Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to the Le Travenues Technology Q1 FY2026 earnings call hosted by DAM Capital Advisors Ltd. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen-only mode, and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during the conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touch-tone phone. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Anmol Garg from DAM Capital Advisors Ltd. Thank you and over to you, sir.
Thank you, Zico. Good evening, everyone. On behalf of DAM Capital, I welcome you all to Ixigo's 1Q FY2026 earnings call. We have with us Mr. Aloke Bajpai, Co-Founder, Managing Director and Group CEO of the company, Mr. Rajnish Kumar, Director and the Group Co-CEO of the company, and Mr. Saurabh Devendra Singh, Group CFO of the company. Before I hand over the call to Saurabh, I would like to highlight the safe harbor statement on the second slide of the earnings presentation, and it is assumed to be read and understood. Thank you and over to you, Aloke.
Okay. Hello everyone, this is Aloke here. Welcome to our Q1 FY2026 earnings call. We have kicked off FY2026 with a fantastic quarter for the Ixigo Group. We've managed to beat our own expectations and continue to grow at a strong pace despite this quarter having its share of challenges for the broader market. Q1 FY2026 had a few events that impacted the aviation market in India and the region. Operation Sindhu led to a temporary airspace closure across parts of North India in May, affecting flight operations for nearly 8- 10 days. While this was a significant disruption during the period, the post-event recovery has been swift, and the ecosystem has adapted quickly. The tragic AI-171 crash in June created another setback due to the dent in morale and passenger confidence in the immediate aftermath.
In addition to this, the airspace closure in Pakistan, as well as the airspace disruptions in the Middle East during the Iran-Israel situation, led to some dampening of international flight growth in the interim. Air India also voluntarily cut 15% of its international widebody flights till mid-July to accommodate enhanced safety inspections, and then the Middle East airspace closures affected many carriers as well towards the end of the quarter. While all this is normalizing, we believe that quarters like these, which have some headwinds, give us an opportunity to test our customer-oriented mindset. In Q1 FY2026, our team saw spikes in customer reach out for reschedules, cancellations, and alternate arrangements.
With the help of our AI customer support and newly launched Voice AI capabilities, we got the ability to go above and beyond for our customers, and we were able to demonstrate more agility and responsiveness in these situations, helping us to continue to gain market share. Penetration of air travel in India is still in its early innings compared to global benchmarks, and we see headroom for growth, particularly from regional airports and underserved segments. Just over 4% of Indians travel on flights, compared to 37%+ in China and 85%+ in the U.S. Once the GDP per capita crosses the $400 mark in India, we expect discretionary to flow further into flights and hotel categories. India's airport infrastructure is also undergoing a transformative expansion, with the number of operational airports doubling from 74 in 2014 to over 160 in 2025.
The government is targeting 200 airports by next year and 240 airports by 2030 through an INR 92,000 crore investment push. The regional connectivity boom backed by INR 60,000 crore in dry weights terminal upgrades unlocks massive demand from tier 2-3 cities, where Ixigo already has a very deep market penetration. Our multimodal capabilities and personalized offerings position us perfectly to serve and scale with this next wave of Indian air travelers. On our bus business, we have strategically been prioritizing growth over near-term margin optimization for a few quarters now, given the sheer size of the opportunity in front of us. That philosophy remains unchanged. Bus travel in India is also undergoing an inflection point. Despite the segment's scale, only 20% of bus bookings happen online, leaving vast room for digital expansion.
Simultaneously, most buses run at 60% - 70% capacity, while trains and flights on parallel routes are frequently waitlisted or overbooked. This supply-demand mismatch, coupled with rising expectations around travel comfort and flexibility, presents a massive opportunity. Private operators are already upgrading their fleets and bus travel is now happening on clean, modern buses and is being marketed as a preferred mode of transportation for Gen Z travelers. This growth is being further accelerated by the massive expansion of India's road infrastructure. We've been expanding our geographic footprint. AbhiBus, which initially had strongholds in South and West India, now has a growing presence in the North and East as well. Our partnerships spanning both private fleet operators and SRTCs across the country have continued to grow. These relationships are foundational to our ability to scale efficiently.
In fact, our bus partners are working more closely with us than ever before to identify ways in which we can help their business not just grow but also market their new routes, bus amenities, and improve passenger experience. This quarter, we've made significant strides in cross-selling buses and flights both across our ecosystem on Ixigo, ConfirmTkt, and AbhiBus apps and websites, thanks to proprietary tech enhancements and products such as Travel Guarantee, which offer customers flexible multimodal alternatives, capturing spillover demand from waitlisted customers. Our biggest achievement has been our ability to maintain leadership in the OTA category in terms of user base, not by outspending competition, but by continuing to see a lot of organic product-led growth as well as word of mouth about the overall customer experience we've built, leading to market share gain on all three lines of business that we operate in.
