Thank you. Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Trainline first half full year 2023 results presentation. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a Q&A session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. Please be advised that today's Conference is being recorded. Now, I would like to hand the Conference over to Mr. Jody Ford, Chief Executive Officer of Trainline. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining the call today for our half year results presentation. I'm Jody Ford, CEO of Trainline, and it's great to be joined by Pete Wood, our interim CFO. Pete stepped up into the role in September, but has been deputizing for our previous CFO for the last few years. Let's first go through the disclaimer. Onto the agenda for today. I'll intro with the key highlights for the first half of the year. I'll then bring to life how we are promoting environmental sustainability, the core theme behind our purpose. Pete will talk you through our financial performance, and then I'll update you on progress against our strategic priorities. After that, we'll open the floor to questions. In the first half, the group delivered a strong trading performance with net ticket sales up 17% and revenue up 28% versus pre-COVID levels.
This was led by our consumer businesses across U.K. and International, which in aggregate were up 53% versus the pre-COVID levels. EBITDA grew significantly too, while the business increased its investment in the European opportunity. In the U.K., we continue to unlock value for customers, increasingly relevant given the rising cost of living, including scaling active digital Railcard users to 1.7 million. In International consumer, we further positioned ourselves as the aggregator on high speed routes. This included launching Iryo in Spain, the fourth carrier brand in that market, and attracting a strong uplift in customers from outside of Europe, particularly tourists from the U.S. We continued to significantly increase transaction frequency. Double the number of customers were transacting more than once a month in the U.K. and France versus pre-COVID, while in Italy it was 4x as many.
That's a pretty remarkable step up. As you know, at Trainline we have a core purpose: to empower greener travel choices. Our vision is to build the world's leading rail platform, making it easy for customers to find the right ticket at the right price online, and delivering that experience through our own branded channels or through travel partners. In doing so, we're making rail travel more attractive, encouraging millions of people to take the train instead of driving or flying. We're enhancing our app to encourage modal shift to rail and help our customers travel more sustainably. In the first six months of the year, we launched a carbon comparison tool showing customers emissions savings versus other forms of transport. Soon we'll launch bike reservation within the app, helping the millions of cyclists in the U.K. to take their bike onto a train.
However, there's a lot more we can do. With emissions from the energy sector having significantly reduced, transport is now the largest emitting sector in the U.K.. A key way to reduce these transport emissions is by switching to rail, given it emits far less carbon than flying or driving per passenger kilometer. I believe Trainline has a key role to play in promoting modal shifts and encouraging greater use of rail. We will continue to do that by leading on product innovation, but now we want to lead the industry agenda as well. We recently launched I Came by Train, a new initiative focused on growing the public's awareness of the relative benefits of train travel and inspiring pride in those that take positive action. The initiative gives people the opportunity to pledge to swap a car, a journey by car or plane to rail.
We've launched brand campaigns, are leveraging influencers on social media. To top it off, the artist Craig David has written and released his own track. It's called Better Days (I Came By Train), and you've just heard it prior to the call start. Overall, our mission is to make rail famous for being the most sustainable form of transport. With that, I'll hand over to Pete to talk through our financial performance.
Thanks, Jody, and good morning, everyone. I'm Pete Wood, and I'm delighted to have stepped up into the role of interim CFO. Having been at Trainline a number of years, I remain hugely excited about the growth opportunity ahead and the momentum we are building. As Jody discussed, the group achieved strong growth in net ticket sales, revenue, and gross profits in the first half. Net ticket sales were up 17% versus three years ago, the year before COVID. Within that, our U.K. consumer business was up 45%. International consumer was up 81%. While Trainline Solutions, given a slow recovery in business travel, remains less than half its pre-COVID size. Revenue was up 28% versus three years ago. Its growth outpaced net ticket sales, supported by a strong rebound in global inbound customers, who we monetize at a higher level.
Gross profit was up 33% versus three years ago, with the growth margin improving as we continue to scale. The business delivered a strong step up in EBITDA, even while increasing investment to support growth. In the first half, adjusted EBITDA was GBP 45 million, up GBP 30 million year-on-year. In the U.K., we increased marketing investment to attract new customers to rail and to support the recovery of the rail industry. In international, as laid out last year, we have increased our marketing to build brand awareness and drive demand in our target European markets.
As we increase investments, we continue to focus on marketing efficiency. In the first half, we grew the number of international customers acquired for free through SEO channels by 50% versus pre-COVID. We also scaled our team, hiring 150 more people to further accelerate product innovation in international consumers. This included optimizing the user experience, launching new value features relevant to each core market, and aggregating new entrant rail carriers. Jody will discuss the exciting progress we're making here. As we process a much higher level of transactions in the first half, the cost to run our platform also increased as reflected in the other cost bars. This includes investment in the platform to ensure it remains resilient at high levels of scale.
Notwithstanding these investments, we continue to see operating leverage come through, further supported by our continued focus on cost discipline that we honed through COVID. As Jody outlined earlier, the rail industry has significantly recovered from the impact of COVID-19. As you can see on the chart, U.K. passenger volumes have returned to around 85% of pre-COVID levels over the last few months. This recovery is very encouraging and a sizable step up from a year ago. It's not without some volatility given the ongoing industrial action. It's not yet clear when this will conclude, with more strikes happening in the U.K. over the next few days. However, I want to emphasize that post period end, underlying demand remains strong. The pressure on disposable income from the cost of living crisis is likely to impact many consumer-facing businesses across Europe.
