Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Hostelworld 's 2025 interim results. I'm joined today by Caroline Sherry, our CFO, and David Brady, our Head of Commercial Finance and Investor Relations. Turning to the next slide, I will take the usual disclaimers as read, moving through the highlight slide, and we'll start with our financial summary. I'm going to start today by discussing our financial results in the context of customer trends year-over-year, our social strategy performance, OpEx investments, and how we have deployed our operating cash flow. If we start with net bookings and net ABV, Q1 started off with a decline in net booking and ABV growth rates, which then returned to growth in late May into June, and this momentum is continuing into July.
Net bookings growth recovery from late May into June and continuing in July is being driven primarily by Europe as a destination returning to growth. Net ABV growth, however, is being driven from late May by the release of Elevate, our new marketplace monetization tool. This tool has increased commission rates from 15.2% in H1 2024 to 15.8% in H1 2025, which has served to offset bed price deflation, which we have seen in all regions apart from Asia, and also a weaker U.S. dollar. Turning to net revenue, as a consequence of the movements in net bookings growth and net ABV growth through the half year, net revenue growth also contracted in Q1 and then returned to growth in late May into June, and that positive momentum is also continuing into July. However, overall revenue was flat for the first half.
Turning now to our social network, throughout the first half, I was pleased to see continuing take-up of our social network, with 85% of our 3.7 million bookings being made by social members, up from 80% in the prior year. This was also accompanied by very strong growth in engagement, with the number of messages being sent over the network increasing 42% on a trailing six-month basis. As you'll know, our social network is only available on app, and this encourages our customers to download the app and use the app as their booking platform. Overall, the strength of the social network in the first half led to 11% growth in bookings on the app year-over-year, now almost 50% of our mix, up from 45% in the prior year.
In normal circumstances, this would have continued the downward pressure on marketing as a percent of revenue for the half year. However, we did see paid cost inflation in Q1, which drove up marketing as a percentage of net revenue to 51% for the half year as a whole. This has since moderated, and I expect that this will fall back to within our guidance range on a full-year basis. However, the consequences of the paid cost inflation resulted in net margin contracting 11% to EUR 19.8 million for the half year. Turning now to OpEx, overall OpEx was essentially flat at EUR 12 million, with a reduction in discretionary wages and salaries costs offsetting modest investments in our platform and B2B marketing costs.
Collectively, the reduction in net margin in the first half, driven by the temporary cost inflation in Q1 over that flat OpEx space, resulted in an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 7.4 million. Turning now to cash, 65% of the EBITDA converted to cash, which is EUR 4.8 million. If you combine that with the EUR 8.2 million cash on hand at the start of the year, we used this to repay EUR 1.3 million of the residual warehouse tax liability to the Irish Government, and EUR 400,000 was used to repurchase our own shares over the period following the share buyback program launched on the 19th of June. This left us with a closing cash position of EUR 11 million and net cash of EUR 6.1 million. Finally, we expect to pay an interim dividend payment of EUR 0.82 a share in September. Turning to the next page, I'll just run through those key highlights again.
Trading definitely improved through the half year, starting in late May, continuing into July, and net bookings and ABV improving through that first half, returning to growth in late May into June, continuing positive momentum into July. The increasing commission rates post-launch of Elevate have served to offset bed price deflation, which, as I mentioned before, we have seen in all regions in the half year, over half year, except for Asia, and also the weaker than expected U.S. dollar. We observed paid cost inflation in Q1, which has since moderated. I expect marketing as a percent of revenue to be within our capital markets guidance range on a full-year basis. App bookings have grown 11% year-over-year, reflecting continued progress of our social network strategy, which I'll talk more about later in the presentation.
App bookings in total now represent circa 50% of all bookings in first half 2025, up from 45% in first half 2024. Since the start of the year, we've been executing our strategic initiatives that we talked about in the capital markets day and also our capital allocation policy. The rollout of Elevate, the new marketplace monetization tool, is certainly showing early signs of success, with blended commission rates increasing to 15.8% in H1 2025, up from 15.2% in H1 2024. Through the half year, we have seen continued growth in social network size and engagement. Social members now reach 2.9 million by the end of June, and that's up from 1.8 million in June 2024. The number of messages sent over the network increased 42% on a trailing six-month basis.
