Ladies and gentlemen, good day and welcome to Le Travenues Technology, also known as ixigo, Q3 and FY 2025-26 earnings conference call hosted by DAM Capital Advisors Limited. As a reminder, all participants in line will be on the listen-only mode, and there will be no opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during this 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. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, Danish. Good evening, everyone. On behalf of DAM Capital, I welcome you all to ixigo's Q3 FY 26 earnings call. We have with us Mr. Alok Bajpai, Chairman, MD and Group CEO of the company; Mr. Rajnish Kumar, Director and Group Co-CEO of the company; Mr. Saurabh Devendra Singh, Group CFO of the company. Now, before I hand over the call to Alok and Saurabh and Rajnish, I would like to highlight the safe harbor statement on the second slide of the presentation, and it is assumed to be read and understood. I'll hand over now the call to Alok, Saurabh, and Rajnish. Thank you.
Thank you. Good evening, everyone. This is Alok here. Thank you for joining us on our Q3 FY 26 earnings call. Q3 was a defining quarter for ixigo. Not only did we deliver strong growth and improved profitability, but we also demonstrated the resilience of our platform, the benefits of our diversified multimodal strategy, the strengths of investing in an AI customer experience stack, and most importantly, we lived up to our customer-first philosophy during one of the most disruptive periods for the flight industry. Let me start with the headline numbers. We reported all-time high revenue from operations of INR 317.6 crores, up 31% year-on-year, all-time high gross transaction value or GTV of INR 4,902.9 crores, up 21% year-on-year, and our profit after tax came in at INR 24 crores, up 54% YOY. These results reflect strong execution across our core business and continued operating leverage.
What makes this performance particularly meaningful is the context in which it was achieved. During December, following the implementation of revised FDTL norms by the DGCA, a leading airline experienced significant operational disruptions. Over a 12-day period, there were approximately 4,500 flight cancellations and reschedules, with the impact peaking between December 3rd and 8th. This period saw a twofold surge in customer reach-outs and a fivefold increase in usage of our flight tracking products. As soon as the situation escalated, we set up a dedicated cross-functional war room to manage an environment that was evolving daily. We were also the first OTA to announce a proactive customer-friendly response, refunding not just the full ticket amount, but also convenience fees and ixigo Assured fees on impacted bookings during the peak disruption window.
When we take such calls, the only lens we apply is whether we are doing the right thing for our customers in that moment. Travel is a high-trust category, and moments of disruption are when that trust is most visibly tested. Our approach during this period was multi-pronged, reducing customer anxiety through timely and transparent updates, enabling affected users to quickly receive refunds, or rebook stranded customers using alternate modes of transport, ensuring operational resilience at scale. Despite the severity of the disruptions, our flights business grew faster than the overall market, with flights GTV growing at 22% and flight revenue growing at 49% YOY. We gained some market share and a lot of goodwill as a result of our customer-friendly policies in the time of crisis and lived up to our playbook of doing the right thing for the customer in all such times of crisis.
Another important highlight of the quarter was the continued momentum in our international flights business. International flights GTV grew over 50% YOY in Q3 and has now crossed 20% of our overall flights GTV for the quarter. This growth is no longer restricted to Tier 1 airports. We are seeing strong demand from Tier 2 and 3 cities driven by improving connectivity to Southeast Asia and the Middle East, both through direct routes and efficient one-stop connections. On the supply side, we have strengthened our international coverage significantly. Today, we have GDS partnerships across Amadeus and Travelport, giving us access to all leading full-service carriers. In addition, we have onboarded 26 airlines on NDC pipes, including major, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, and European carriers.
NDC enables access to better fares, richer content, and deeper airline integrations, allowing us to build more direct relationships with these carriers to deliver better value to our customers. We are also seeing new outbound destinations emerge strongly on our platform, including Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, Oman, Kenya, and Indonesia. In parallel, we are beginning to see early signs of organic inbound travel, particularly from Middle East and Southeast Asia, which will be further aided by the government's expansion of the e-tourist visa scheme to 211 countries. On trains, while the business continues to grow well, the mix of trains in our GTV and revenue has reduced as flights and buses grew faster. With flights GTV starting to come in nearly as big as train GTV now in our business.