However, recent survey data gives us some reassurance, suggesting rail should prove more resilient than other modes of transport, in part, given it is experiencing lower rates of price inflation. The cost of living crisis also brings into focus how we can help customers save money when traveling, leveraging our broad set of value features like SplitSave and digital Railcards. Jody will come on to talk about this in more detail later. Given the better than expected recovery in rail travel, in July, we lifted our guidance for fiscal year 2023. While acknowledging the industry headwinds, we reaffirm our upgraded expectations today. The business is in good shape and remains on a strong growth trajectory. Thank you, and I'll now hand back to Jody.
Thanks, Pete. Let's now talk about our progress against our strategy. As a reminder, here are our four strategic priorities.
Let's first discuss our U.K. consumer business before discussing international consumer and then finally, Trainline Solutions. Our first key priority in the U.K. is to provide customers with an excellent user experience, removing friction when searching for trains and booking tickets while offering them unrivaled value. In doing so, we have shifted more people to online, in particular digital ticketing, with e-tickets a core part of our mobile app proposition. Availability of rail journeys where e-tickets can be used has continued to grow. Southeastern, the last major rail operator yet to have enabled e-tickets, began its rollout in H1. As you can see on the chart on the left, e-ticket adoption from customers tends to grow quickly once they are made available on a specific operator. Once complete, this will take the e-ticket availability north of 90%, broadly resolving the supply issue.
Transport for London being the only notable part of the network not to have e-tickets. On the right-hand side, you can see how industry e-ticket penetration in the U.K. has grown significantly. This is driven in part by greater availability as well as demand growing as more people opt to buy tickets through their phone rather than queue up at a station. At 43%, there's plenty of runway and clear tailwinds for future growth. The commuter segment represents a significant growth opportunity for digital ticketing. This includes season tickets, which have so far recovered to around GBP 800 million in sales. Season tickets have historically had limited digital ticket options available. When I spoke to you in May, I said we would roll out a digital season product this year following a successful pilot.
Six months later, we are now selling digital seasons on 10 train operators in the U.K.. Prior to COVID, many commuters used our app, but due to a lack of digital ticket options, only a minority bought their tickets through Trainline. We have a large cohort of app users we specifically call time checkers who serve as a good proxy for commuters. As I've spoken about before, we've been priming our app to serve such customers with features like Favorites to personalize their journeys. In H1, we saw well over a million Favorites set up, helping to grow the time checker cohort by 58%. We've also grown the number of time checkers that then go on to buy their tickets through Trainline by 63%. This is a strong start, but there's clearly still a lot of headroom to go after.
Now with a fuller suite of commuter tickets in digital format, we're in a strong position to convert more of these time checkers into ticket purchasers. In the first half, we also enhanced SplitSave, our split ticketing feature. We ran a data-led optimization process to make the product even better, expanding the number of journeys in which split tickets are offered. This helped grow availability of SplitSave tickets to 76% of all journeys, up from 64% at launch. Having previously only been available on our mobile app, we recently made SplitSave available to customers that book via web as well. By improving the availability of SplitSave, we can help more customers save money. Moving on to our second priority in the U.K., building demand, but sticking with the theme of saving customers money.
Our broad value proposition is becoming increasingly important as the cost of living becomes more of a concern. We offer customers all carriers and journey options on key routes, including coach, allowing them to compare and select the best value fares. We provide customers a seamless way to book tickets in advance of travel, often making it considerably cheaper than buying a ticket on the day. With digital Railcards and SplitSave, customers can unlock further savings on their train fare. All of this together provides an easy and convenient way to save money. We're telling customers all about the value we offer in a brand campaign in the U.K.. It highlights how they can save up to 35% on their ticket when booking through Trainline.
This is further reinforcing Trainline's reputation with customers as a key way to get value for money when using the rail network. Let's move on to our third priority, increasing customer lifetime value in the U.K. and step into digital Railcards. Railcards are a key loyalty proposition for the rail industry, giving customers access to discounted tickets. We estimated that there were around 6 million in circulation when we started marketing our digital Railcard 18 months ago. Last year alone, we sold 1 million digital Railcards. Since then, we continue to make significant progress with 1.7 million active digital Railcard users in August. Our new Railcard renewal process will further support retention, with customers able to renew their digital Railcard in just a few clicks.
Priming our app for commuters and scaling digital Railcards are good examples of how we are helping people make better travel choices every day. They're also helping increase our relevance for more of our customer travel needs. This is driving a notable increase in repeat usage, with the number of customers transacting more than once a month doubling versus pre-COVID. This is a huge acceleration in our U.K. business and underpins the 45% year-on-three-year growth of net ticket sales we saw in the U.K.. Now let's turn to progress against our strategic priorities for International Consumer. I'll start first with enhancing the customer experience in our priority markets, France, Italy, and now Spain. In these markets, we are striving to be the aggregator for rail travel, offering all the carriers on all the key routes.