On the trains front, our market share has now crossed 60%, up from 58% two quarters ago. We've recently seen some minor volatility due to a series of passenger-oriented policy changes introduced by Indian Railways. However, our trains business remains resilient, and our user experience has continued to improve, and that is reflected in our rising app store ratings as well as our growth. I'm pleased to report that now we operate India's highest-rated travel app by far. ConfirmTkt and AbhiBus have both got 4.8+ ratings on the Google Play Store. Ixigo Flights has crossed 4.7, and Ixigo Trains app is 4.6+. We have a staggering INR 50+ user rating, 5 million+ ratings on the store across these apps, reflecting our scale. For the first decade of our existence, our entire growth story was organic, and we spent almost nothing on brand and performance marketing.
It was only in 2023 that we began making deliberate long-term investments in brand once we gained more confidence on the superiority of our products and customer experience. We recognize that top-of-mind recall, brand affinity, and trust at scale not only serve as a long-term moat but also materially improve conversion rates and the effectiveness of our performance marketing channels once product-led growth has established a strong base of early adopters. This quarter, we ramped up brand spend in line with growth and ran a major Ixigo Anniversary Sale and Flash Sale for flights and hotels, in which we leveraged AI into our marketing workflows. Our AI video production cost is 0.1% of what it would be with traditional campaign production.
On the train side, we've entered into various brand partnerships, most notably with Rohit Sharma for Ixigo Trains, which helps drive awareness and adoption of our Travel Guarantee features and improve top-of-mind recall, particularly in North India. On the bus side, AbhiBus partnered with 108 Super Kings and the Tamil Nadu Premier League, while ConfirmTkt collaborated with the Royal Challengers Bengaluru team. The Royal Challengers Bengaluru partnership gave us nationwide visibility, especially during the iconic 18th-year title win and emotional high-recall moment that coincided with Ixigo's 18th anniversary. These campaigns were not just about visibility, they were about building deep user trust and emotional resonance across markets. Our line of business owners make sure to prioritize between performance marketing, discounts, or brand-building initiatives based on when and where they see most value for these throughout the year.
We focus on measurable outcomes such as a baseline shift, the stickiness and repeat behavior of the instrumental traffic, as well as lifting conversion rates across organic and performance channels. Since this is a multi-year exercise, some of these efforts may not show material impact immediately, but early results indicate these initiatives are working for us, and we'll continue to do them within a fixed guardrail. Our strategy of building for bar up, staying asset-light, and creating deep user trust over years is what reflects the kind of growth we've seen at Ixigo over the last few years. The Gross Transaction Value CAGR of 83.7% over the last six years, or a better CAGR of 84.3% since we turned profitable in FY2021, are a reflection of what execution DNA we've built over time.
Over the next few years, I believe that we can continue to grow significantly faster than the market in hotels, buses, and flights, and in line with the online market's growth in trains, with multiple optionalities for new later-on additions such as what we did with food delivery on the train business. Travel is an inherently unpredictable experience due to constantly changing prices, availability, terms and conditions, fine print, and all. At Ixigo, we believe it's not just our responsibility but our duty to offer not just tickets but peace of mind to our users. Our unique peace of mind stack of value-added products allows us to reduce anxiety, protect downtime, and increase predictability for our customers. Our ability to use AI to price and personalize all these products has been applicable to our growth and margins.
We are now able to use a large user base and trust space over years to move up the value chain and grow faster in new categories such as flights and hotels. Very few companies have been built this way in India since most choose to focus on the top 50 million consumers only. Since the proverbial pyramid will now become a diamond, as middle-class India grows, or I should say bar ups, ambitions, and wallets continue to expand, consumer-to-fiction categories will continue to see disproportionate growth. Travel continues to be in the top three things people want to spend on to improve their lifestyle. When you look at buses, budget hotels, tours, etc., online penetration is only getting started. Finally, I'd like to point out that our business has a seasonal cadence. Q1 and Q3 tend to be strong quarters due to vacations and major festivals.
Q2 is historically a leaner period, while Q4 sees regional surges, particularly in South India, where festivals like Pongal, Ugadi, and the regional New Year celebrations occur. Despite this seasonality, we remain well-positioned to sustain Y-o-Y growth faster than the overall market in the near to midterm. With that, I'll hand over to Rajnish, who will talk about something we have been talking about for many, many years, but people have recently started paying more attention to, which is AI and our reinvention to an agentic organization. Over to you, Rajnish.
Thanks, Aloke. Aloke talked about why we are growing the way we are, but I believe this growth is a privilege that has to be earned and re-earned every single quarter. Our conviction comes from a clear understanding of what drives our differentiation, which is the ability to identify, design, and deliver tech-led innovations that are what we call our peace of mind product stack. Features that reduce anxiety, improve reliability, and simplify complex travel decisions. This focus has enabled us to acquire and retain customers cost-efficiently, even in competitive markets. Whether it's delay predictions, intelligent stay logs, or multimodal routing, we are not just optimizing bookings; we are elevating the experience of travel. That's what fuels our continued momentum. At Ixigo, our journey with agentic AI started as early as 2017, when we introduced our travel assistant and recommendation agent, better known as Sara today, an award-winning multimodal agentic travel assistant. Sara was way ahead of its time. It was autonomous, preemptive, multimodal with voice and aspects, and hyper-personalized.