I'm pleased to report that our strategic initiatives, including the social platform monetization and the addition of budget accommodation that we talked about at the capital markets day, are on track to launch these this year. These will serve to expand our addressable market and monetize our growing social network into 2026. In parallel, we are continuing to evaluate acquisition opportunities, and these include marketplaces that have travel products used by our customers and other opportunities to strengthen our social network. Finally, we have reinstated our progressive dividend policy with a EUR 0.82 per share payment expected in September, and we also launched our share buyback program on June 19 with a GBP 5 million quantum. I will now hand to Caroline Sherry to talk about our first half results in a little bit more detail. Caroline.
Good morning, everyone. Following Gary's overview, I'm delighted to present Hostelworld 's financial performance for the first half of 2025. Our first slide illustrates net bookings by customer nationality. In H1 2025, we generated 3.7 million net bookings, which remained flat year-over-year, reflecting varied regional performances. Looking first at Europe and the U.K., which collectively represent over 60% of our bookings, we observed some strong demand, with U.K. customer bookings growing 4% year-over-year and our broader EMEA region growing 2% year-over-year. Notably, a significant portion of European customer demand was directed towards Asia, with European travel to Asia growing by 9%. North America and Canada, which accounts for 20% of our source customers, experienced a 4% decline. Encountering this, Asia continued its robust growth trajectory, with customer bookings up 3%, driven both by strong intra-Asian and international travel demand.
Moving to the next slide, this slide reinforces a trend we first observed in 2024, a continued preference for lower-cost destinations, which persisted into the first half of 2025. This is clearly reflected in the dominant performance of Asian destinations, which collectively accounted for 34% of our H1 bookings. Specifically, South Asia grew 8% year-on-year, and North Asia saw an impressive 14% growth. European and U.K. customers were key drivers of this, with bookings from Europe to Asia up 9% and U.K. to Asia up 12%. While Latin America bookings remained relatively flat, representing just under 20% of H1 bookings, it's notable that we saw a 31% increase in bookings from Asia-sourced customers into LatAm. Europe, our largest market, at just under 40% of bookings, saw some softness in H1 as customers opted for lower-cost regions.
However, we are very encouraged by a distinct shift in performance, with Europe returning to growth in late May into June and this positive momentum continuing into July. Moving to the next slide, transitioning from bookings to revenue, this slide illustrates how our performance translated into generated revenue, defined as gross revenue less cancellations. Overall, generated revenue was down 1% year-over-year. We observed strong revenue growth across our low-cost destinations, particularly in Asia. South Asia revenue grew an impressive 26%, significantly outpacing its 8% bookings growth, a clear benefit of bed price inflation in the region. Similarly, North Asia revenue increased by 25% compared to a 14% booking growth, also driven by favorable bed price dynamics. Conversely, revenues in Western and Eastern Europe saw declines, reflecting a different dynamic where bed prices have contracted year-on-year.
Western Europe revenues decreased 9%, more pronounced than its booking performance, and Eastern Europe revenues were down 3%. The reduction in European bed prices is, however, stimulating demand, and as mentioned by Gary and in the previous slide I discussed, we have seen a positive momentum in booking growth since late May. While the shift towards lower-cost destinations acted as a headwind to our ABV in the first half, this impact lessened as European performance strengthened towards the end of the first half of the year. Now, let's examine how this performance has impacted our net margin. Starting from H1 2024, where we generated EUR 22.1 million in net margin, while net bookings of 3.7 million and net revenue of EUR 46.7 million remained flat year-over-year, we experienced a significant impact from increased paid marketing costs.
As Gary highlighted, cost per click inflation in Q1 led to paid marketing increasing from 45% of net revenue in H1 to 51% in H1 2025, and this resulted in a EUR 2.9 million reduction in margin. We are pleased to report that paid marketing costs have moderated since Q1, and we anticipate our full-year marketing costs to be within the 45%- 50% guidance range. Average booking values were broadly flat year-over-year. Headwinds from bed price deflation and a weaker U.S. dollar were largely offset by an increase in our commission rate, driven by the strong uptake of our new Elevate product, which was launched in May. This, combined with the lessening geo-mix headwind as Europe returned to growth, saw ABV return to growth from late May onwards.