By positioning Trainline as the aggregator, we believe we are well-placed to win in Europe and significantly grow our share. This is playing out on the two routes that we have most recently opened up to competition. Madrid to Barcelona and Paris to Lyon. When I spoke to you in May, I said tickets sold on Madrid to Barcelona were 5 x higher than pre-COVID. Well, it's now 7 x as high. Likewise, for Paris to Lyon, I said tickets sold has doubled since Trenitalia launched its service in December. That number has now tripled. European markets are opening up to new competition, and this is happening most rapidly in Spain. Last summer, SNCF launched their low-cost challenger brand, Ouigo, on the Madrid to Barcelona route. They've competed fiercely since then, with average ticket prices on the route halving. This month, Trenitalia's Iryo will launch their premium service.
This will give customers even more choice, and we have already begun selling tickets. With four carrier brands now competing on trains' busiest routes, almost doubling total daily service, this represents a great aggregation opportunity. Competition is also expanding to other routes across Spain, most notably Madrid to Valencia. Ouigo launched a new service last month, with Iryo set to follow before the end of the year. Next year, both carriers plan to extend their operations further, with new services between Madrid, Seville, Malaga, and Alicante. This means four different carrier brands will compete on high-speed routes right across Spain. Taken together, we estimate these liberalized routes will represent a EUR 1.3 billion aggregation opportunity. We've accelerated and scaled our pace of product innovation for our international customers, driven in part by having now fully hired the 150 new people I highlighted six months back.
We are rapidly rolling out new features across each market, as shown by these examples in H1. By doing so, we are optimizing the user experience while differentiating ourselves from the other retailers. As I mentioned earlier, we have a broad value proposition in the U.K.. We are building the same in our target markets too. Across these markets, we made it easy to book in advance and give customers the ability to book all carriers and journey options. We then tailor our feature set to reflect the nuances of each market. For example, in France, we have digital Railcards, but in Italy, Railcards don't exist. Instead, we have Trenitalia discount codes. In each market, our localized set of features increasingly provide customers an easy and convenient way to save money.
As we said we would, we have meaningfully increased marketing investment to drive up customer demand and brand awareness of our value proposition. This includes a nationwide brand campaign in Italy, which has significantly grown brand awareness, helping to triple the number of new app customers year-on-year. Our brand campaign focuses on the benefits Trainline brings to customers as the market aggregator. It highlights how we allow them to compare all carriers, prices, and journey options to find the right ticket at the best price. Global inbound customers made a strong recovery in the first half, led primarily by U.S. tourists. We positioned ourselves well for their return. Net ticket sales to global inbound customers was up 66% versus pre-COVID levels, with sales to U.S. customers almost doubling.
As a result, U.S. inbound sales into mainland Europe were twice as large than into the U.K., which is notable given we're still at an early stage in developing our international business. As we acquire more customers, we are driving up customer lifetime value by increasing the frequency in which they transact with us. In the first half, the number of customers transacting more than once in a month doubled in France and quadrupled in Italy versus pre-COVID. Finally, our fourth priority, growing Trainline Solutions. Before we step into our progress here, I'd like to briefly talk about GBR. Published in May last year, the Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail included proposals to create GBR, a new central governing body to control and manage all aspects of the railway in the U.K.. Those reforms require legislation.
However, last month, the government confirmed this legislation will be delayed, with no definitive timing on when it would resume. The white paper also included proposals for GBR to launch its own retailing app and website. In December last year, Rail Delivery Group took preliminary steps ahead of a formal tender process to procure retailing platform service. However, this process is also delayed, and at this stage, we have no further details to share. Finally, we continue to work with RDG on a shared agenda to reform rail retail following our MoU agreement early in the year. While we're making some progress, I don't think we'll see any outcome just yet. We continue to leverage the strength of our platform to support our travel partners. In the U.K., we signed a contract extension with ScotRail, while in Italy, sales for our first white label carrier partner, Italo, went live.
We continued to position our global API platform for growth, giving more B2B partners the ability to offer European rail options to their customers through one simple, seamless connection. We also signed up travel management companies including CWT, Egencia, and Havas, and added new inventory to the global API, expanding our content offering in core European markets. Before we open the floor to questions, let me recap on some key takeaways. The business delivered a strong trading and financial performance in the first half, with a notable step up in net ticket sales, revenue, and profitability. With that, we today reaffirm our recently improved guidance for the full year, expecting robust growth to continue into the second half. Our U.K. consumer business is growing strongly as we shift more customers towards digital ticketing, particularly in the commuter segment.
Likewise, in an increasingly cost-conscious environment, we continue to unlock value for customers with enhanced products like SplitSave, scale digital Railcards, and make customers aware of our broader value proposition. In Europe, we are aggregating all new carriers on key routes and increasing the pace at which we roll out new value features. We are already seeing this accelerate our sales growth, including now with global inbound travelers. Looking forward, I remain hugely excited about the opportunity ahead, our long-term growth tailwinds, and the progress we continue to make in delivering to our customers in the U.K. and across Europe. Thank you very much for listening. We'll now hand back to the operator for questions.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Once again, that's star one one for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Navina Rajan from Morgan Stanley. Please ask your question.
