is only going to be available on iOS. It will only be in English.
It'll only be in a few destinations, but it will be absolutely solid. With that, we will then quickly scale as we get into 2026. We'll take iOS, put it on Android, put it on PWA, put it in all destinations, put it across all languages. As I mentioned earlier, it's a very, in order to get that Hostelworld branded platform, so a customer wouldn't know, right the way through the social network, right the way through the shopping pages, through checkout, is a tremendous amount of work. In terms of thinking about 2027, there are a lot of things that we've been talking today about value drivers, whether it's enhancing the social network, the budget accommodation, or monetizing social. From my perspective, we can certainly stand behind and are extremely confident with the double-digit revenue growth.
As we get into the end of this year and get into next year and we're starting to see these things come on stream, we can use sort of a more annual cadence to be able to guide the market. The firm conviction that we have is the numbers that we put down today.
Thank you. The 2025 question is getting a lot of interest, obviously, in the new EBITDA margin guidance. You're still talking about a marketing margin, quite a big range, five percentage points. Can you just talk about the relationship between that and the 20% EBITDA margin target or guidance?
Yeah, I mean, we have kept our marketing range at 45%-50%, as you say. It is broad in that deliberately so to give us opportunity. We've always said this, right?
Gary and I have always said that marketing is a percentage of revenue. It flexes up and down. We will bid up, bid down, but strategically so, where we see an opportunity to acquire more customers, to grab market share. I think it is one where we have been able to operate very effectively and we have been able to grow top and bottom line with marketing at over 50%, then at 50%, then at 46%. I think for us this year, again, kind of leaning into something that Gary has just said, we are trying a lot of new things at the moment. I would not like to constrain the numbers by saying it is only going to be within this certain percentage. What I would say is that a lot of the things we are talking about are additive to ABV and will be margin accretive.
We will fall through to the bottom line. Again, it is a little bit early to say it. Sorry.
I will add two further points. The purpose of the upper funnel, that pre-booking network, obviously we want to draw in more people into our app ecosystem by providing value earlier on. It is applicable to more travelers. Crucially, it is meant to be a new way, a new customer acquisition channel, a very low-cost one, because you are already drawing them through. Other tests that we have done in the past would suggest that that would be the case. There is a product example which has nothing to do with marketing spend, but it serves to increase downward pressure. Building that social flywheel is a little bit different because it does require a kickstart. We are going to be working with our own customers who are creators.
We are going to be boosting the best performing posts. We'll be putting links in those posts. We'll be expecting that to then come round and create new customer growth. That is one of those things. It's a bit like paid search. It takes a while just to get it absolutely right. What I'm saying is maybe that'll be low single digit of current spend. We'll optimize away. In the long term, it's absolutely the right thing for us to do, which is to create a new customer acquisition channel in networks where our customers currently reside. Hence, there is a little, there's a band for a good reason.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you. Dudley Shanley from Goodbody. I have two questions as well.
First of all, you talked about the proprietary data set that you have and using AI to unlock that. Can you talk in a little more detail about what that brings to the hostels that are on your network and how that then feeds into you monetizing it better in the overall ecosystem? The second question is to do with, you mentioned stretching the social network earlier in terms of going into the adjacent products. Can you talk in a little more detail there and what really the social network gives you an advantage in that space?
The strategy where we leverage our own proprietary data in our social network is customer-led. We are aiming to basically draw more people into our network. The value that our partners will see from that is increased bookings.
I am certain that there will be insights that we can give them in terms of looking at how people are using Linkups, for example, having more active customers in a city in Rome, for example, where we can start giving them insights into things that people are thinking about, what they are doing in other places in Rome. Moreover, Linkups itself, each of the Linkups has its own little mini social network. So a customer, a hostel partner can respond to requests, and we can analyze that data and pass that back. To be honest, this is early days. We've got some very strong features that we've actually launched now, which is basically categorizing the chat content for our customers. In the fullness of time, I'm sure we'll find lots of opportunity to be able to create more value for our hostel partners as well.
Your second question was?
It was to do with the social network and what it brings to your ability to move into the adjacent categories.