It could understand a user's past travel patterns, preferences, loyalty programs, everything else to make intelligent travel decisions, showcasing our early beliefs in the power of agentic systems to transform the travel experience. Fast forward to today, agentic AI is now deeply embedded across our business, enhancing efficiency, personalization, and autonomy at scale. From real-time fare trackers and price prediction agents to autonomous web-selling agents that deliver your boarding pass straight to your Apple or Google Wallet, much of what a user experiences on Ixigo today is already powered by invisible agents working behind the scenes, interacting with complex third-party interfaces to get your job done efficiently and preemptively. Internally, we are driving significant productivity gains through our project Cruise, our CXO's AI-first infrastructure strategy centered around efficiency, revenue, and disruption.
Automated testing, intelligent code generation, smart deployments, rollbacks, and ML-driven pricing models for products such as Price Lock and Assure all run on self-governing agentic pipelines. Teams across HR, finance, and marketing use these agentic tools to automate workflows, to generate content, or even deploy voice agents that can allow customers or partners autonomously. One of the most powerful applications of agentic AI at Ixigo is in voice agents. Today, more than 60% of our customer support voice interactions are handled end-to-end by fully autonomous AI agents. These voice agents don't just respond, they proactively call customers to deliver critical travel updates, collect NPS scores or feedback, and even follow up with business partners on behalf of our users or internal teams. This is saving time, improving service levels, and enabling proactive customer care and scale. Democratization of agentic AI across the organization is a key powerful strategy as well.
Anyone at Ixigo can build, test, and deploy autonomous workflows without needing an engineering background and without having to write a single line of code. As for the future, we believe travel apps will evolve into conversational, multimodal, and hyper-personalized autonomous agents, not just recommending but doing for you. From booking your trip at the optimal time to reserving your travel at a restaurant on arrival, future travel assistants will act not just to guide, and to power this, you'll need real-time inventory, context-aware decision systems, and value-added services, all of which Ixigo is uniquely positioned to provide. A lot of people ask me what percentage of our code is now AI-generated. I think the commonly quoted metric X% of our code is now AI-generated is fundamentally flawed if we're trying to really measure the real impact of AI in software engineering. The reason is simple.
Coding itself is not the main bottleneck in software development. In most real-world engineering workflows, typing code barely accounts for about 20%- 30% of a developer's time. The remaining 70%- 80% is spent on far more cognitively intensive and collaborative tasks like system design, architectural planning, writing detailed documentation, thinking through edge cases, defining interfaces, creating test strategies, setting up CI/CD pipelines, etc. In that context, even if an AI assistant can generate 80% of your code, that's still just the productivity boost on a small slice of the overall effort. Mathematically, it amounts to only about 15% to 20% efficiency gain at best. That's assuming a near-perfect AI-generated code, which often still requires a lot of review, debugging, refactoring, etc.
The mode of code generation has been getting incrementally easier over years, whether it's by auto-complete in the early version of Copilot or people just copy-pasting stuff from Stack Overflow. More decentralized tools like Copilot or Cursor, etc., have evolved a lot. While these are impressive evolutions in productivity, they are at best evolutionary, max evolutionary. Where AI is now playing a role is in tracking and tackling the upstream and downstream parts of the software development lifecycle, from exploring trade-offs to helping with design or architecture decisions, generating documentation, writing test cases, creating mocks or deployment scripts, and managing infra scope, handling observability and rollback logics for self-healing failures. This is where agentic AI becomes especially powerful, not just passively generating code when prompted, but proactively owning parts of the entire software engineering process.
Rather than asking what percent of our code is AI-generated, a better question would be what percentage of the end-to-end engineering process is now autonomously handled or significantly accelerated by AI. For us, that number currently would be north of about 40%. When it comes to leveraging emerging AI models and tools, we have taken a forward-leaning experimental approach both to enhance internal efficiency and to power new customer-facing experiences. We recognize that we are still in the early wings of what is effectively a new industrial revolution. The AI landscape is evolving at breakneck speeds, with no single model, platform, or framework having yet emerged as a clear long-term benefit for deep scale investment. In such a dynamic environment, we believe it's critical to stay agile and continue investing in cutting-edge technologies and capabilities.
These technology expenditures may not immediately translate into operating leverage in the short term, but when one of these bets pays off and a particular use case matures and can be deployed at scale, it unlocks significant operating leverage and competitive advantage. Our philosophy is to stay ahead of the curve, absorb the learning costs today, front-load it, and build a defensible moat that compounds over time through proprietary AI-driven efficiencies and user delight. The other question I get asked frequently is whether agentic AI will disrupt OTA businesses. Agentic AI may pose risks for those who don't adapt, but for us, it's a once-in-a-decade opportunity to use it to lead from. They're not only ready for this shift; they've been building towards it for years.
If you want to measure how good a company is at AI adoption for accelerating growth and efficiency, the best measures would be to look at their revenue per employee. For us, last quarter, we have crossed INR 2.2 crore annualized revenue per employee in Q1, or roughly $236,000 USD, which even on global benchmarks is pretty decent. We believe this is just the start. In FY2025, we've managed to grow our revenue nearly 40% while growing our employee base by less than 10%. In spite of having newer business lines like hotels, food, and trains, etc., which would require a couple of years to scale, this is only possible if the mindset inside the team is to use technology and AI instead of just hiring more people. With that, I'll not bore you further and pass it to my friend who has a unique knack of being good with both numbers and people, Saurabh Devendra Singh.