Finally, a EUR 0.9 million benefit primarily relating to a deferred revenue provision movement for free cancellation bookings, combined with the other factors I've just spoken to, delivered a net margin for H1 2025 of EUR 19.8 million, representing an 11% reduction compared to the prior year. Now, let's turn our attention to our operating cost base. These are the costs which exclude paid marketing. This slide illustrates the evolution of these costs over the past three half-year periods. For H1 2025, our operating costs were slightly down compared to H1 2024, and we maintained efficiency with costs at 25% of net revenue. Breaking this down, wages and salaries, the purple segment, saw a reduction year-on-year, primarily due to lower discretionary compensation, despite an increase in headcount to 267, up from 229 in June 2024.
This increased headcount has seen us invest in resources in product, tech, analytics, and our global markets team, particularly in low-cost destinations and mainly in Portugal. Contractor costs, the navy segment, marginally reduced year-on-year as we continue to strategically utilize temporary resources in low-cost destinations. Our in-house technology investment, the gray segment, increased by 4%. This reflects our commitment to support the strategic initiatives and the new capabilities outlined at our capital markets day. Finally, other operating costs, the scion segment, increased by 6% year-on-year, driven by additional marketing activities, CRM, and increased investment in our hostel conferences. The next slide brings all of the elements together, and this slide presents our adjusted EBITDA. We started H1 2024 with an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 9.6 million.
As discussed, flat net bookings and net revenue combined with a higher marketing investment resulted in a EUR 2.9 million reduction in margin. Average booking value contracting 1% year-on-year contributed a EUR 0.3 million reduction in margin. However, our focus on cost control led to a 1% reduction in operating costs, delivering a EUR 0.3 million benefit. A EUR 0.9 million benefit arose from deferred revenue, primarily a provision movement relating to free cancellation bookings. Consequently, our adjusted EBITDA for H1 2025 stands at EUR 7.4 million, representing a 23% decrease from H1 2024. This results in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 16%, down 5% from H1 2024. It is important to note that EUR 3.1 million of H1 2025 revenue has been deferred, which will unwind as EBITDA in H2 2025. Moving to the next slide.
Looking next at our balance sheet and cash performance, we began the year with EUR 8.2 million in cash. Our operations generated EUR 4.5 million in cash flows for the first half. This is derived from EUR 46.7 million in booking revenue, offset by direct costs of EUR 26.9 million and operating costs of EUR 12.4 million, with EUR 3.6 million in capitalized development labor, EUR 0.3 million in exception costs, and a EUR 1 million positive working capital movement. We continue to repay our warehouse payroll taxes to Irish revenue, making a EUR 1.3 million payment in H1, reducing the outstanding balance owed to Irish revenue to EUR 4.9 million. This is an interest-free liability and is scheduled for full repayment by May 2027. Demonstrating our commitment to capital allocation, we commenced a EUR 5 million share buyback program on June 19th. As of June 30th, 250,000 ordinary shares were repurchased at a cost of EUR 0.4 million and subsequently canceled.
All these factors combined resulted in a strong closing cash position of EUR 11 million. Our adjusted free cash flow of EUR 4.8 million on an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 7.4 million represents a solid 65% cash conversion. Turning next to our capital allocation priorities, the first half of 2025 has seen us actively execute against the objectives set out at our capital markets day, all aimed at creating long-term shareholder value. We continue to prioritize the repayment of our warehouse payroll tax liability to Irish revenue, with EUR 4.9 million of that liability extended. This is currently our sole balance sheet liability, contributing to a strong EUR 6.1 million net cash positive position. We have reinstated a progressive dividend, targeting an annual payout ratio of 20%- 40% of adjusted profit after tax, aligning with our CMD framework.
The board has declared an interim dividend of EUR 0.82 per share for the six months ended 30th of June 2025, payable on September 19th to shareholders on the register on the record date of August 29th. As previously mentioned, our EUR 5 million share buyback program, announced on the 19th of June, is well underway. Lastly, our M&A strategy remains active. We continue to evaluate incremental acquisition opportunities to complement our organic growth initiatives and expand our presence in the dynamic youth travel market. Finally, I'd like to conclude my section by highlighting our unwavering commitment to ESG, which remains central to both our culture and the broader hostel category.