The train segment remains an important pillar of ixigo's multimodal strategy, accounting for 43% of GTV and 35% of contribution margin, and growing in the mid-teens. Our leadership here is underpinned by deep product innovation, AI-driven complexity management, and a strong Peace of Mind stack for train travelers. On the railway policy front, Indian Railways has implemented several passenger-friendly changes since July, including mandatory Aadhaar verification and linking during peak booking windows, such as advanced reservation period and Tatkal, in order to curb misuse and fraud. While these changes introduced some friction initially, we were quick to implement them in coordination with IRCTC, and user experience tends to normalize after the first booking. More importantly, we are encouraged by the government's intent to expand capacity.
Plans to double originating train capacity across 48 major cities by 2030, along with initiatives such as Vande Bharat Sleeper and Amrit Bharat Express, give us confidence that the capacity growth in subsequent years will be better than in the past. That said, capacity expansion involves long-cycle infrastructure investments, so please do not treat this as guidance. The bus segment continues to be one of our strongest growth engines. Since acquiring AbhiBus in 2021, a business doing roughly INR 400-500 crore of annual GTV, we have scaled it to over INR 2,400 crore of GTV in the last 12 months, representing nearly 6X growth, and it continues to compound at 40%-50% YOY. Our strategy here remains tilted towards growth over margins in the short to medium term as we continue to invest in penetration, brand recall, and industry-first product innovations.
Before I hand it over to Rajnish, a quick word on spiritual tourism and base effects. Q4 FY 25 benefited from the Maha Kumbh, which drove extraordinary demand across trains, buses, and flights, with mid- to high single-digit GTV in Q4 last year coming directly or indirectly due to Kumbh, depending on the vertical. While this creates a base effect for Q4, our Great Indian Travel Index 2025 also shows that spiritual tourism still remains a strong secular trend. Destinations like Varanasi, Tirupati, Prayagraj, Ayodhya, and Shirdi continue to see long-term growth, with Gen Z participation rising sharply, particularly through bus and train travel. With that, I will hand over to my friend and Co-CEO, Rajnish, to talk about our AI products and new growth strategies.
Thanks, Alok. Q3 was a real-world stress test of our AI customer experience stack, and I am really proud of how the platform performed in a time of need. The December disruptions and how we handled them underscore the importance of our sustained investment in an AI-led customer experience stack and utility-driven product innovations such as Flight Tracker Pro, which proved critical in managing large-scale disruptions during a period of crisis. We orchestrated a coordinated response that combined the speed and scale of AI with human judgment, deploying both efficiently to support impacted customers. Verified information was continuously sourced from authoritative channels and proactively communicated to users, while well-defined SOPs enabled rapid handling of customer queries. Multiple proactive touchpoints were initiated to ensure timely refunds and smooth rebooking wherever required.
We leveraged AI-driven outbound calls to proactively inform customers of flight cancellations or reschedules, automatically trigger refunds and alternate bookings, and guide them through next steps. Tara, our AI agent, played a central role by actively assisting customers with refund processes and recommending alternate travel options. In parallel, our AI-augmented human support teams operated extended hours during peak disruption periods, helping us maintain strong customer satisfaction despite elevated volumes that we saw during this period. In the third quarter, the percent of voice calls that were handled end-to-end by AI stood at almost 76%, in fact, more than 76%. But what really stood out for me was that in December, when the crisis unfolded, we stepped up proactively, voice calling, and with AI handling a whopping 90% of all calls in December, and that was more than 150,000 calls handled end-to-end by AI during this period.
Thanks to this, even though overall customer contact volumes across voice and chat more than doubled, resolution times remained within internal benchmarks that we strive for, and customer satisfaction metrics stayed stable throughout the entire period. This is evidenced by our calls answered within two minutes metric, which remained under 96.7% despite the elevated volumes and our average refund time remaining just three hours and 10 minutes. Flight Tracker Pro also saw extensive usage. In fact, it was a godsend product for a lot of users and airline staff. This enabled customers to track real-time flight schedules at airports with multiple instances of positive feedback from both travelers and airport staff on its usefulness during these challenging conditions. These moments reinforce our belief that AI is not just a cost lever, but a trust and experience lever, especially in moments of crisis.