Morning, Jody and Pete. Congrats on the results and the collab with Craig as well. Enjoyed that. Just a few questions from me. The liberalized routes opportunity, interesting that you've put some numbers around it, the EUR 1.3 billion opportunity you mentioned. Can you just clarify that net ticket sales? How do you sort of get there? And then regarding the similar markets where you're doing similar initiatives, France and Italy, do you sort of see that opportunity in those sort of routes, Paris- Lyon, such, being similar? My second question is on the sort of near-term trading environment. Understand rail probably poses a down-trading sort of proposition for the consumer, especially due to sort of high fuel prices.
In International, where travel and U.S. inbound is quite a big part of your business as well as tourism, how do you see sort of a weak consumer environment playing out there? Then lastly, just on Solutions, how should we think about the earnings profile of that business, given that it's relatively a new segment? Thanks.
Thank you very much for the question, Navina. I'll take the first one, and then Pete will probably chime in on the other two as well. First up, the point around liberalized routes and the EUR 1.3 billion we're highlighting in Spain. The sort of math to get there is looking at our best understanding of that market, of the Spanish market and saying of the effectively high speed routes, what part of them are effectively everything is sort of liberalized, but where will we see competition occurring and where can we point to competition entering the market?
I think the really good news here around Spain for us is that it is happening and it's already we are selling tickets, and Madrid, Barcelona is a very significant part of that market. It's one of the top routes in Europe. That's already there. Within four weeks we'll see Iryo launch. We're already selling tickets on that route. Then Valencia is the number two route. The same is already happening there. Then these points around Seville, Málaga and Alicante, they are all coming online. When we look at those routes, we get to a sort of TAM of EUR 1.3 billion. How that plays out between those four carriers, I don't know.
The other thing which I think could drive that number actually significantly higher will be substitution from road and from air. If you take a route like Madrid, Barcelona, we estimate less than around a third, maybe up to 40% is currently on rail. A lot of people drive, and a lot of people fly that route. With the competition and particularly the low cost carriers like Avlo and Ouigo, we expect to see more substitution as prices drop. That's kind of the only direction we think prices will go. That's how we get to that number. To your question on Italy and on France. Italy, that is really, I mean, the most of the high-speed network in Italy has two carriers, in Trenitalia and in Italo.
We already have a strong proposition there as we talked about with regard to our marketing. We will continue to push that and to bring together ensure we have all the fares and the customers understand that they don't need to look at two apps, they can do it all on one. We'll obviously keep a watching brief to see if there's any new entrants potentially coming into Italy in the next year or so. Finally on France. Paris-Lyon is absolutely the number one route in France, and that has as we discussed a couple of times been liberalized. I can't share at the moment any further plans for other routes that will have competition yet. Clearly, Spain is where the focus is and where we're seeing new routes launching.
What if we kind of forward five years and then 10 years, do I expect that we'll see competition on many routes in France and frankly throughout Europe? Absolutely, yes. It's just the train sets that the these players need to buy are fairly expensive to kinda get through the various national health and safety rules, it takes time to do that. I think we will continue to see them launch and we've highlighted the ones we know with certainty are launching. That was the first question. I think International and U.S. inbound and the potential in consumer environment playing out there.
I guess the first thing to say is that as we think about those markets, we are still majority domestic demand, and that is absolutely our strategy is around driving that domestic demand and building up. What's been very pleasing and we think is still a significant opportunity and you know, multi-billion opportunity is this international part. I think what makes that interesting is that we think we are only currently around maybe five-ish mid-single digit part of the market, and there's therefore a lot of opportunity to grow. We are clearly the number one player there with just a very strong proposition. Pete, do you wanna speak to kind of consumer demand and any thoughts on how that plays out?
Yes, of course. So the first point I'd make is that the underlying performance that we see continues to be strong and we're confident in our improved guidance range. That said, of course, yes, it is a tougher environment. We believe that transport may be a bit more insulated than some other sectors. In the global financial crisis, we saw the proportion of budget spent on transport actually grow as consumers made other choices in where they saved. Rail may be more insulated than other modes of transport too. The cost of car ownership has been going up meaningfully over the last two years and certainly is outstripping the rail fare growth that we see. Then your question on Trainline Solutions.
Yes, this is a slightly different part to our segmentation. Really there are two parts to this. You should think about two different parts to the revenue generation here. The first is the TPS business. We continue to see recovery and tailwind of recovery in the B2B space, particularly as the environmental aspect comes into play. Switching business travel from air and into rail is certainly a tailwind for this part of the business. Then there's a pipeline of business here that we have built up, and that will continue to play out and drive growth in this segment.
Of course, the other part of the business here is the revenue generated for the platform from the U.K. consumer and international consumer businesses. That will further drive this part, this segment of our business.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you for the question.
Great. Thank you very much for your questions. Our next question comes from the line of Ivar Billfalk-Kelly from UBS. Please ask your question, Ivar.
Just following up a little bit in terms of the current volumes that you're seeing. I mean, given that the national recovery has stalled a little bit and we're looking at about 85% of pre-COVID volumes over the last couple of months, what have you seen over the last couple of months for yourselves in terms of your gaining market share? Secondly, in terms of the cost of living crisis that we have, I mean, clearly train is more attractive now. Of course, if we get fare increases coming through next year, which may well be high single digit or potentially even higher, I mean, how do you expect that to actually impact your ticket sales and your revenues?