What we see with a lot of those other social products, or let me give you my own experience, actually. I, as a customer, many years ago, went on a trip in Thailand. Actually, it was to Borneo. I went trekking around Borneo for three weeks, and then I went hosteling. What you generally find is that happens quite a lot. Young travelers will go somewhere international. They'll do one sort of product, then they'll go hosteling, then they'll do another different type of product, and so on. When you bring people into the network, you can start giving visibility to where people will be in the future.
No matter what the product is, even if it's an organized trip or if it's a volunteering trip, if you take a volunteering trip, for example, what do I do at the weekend? What do I do in the evening? Because at the moment, if I'm working on some cattle ranch in the middle of Australia, I have no ability to be able to find other people. Yet, in the local town, there may be people staying in budget accommodation or staying in a hostel. This will provide the ability for those people to hang out in the times when they're not volunteering. I think we're starting to explore exactly how we would implement it, and it might not be exactly the same way for each of the travel types. When we talk about budget accommodation, it's a carbon copy of what we have.
When you talk about some of the other trips, the use cases for how you might use it might be a bit different. Ivor.
Hi, thank you. Ivor Jones from Peel Hunt. You've talked about knowing about travel intent several times. Why isn't flights part of the future TAM for the business?
People don't want to hang out with each other in a plane.
You know where they're going, and you're going to pay away commission to a third-party bed bank. Is it not a logical addition?
It is an excellent question. Typically, the way people buy travel products is they buy flight first, accommodation second, because that's the scarce resource. Are there opportunities to think about a broader transportation type of additives where somebody who's bought a train ticket and is then looking for experiences? Yes, that is a possibility.
What I would say is the strategy that we've outlined today are the things that we think are the most value accretive as fast as possible. It may well be in three years' time, two or three years' time, where we would think about that. Right here, right now, we have an existing customer, many of them who are already buying those products that we can tap into. There is no philosophical reason not to do it. It is just more of an order of operations. It makes more sense to do what we're doing first.
Thank you. When you first started talking about the social network, I think you talked about one of its attractions as being a walled garden. To get in here, you have to book with Hostelworld to be a customer.
Why shouldn't I be worried, as you open up the walled garden, that there will be travelers who enjoy the social interaction and book with Booking.com? Was that not a traction of the original model?
This is a walled garden strategy as it currently stands. I wouldn't want you to walk away with a notion that there is no possibility to provide value unless you book something. If you look at that trip plan network, that's a classic case of we are satisfying a social need for people when they get to a destination. I'm here now. I need to find people to hang out with. What we talked about today is a product that we launched last week, which is for a different social need, which is, I really need to do this. I need somebody else to do it with. You looked at Shelly earlier.
The right answer to your question is, is there another social need which we could tap into, which potentially we could pay, which people would pay for? We believe there may well be. We are conducting lots of research, running tests, looking at technical evaluations for what those features might look like. That would be completely independent of the rest of our network. It would be all one network. If people are willing to pay you for that particular need, the value I see is, you had to create a social profile. You had to download the app. Probabilistically, I have got you further down to the point where you might book with me. If we are delighting you and you want to use the rest of the social features, there is more likelihood that you would use it.
Okay, that is interesting. Thank you.
Can we talk about the M&A strategy? I understand how you discussed you're widening the top of the funnel, and you have an opportunity to convert bookings into the budget accommodation you're going to get via a bed bank. Why isn't that the strategy in relation to other travel products you should sell? Why would you take the risk of paying goodwill for somebody else's business when you could simply click a commission on the way through, through Linkups, perhaps?
I think when we talk about inorganic growth, there's a number of different channels that we're looking at. There's adjacencies and partnerships, which Chris talked about, which that's us integrating with a third party to service inventory that we don't yet have on our platform, which, if you're a customer, I guess, is quite frustrating.
You come onto our booking platform, onto Hostelworld, and you search up a location, and we cannot service that need. The more you have to sell, the more you sell. That is one block that we are looking at. The other are these really quite so interesting, fast-growing online marketplaces. We are not going into the infrastructure business. We are not going into fixed assets. It is all online, which is so synergistic with our business. Some of these platforms have years of track record of sustainable growth. They have really strong customer acquisition numbers. They are profitable. It is additive because they are built on the foundation that we are built on, which is community and connecting people. That is the linchpin of what makes hosteling and what makes us different to Booking.com. That is the essence.