I'm delighted to report that our innovative staircase to sustainability framework, launched in February last year, has seen remarkable adoption, with over 2,300 hostels now proudly displaying the sustainability badge on our platform, with an additional 500 hostels currently undergoing the assessment process. Beyond highlighting our partners' efforts, we actively champion the inclusive nature of the category, leveraging our social channels to showcase hostels that celebrate sustainability, diversity, equality, and inclusion. Internally, Hostelworld takes full responsibility for our own sustainability practices, and for the past four years, we've partnered with South Pole to effectively manage our carbon emissions. We are also dedicated to building a strong culture rooted in DE&I principles, actively working towards a gold accreditation by Investors in Diversity. With that, I'll hand you back to Gary.
Thank you, Caroline. I'll now take you through a few short slides of a strategy update since we had our capital markets day. If we turn to the next slide, please. First of all, I'm pleased to report our social network is continuing to accelerate, with the number of unique customers who have made a booking on our platform and signed up to the social network being just a bit shy of 3 million by the end of the half year. Turning to the right, more importantly, the number of messages being sent over the platform, which is a key engagement metric, continues to grow very strongly, driven by continuous innovation and network effects. If you compare the number of messages sent in the second half 2024 versus the first half 2025, trailing six months, that's up by 42%.
You may also recall in our 2024 interims presentation, I pointed out that we had reached the capacity limits of our messaging platform in the first half of 2024, and you can see that clearly on the bar chart where it says 1.7 million. If you were to normalize that to say 2 million messages between first second half 2023 and second half 2024, and take that 2 million and compare it to 3.2 million, it would be up about nearer 60% on a year-over-year basis. At the capital markets day, I laid out the framework and the Gantt chart for all of the growth initiatives that we were executing on the business. If you were to look somewhere between the middle of the page where it says Q3 2025, that's where we are today.
I'm going to run through each of these and just give you a little bit of an update as to where we are. Turning to hostel inventory expansion and the next page. We have continued to increase our local presence. We have a new branch in Thailand, plus an increased headcount in LatAm and Japan. That's driving strong growth in local hostel signups to our platform in those regions. We're also releasing features to bring our hostels into our social network. Hostels can now chat with their guests post-making a booking through our social network. In Q3, we will release features to allow hostels to chat with guests directly who have signed up to their events or link-ups. We've continued with connectivity investments. We saw double-digit growth in the number of supported channel managers half year over half year.
We're also going to adopt the Open Travel Alliance connectivity standard in Q4. This will really increase the number of channel managers we can access still further, but with zero development effort. Finally, we continue to invest in our B2B marketing programs. For example, our next EMEA conference is planned for October in Seville, and we hope to have more than 500 delegates. Turning now to marketplace monetization. We launched a smarter hostel ranking system to boost our overall commission rates in May while balancing several key factors. First, we wanted to leverage the historical user conversion patterns. Second, we also wanted to continue to incentivize the desired marketplace behaviors. What I mean by that is so that we always have the most competitive inventory on the platform.
Finally, and this is the essence of the new smarter hostel ranking system, we also give hostels the ability to pay higher commission rates for specific demand types that they want. As you can see on the left-hand side, the early results are ahead of our expectations, fueled by greater adoption rates. If you look in 2023, it was 15.1%, climbing to 15.3% in 2024. H1 2025, it's now 15.8%. We have a general expectation to reach around the 16% mark in 2027. Turning to the next slide. One of the other things that I talked about in the capital marketplace was travel plans. It's a new pre-booking feature, which was launched in May, designed to generate connections across travelers, pre-travel, with global reach, and across our existing network of social members.
To be clear, our rationale for doing this is that travel plans will recruit future customers into our apps before they make their first booking on our platform. To date, we've seen some really encouraging early signs, in particular strong adoption by app users who have yet to make a booking on our platform, and also app users interacting with submitted travel plans. The early signs also indicate that these users do indeed convert to high-value social members who make bookings on our platform over time. Our plans now, we will complete the product in Q4 by introducing AI-powered smart matching across users who've submitted travel plans, and also introduce push notifications to notify users of those matches in Q4. Turning to the next slide.