Thirdly, this is a little bit of a different one, but it seems like Uber has finally started to dip their toe into the market a little bit, and granted it's a clunky proposition at the moment. But do you have any views on how their entry into the market might benefit you or alternatively how they might compete against you? Frankly, anything you can tell us about operational or financial impacts, either positive or negative, would be great.
Thanks, Ivar, for the questions. There's a lot in there. What I'll do is pick the Uber one off first and then speak a little bit to the first one on volumes and hand over to Pete. Yeah, Uber entering the market. Look, generally we welcome competition. We think it's really healthy to have a market where there are multiple players entering.
It's aligned with our broader purpose here, right? Getting new people to find rail, whether that's a new type of journey or a wholly new person, we think is a good thing. If Uber can do that or any other player then we truly welcome that. I'd say sort of moving on from that, we absolutely back ourselves, right? With 500 rail engineers to come up with the very strongest proposition to win those new customers over into Trainline. That's really a function when you think about it. We talked about it in our product session we did a couple of months back. You know, rail is complex. We have a 4.9 star app.
When you think through what we do with regards to the UX, regards to the features, whether that's all of the different suppliers we now integrate, whether all of the implementation of rail cards, value features, and so forth, so on and so forth. I think that's what regular rail users absolutely will expect. Then just one more reflection as I think about Uber, which is to say, you know, when we talk to customers, really the booking, the train bit comes first. If you're booking a weekend in Edinburgh or going to Barcelona, you use your rail app to find and secure a great fare.
Then nearer the time, you look at how you're gonna get to the station, whether that's with a ride-hailing app or a bike or whatever it might be. Actually we think, you know, longer term there's actually interesting partnerships for us because we believe we start with the primary traffic on that. That's kind of quick thoughts around Uber. Then in terms of volume and just your comment on over the last 10 weeks and it's kind of 85%. Clearly that data, we know that there's volatility, and this is through a period of, you know, a number of strikes in the U.K. market. What we have seen, and Pete spoke to the underlying strong demand.
We have seen that peak up more in the kinda mid-nineties at times in terms of those volumes, which I think is interesting. As we talked about before, we believe leisure is already fully recovered at more than 100% in terms of demand. We are seeing pick up definitely around commute and some of those products that we have put live there. I'd say one other feature is, you know, the booking window is later this year for Christmas because of some of the sort of challenges around getting those things live. I think that we remain confident and believe there's strong demand there.
Pete, do you wanna add anything else on that one or speak to kind of fare increases and how we're thinking about future sales?
Yeah, I think you've covered the points on the volume increase. With regards to fare increases, we are expecting an increase in fares in March 2023. The government hasn't shared exactly what that increase would look like, but they have stated that it will be below inflation levels. We've also seen some fare increases in Europe in the mid-single digits. Our planning assumption is that it would be similar to that in the U.K. as well. In terms of how that might impact us, look, we've got some good tailwinds, and we have some opportunities to grow nonetheless. E-ticket adoption, as Jody just spoke about, still has some strong headroom growth there.
Of course, we have a really great value proposition which becomes all the more important at this time. Ensuring that customers understand that they can save money by booking in advance or making use of features like digital Railcard or SplitSave will really support customers through this difficult time. Thanks for the question.
Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from the line of Steve Liechti from Numis. Please ask your question, Steve.
Yeah. Hi there. Steve Liechti here from Numis. I've got two actually. The first one, you may or may not be able to say much on it, given what you said on GBR needing legislation and the delay there. Have you got any sort of view from your end on what you see, what? Is there any sort of timeline or things that need to be put in place that will that restart the timeline on that GBR thing? Anything, any color-wise you can give us there? That's the first question. Then second question, just on Tap and Go, I'm interested how aggressively that's being rolled out in various different places. I know it's been talked about before and any updated thoughts on it in terms of threats and opportunities there. Thanks.
Thanks for the questions, Steve. Yeah. Well, I'll speak first to the sort of pay as you go and the opportunity there. For those who follow closely, this has been a government objective sort of since the Williams Rail Review. I think we can probably break that into two halves. One is what's happening in London and one is what could happen in the future in the regions.
What is confirmed, and I think to sort of think over the next couple of years is the way to think about this, is the Project Oval, and I'm sure many people on the call are familiar with this, but that ability to sort of tap in and tap out is being extended beyond sort of Greater London into a sort of broader region which goes about as far north as Bedford and Cambridge and goes south to Brighton on a number of those routes there.
We think that takes about two years to fully implement and then probably have some form of impact on our ticket sales. It's hard to say exactly, but probably heading up towards about GBP 150 million is the number where we think there may be some risk associated with that. What I'm gonna stress is that that particular proposition actually lacks quite a lot of what customers want. You know, moving around London, people tend not to worry too much about a few pounds. But as you get into more expensive fares, as you go to Cambridge or to Bedford, it's kind of tough to tap in and tap out without really a sense of control.