If you can build more and more around that, it compounds your network effect and it scales. That is why we are kind of focused on that channel.
A lot of these, they are all public companies. They are not private equity-backed companies. They are typically owner-operated that have scaled because the owner had a particular passion about something and then over a period of 10, 15 years built up a tremendous unique supply. That is where they get the network effect, and they make a lot of cash. You are trying to look at each of those segments and find, okay, which one is the best, which has unique supply, track record of growth where we can bring it onto the network.
As Caroline said, they have the same social need, fantastic post-merger, post-integration efficiencies that then generate the future value, which is on top of the low double-digit pre-M&A revenue growth rate that we spoke about today.
Thank you. Can I just ask one last one about current trading? The shift in ABV, is that really all or mainly about destination, or is there a mix shift in nights or a shift to lower-cost accommodation in existing destinations?
It is really geo mix, so a continuation of the trend that we saw last year. It is really interesting. We have had 2023, when we look at 2023 over 2022, 2024 over 2023, we have had two years of consecutive ABV inflation. We have been around, well, not Gary and I, but the business has been around for 25 years, and we have never had that.
It is quite exceptional what we're seeing at the moment. We had not anticipated that Asia, after two years of stellar growth, would still be growing double-digit. It is interesting when you look at Europe and kind of the bed prices there now versus pre-pandemic, they're up 40%. Our customers, their value, they're very cost-sensitive. They're looking for fun, adventure, exotic locations, and they are going to not just to Asia, but all the lower-cost destinations.
I might just add one comment to that. In lots of frequent conversations that we've had about this persistent shift to low-cost destinations, one of the questions we've had, or some of the feedback we've had, is, would it cost a lot to get there? It doesn't. Remember, our customers, they're 18 to 30. In the main, they don't have mortgages. They don't have families to support.
They have tons of flexibility. If you go on Google Flights and you want to get a one-way to Bangkok on a Tuesday night, one-stop KLM, EUR 250. It's not an impediment.
It's just an important point for people to realize, I think.
Thank you. Katie.
Thank you. Kate Cousins from Shore Capital. In your guidance, you've got net revenue growth, but you haven't got bookings growth. How should we expect those to pan out versus ABV? Sorry, just sitting a lot while on the ABV. How should that change as we look into those market segments as well?
Yeah, great question. In terms of growth, we are anticipating that most of the growth will come from volume. We're expecting that ABV will grow very modestly. That really is predicated on what we've seen year to date. We talked about geo mix shift.
We've talked about effects and the headwind with weakening dollar. There is, of course, solos. Last year, we saw the impact that more solos on our platform had on our average booking value, but actually got the upside in margin when marketing efficiency improved because they're such advocates of the social network. That's kind of like our hypothesis as we think about the medium term. In terms of what can we expect with the evolution of ABV, all the things we are talked about today are all additive to ABV. That's really important for us and for this business so that we have other things to grow and other ways to monetize the platform and supplement that ABV, that it's not so sensitive to what's happening with bed prices in the hostels.
Got it. Thank you.
On the social cards you spoke about and how it's mandatory to fill them out.
Mandatory to fill out the social profile.
Yes. But do you then verify with Airbnb the way sometimes you can put your passport in to say that person is?
As yet, no. Interestingly, I mean, we are consistently doing research into social needs and so on and so forth. Of course, we have the network, so it's not hard. We can just send out a few messages on the global network and find out more about what people's needs are. Verification is one of the ones that is starting to pop up. Probably next year, you should see us have some verification product.
Okay. Final one from me, if that's okay. Obviously, as you expand into these new market segments, the mix of properties you own are going to change.
At what point does Hostelworld as a brand name become irrelevant?