Thanks, Rajnish. You are not even close to being boring. In fact, I have to tell the larger quorum, I feed on Raghini's discussions on AI. I regularly get inspired by them. A few days after our last quarterly call, inspired by Raghini and the work he's doing on AI, I read all our past presentations, financials for six years, and would report the RXP conference call into an artificial intelligence model that I've been using a lot recently just to see what it comes up with. I requested AI models to give me a hopeful best-case prediction for this quarter. The model came out with three outcomes, outcomes that I backed then, classified as highly optimistic.
One, Ixigo would build on its momentum, gain OTA market share across every segment we operate in. Two, Ixigo would kick off FY2026 with record revenue and, more notably, record profit. Three, I, Saurabh Devendra Singh, would finally stop saying "hmmm" after every couple of words and lose the pumble or the riff of "next" and "duh" that heavily defined my conference call. I'm happy to report that AI got two of the three right. OK, jokes aside, let's walk through the highlights of Q1 FY2026. As always, all the figures are in INR crore unless specified otherwise. Year-over-year comparisons are made for Q1 FY2026 against Q1 FY2025. Starting with the headline numbers, our gross transaction value, GTV, reached INR 4,644.7 crore, marking a 55% increase over INR 2,988.1 crore that we saw in Q1 last year.
Revenue from operations stood at INR 314.5 crore, up 73% from INR 181.9 crore in Q1 FY2025. Contribution margin grew to INR 128.1 crore, marking a strong 48% year-over-year increase. Contribution margin percentage stood at 40.73% versus 47.74% in the prior year. The decrease in percentage was as per plan and, as Aloke talked about, driven by our focused investments in driving growth and strong performance of cross-sell products like Travel Guarantee. We've talked a lot about this in the previous FAQ in case somebody wants to dig deeper. Adjusted EBITDA, excluding other internal needs of cost, improved to INR 31.4 crore compared to INR 20.3 crore last year and increased by 54%. Profit after tax came in at INR 18.9 crore compared to INR 14.9 crore in Q1 FY2025. There are some one-off/fallouts in this number which I will discuss in the end.
Turning now to our individual business lines. For flights, this was a challenging quarter with several unfavorable developments in the macro environment, which Aloke alluded to in his talk. Despite these headwinds, the flight teams have driven to the occasion, staying focused on delivering peace of mind to our customers. Our suite of value-added products have played a key role in maintaining the strong performance and building customer trust during these times. The numbers reflected that we booked 2.79 million flight segments with GTV rising to INR 1,848 crore. Contribution margin grew to INR 43 crore, representing a 42% contribution margin percentage. Flights accounted for 33.5% of group's total contribution margin this quarter. Our bus business operates out of Hyderabad, and like the city itself, it's a seamless blend of the traditional and the modern.
The business pairs deep-rooted empathy for customers and operators with cutting-edge technology to drive efficiency and scale. Fittingly, the results this quarter were equally balanced, calm, steady, and right on plan. This quarter, we completed 6.67 million passenger segment bookings, marking a 74% year-over-year increase. GTV rose 81% to INR 681 crore. Contribution margins for the category grew 44% to INR 42.3 crore, with a contribution margin percentage of 55%, a planned tapering consistent with what we talked about in Q1 FY2025 conference call. Buses contributed 33% of group overall contribution margin in Q1 FY2026. The pace of growth of trains' business continues to surprise me personally. We have a dominant position in the business line. In that context, the fact that this business continues to grow significantly faster than in the train OTA market is extraordinary.
In Q1 FY2026, we booked 26.6 million train segments, marking an impressive 26% Y-o-Y growth. GTV stood at INR 2,055 crore, a 30% rise. Revenue from operations was INR 129.9 crore, up 29%, and contribution margin came in at INR 41 crore, up 14%, and at a 32% contribution margin. The train segments contributed 32% to the overall contribution margin, the group contribution margin. Now, as promised, let me discuss the one-off items and the callouts. In Q1 FY2026, the share of loss from Freshbus, which is an associate company, was INR 2.34 crore. For Q1 FY2025, there was a reevaluation gain of INR 5.77 crore on Freshbus, share of loss from Freshbus of INR 2.01 crore, and IPO expenses of INR 2 crore charged to the P&L.
If I was to compare on a like-to-like basis by excluding all these items in both periods, our profit before tax would have increased by 76.2% from INR 16.2 crore to INR 28.7 crore. What do I expect from the rest of FY2026 and beyond? To answer that, we'll have to start with the reality of what we are stepping into. Artificial intelligence isn't just another trend. It's a seismic shift, on par with the invention of 3D printing first or maybe even greater. It's already interesting how we think, build, and adapt. In moments like these, I'm reminded of a line often misattributed to Charles Darwin, but actually written by Leon C. Mendelssohn in 1963, when he reinterpreted Darwin's idea for the business world. It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives. It is not the strongest that survives.