For the customers that the government is really keen to get traveling, that is gonna be an even more of an increased challenge. It also doesn't allow rail cards, so kind of young person, senior citizens and so forth, and it's very difficult to travel with a family with that. Actually a lot of the market won't want to use that system. Actually we see an opportunity here in the medium term for Trainline. This is something we think we could do well, and we could work really with the industry on this one. In the same way as we've innovated across a number of other ticket types, this is something we think is very interesting and we are looking pretty hard at how we could support that.
Just to the point on the regions as sort of you intimated, this, whilst it remains kinda high level, has been talked about a lot by the government. There really is no clear sort of strategy, policy, investment level or even a technology yet of what that would look like. I mean, again, I think it probably is an opportunity for Trainline, but it's definitely medium term plus. I'd be quite surprised if there was any product like for customers in the next four plus five years to go out. Look, we'll wait and see. I'll come back to the GBR piece here, which really is tough to answer. Obviously, there's you know, we are just awaiting confirmation of the rail minister coming in.
We heard about the Secretary of State just last week, and they are obviously kind of getting to understand their briefs at the moment, and they are going to form an opinion of exactly the direction they want to take this. I think the government have got questions. You know, they need to kind of philosophically and then strategically what direction do they want to take this with, specifically with regards to the GBR app. Look, we stand ready as we have always been to engage if the government would like to work and run a broad procurement exercise. I don't think it's as clear cut anymore it being a free standalone app.
I think there's still shades of gray of what this ultimately could look like, which is probably not that helpful to speculate on where that goes. All of that said, I think, you know, at the end of the day, where we've got to really is that, you know, we have incredibly high trust with customers. You've seen the sort of the growth in our innovation and feature development. 86% of customers rate Trainline as sort of highly trustworthy, and that's fairly significantly ahead. I think whatever government sort of policy or it turns out we have an opportunity to work with them to help them deliver their policy and we have the technology to do that. Oh, thank you very much, though, for the questions.
We'll move on to the next one.
Great. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Simon Davies from Deutsche Bank. Please ask your questions, Simon.
Morning. Morning. Couple from me. Firstly on your obviously big step up in marketing spend, can you talk a bit about what you're seeing in terms of trends for CPAs in Europe? Are they beginning to push upwards? Are you still very comfortable in terms of the value you're extracting from those in terms of customer lifetime value? Secondly, you've mentioned previously strike action, is it assumed within your guidance? Can you give us some color around what you are assuming in terms of the number of strike days and some kind of color around what the cost is now per strike day? Just lastly, balance sheet beginning to rebuild, when might dividends come onto the agenda?
Thanks for the question, Simon. Look, why don't I start on number one, and I think they sound like good questions for Pete, we'll pick up on two and three and maybe some of one. I think how we think about marketing is we are long-term, you know, we've got a good performance marketing muscle. We have been using that in Europe for a number of years, but we have stepped that up and we are broadening the number of channels we use, you know, beyond Google and paid search into app downloads, and more broadly into sort of social and other channels as you'd expect.
We've also made significant investments, as you've seen and we've talked about, around brand campaigns in France and in Italy, particularly targeting those aggregated routes 'cause we just think this is the moment in time to tell the sort of populations and rail users that they have choice. That's where we're going. With regard to the performance marketing and the channels, we set, you know, we have a fairly clear delineation and kind of guardrails around how we spend, and we remain kinda comfortable with the investment levels that we're seeing and the CLVs that we're seeing.
I think there's a number of stats between Pete and I that we spoke to that really speak to engagement and more frequency driving up across those user bases, which obviously, as you know, drives the CLV. Pete, I don't know if you wanna give any more on that one or not, and then talk to the other two.
Yeah, I think Jody's right. We're really encouraged with the way in which that European business is evolving. Of course, it's in terms of rolling out the playbook, it lags the U.K., but it is taking all the right steps that we need and gives us confidence to continue to invest. Your second question regarding strike action. Look, we're not gonna share the specifics of how it impacts on a day-by-day basis or anything. A couple of things to note. The first is that the impact we see is fairly V-shaped, right? We see a good recovery once the strike is over.
If you analyze out and look to see what's happening behind the strike, we see a strong underlying demand. That's very encouraging for us. Of course, you know, in the medium term, we expect this to be resolved. Really our focus in the meantime is to help customers through these industrial action days.
Then your final question, regarding capital allocation. Look, our focus is on ensuring that our business is well fueled, and that our expansion into Europe is supported. You know, there may be some inorganic opportunities along the way, as well. Beyond that, all options remain on the table, regarding how we drive shareholder value.
Thank you for the question.
Great.
Next question comes from the line of Owen Shirley from Berenberg. Please ask your question, Owen.
Morning. Thanks for taking the questions. The first one was a follow up on the Uber point. Just really wondering whether you engaged with them at all, or if they engaged with you about using, you know, your sort of API from the Trainline Solutions business. The second was on the retail review, where you sort of said negotiations are ongoing. I just wondered if you could sort of shed any light on what the main sticking points are. On the international opportunity, clearly sort of very big. Are you seeing competitors spend more on marketing in the way that you are? I suppose just more broadly, any behavior from the competitors in Europe that you think is worth calling out? Thanks.