Great question. Look, we're very live to that. I think one comment and then what we're going to do about it. The comment would be in 2019, probably about 5% of our bookings were non-hostels. It's not as though people don't book hostels now. This was unmanaged inventory. It's not properties that we actively solicited. It's properties that want to list on the platform. Customers do buy it when it is available. On one level, I'm not anticipating that our existing brand will necessarily gate what we plan to do on the budget accommodation level. More broadly, we have been talking internally about how our brand hierarchy needs to evolve. I have nothing to announce today, but it is definitely something that's part of our strategic thinking.
Cool. Thank you.
Anna.
Hello, it's Anna Barnfather from Panmure Liberum. Three questions, please. The first question is just on the commission increasing that you're proposing. Could you just expand a little bit on how you're going to roll that out, how quickly it'll be rolled out, and also where you stand just over 15% versus the competition?
On the rollout plan, we have been building this platform, I'm going to say, since Q4 last year, sort of leveraging a lot of the new services that Chris's team have been building. It actually launched soft launch last week. Now we are in a position where we make it available to our hostel partners, and we educate them that it's there. If you want to use it, here's how you use it. You go into our back-end platform, and this is how you can configure it to make it work.
It is for that reason that we would anticipate this would be a slow, gradual evolution to around 16%. In terms of where we sit versus competition, I would say our base rate at 15% is at parity or lower than anybody else in the market. If I were to look at what our average commission rate would be at 16%, it would still be on a blended basis. It would still be quite a bit lower than our largest competitor.
They opt in.
Oh, 100%. For the features to pay the extra commission.
Okay. Got it. The second point is just on the investments you're making this year. I suppose the way you've articulated it really is the slight margin compression from where you were last year to 20%.
I wonder if you could give it to us in euro millions, or are you thinking about that additional investment in tune with where revenues end up?
Yeah. Good question. Look, not to go over all grounded history, but we have been incredibly disciplined with our operating cost base the past number of years, and OpEx has been flat for three years running. Now, definitely with everything we want to do and the strategy we have launched today, it does necessitate some platform investment, platform capability. That is really resources predominantly. Engineers, tech, product, data, AI, scientists will be brought in, costs will be brought into the business. Circa EUR 3 million increase year- over- year. That is why we are seeing our adjusted EBITDA margin go from 24% last year now to circa 20%.
That plus, of course, the impact that we've seen year to date on the customer shift to low-cost destinations and the headwind that NFX is having on ABV. It is kind of like those two combined. As we think about that going forward into 2026, 2027, we are making the step up of investment this year, and that helps us scale and grow. That OpEx does not grow at the same rate as well. It is building up the teams and the capability this year. 2025's EBITDA margin reflects that. In 2026, 2027, we would see that EBITDA margin grow much, much faster.
Okay. Thank you. My third question, a slightly probably harder one to answer, but you've got 2.6 million members. You mentioned.
Sorry, say again.
You've got your 2.6 million members, which you mentioned are over 3,200 locations, which is sort of less than 1,000 people per location or per city, which I know it's a big number, but on a global scale, it doesn't seem that high if you break it down by that network.
We're proud of it.
No, no, I'm not dismissing, but in terms of the distribution of those members and critical mass or any targets on how many actual members you're aiming for with this social media flywheel, is there a figure or a number?
I'm going to split your question into two parts, which is one thinking about density. How much density do you need to make any network work?
I mean, our network is more like an Uber network, which is like every city you have cars running around, rather than a global network, which is like a Facebook where it just literally expands as the number of users expand. What we find is as long as you have more than, I'm going to say, five or 10 people in a city, you have a network. It's viable. Once you start getting beyond 10 going into 50, you can really see a huge amount of activity. What happens is in Amsterdam or Barcelona in high season, we have several thousand people every day. I think thinking about the growth strategy, it's sort of a twin track. We know we want to have more travel products that our existing customer buy. That gives us the revenue growth.
At the same time, we want to scale the network precisely for the reasons that you're mentioning, which is more cities, more of the time, we get to critical mass, and that delivers more value, people post about it, and the network keeps growing and growing and growing. It is almost like a two-sided network. You have to grow both. The strategy that we've outlined today with the investments that we're making is designed to do exactly that. It is designed to grow the utility and the scope of the social network, but at the same time, rapidly increase the supply side so the network as an overall will grow. Now, turning to the point about social media flywheel, we have more than enough content right now. I do not need more.