The species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself. That insight has never felt more relevant. As Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar have talked about, we are ready. There will be quarters like this one, full of energy, growth, and the thrill of getting things right. There will be quarters that are humbler, when we reflect, recalibrate, and learn. Through both, our compass will remain steady: empathy, honesty, and adaptability. With that, I'll hand it back to the moderator for questions.
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question- and- answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch-tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and one. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. Our first question comes from the line of Anmol Garg from DAM Capital. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Thanks for the opportunity and congratulations on very, very strong performance. Just a few questions. Firstly, I wanted to understand what led to a sharp increase in the take rates in the flight business in this quarter. We have now reached almost at a 9% kind of take rate. Is this kind of sustainable going ahead?
There are a couple of things. One is the underlying ticket price has gone down. It's a fixed business. The second, as I said, we have what we call a peace of mind or value-added services product. I've talked about how some of them have done well. It's a combination of these, which are leading you to feel as though the take rate is higher. Remember, a large part of what we have in the take rate as a percentage is a fixed amount.
Thirdly, you have to also realize that in flights, what has led to some of the things is also the fact that we've run promotions. If you see us compared to others, and this has been mentioned multiple times before, we look slightly different because we are more domestic. Domestic is the underlying amount. It's a lower ticket item. Our geographical shifts are different. On the take rate, going back to your original answer on the take rate percentage, we don't look at it at that rate as a take rate percentage because I don't control the price of the ticket. I control what I see as commission. What we see as commission and what our attach rate for our products could be, we remain confident on that.
Understood. Understood. Secondly, I wanted to understand that while our bus segment is doing at a very fast pace, if I look at the contribution margin here on a by-and-by basis, it seems that it has dropped almost 20 percentage points. Is this because of this one-time IPL advertisement that we have done in this quarter? Do you think that this is the range that it will be going ahead as well? From that perspective, overall margins for the company, should we expect the leverage to come in the overall margins? Or the focus currently will be on the growth side?
Let me break the question down in a couple of parts. The easiest part out of these is that whenever we are doing branding, that will come below because we see branding as more long-term. I think Aloke has talked about what the IPL in boxes that we've done, why we've kind of done it for the Tamil Nadu market, which is where we've been focused on. A year ago, we talked about we were at mid-70% as a contribution margin. We've talked about that we see this as a very low penetration market. We believe it can grow. When I look at the numbers right now, I know that looking at the contribution margin percentage is important in a lot of cases. For me, the growth of 44% in the actual absolute contribution margin is very important, especially in an industry or in a sector where it's underpenetrated. It's very underpenetrated. We have been focusing on that.
Is it something where we feel that this is a number that if we continue growing like we are, would we be comfortable with this kind of scale? Yes, we would be. I would say it on both sides that, and I've said it multiple times before, I don't believe that you will see all quarters be a 1% growth in buses. It will be as in I think we're doing well. I hope we continue doing as well. We will keep a lookout here in that sense. In terms of what we have above CM, it's a very controlled expense. We can manage it because it's on a per unit basis. It's much easier to manage.
Also, Anmol, Aloke here, the brand expenditure is not knocked off from CM. It's actually below, right? I don't think brand plays a role here. It's largely discounting performance and variable cost that is knocked off from the CM side in that sense.
Understood. Understood. If we expect that for the full-year basis, we will see some kind of operating leverage benefit to the company?
See, operating leverage on the fixed cost level is already visible. It's just that we are reinvesting that into multiple areas, right? If you think about new initiatives like hotels or some of the AI initiatives we're talking about, or also things like food delivery on trains and things, those are areas where as a company, we are pushing the pedal on saying, OK, how do we capture the market opportunity? How do we build out? Despite those investments, etc., we are essentially staying this kind of operating leverage layout. Had we not been making those new initiative investments, the operating leverage would be more visible in the bottom line.
We choose to do that because we want to continue to grow fast and seize on those opportunities, right? That's what Saurabh was allu ding to.
No, and the other part which you said, look, this quarter, and as I've said that multiple number of times and I stay with that, you should realize the branding is bunched up together. You won't see what you're seeing is the branding cost right now, the amount that we are putting that's on branding, which is below CM and above EBITDA. That will kind of spread across the year. This quarter was a heavy branding quarter because of IPL being there, as an additional little kind of bell tower.
Understood. Understood.
Sure. Thanks, guys, for answering my question.
I'll take a second to speak.
I think Rajnish is going to add.
Yeah, just one more thing that I wanted to add that there are new business lines which are very far, far away from reaching operating leverage. In fact, they are in beta phase, and they are like a bigger cost center than all of the other businesses. You might not completely see that operating leverage. There's some absorption of that happening because of these new lines of businesses like hotels and food and food etc.
Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Swapnil Potdukhe with JM Financial. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for the opportunity. Congratulations on a very good set of numbers again. My first question is with respect to your Travel Guarantee feature. I would like to know what percentage of your flight business and the bus business in this particular quarter came from this feature that you have been running. What would be the contribution in GTV terms, however you would like to explain.
Swapnil, I would have loved to give you a lot of details, but we don't track that. The answer would be the simple answer, we can't tell you because we don't track that. Yeah. Would it be fair to say just to say something here? Even if you look at just the fact that even when we hadn't launched Travel Guarantee, we were able to grow at a certain velocity even two quarters ago.