I'll reiterate that we believe we are living through a once-in-a-lifetime technology transition with AI, even bigger than the emergence of the internet or smartphones. AI has clearly moved beyond experimentation, is now entering a phase of real product-market fit across agentic workflows, core infrastructure, and applied vertical use cases, including travel. We are at a juncture in history where we'll be judged not by our performance in any one of the quarters or any one year, but by how we were able to lead our industry's AI transformation and demonstrate the results and customer delight with long-term growth and profitability. For the flight business, we also added more inventory, as Alok talked about, launched airport cabs so that you can seamlessly book taxis to or from the airport right from inside the app.
And most recently, we have enabled Armed Forces fares, which allows those who serve our country to get access to preferred fares from airlines, offering up to 25% off the regular fares. Moving to buses now, the bus category has started seeing more innovation both for the customer and the operator, partly due to our intense focus on this category over the last four years. If I had to name all the industry-first features AbhiBus has launched since we got involved, the list would be very, very long.
Starting from our Abhi Assured service guarantee and full refund for delays and cancellations, the Pink Seat feature for women travelers who wish to be seated next to other women travelers, Bus Insights where we even tell customers right at the time of booking their exact bus model with license plate number and the age of the vehicle, 360-degree walkthroughs that we have built inside several buses to allow customers to see what their seat or sleeper berth will look like exactly, and many more features. Last quarter, we observed that some bus incidents and breakdowns happened, and then it made us reflect how important safety is for our customers. So our bus safety reports now cover over 40,000 buses where our platform validates regularly their permits, their insurance, their RC and fitness certificates.
The ReadyGo platform for bus operators now gives them more real-time insights and control over their operations. And last quarter, we launched an industry-first roadside assistance program offering alternate travel options in case of bus breakdowns or incidents. Moving to the trains business, we have added Mumbai Metro along with Delhi Metro for QR code-based metro ticketing and are seeing decent usage of that. And we also went live with our confirmTkt train ticketing funnel inside the Rapido app. Both ixigo trains and ConfirmTkt are now at 4.8 app ratings on Play Store, and that is at a scale of millions of reviews, by the way, reflecting consistently high customer satisfaction.
Having lived and traveled globally, I can confidently say these apps work better than any train app I have used, even in any country outside India, and hence would be the top global train apps in terms of product utility and user experience. Now, let me talk a bit about hotels as well. We've made several product improvements on hotels that users are complimenting us for, including our AI summaries for hotels and smarter ranking algorithms. Despite seeing good quarter-on-quarter growth, I would say that we are still not at the product-market fit stage on this business yet, which would involve solving the what-you-see versus what-you-get problem that the budget hotel space is riddled with mostly. We now have some deeper learnings on what is broken in this space, and we are building our hypothesis on how those can be solved.
We have talked to many customers and hoteliers and also done on-ground market research to test the hypothesis, and we expect to intensify our efforts on both product and supply in the coming fiscal year. Last quarter, we kicked off adding direct hotel supply by tying up first with channel managers who work with multiple hotel chains and independent hotels. Through these tech integrations, we can onboard direct supply without deploying a large team on the ground. We're now also adding budget hotel chains and the first set of independent hotels focused on those segments that overlap with our core user base. Now, going back to my favorite topic, which is AI, let me elaborate a little bit more on our AI strategy. The disruptive use cases for AI and travel need some key ingredients: talented teams and access to large data sets and real user journeys.
Thanks to ixigo's AI-first DNA, we have the ability to accelerate ideas and teams. I often find founders at the forefront of AI understanding and building promising products as well, but without enough real-world use cases or enough vertical data or distribution to test, learn, and demonstrate the impact of those ideas. Based on our deep experience with AI over a decade, we have a unique ability to scout and diligence such AI-first teams and ideas. Our strong preference will be access to frontier AI talent working on ideas or applications that are synergistic with our own future plans and product vision. We'll also continue to invest organically within our own AI stack. AI is also already deeply embedded in our products from planning and discovery to predictions, pricing, discounting, customer support operations, and supply-side efficiency.