If I have 3,000 posts, 3,000 good posts that are authentic, made by customers every month, if only a small proportion of those are good, funny, viral, that's enough. We're already at the point where we can make that social media flywheel work. It's more about optimizing it and learning what kind of posts are people resonating most to. You can expand the duration that a post remains viral and then the reach that it has as well. These are things that we will learn. It's part of our DNA because it's data optimization, and we do that all of the time. I'm just anticipating and putting an envelope around the fact that it'll probably be low double digit of current spend for a bit until we really get this going.
Once we've started learning, we're putting the links back to the site, tracking individuals, tracking pieces of content, it will be a flywheel.
Thanks very much.
Ed.
Hi, Ed Dunne from Goodbody. Thanks for the update on the dividend today, but there's a bit of a missing piece with the buyback. I mean, in terms of scale, how big do we think that's going to be? What would the timing of it be? You said market conditions. How should we think about the relevant market conditions where it would make sense to do that?
Yeah. In terms of the buyback, I suppose when we think about our capital allocation approach, it is comprehensive. It's incorporating quite a number of initiatives, one of which is the buyback.
For us, we're not at this moment in time giving a specific timeframe on it's going to be X amount by when because there is, for us, some latitude as well. There is a lot we're delivering in this strategy. Now, that's not to say we won't take action this year. We will. The slide sets out in 2025, what are the different things we're going to do, one of which is dividends and one of which is looking at share buybacks. Obviously, the share value at the moment, the share price at the moment represents good value for us. We've not been giving very prescriptive in terms of what it's going to be and when it's going to be, but we are seeing it as part of a great way for us to generate shareholder return, good use of excess cash.
We're now finally in the position where we have excess cash. We've cleared down the balance sheet. We've repaired it. We're debt-free. We are generating strong cash flows. Even despite, I suppose, what we've been talking about with what we've seen in trends year to date with ABV, cash remains strong, and we are going to put that cash to work. I think there's lots more to say on it, and it's something that, as a board, we are discussing and that we're live to.
Charles, you had a question?
Hi, Charlie Jobson. Question about the social, sorry, the other budget accommodations rollout and the speed and scale of the rollout. You're entering a segment which you're not the first in the market now. Practically, are you going to be able to get the listings by with boots on the ground?
How are you approaching the individual hotel owners? What's the quality control that you're going to be putting into place? Maybe it's a segment you know less well than you do the hostels. How is it actually practically going to roll out, and what's the incentive of the other budget hotel owners and guest houses and so forth to join you?
When Chris was talking about partnership, we are actually plugging in using an API into a third-party provider. They provide all of the inventory. We do not need any incremental resources in the ground at all. We've talked about budget inventory because actually that's the piece that we are most interested in. Chris, when he did his presentation, sort of tried to give people a feel for how much incremental in locations where there is hostel inventory.
If you look at a destination that we're familiar with, the U.S., there are 300 cities with more than 100,000 people. Yet the number of cities where there are hostels is 17. There is a massive scope for increasing our footprint in the U.S. For us, the price we pay is the revenue commission share. We do not get the full 15%. By the same token, we are able to offer such a vast array of inventory to our customer base that we're really excited, A, for the additional revenue, but B, how much this is going to expand the social network.
Okay. That is an immediate plug-in. Immediate plug-in.
Oh, given about a year's worth of development time to get the plug-in, so it is completely seamless top- to- toe. It is a plug-in.
Okay. Thanks for that. Then a question for Caroline.
In terms of your acquisitions that you're looking at, what is the general size range in terms of pounds that you would expect them to be?
Yeah. Look, what we said is that we're going to maintain our net leverage, so our debt to EBITDA in one-time's range. That's kind of broad rule of thumb what we're working towards. It really depends on the opportunities that are out there in terms of do we go scale up beyond that. That's kind of the comfort level that we have, and that's kind of the rule of thumb we'd like to give everyone today is broadly that's the kind of range we're looking at.
It could be up to GBP 20 million, something like that?
Correct. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. And they're available at that size?