Sure. I'll start with that final question and then sort of work through the other two. With regard to International, we really feel like we, you know, are really the only European proposition, operating all of those markets, at the scale that we're operating at. We don't spend a lot of time focused on the competitors, which are frankly pretty small and pretty focused on individual markets. No, I think the broader point is actually our principal competitor remains the sort of state monopoly, if you like, the state incumbent operator who have spent back in.
I guess, you know, at this time a year ago, we were talking about how sometimes, you know, those players had pulled back in terms of spend because of COVID and so forth. They are back in those markets and, you know, as you'd expect, frankly. That's kind of the position there. I think the sort of what's been especially pleasing is actually to see how our proposition, as we talked about earlier, has played out with those inbound customers, and in the U.S. particularly, where we just have such a clear, strong proposition as you also potentially know that those commission rates are indeed kind of higher and more interesting, even more interesting for us on those types of things.
They're particularly good from a CLV point of view. Actually what we're seeing is they are not just taking one journey. They might book a couple from, let's say, New York in their apartment, but they're actually beginning to book further as they come from London, and then they go up to Oxford, and then they actually take the Eurostar with us, and then they sometimes book, you know, all the way down to the south of France or into Italy or whatever it might be. Coming back to the Uber point.
Look, I won't speak to any specifics, but we remain in, you know, open conversations with a number of different players around the use of our API and some of those sort of travel management companies, but also businesses that might look a lot like Uber. I think we have the broadest set of APIs and we have the most robust set of APIs. I think the way I characterize what we've been doing at the moment is a test. We'll have to see how that test goes and where they might go in the future and who they may decide to partner with. Then retail review.
To again, there's really very little I can say about this, but I think the context I can give is this is just I mean, it's just not the top priority for the DfT right now. As you can probably understand, there's such radical sort of change, if you like, over the last few months, and there's such a broad agenda of potential change. Sort of what are the finer points, which was how we'd kind of characterize it, of third-party players, is not something that is, you know, top of that list. That's why we sort of six months ago, I said, look, I didn't think we'd be returning anytime soon with a conclusion.
Now, I suspect this is something that goes on for sort of several months into the future. As we talked about six months ago, the important thing for us was the backstop agreement and the sort of conclusion, if you like, of the discussion around the commission level, which is very helpful for us and allows us to continue to invest in it in the way we want. I think that covers it. I don't think there's anything.
No.
Thank you for the question.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Lara Simpson from JP Morgan. Please ask your question, Lara.
Yes, good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about your online share development. Clearly making strong inroads there with market penetration now at around 53%. Where do you think that could go in the next two years, both U.K. and international? Any color on that would be helpful. Then my second question, more of a follow-up again on international. If you could talk about your marketing strategy there, how we should think about investments as you look to drive growth in those markets. Thank you.
Thanks, Lara, for the question. I'll pick up that first one on International marketing first, then speak a bit to share and how we think about that. You know, as I sort of previously referenced, we are really building up a new capability around brand marketing, and that takes the form of, you know, we showed some pictures of outdoor, you know, with TV campaigns. That focused TV campaigns very much focused on value and the value of aggregation. As you'd expect sort of digital marketing delivering that to the particular Gen Z, which is a particular area of focus for us. We think, you know, the younger users are the most likely to convert and move away from the SNCFs and the Trenitalias of this world.
More broadly, performance marketing, we are just, you know, without getting into all the sort of technical stuff there, we're really looking for the sort of growth loops that bring the new user in and get them through, you know, exploring things like coupons and future tickets, if you like, that will drive further growth there or maybe pairing that with a Railcard or something like that. Around that, building a set of value features. You know, we showed that chart earlier, Save for Later, we've launched SplitSave in France. Bringing the fact that we've got these differentiated features versus the incumbent player. That is our angle and that is our proposition as we go through that.
In terms of broader performance marketing, I think we probably spoke to that one earlier. In terms of market share, International, I'll cover that one off first. Look, we continue to see really accelerated growth in those markets. We are increasingly kind of highlighting, if you like we talked about the EUR 1.3 billion in Spain. You know, fairly clear slices where we think we have a very strong proposition and we are going hard at those shares and looking to get into double the share growth quickly within those areas. We have seen that we can be actually on a new challenger brand. We are seeing sometimes we are north of 30% of their ticket sales on some of these challenger brands, which is very encouraging.
Overall, I think what we've said historically is we want to, as quickly as possible, get to double digit share, in those markets and kind of get on the trajectory that we've seen historically, in the U.K.. To speak to the U.K., yes, we think and continue to believe there's the opportunity to expand our share. We see good underlying performance and growth in that area. I think the area and the part of the TAM that we're pretty interested in, we've both spoken to today, is around commuter tickets and season tickets. That's an area that we've really had very little of historically. I said today, that's recovered to GBP 800 million. Historically, that was a GBP 2 billion market. We think we can play a significant role in that given our product innovation, and digital Season Ticket.
That remains an encouraging area for us. Pete, anything you wanna add on that?
Yeah. The only thing I'd add is that we're also investing, you know, by investing in the product, removing friction, it's growing rail. You know, the investment that we're making in sustainability and making rail famous as the most sustainable mode of transport, right? This is to grow the whole market. Of course, you know, we will all benefit from that.
