Welcome to the On the Beach Interim Results Presentation. Me and John will start by talking through performance so far this year, and I will then provide an update on our strategic progress. I'll start by talking through some of the key highlights of the period. We've had a great start to 2025. Sales of $640 million were 13% ahead of last year. Within this, booking volumes were up 11%, which is significantly ahead of the growth in both at-home numbers and seat supply out of the U.K. Operational leverage continues to improve, which contributed to a 23% increase in adjusted profit before tax. We have significantly expanded our addressable market, now live with 130 city destinations, and we have established a presence in Ireland. We invested $1.5 million in our Ireland expansion during the period.
Worth noting that without this investment, adjusted profit before tax for the group would have increased by nearly 50%. We have a strong balance sheet. Total cash has increased year -on -year, and over the last 12 months, $30 million has been returned to shareholders via share buyback and dividends. Today, we are declaring an interim dividend of GBP 0.01 per share, in line with our capital allocation policy. We are pleased to report that we remain on track to deliver our medium-term ambition to more than double the size of the business. Moving on to trading highlights for the period. The chart in the top right shows booked sales by month. As you can see, booking momentum has been building through the year. Sales were + 15% in Q2, a key booking quarter, and Q3 has started strongly. Sales so far this quarter are 18% ahead of last year. The chart in the bottom right shows the value of holidays departing by month. This is in line with how tour operators will be reporting their numbers. You can see winter finished very strongly with 19% growth, and sales for summer departures are currently up 14% year -on -year. With the current trading momentum, we are on track for another record summer. On that, I'll hand over to John to run through financial performance.
Thanks, Sean. I'll take you through the half one performance, starting with the group P&L on slide seven. From a group perspective, we now show both the B2B and B2C segments on an agency basis. So with a consistent revenue recognition policy, which has simplified our reporting from previous periods. The first half saw revenue growth of 12% on an adjusted basis, with strong revenue growth across both the B2C and B2B segments. Growth in marketing and overheads year on year was 7%, which is significantly below the rate of volume growth. This resulted in an EBITDA growth of 19% after a $1.5 million investment into Ireland as we begin to build our brand presence there, with a 4% improvement in operating leverage.
After taking into account depreciation and finance income, our adjusted PBT has increased by 23% year -on -year, which is in line with the full year expectations. Turning to slide eight and the B2C segment P&L, we've seen overall bookings growth of 10%, with positive growth across three-star, four-star, and five-star holidays, highlighting the broad appeal of the On the Beach brand. Average booking values and margin per booking are up 1% on the prior year, and that reflects low single-digit inflation in the core beach market, with a slight dilutive impact of the city's proposition to both of those measures. Total marketing costs are broadly flat year -on -year, resulting in a cost per booking down 9% despite the investment of $1.5 million into Ireland. Online marketing costs are up, reflecting cost per click inflation, partially offset by an increased efficiency through the benefits of our offline campaigns.
This year, we've got an intention to retain an offline presence for a greater proportion of the year, and so offline spend in the first half was down by 7% versus last year. Our current creative continues to work very well, and our investment into perks continues to ensure that our brand messaging is strong. B2C segment overheads were up 9%, again below the rate of bookings growth. We continue to invest into key tech and product roles, as well as continuing to pay the national living wage for our lowest paid colleagues. Within our medium-term ambition, we set a target for EBITDA margin to increase to 40%. Our continued focus on improving leverage is shown through a 4% improvement in the EBITDA margin year -on -year.
Turning to slide nine and an overview of the cash position, position as at the end of the first half really reinforces the cash-generative nature of our business model. As Shaun said, there was a reduction in net debt of $18 million versus the prior year, despite the return of $30 million to shareholders through divvies and share buyback over the past 12 months. Customer monies, which are held in trust, have also increased by $28 million and will continue to build ahead of the peak summer departure months of July and August. We have also agreed with our banking syndicate that the $25 million RCF extension, which we agreed in January 2024 for an initial 18-month period, will now become a permanent part of the RCF facility. We now have GBP 85 million available under that facility until it expires in December 2027.
We feel that this gives us increased optionality for investment as part of the capital allocation framework, which I'll now talk to on slide 10. The framework is consistent with the prior year, and the prioritization remains with our focus on organic growth. In terms of that investment into organic growth, the recent tech spend has resulted in 130 city destinations now live, and we've added 13,000 more hotels and 19 additional airlines to the platform, all in the last six months. As Shaun mentioned earlier, we've also made a net $1.5 million investment into Ireland to build the brand presence. The board has proposed an interim dividend of GBP 0.01 per share, an increase of 11% on the interim dividend paid last year. In terms of M&A, we continue to review opportunities that could accelerate our growth in either the core or expansion areas, but we're not aware of any opportunities that are appropriate at the current time. Finally, the board continues to assess whether there is surplus cash available for distribution. At the current time, we're minded to retain maximum flexibility for investment into organic growth in order to accelerate our medium-term ambitions, and therefore do not believe there is surplus cash for distribution at the current time. I'll now hand back to Shaun.