They are.
It's a very, very fragmented space.
Outside of budget accommodation, when you look at those other slicers, it's extremely fragmented.
Yeah. I know, as we were saying, there is no brand leader in that space. We are the brand leader in that. We know that category so well. We know the 18 to 25-year-olds. We know them even better now because we see what they post. As Gary said, that propriety data that we have and that we can mine and that we can understand. For us, that's really incredibly helpful and rich data when we're scanning this landscape to say, what are the things within this huge marketplace that's incredibly fragmented that are the things we know people want? We integrate that, apply our social network, and that helps turbocharge that new acquired marketplace growth as well.
Okay. Thanks.
In terms of the longer-term social monetization opportunities, I know we've spoken about this before, but where do you think in terms of long-term, can you, once the social chat and meet-up, the link-up phase gets you get the customers, can you actually charge GBP 0.10 per conversation, or how would that look to you?
I'm not sure we would ever be able to do that. Look, it's a great question. Obviously, as you might imagine, when you look at the larger social networks, they're all based on advertising. That advertising has no variable cost associated with it. There is no marketing cost associated with it. Similarly, when we think about the features that we are going to add to the social network, that revenue should all drop, minus development cost. It should all drop through into EBITDA. Ergo, relatively small amounts become incredibly accretive.
In terms of what we are thinking of doing, as Chris said, there is a range of different opportunities. We are actually doing quite a bit of consumer research, quite a bit of testing, looking at potentially bundles of features that might be interesting. Also seeing, of course, from an e-commerce perspective, it will grow when we add more travel products anyway. For now, and I am going to say sort of a little bit for competitive reasons, we are probably going to launch—well, we will launch something in Q4. At that point in time, it will be evident which of those ones that we would go for. What I would say is the network is expanding rapidly, and it will continue to expand even more rapidly when we have more travel products.
The constraint that Chris said, which is 4 million monthly actives versus a Life360, which is a very successful platform that has 40 million, there isn't that much gap. We're just waiting until we get a little bit more scale there so we can start to become relevant from an advertising perspective.
Okay. Last one, in terms of offering additional products on the Hostelworld site, for example, I booked a hotel with Marriott two days ago, and on their own site, they offered me insurance cancellation on their own website, which I thought was ridiculous. Anyway, can you—can you insurance cancellation insurance, those types of products? Are those just not compatible with the website, or is that something you could—probably not a huge revenue opportunity, but can you do more of that?
There are two answers to the product.
The first answer is we actually have a free cancellation product, which is basically—I am going to say probably about half of our bookings use a free cancellation product. If you cancel within the hostel's own cancellation policy, which is 24 or 48 hours, then you get your deposit back and so on and so forth. The broader question is about ancillaries. How I would describe that is we are looking at other partnerships that we can either attach to the OTA platform and also partnerships that we might be able to attach to the OTA—sorry, the social network platform. We have experimented with insurance quite a lot in the past. What I generally see—and this is true of Expedia as well as here—is insurance is an incredibly prevalent, freely available product.
Unless I can figure out an edge that only we can provide for it, there are probably better ways of us thinking about revenue growth, which I'm hoping I've convinced you all today that this is the right strategy for our company.
Fair enough. Thank you.
Hi. James Workman at Canaccord. I actually had a follow-up question from something Anna was talking about, and it was around getting a better understanding of that sort of journey to 16% rates. I just wanted to understand a little better, what does that mean at the sort of hostel level? You've chosen to basically upgrade to those tools that would then drive pricing. Is that that individual goes to 20% commission rates, and you're assuming sort of a 20% penetration of that across all of your hostel owners in time? How does it all work to get to 16%?
The way to think about it is in order for a hostel to be able to use the product, then there are certain conditions that must be true. You must have a review score that looks like this. You must have a competitiveness score, meaning prices you give us versus other parties. The goal is not to say for every 1% you get X, because actually that's not possible. If I do that, the first thing that I'll kill is user conversion. It is designed to be, if you want to add a small amount for a discrete period of time, here is a simulation of what you will get. What we expect to happen is that penetration over a period of time or adoption over a period of time would be relatively broad, but the amounts would be not sort of 5%-10%.