Finally, I'm also pleased to report that the two really big strategic initiatives, which are designed to expand our addressable market and monetize our growing social network, are very much on track for launch before year-end. Turning to the social network monetization, the product and pricing strategy was completed in the first half of the year. We're finishing off the product development this quarter. We will pilot a launch in two markets in early Q4 in October, and the global launch will happen before the end of the year. We're very excited about what that product will do. In terms of the budget accommodation provision, the partner selection was completed much earlier on this year, but it is an extremely large piece of work to make sure that we can show budget accommodation on our platform seamlessly and also have customers who make bookings drop directly into our social network.
That product development is really throughout the year. In terms of launch, we'll do the pilot launch probably in October, which will be on the iOS app only, English language, selected destinations, with a plan to do the global rollout across all of our platforms, all languages, and all destinations throughout 2026. I'll hand back to Caroline just to take us through one part of the closing remarks.
Many thanks, Gary. Bringing this all together, the outlook for 2025 remains in line with the expectations we set out at Capital Markets Day. Net revenue, we expect to grow mid-single digit. Following on from the trends we saw in the first half of the year, with strengthening European performance, with ABV and booking growth from late May continuing into June and into July, we expect on a full-year basis that we will deliver against our mid-single digit target. Marketing as a percentage of revenue, whilst we saw some CPC inflation in Q1, that marketing spend has since normalized, and we fully expect that on a full-year basis, marketing will be within the range that we guided and that we have operated at previously.
Adjusted EBITDA margin of circa 20%, again reiterating guidance for this number, whilst our H1 EBITDA margin was below this, we do have over EUR 3 million of deferred revenue, which will unwind as EBITDA margin in H2. Cash conversion of 60%- 70% remains similar to last year and levels that we have operated at in H1. Gary, I will pass over to you for closing comments.
Thank you, Caroline. A few closing remarks from me. I hope you will see from the presentation that we've been through today that we are continuing to execute our highly differentiated growth strategy. As we've mentioned, net bookings and ABV improving through the first half, returning to growth in late May into June, and that continuing positive momentum into July. We've also seen continued growth in social network size and engagement, social members reaching 2.9 million by the end of June, up from 1.8 million in June 2024, and strong growth in the number of messages sent over the network, increasing 42% on a trailing six-month basis. Elevate, our new marketplace monetization tool, showing early signs of success, with blended commission rates increasing to 15.8% in first half 2025, which is up from 15.2% in first half 2024.
The strategic initiatives that we talked about, including social platform monetization and budget accommodation provision on the platform, are on track for launch in 2025. We are also reinstating our progressive dividend and the launch of the GBP 5 million share buyback program, underpinning our balanced approach to capital allocation and our commitment to long-term shareholder value. Turning to the next page, Q&A, I'll now hand over to David, who has been compiling the questions that have been submitted through the presentation. Thank you, David.
Thank you, Gary, and thank you everyone for your questions so far. Let's jump straight in. Caroline, I might turn to you first. We've had lots of questions around trends that we're seeing with respect to trading and what we can see as we look into August and through to the end of summer. We've already touched on points like performance in Europe. We've touched on trends in net bookings and what's driving shifts in average booking values. We've talked about the marketing percentage as well, shifting through Q1, Q2. People are just looking for a little bit more color insofar as we have it around how we see that playing out through the course of the summer.
Good question. The first thing to start with really is our visibility. As people will know, we do operate within quite a short lead time. For example, the first half of the year, 55% of our volume came within a period of four to six days, and the majority of that being same day or next day, and then 45% being seven days plus. Lead time is very short in this business. What I can say, though, is the strong trends and momentum that we saw appear at the end of May continued into June, continued right through to July to current date. When we look over the last seven days of trading, we are seeing that positive momentum across not just booking volume, but ABV, new customer growth rates, revenue growth rates. That's not solely Europe-driven. It's a key component, but really strong performance across all of the regions.
I've seen that positive momentum across all the regions, really bar North America, which for us as a destination is nominal in terms of the overall booking mix. The growth in ABV, which we are very happy to see after a prolonged period of ABV contraction, and something that had really distorted our trading performance over 2024 and continued into 2025, that has shifted. When we think about H1, there's kind of almost a truncation between what we saw year-to-date May and then what we evidenced from late May flowing through into June and onward into July. One of the main components of that, of course, touched on it, is Elevate, the performance of Elevate. That continues to grow and is a compounded benefit factor. Lots of the signals that we saw towards the second half of H1 are continuing into July.