Thanks, John. I'll just take us through the progress we've made on the strategy over the last six months. I will start by recapping the strategy we introduced last year. Our strategy is based on delivering against four core design principles shown on this diagram: stickiness, choice, peace of mind, and scale and automation. I'll summarize them briefly in turn. Firstly, customers are shopping around as much as ever, so we are having to reacquire them. We must therefore design for stickiness. Secondly, we are currently only competing or have been only competing for a small share of our customers' holiday wallet. We therefore must design for increased choice. Thirdly, we know that customers want the choice, value, and flexibility that we offer or that travel agents and tour operators offer, but they also want hiccup-free holidays. Therefore, we must also design for peace of mind.
Finally, we have significant opportunities to expand our customer base as I'll take you through. Therefore, we must design for scale. By this, we mean a platform that can deliver 10x , not + 10%. By delivering on these design principles, we expect to achieve a higher level of repeat bookings, increase average annual customer spend, attract new customers to the brand, and continue to improve operational leverage. Moving on to talk about key tech developments in the period. Take these in turn on the right-hand side. We have created a new inventory data store. This is optimized for accuracy and performance. By introducing a live search layer to our platform last year, we were able to optimize how we collect and store inventory data. As a result, we are now able to include significantly more hotels and destinations in our offer, all delivered with increased accuracy.
This development has been transformational in unlocking our ability to expand efficiently. We are now developing faster search technology with smarter filtering and better discoverability. This will improve our customers' on-site experience. We have developed our platform to be customer rather than booking-centric. This enables us to deliver an increased level of personalization to our customers. Underpinning our drive for scale and automation, we continue to develop towards being an AI-literate organization. This includes using AI to improve operational efficiency across the organization, as well as improving customer service and experience. Now on to our proposition. As shown on this diagram, our proposition is designed to achieve several things. It is designed to efficiently attract new customers, improve customer experience, and increase loyalty and repeats.
As a result of the technological developments we've just talked through, we are now able to supercharge our proposition by increasing the level of personalization through our customer-centric app. The leading indicators so far are very strong. In the period, we have achieved all-time high top three brand consideration. We're seeing increasing customer repeat rates. We have increased our customer Net Promoter Score from 48 to 57 so far this year. We've achieved a 27% reduction in customer service inbounds. Now I'll talk about some of our expansion areas, starting with City Breaks. We continue to upgrade our platform to enable us to offer more holiday options. The latest leg of our expansion program was to launch City Breaks in the final quarter of 2024. We did this because our customers told us they would purchase City Breaks from us if we sold them.
That certainly seems to be the case. The process of adding cities is now largely automated, making rapid expansion possible. We now have 130 city destinations live on-site, resulting in a tripling of our hotel inventory since 2019. As a reminder, whilst the City Break attracts a lower revenue per booking than a beach holiday, the economics are very attractive. This is because, firstly, there is a significant addressable market for City Breaks that we are now able to access. We estimate this is more than 20 million passengers out of the U.K. We are not investing in brand or direct marketing at the moment. Therefore, City Breaks increased the overall effectiveness of our marketing activity. Finally, these city bookings can be fulfilled and served on our existing technology and by our existing operation. The offer scales very efficiently. Now moving on to Ireland.
Following the Ryanair integration last year, we upgraded our platform to launch On the Beach in Ireland. Growth in the core business last year and so far this year has enabled us to create room for GBP 1.5 million investment in the first half of this year to establish a brand presence in this new market. We are pleased with progress so far and plan to invest up to GBP 1.5 million again in half two to continue to build this brand presence. This market is a very attractive and obvious choice for us for a number of reasons, not least because we estimate the beach and city package market from Ireland to be around 6 million passengers. On the next slide, we summarize how the total addressable market has evolved for the business.
Significant upgrades to our technology have enabled us to increase the size of our addressable market from around 20 million in FY2024 to over 50 million, nearly 50 million in FY2025. Represented here in the first third of this diagram is the core business as it stood in FY2024. We show beach package holidays from the U.K. as our core market, which was around 20 million passengers. With the developments discussed today, we have now more than doubled this addressable market to include city destinations and establishing a presence in Ireland. You can see in the table on the right that as part of this addressable market expansion over the last six months, we have increased the number of hotels on offer from 9,000 to 23,000 and increased the number of airlines on offer from 28 to 47. I'll now finish with some messages on current trading and outlook.
Half one growth in profit before tax was 23%. This is in line with expectations and stated after the net GBP 1.5 million investment into Ireland. Quarterly booking momentum has been building, and sales so far this quarter are 18% ahead of last year. Summer 2025 is currently 14% ahead of last year, which is an improvement on the position we reported back in February. As a result of these factors and the continued execution of the strategy, we expect to have another record year this year. We are confident in delivering this year's profit in line with current consensus expectations, GBP 38.2 million. We are on track to deliver our medium-term ambition of GBP 2.5 billion sales and GBP 85 million adjusted profit before tax. Thank you for joining us today.