This is in response to what our hostels have asked for, which is certain times of the year, occupancy is lower than we'd like it to be. We want to talk to you about how we get more business on your platform. Historically, they would have used just promotions, which actually amounts to the same thing because essentially a promotion is just a discount against a rate at a flat commission rate. All we're doing now is changing it and saying, you don't have to use a promotion to get yourself up the sort with a cheaper price. You can actually stay with a price, and you can just use a commission rate. Economically, it would amount to the same thing.
Okay. Thank you.
The inventory partner that you have partnered with, can you give us a better understanding of what type of business that is? Is that just another OTA, stronger in the space, or is it sort of an overspill sort of service provider to other OTAs?
No, it is not an overspill service provider. Unfortunately, under the terms of the contract, I can't disclose who the individual is, suffice to say that it has an incredibly broad global reach, not just in budget accommodation, but all kinds of accommodation, which actually may become relevant when you think about our future strategy, which is to have social travel for all the ages. We already will have accommodation for that age group as well.
Okay. The last one. During your video, you had a short video for your growth section.
You sort of pulled out a user, and they had this user stats box. It showed, I think they'd been to about 25 different countries, 35 different properties, I think is what you'd call it. Someone that does that sounds like a very valuable user. Other than sort of social clout, is there anything that you can do to sort of incentivize people to rack up better stats by using you more? Do you get sort of—I mean, the example would be Booking.com. If you book on Booking.com five times a year, you're going to get better discounts, better availability than someone that does it once a year. Obviously, you want activity and sort of community more than booking would have, so that might be a priority for you. What can you do to incentivize people to bring that to the social?
Two answers to that question.
One is the social proof angle, which is people love to display things that they have achieved. In that particular example, that person is displaying all of the destinations in terms of maps. In terms of Booking.com's program that they have, Genius program, one part of the Genius is that they do not pay for it. Ultimately, it is the suppliers who give increasing discounts in order to participate in Genius level one, Genius level two, Genius level three. I mean, on one level, the things that a traveler needs to do to be able to go through those particular tiers, it is very light. You have to do very little in order to avail of that supplier-funded discount.
I think for us, we would never say no never to some sort of rewards program, but I would be laser-focused on making sure that that rewards program isn't going to cost Hostelworld. I mean, having had experience at Expedia at looking at different kinds of points-based programs and Hotels.com had one night, stay 10 nights, get one night free. Both of those programs were funded internally and actually became significant drags on gross margin. What we also found by looking at A/B tests is they weren't accretive. I mean, essentially, people say about rewards programs that my rewards members, they spend so much more than the ones that don't spend. The reality is they have a higher purchasing frequency anyway, and it doesn't actually shift behavior. Your point about thinking about how we acknowledge, reward, and incentivize our heaviest frequency purchases is well-founded.
I think the technique of how we will do that, we're probably still working through, and we will continue to sort of execute the growth strategy that we laid out today. Rowan. Sorry.
Hi. Rowan Marron of Aberforth Partners. Two from me. I'll ask them one at a time. Perhaps an opposite direction question to some of what Charles was asking earlier. As you add things like advertising to the social network, how do you balance the incremental revenue versus the risk of annoying your customers instead of delighting them?
Great question. One of the common models for premium subscription is to get it without ads. I'm not saying that we would do that. I also know that ads done well, which are very personalized, can work well, especially if the products or services that you're pushing are somewhat contextually relevant to where that person is.
I may be in Rome, and there may be a restaurant business that has a fantastic offer for two people dining tonight. I mean, these things are quite difficult to configure, but that would be really relevant. Yes, I would like to know that, and they would like to tell me that. I think there are mechanisms to make advertising work without overdoing it and, to your point, annoying users. Coming back to the original point, with 4 million active users, building that level of sophistication is quite hard. As the network grows, the investments to build that sophistication become increasingly relevant.
Okay. Thank you. Second question, very different. I was actually thinking about the guidance on marketing spend, so effectively flat, that 45%-50% range.
Given everything you've said, I would have expected guidance to lower marketing spend, but perhaps offset by higher tech spend as you put resources into the social network and the compute and the AI. Why does the marketing spend not go down?