Strong indicators for August then, particularly within Europe, given it's such a peak season for Europe. I would emphasize we're seeing the trends across all regions, not just Europe. All bodes well for H2.
Thanks, Caroline. Gary, I might turn to you. We have a number of questions around social, proving to be very topical in the Q&A. I probably have some follow-up questions, but let's start from this basis. Let's break it into two. One is just generally, how do you and the team think about social and the opportunities for product development? What type of analytics do we use? What type of data do we look at? How do we incorporate customer feedback into product development?
Okay, with the social network, we look at all the way from when new customers, and I'm talking about new OTA customers, come onto the platform. That may be because they find us on web or because they go directly to the app store and download the app. I should say that the amount of new customers that we're recruiting via the app is growing very strongly. People go directly to the app store. The first thing we look for is, do they sign up to the platform? At the point that they opt into the platform, do they create a social profile? Does it have a picture? Does it have a bio? Does it have more information? From that point on, we then look to see how they engage with the social network. How many profile views do they look at? How many link-ups do they look at?
Do they look in the chat room? The next bit of activity is, do they start posting? Do they start replying to other people's messages? You can imagine it is sort of like a funnel journey. At each step of that, we are looking to create utility or remove friction, either making it easy to do or making it more useful. An example of making it more useful is when you open up the app after you've made a booking, you will see a carousel of people for you to chat to. Over a period of time, we have looked to see what kinds of people, based on their social profile data, are clicking or viewing and clicking and talking to other people in the carousel. You start building up signals. As a result of using those signals, you can then optimize the people that you show in the carousel.
There's one example. It is an extraordinarily data-driven approach. We're executing very small enhancements and very large enhancements. I think probably the most significant one that we'll talk about, we have spoken about in the presentation today, is the launch of the first monetizable social feature on the social network, which will launch in October in a couple of pilot markets, followed by a swift global rollout before year-end.
Gary, turning then to the roadmap, we've touched on how we see things coming live and coming on stream in Q4 and said quite a bit about that. How do you see that then playing out over the course of 2026?
In the presentation on page 18, there is a Gantt chart. There are a number of themes, which are continuing to grow our hostel inventory, enhancing the marketplace monetization, which is, of course, Elevate, new AI capabilities to enhance both pre-booking features on the platform, where you don't need to make a booking, but we still want to provide users value to draw them into our ecosystem. Of course, AI-powered features post-booking, for example, one of the things that we've just talked about, which is optimizing the people you show in the carousel. There is building the social media channel. Over a period of time, we want to divert more of our energies and investments to growing paid and free traffic, directly from the likes of TikTok and Instagram, leveraging the fact that we have so many of our customers posting customer testimonials.
The provision of budget accommodation and rolling that out in 2026 and then optimizing that social feature. What I would say is those one, two, three, four, six themes will be the consistent themes throughout 2026. Investors should look to us to continue to execute and optimize on those particular six themes. I don't envisage there are going to be any changes to those six themes. It's more a question of execution. The one thing that may serve to change that roadmap if there is an acquisition, as I mentioned in the presentation, we continue to look at acquisition opportunities, in particular marketplaces where we can see that there's a strong marketplace that has travel products that are consumed by the existing customers we have. Of course, if there are other technology acquisitions that we can see that would enhance the social network.
Gary, on the roadmap, do any of these initiatives require a step-up in marketing spend to support implementation and to gain traction?
No, I would say that's not the case. If you go back to the very beginning in April 2022, when we launched the strategy, there were two components. One, providing a compelling reason to book with us, and that was all about the social network, of course. The second was to implement it only on iOS and Android, with the clear strategy there, of course, to get more apps downloaded onto our customers' phones, and then they would use them consistently or most of their retention bookings thereafter. There were really two things. One, a compelling reason to book. Two, a mechanic to reduce marketing user percent net revenue over time. In relation to the Gantt chart and the initiatives that we talked about, that is entirely consistent with that original thesis.
Ongoing, increasing the value of the product that we give to our customers on app and using that as a mechanism to drive marketing % net revenue down. I would say the guidance that we would give, and indeed consistent with what we had at the capital markets day presentation for the next couple of years, is still in the 45%- 50% range.