We use AI practically everywhere, and we are doubling down now on voice and personalization as well. So why now? The current phase of the AI cycle offers early access to exceptional founders, talent, and platforms, which we believe is a durable strategic advantage. We intend to make a small number of focused high-conviction investments, partnerships, or acquisitions in the short to medium term where there's a strong alignment with ixigo's core travel ecosystem, data, and AI strength and distribution. These investments are not financial returns alone. They are designed to accelerate learning, enable faster internal adoption of AI, and create long-term strategic optionality. Here's another important reason on why the timing is correct, and this is about the slow death of software as we know it. All software will be rewritten, not line by line, but rule by rule, because the assumptions it was built on are breaking.
Intelligence no longer needs to live inside hard-coded logic. Interfaces no longer need to be fixed artifacts, and humans no longer need to adapt to machines. In the new model, software infers intent. It remembers context, and it renders itself on demand, turning applications into temporary projections rather than permanent products. Code stops prescribing behavior and starts defining constraints, data access, and truth, while intelligence lives above it, adapting continuously to each user and moment. Stability shifts from deterministic outputs to successful outcomes, and change becomes cheap, local, and constant. Most existing software cannot survive this inversion, not because it's bad, but because it encodes the old rules too deeply. So it will fade into the background as a system of record, while new AI-native layers quietly replace the experience. This isn't just the rewrite of software around humans for the first time.
It's also a once-in-a-generation opportunity for builders, making this the moment to scout relentlessly, back exceptional teams, and place bold concentrated bets on those shaping what comes next. With that, I'll hand over the call to our friend and Group CFO, Saurabh, to talk about the numbers. Thanks, Rajnish. At the end of last year, I had two choices. One was to go to my IIT Delhi 25-year reunion, something I've been looking forward to for months. The other was to use the days off slightly differently. Almost on a whim, I packed a couple of ixigo-branded T-shirts and decided to take a simple trip, part flight, part bus, part train, starting at Ayodhya Airport and ending up at Varanasi Railway Station. Now, I won't lie here.
I did miss meeting a lot of old friends, getting silly drunk, and also the networking that comes up with a reunion of this kind. But alternating between ixigo ConfirmTkt and AbhiBus T-shirts, I realized something I hadn't fully appreciated for a long time: the impact we, as ixigo, are having on people's lives. Everywhere I went, people came up to me, smiled, shared their little ixigo stories, moments where our brand had quietly become a part of their journey. Some simply said thank you. Others told me how we'd made travel a little easier, a little less stressful. And some even took time to offer suggestions, not as customers, but almost as partners who genuinely wanted us to do better. In those moments, it all made sense.
Now, I can talk about the trip for us, but this is a one-hour call, and I have an obligation to talk numbers. So let's discuss the numbers. As always, all the numbers are in INR crores unless stated otherwise, and year-over-year comparisons are Q3 FY26 against Q3 FY25. Our gross transaction value stood at INR 4,902.9 crores, up 21% from INR 4,036.3 crores last year. Revenue from operations came in at INR 317.6 crores, a 31% YOY increase. Contribution margin was INR 115.3 crores, up 12% YOY, with contribution margin percentage at 36%. Adjusted EBITDA stood at INR 30.8 crore, compared to INR 24.3 crore in Q3 25, a growth of 27%. PAT was up 64% at INR 24 crores versus INR 15.5 crores. Now, these numbers include some one-offs that I'll discuss closer to the end. Moving on to the business segment overview.