I think we are starting off at a very low base of market penetration when we started our flight business just about four or five years back, right? In that sense, I think there is still a very, very, very long runway even outside of the additional delta that Travel Guarantee might be adding in terms of upsell, etc. I think in the larger scheme of things, it will look like a smaller piece.
OK. I would recommend this. Last quarter, if you go to our FAQ, we did a very detailed explanation of how we think of this product. You can just go through that part, and you'll get a lot of your answers on this product thematically.
Right, right, Saurabh. If I were to just, you know, prod you a bit more, I mean, yes, you may not give me any numbers per se, but any sense as in incrementally how much that growth is coming because of this feature and also because of not just Travel Guarantee, but also your partnership with someone like a PhonePe, right? Which has been there for one year now almost. I'm just trying to triangulate things because your contribution margins have been a bit on this pressure.
C ontribution margin has been?
Contribution margin has come down a bit, right? Is it because of some investments that you're doing on the third-party platforms, revenue sharing, or those kinds of things?
Firstly, Swapnil, as in I think me and you are slightly different on the destination. When I say contribution margin, it's the INR crore number. Contribution margin percentage is what you are.
Yeah, I'm looking at the percentage.
I'd like to clarify that part first. The second part is to realize, look, contribution margin percentage is something you look at and when I look at it. This is what I'm saying. In each of these businesses, when I introduce a new product, and this is why I'm saying I've given that logic in a lot of detail in the last FAQ, when I introduce a new product, I can decide on what I want to optimize on. Am I optimizing it on margin, or am I optimizing it on usage? A couple of things from our side is we don't like having a loss-making product sustainably for a very long time. When we look at it, we say that firstly, we are able to launch the product.
Why we can launch the product at probably a more optimized cost than anybody else is because of what Rajnish Kumar talked about in his section in the AI and products that he's launching. When we launch a product, we kind of take that call saying, look, in the initial part of the product, I don't want to raise a really high margin. I want to make money on that because otherwise, it doesn't make sense for me. I'm an OTA. That's my idea. I want it to be a win-win between me, the customer, and the supplier in cases there is my speed. Whenever you see a product initially, and especially what we call the peace of mind stack product, we would optimize this for a lesser margin.
As the products grow, we might choose to increase the margin if we could find the utility and people are using it much more. The other part for you to realize what you've asked on Travel Guarantee, remember Travel Guarantee, the person is, say, I have a train ticket. I take a Travel Guarantee. I buy a flight. Essentially, I'm still using, and you should use Travel Guarantee if you travel on train. You'll realize the utility of the product. If you have to have a time-sensitive meeting, event, function where you have to be there, in that case, what I'm doing is I'm giving you an incentivization to get into a new mode of transport in many cases. When Aloke Bajpai talked about the 4% penetration of flight, and there it is growing.
If you want the real answer, you can check how many new flyers are coming in in India. I would argue that a significant percentage of those would be from us. Last time, we had given out this message that, you know, for the new flyers that we are adding from our NGO app, you know, half of them were actually flying for the first time because we run surveys on that cohort and asked them whether it's the first flight of their lives, right? I think the real win with products like Travel Guarantee is that, you know, we are making flyers out of people who are not flying before, right? In that sense, we are growing the market, growing the air head market, and not necessarily eating into anybody's market share.
Understood. That's pretty clear. Another question on flight business, we go. This is a follow-up to the previous question that was asked by Anmol. You did mention three reasons for the take rate going up. One was your domestic pricing coming down, which is understandable. You did mention that there were some anniversary sale and flag sale promotions also with certain bank partners. How does that help your take rate process?
It doesn't. I was just talking about general flight business. I wasn't talking about taking. I was giving you the two reasons which I said. One is the domestic/Tier two base. The second reason I was giving was the fact that I have these products, which are also included in the take rate. The third, which is the underlying ticket price, which was what I said, is the ticket price, because mine is a fixed price, what I get. If the underlying ticket price of flight changes or average flight changes, my take rate varies.
Got it. Just to be clear, when you report gross revenue, you don't include ad income there, right? You include that in the net revenue that you report.
When you're looking at GTV, there won't be any ad income. GTV into take rate would be ticketing revenue. You add other income, which is ad and bank offers, and then you get to take off the discount. You get to revenue from operations.
Perfect.
Things like bank advertising will show up in the revenue from operations growth. Whenever we run these kinds of campaigns, if you see any excess jump in the revenue from operations, some of it could be because of that. On the gross take rate side, it's basically the gross ticketing revenue that we consider.
Right. Perfect. Yeah, that answers that question. Just on your bus business, was there any tailwind on a, you know, when you look at a Y-o-Y basis? Because last year, probably there was an election quarter, right? So the numbers could have been a bit depressed when you look at it from a Y-o-Y perspective. Any incremental benefit? You had mentioned in the last quarter also that some of the traffic, which was affected on the air side because of the situation in the North Indian states and during, with Pakistan, the bus business was likely to benefit from that, right? Some traffic shifts?