Gary, last question on this section and chat about social, you reminded us there just a moment ago that social is only accessible via Android and iOS. Why, in that case, are all of our bookings not from the app? Why do we have bookings that don't come through the app?
That is a splendid question. I recall very recently actually having a conversation with our board, just saying, look, we're on a journey from taking what was a web-centric OTA to an app-centric social network with multiple monetization opportunities. It is a transition. I'm delighted to see the app bookings continue to grow. They were up 11% half year over half year. They're about half the total bookings now. New customer growth is very encouraging directly on app, where the first booking is made on app. We're certainly making inroads on that journey, and perhaps in the years to come, we will be a totally app-centric company, but there's a journey to get there.
Thanks, Gary. Caroline, I might turn to you for the next question, and it relates to OpEx. We touched on this at Capital Markets Day, and even Gary has talked about it there again, a very ambitious product development roadmap. We said at Capital Markets Day that that would drive a modest, but nonetheless, a step-up in investment in our OpEx. If we look at our OpEx in H1 so far this year, actually flat year-on-year, how should people think about that in relation to the guidance that we gave at Capital Markets Day that there should be some step-up over the course of 2025?
Yes, yeah, great question. Yes, we still expect that that will be the case, albeit not quite evident from the numbers in the first half with OpEx down 1% versus H1 2024. A couple of things to unpack in that number. You'll see that from size up size 11, our platform costs and our other OpEx have increased. That is us spending a little bit more on things like marketing capability or hostel conferences, our tech platform products to support the deployment and build of the product features and the initiatives that Gary talked about. The dominant cost in our cost base, in our operating cost base, is wages and salaries. This is our headcount. Our headcount at the end of June 2025 was at 267. That compares to 229 in H1 2024. That's a 17% increase in our headcount.
That's investment in our product, tech, AI teams, our global markets team, which is a team that supports the hostel category. We are investing in our headcount. That step-up in investment will be more pronounced in H2 because, of course, there is the timing of hires, etc. The second component as well, that is attributable to why cost base is down year-over-year, is, of course, within wages and salaries, we have a lower discretionary compensation in the first half of this year versus what we had first half of last year. Those two components, I suppose, are kind of why, on face of it, OpEx is down year-over-year. Absolutely, to speak back to the question, we are investing, and that investment level will be evident in H2.
Thanks, Caroline. Another question, which shapes our EBITDA guidance, is around the guidance and the marketing range. We were just touching outside that on the first half of this year, and we talked about factors in Q1. You might maybe talk to people around the factors that bring that back into range over the course of H2 and maybe where we see that landing on a full-year basis.
Yeah, good question. As we said, reiterated in a statement, I've said it again this morning, we feel confident that on a full-year basis, our marketing as a percentage of revenue will be within the guidance range. What underpins our confidence in that is really when we unpack H1 and we look at Q1 versus Q2 separately. Q1, as we talked about this morning, was impacted by CPC inflation. That cost has since normalized. Actually, when we unpack Q1 and Q2 separately, Q2 marketing as a percentage of revenue was within guidance range. Continuation of what we see in Q2 on it to Q3 and Q4 will bring marketing back within the guidance range on a full-year basis. As the question asked, and it's very true, P&L is very sensitive to that cost number.
Of course, whether you're down at the bottom of the range or at the top of the range, it has quite a marked impact on margin and on EBITDA. I think right here, right now, and again, I suppose it speaks back to one of the earlier questions, our lead time is very short. With the visibility that we have, with what we're seeing, with what we're spending in order to acquire so many new customers, both through web, app, and the paid channels performance, I think on balance, it's safer to assume that we will be mid to high level of that range. I wouldn't like to guide being down at the bottom of the range because actually, in order to do so on a full-year basis, that would require H2 to be sub 45%, which would leave us bare.
For us, it's all about growing that top line, something we've talked about today. We've talked about it at Capital Markets Day. We're very excited by a lot of the initiatives of product releases and that roadmap into H2. There's a lot of good things coming and further monetization opportunities for the platform. We don't want to jeopardize that by being tight on market investment.