Thanks for the question, Lara.
Thank you. Our next question comes from James Lockyer from Peel Hunt. Please ask your question, James.
Hi. Yes. Good morning. Three questions from me, please. Firstly, just on the 10 carriers you're doing season tickets with so far. Can you tell me what the sort of the pipeline's looking like there, and what are the blockages to getting all of them digitized? How should we think about the end of the year in terms of number of season tickets live? Secondly, just on the U.K.. You mentioned new value add services such as the bike reservations. How should we think about that going forward? What other options could you bring to the U.K.? I mean, given that I think you mentioned earlier that actually rail, you know, the decision before rail in terms of how you get to the station, things like car journeys, for example.
Thirdly, just in terms of recruitment and attrition rates and salaries. Could you give us a bit of color around that and how that's going to plan, please? Thanks.
Thanks very much, James. You slightly broke up on the last one. I think we got it in the, so I'll just pick up the final one there. In terms of recruitment, as I said, we've hired those new 150, essentially kind of engineers and data scientists, and we feel really good about that. I'd say just more broadly as kind of sentiment wise, the market has definitely eased a little over the last six months. I think, you know, you will understand why and we are finding it easier to recruit engineers than perhaps 12 months previously we were, which is a good thing.
We kind of hit the run rate we need, and we feel good about the engineers we have. I'd just call out our Barcelona tech hub that I think we spoke to six months ago, has been a great source of kind of expertise in engineer hiring. Well, a very good sort of overall compensation package in value terms. That's there. To speak to the first question, which was the Season Ticket, digital Season Ticket and what might be future blockages. Look, actually that's going really pretty well. I mean, anytime you deal with sort of physical infrastructure and gate lines and so forth, it always just takes longer than launching a purely digital feature.
What needs to happen here is to ensure in each of these, sort of particularly the London terminuses, there's enough barcode readers on the gate line for that to happen. Generally speaking, that's gone well and the employees at the station are trained. We've generally been you know, very well supported by the government on this. They are very much behind this as an initiative and the industry more broadly. We're getting good feedback and traction with those TOCs, the train operating companies around rolling this out. We've been able to also deliver it for some of the white label commercial TOCs that we support.
Look, I think in the coming months and I think you know over the probably, I don't know, 6 to 12 months would be a good time zone to be thinking about ultimately enabling it. Then once we've got it enabled, we then can really start focusing in on educating people around the around the feature and driving it. Ultimately this drives to us having the full suite and bringing our intelligence and data smarts to be able to help people make the right choice, which is something we think we do that others won't be able to. Then I'll just touch on the final kind of question around bike reservations and other features. Look, I would just say this remains a sort of watching brief.
We do invest here around partner services, and there's a few things that we are beta testing, right now, and working with different types of providers. I don't think anything here is going to surprise you. All I would say, and we said this, you know, I've said this the last couple of years, is we are laser focused on the core proposition and then the growth of that, and then not just in the U.K., but into Europe. There's just a whole wide range of things that we'll keep working out, but they aren't our top priority. Over time, they will become things that we will get much more invested in when we're looking more to sort of drive value around given customers. At the moment, we're in that earlier stage of growth. Thanks for the question.
Great, thank you. Our next question comes from Ciaran Donnelly from Liberum. Please ask your question, Ciaran.
Hi. Thanks, guys. Just a couple clarifications first. Just on the retail review. Look, clearly the timing's unclear, but with respect to the implementation of any change, would it be affected by the completion of these negotiations, or does the timing refer back to when the MoU was signed? I think you said at that time, any change would be effective kind of April 2025. If we do have an elongated process from here, could that potentially be pushed back? Two, just on the percentage of U.K. rail volumes that Southeastern accounts for, if you just have that information. Then just two kind of higher level questions from me. One, I've noticed kind of in the customer journey that you're adding on kind of post-travel options in terms of carrying on your journey.
Is there any kind of plans to start looking at potential monetization processes for post-customer journeys? Just finally, I think Peter talked about as part of the capital allocation, inorganic opportunities. What will be the priority when you're looking for any potential inorganic opportunities in the future? Thanks.
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Goodbye.
Thank you.
Thank you for standing by. We will now resume the call.
Apologies around that. I don't quite know the technical issue. I think we've, Ciaran Donnelly, just worked through your questions. I think we just covered off the Southeastern the thinking around that of 6% to 7% of U.K. volumes. Then I think the retail review I covered off. Don't quite know if we were cut off, but I think use the planning what we talked about six months ago that is three years' time net 25 basis points impact. Whatever the conclusion of that retail review, whenever it happens, I don't see any real possibility of a delay to that impact or anything significantly different as it stands. Thank you very much for those questions.
Thank you very much for all your questions. We have now reached the end of the Q&A session. I'll now turn the call back for closing remarks.
Thank you very much. Thanks everyone for joining today. As Pete and I have said, we have delivered a strong financial performance in H1 and are pleased to reaffirm our enhanced guidance for the year. We have clear strategic priorities and are making significant progress against them. We remain positive as ever about the opportunities that lie ahead. Thank you everyone for joining.
Thank you. This concludes today's Conference Call. Thank you for participating.
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