Not really seen as growth. Your team on the bus side is not just a one-quarter story. If you look at the last three quarters, actually, we've been growing pretty rapidly on the bus side. Again, there is no base effect here. I mean, elections, you know, what happens is, yes, there could be some people who may choose not to travel during that, but then there are other people who will go back to vote in the city where their vote is, right? In some cases, we've seen even more travel on certain axis as a result of the election. I don't think there is any kind of a base effect playing out here. The fact is that, look, we are still, you know, like number two in this, and there's a long runway for us to grow because the market is only 20% penetrated.
Like Saurabh said, you know, I think those are the reasons why we are not looking at whether the CM is 55% or 60%. I mean, that's not material for us because as long as the absolute CM is growing at this kind of velocity, there will naturally be operating leverage flowing in because the, you know, at risk costs are not growing in that kind of base of contribution margin growth, right?
On bus lines, if you see the product which you have right now, what has happened over the past one year is we have really improved the product. Maybe Raghini can talk a bit more about what we've done there, but it's a product that has really improved.
Yeah, I mean, like a lot of changes that we have done in the product recently, including the introduction of the new edge platform, utility features like passenger side, etc., which is giving passengers a really deep insight into an otherwise really fragmented inventory business, right? Where when you actually start from a passenger room, you've got a bus to arrive. I think bus insights is getting you to speak into the quality of the fleet as more of a business like random bus purchase, etc. All of this has boosted a lot of trust and conversion rate in bookings. I think some of these things are kind of feeding into a top positive customer service, getting us to 4.8 days over the conversion rate.
All of these things are kind of impacting our conversion rate and creating a virtual cycle of quality in the bus where we are able to capitalize on this and grow purely like, you know, with a product-led source approach, amplifying that with the performance trends which are optimized.
All right, Rajnish, just one thing on train as well, some comments because there were some changes by IRCTC recently. I think Saurabh also touched upon briefly on this point. Any impact of those changes, if you can just clarify or give some color on that?
Yeah, so I think, look, there were broadly three types of changes that happened there. Just so you know, I mean, one was there was a change in the bus timing, which is about head back to a 40-minute delay from 10 minutes that we said earlier to introduce to. Why we are saying the question to understand, you know, what the impact and why was it. I think there is, it's just too early to quantify the impact of that. We did see some volatility as a result of that. Of course, this year also growing quarter- on- quarter, month on month, you know, it's harder to break out how much of that is resulting from, you know, the change in particular.
Our linking is the other thing where on the 12 tickets, you need to link your Aadhaar and there's an OTP circle from Aadhaar OTP that needs to be filled in. While this is how it goes out, you know, and it's just the first couple of days that, you know, the change has been implemented. It's very early. We haven't really seen a material impact as a result of that. There is a slight impact, I would say. In terms of the third change, which was the chart preparation being done with hour prior rather than four hours prior, I think that's a great move because it allows customers to plan accordingly and maybe switch to alternate modes of transport sooner rather than later. In that sense, I think that has been a positive move in terms of even booking volumes, etc.
Net-net, we are not seeing, you know, if I have to say that some impacts were positive, some were negative, and they kind of are canceling out each other as we speak. It's very early to comment. I think these changes are very, very recent. I think even passenger behavior will adapt to it over time, over the next few weeks. We will only know at the end of this quarter how this kind of impacts us. Nothing materially negative to report here.
Got it, Aloke. Just the last word on a group. How is that business doing? You mentioned that it's doing more than 10,000 orders per day. Would like to understand, like, any sense on unit economics or what kind of revenues you make on a per order basis or, you know, those kinds of things would be of interest.
Swapnil is still a smaller business in that sense. I mean, if it was material enough, I would have ruled it out to another line of business. It's not material as of now. Look, as I said before, when we acquired Zoop and the idea of Zoop was to increase the monetization of the users that we have. So it's our Anmol, which are dragging increase the monetization. Right now, we are still building the product, expanding our user base. Giving any color, it won't help you. It won't help me. It'll put unnecessary pressure to the team beyond this. The idea is we will be factual in what we've been reporting. Beyond that, we're still working on the product. Like we do for everything which is new, we would only start giving more numbers once the product has been established and stabilized.
Got it, Saurabh. No, but thanks a lot for your time, guys, and all the best for future quarters and great goings. Thanks a lot .
Thanks a lot.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Rohit Saurav with Axis Capital. Please go ahead. Rohit, your line has been unmuted. May I request you to unmute it from your side and go ahead with your question, please?
Can I unmute it now?
Yes, sir. Please go ahead.
Thank you for the opportunity. First of all, congrats on the good set of numbers. My first question is on the technical and related cost part. We have seen a sharp decline on a sequential basis in technology costs. In the previous quarter, you had mentioned that the cost increased because you had seen a surge in the number of queries in some of your products like flight tracker and train tracker, due to which the cost has gone up. This quarter is also not an occasionally weak quarter. Those queries should be high in this quarter as well. What is driving the reduction in technology costs for this quarter? How do you see the trajectory going forward for the rest of the year?
Yeah, technology costs are getting bunched up. I would say just look at it over the year. Over the year, what we talked about last time will remain. It is as in what you see this time is just some bunching up, but otherwise not reflective of the year in that sense. The simple answer is what we said last quarter is what you should look and model.