Thanks, Caroline. Gary, I might turn to you again and come back to you on a topic where we've had lots of interesting questions, and that's around Elevate. I'll have some follow-up questions with that as well. Maybe just to start us off, what is different about Elevate at version 2.0 now versus the version of Elevate that the business had in place pre-COVID?
Great question. Version one was very simple. In many respects, that's probably why it didn't create the long-term results that we wanted it to. Version one was quite simply irrespective of conversion patterns and irrespective of whether the hostel was a high-quality hostel. If you wanted to pay more, you would go directly to the top of the sort. You would see situations in certain cities in the past where you had 40, 50 hostels. You would have hostels that had had no bookings on the platform, but simply by increasing their commission rates significantly, they could push themselves to the top. From a user perspective, that's a really bad user experience. Consequently, the better hostels weren't getting the visibility they wanted, and our customers were seeing poorer hostels at the top of the sort. That's why we deprecated that platform. Actually, it was in June 2020 if memory serves.
In rebuilding the platform this time around, we actually rebuilt the sort order first, which is the hostel ranking system. The hostel ranking system at that point just looked at user conversion patterns. As hostels were ranked on the platform, you would see which hostels were getting clicks, how far people were going down the funnel from search results to property detail page to conversion. Everything about user conversion. You always wanted to present the best quality offers at the top of the sort. A secondary consideration is looking at the competitiveness of the inventory that hostels gave us relative to other partners. We also wanted to make sure that the best offers in the marketplace as a whole, we would also prioritize. That sort order has been optimized over some period of time, read a couple of years.
What we have now done is introduced an ability for hostels, all other things being equal, when it comes to user conversion and incentivizing the desired marketplace behaviors. If there's a hostel that says, you know, the weekend after next, I'm looking a bit light, and I would like to get a little bit more demand, then for a small increment in commission rate, they can gain a few places up the sort order. The actual amount of boosting is done in such a way that we do not impact long-term conversion or the desire to maintain those marketplace behaviors. For a small incremental cost, hostels can gain additional bookings, and of course, with those additional bookings, they'll sell more ancillaries, whether that's beers at the bar or events or so on and so forth. That's the difference between the two platforms, V1, V2.
Thanks, Gary. You must be very pleased with the performance, albeit it's still early days, but only a few months in, and the commission rate has already increased. The effective commission rate has already increased to 15.8%. At Capital Markets Day, we had signaled a medium-term target of circa 16%. How do you see this playing out over the medium-term?
It is too early to tell. The actual rising commission rate is a function of two things. One, what the adoption is, and two, what the incremental commission is that people are willing to pay. What I would say is we have seen a stronger adoption than expectations, whereas the incremental amount has been around expectations. It may be that we achieve the target in the midterm sooner than anticipated, and that would probably be the conclusion that I would draw. Ultimately, where it settles at is where the marketplace wants it to settle at, because it will be hostels who will be deciding what boosts they want and when and how that plays out.
The last question just on this, Gary, is any feedback that we've had to share from hostels directly? What are they saying is their experience with this, and how are they finding the product?
I think with the introduction of Elevate version two, we did get a lot of feedback from hostel partners in certain parts of the world. Obviously, over the last few months, I think the global market team has done a great job explaining that this indeed was a feature that had been requested by the hostel industry. I think they've done a great job explaining how it works and, more importantly, how to use it to their advantage. As things stand at the moment, we're very happy with the adoption, the penetration, and the feedback that we've received in the last month or so.
Thank you, Gary. That concludes the Q&A. Thank you to everyone for submitting questions. We've endeavored to get through as many as we can here. If there's anything that we've missed, please do reach out to us directly. You'll also have a chance to engage with the team on the roadshow over the course of the coming days and weeks. Thank you again for submitting questions to the Q&A. Thank you for joining the presentation. I'll hand you over to Gary to close this out.
Thank you very much for joining us today. We're delighted with the progress that we've made since the Capital Markets Day. There are some very encouraging early signs in some of the products that we released in May, whether that's Elevate or travel plans. I think the most important thing is we're really very well positioned for 2026. The two big strategic things that we've been working on all year, which are the addition of budget accommodation to the platform and also releasing our first monetizable feature on our social network, are very much on track. They will launch in Q4. On that note, I'll just say huge thanks to my team for the hard work this year and look forward to speaking to many of you in person over the coming days. Thank you very much.