It's too early is my best answer. There are so many new things that we are launching this year. As we talked about earlier, I gave a couple of examples of building the upper funnel network to get more people in the app to get lower customer acquisition cost and then building that social flywheel. We are 100% alive to the continual need to push down marketing's percent of net revenue. The question is, we actually need to run these things a little bit.
If you remember when we launched the social network in Q2 2022, and six months later, we had a capital markets day in November, we had six months. Even then, the range that we gave for three years was 45%-55% because there was a lot of uncertainty. It is clear as a management team that we want to bring that down. This time around, there is probably an equal amount of innovation compared to what we launched last time, but the band is a little shorter. As we get into the fullness of time, we will be able to tune that to a much narrower range.
Okay. Thank you.
Now, I am going to take one more question if I may because it is five past. All right. Two questions. We can ask the gentleman over there.
Thank you. Hi, guys. Paul from Davy.
Really quick one and quite high level, but just how quickly do you think you can go on all of this? Caroline, I think you referenced the 10% as kind of a semi-organic growth rate. As we move into 2026, 2027, at what point do you see these benefits come through? Is there any quantification maybe, say, from the initial phases for what they might be?
Yeah, I think as we progress through this year and as the different initiatives are launching and we have early indicators and start delivering, we can definitely better refine the guidance that we're giving. It really is trends and targets at the moment because we just do not have enough data points to give a definitive guidance on it.
I think as we come out to the market at interims, when we're talking at the end of the year, when we're giving our pre-close statements, we'll be expecting us to talk about these in more detail and give updates and share with what we're seeing. That will help us refine better what 2026 and 2027 is going to look like. There's lots in this strategy. It's incredibly comprehensive on both the supply side and the demand side and all the things, so many additive factors that are new to our base business that haven't been there for the previous 25 years. It really is very initial, early days. We need to test and learn before we can kind of get firmer on what we think they will deliver.
Just one really quick follow-up, if that's okay.
Just on the one-time net debt-to-EBITDA , is that kind of target leverage range in M&A without M&A, what kind of level would you think that would run at?
That is to support M&A.
Neutral without M&A?
Neutral. We would bring debt back onto the balance sheet purely for the purposes of funding an acquisition.
Thank you.
Okay.
Last question, Ivor.
One.
Get to your choice.
Part. Ivor Jones, Peel Hunt, I really want to come away from today thinking that what you're talking about is additive, but you've moderated your expectations for this year. Can you talk about whether the core business that you were talking about last year is whether it is a leaky boat and you need to talk about these things as additive in order to offset that deterioration?
Could the core business be 2% or 3% revenue growth and marketing spend falling to 40% and 35% and you're building on that? Or is the core business deteriorating and you need to add these extra elements to the strategy?
No, I don't think the core business is deteriorating. The two things that Caroline talked about is, one, people continue searching for value. It's not as though customers have stopped hustling. If I think about a data point that I gave as part of our preliminary results for 2024, if you look at the bookings that we had from U.K. nationals, I'm British, or European, French, German, and so on, we had more bookings out of Europeans than we've ever had in our 25-year history last year. They just didn't go to Europe.
I'm very confident in terms of what the outlook for the hostel category is. Customer needs are going for value. The difference in bed price is three to one. It's EUR 33 in 2024, EUR 11 in Asia. I think the new news this year, which we couldn't have possibly anticipated, is obviously the escalation of tariffs. That's led to a weaker U.S. dollar. That's now another headwind. That has coincided with increased investment in the platform. If you took away the ABV, it wouldn't actually be much of an impact. Clearly, in our opinion, we've had three years of building this social travel network, of learning how to leverage it, of being looking at the data, thinking about the growth opportunities, and now is the time to invest.
It would not make sense to say, "Well, because ABV is not going the way we'd like it to, that we'll shelve the investment." It is a compression from both sides. I would hope you would walk away with a conviction the same as our conviction in terms of double-digit revenue growth pre-M&A based on all of the things that we have been talking about today. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think we will now go next door. Now, we will have a glass of wine.