OK. The second question is on the bookkeeping side of things. Today also you have made an announcement that you have granted some ESOP. How do you see the ESOP cost going forward on a full year basis?
I've talked a lot about the ESOP. You can go through question 9. ESOP cost going forward would be slightly north of INR 30 crore per year. If you see what I've talked about, the change from, I think, Manik or Swapnil, one of these JLS participants last time. In this FAQ, I thought I'll document my answer in a lot of detail why there was a difference between 20 and 30. Part of it is because we did three kinds of ESOP. One is the flag shield, which is time-based ESOP. The other is success-based ESOP, which is calculated using Monte Carlo. You have to realize that if the success doesn't happen, it is expensed, but there is no real payment. The ESOPs are not given, but it's still expensed, and you don't get it back in that sense.
The third is when, say, something like Zoop, where we have a choice to either decide to acquire Zoop and give them cash or give ESOP because we see ESOP is more aligned to the long-term vision for the company. For Zoop, we have chosen the ESOP path, even though it affects the P&L rather than cash, which wouldn't have affected the P&L at all. It's a combination of these three. The number would be slightly north of INR 30 crore.
Hi. Can you hear me? Mr. Rohit, does that answer your question? There is no response from the participant. Maybe move to the next one.
Yeah, we can take one more question. I apologize to all the others who've asked the question and we can't answer. Please drop an email, and we'll set up a call and do that. Yes, we can do one more question.
Thank you, sir. The next question comes from the line of Lakshmi Narayanan KG with Tunga Investments. Please go ahead.
I have a couple of questions. First, I just want to understand how the hotels vertical is getting fractured. The second question is I just want to understand, do you have any B2B verticals for travel, especially air and hotels? The third question is that I just want to understand what's the market share, how it has trended on airlines? Second, on Ixigo, IRCTC, its main market share and how the bus share is reshaping? These are my questions.
Can you repeat the second question? It wasn't very clear. Yeah, we didn't get the second question.
The second question is, do you have any B2B verticals? For example, some of your competitors do offer B2B options rather than tied to the corporate. The entire corporate travel happens to some kind of a micro vertical based on the internet. Do you actually have that thing? Is that a big opportunity for you?
Sure. Let me answer the first two for you, and then I'll let Aloke answer the third one. On hotels, it's still very early. We are still in the build-out phase. We believe, as the big three matures in specifics of, you know, this company's number is just one beyond the fact that we are seeing very strong month-on-month growth in room life, which is the only metric, the general room life, the only metric that we were right now tracking very obsessively. Apart from that, fortunately, we have access to this very strong top of the funnel, which is this GT4 that can unique multi-active users on our platform. This large user base gives us this unique advantage of creating the product's right product market fit while still kind of running a product through multiple iterations, identifying problems, and then iterate through solutions.
We have an amazing test bed of massive number of users, which we are using to fine-tune the product and arrive at the correct product market fit. The fact is that we've been very, very late entering to this vertical, right? There have been lots of players out there for the last few decades in this space. What we have discovered is that there's still a lot of unsolved customer pain areas and different supply issues and problems that could drastically improve customer experience and solve some of these problems. We have focused entirely on some of these problems. We are trying to get to a point where we have this product market fit. We feel confident about scaling this beyond that. That's what I would say about hotels.
Regarding corporate, etc. , it's pretty obvious that these are verticals that we would definitely want to get into at some point of time. It's only a matter of time. The reality is that, given that if your platform has 84 million multi-active users, it's almost like saying that you have a mall where you have a huge amount of footfall, but you don't have a certain kind of section in the mall. It would only make sense to have some of these products. However, at this point, I can't tell you exactly where that fits on our roadmap or timelines, etc . Definitely something that we have on our radar.
Sorry. What was the third question?
It was about market share? Is this regarding the market share in air? The market share outside IRCTC in trains, and how is it trending?
Yeah, sure, sure. On train, like we said earlier, we have crossed 60% of OTA market share, and I think that's about 2% more than where we were two quarters ago. On buses, we would be in mid to late teens. We obviously still await others to declare their results to conclude where the market share exactly was. Similarly, on flights, I think since we are the first to disclose our results this time around, I think we would await numbers from others in order to get a fair sense. Based on the ETA numbers, I think we are growing nicely quarter- on- quarter in terms of market share, even on the flight side. We would have definitely gained share.
I mean, that could be obvious with our growth numbers. I guess you can see that because you can look at how the market is growing, how others are growing, and what our growth rate is. That part is pretty obvious.
Got it. Just on the train thing, what percentage of train reservation happens outside IRCTC?
It's 20%- 21% of IRCTC bookings that are happening through OTAs based on their last disclosed numbers. I think that, you know, outside of that, there is also third parties which are offline or B2B, etc. , would be another 10%. I think in that 20%- 21% bucket seat, like I said, I have 60% of that.
Got it. Thank you so much.
All right. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question for today. I'll hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
Thank you so much for all of you joining us today from all parts of the world to hear out our story. It's definitely getting late here in India, so I'll let you all go. We'll speak soon next quarter. Thank you.
Thank you. On behalf of DAM Capital Advisors Limited, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.