On trains, I'll confess, I regularly try to get invited to train team meetings because, for me, they are a masterclass in focus. What I liked most this quarter was the team's agility at this scale, adapting quickly and benefiting from the changes Alok alluded to earlier. In trains, we booked 26.12 million train segments, up 8.8% YOY. GTV was 2,095.5, up 15%. Revenue stood at 134.1, up 12%. Contribution margin was 40.6, up 2%, with a contribution margin percentage of 30%. Trains contributed 35% to the overall CM. In flights, it was a tough quarter, and our response stood out. Those 12 days in December reflected years of customer obsession and technology-led execution. We booked 2.8 million flight segments, up 15.2%. GTV was 2,055 crores, up 22%. Revenue stood at 102.4, up 49%. Contribution for flights rose 45% to 39.4 at a contribution margin percentage of 39%.
Flights contributed 34% of group's total CM. Buses continued on the growth trajectory, and there's still plenty of road ahead. Passenger segments grew 33% YOY to 6.73 million, with revenue from operations up 47% to 75.6. GTV rose 36% to 671. Contribution margin was down 1% to 34 crores and at a 45% contribution margin percentage. Buses contributed 30% of the total CM. Now, as promised, let me highlight the key one-offs and callouts in the current quarter. The one-offs and callouts in FY26 Q3 included share of loss from FreshBus, an associate company of 2.9 crore, 2.8 crore one-time impact due to the new Labour Code. For Q3 FY25, the one-offs and callouts comprised of share of loss of FreshBus of 1.9 crore.
Now, apart from this, the disruption in the flight operations during December, arising from operational challenges faced by a leading operator, including the impact of low booking and cancellation, would have resulted in an approximate adverse impact of INR 2 crores in our EBITDA in Q3 FY26. On the AI investments Rajnish talked about, I want to reiterate that when we raised the preferential issue last quarter, we had earmarked 25% of the proceeds for inorganic growth opportunities and 25% for organic growth initiatives. Going forward, we will continue to deploy capital only into high-impact opportunities that align with our strategy and offer clear synergies, whether through AI, travel tech, or exceptional talent that fits into our long-term vision.
To maintain prudence, we have constituted an investment committee to evaluate and approve such investments and acquisitions where we will benefit from the deep expertise of two of our board members, Mr.
Shailesh Lakhani, formerly a managing director at Peak XV and widely recognized for backing some of India's most successful ventures, and Mr. Rajesh Sawhney, the founder and CEO of GSF India, a serial entrepreneur and active investor in Indian startup ecosystems, will be a part of this committee. I'll end with an anecdote. When we started preparing for this learning call, our design and branding team was running on a packed schedule, and I had just come back from my Varanasi trip, so by the time we got on to kick off the meeting, it was very close to the result. As they walked me through the concept, they spoke about the perspective and the depth, the isometric language of the visuals, the tiny details that they wanted to add on the runway on the presentation slide cover, and the discipline of keeping it all consistent across every page.
Seeing how much they already had on their plate, I tried to make things a little easier for them and asked, "Why do we really need to spend so much time on the design template of an investor deck? Last quarter's template could work." They looked at me with a stare usually reserved for an unwanted rodent about to devour its favorite cheese. And then the design head said something that stayed with me, "It's never about taking an easy path. It's always about doing what is right. We do it for the craft because that is what we are." And when I think about it, it captures what ixigo has always been about and we will always be. We do it for the craft because that's who we are. And with that final thought, I'll pass it on to the moderator for Q&A.
Thank you so much, sir.
Ladies and gentlemen, we'll begin with a 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 two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we'll wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. Our first question comes from the line of Mr. Anmol Garg from DAM Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi. Thanks for the opportunity and congratulations on a good set of numbers in a tough quarter for flights. I have a couple of questions. Firstly, on our bus business, while the growth here remains very strong, we have seen that almost in a year, there's a 20 percentage points in the contribution margin in this business.
So how should we think about a more sustainable contribution margin in this business in more medium to long term?
Yeah, hi, Anmol. This is Alok here. I think we have been calling out for at least three, four quarters that we have been seeing the opportunity to push the pedal on growth on buses, given how low the penetration of digital bookings is in the country and is still in the low 20s. The other thing we have seen is the ability to cross-sell and upsell buses to a large part of our funnel. And of course, products like Travel Guarantee have actually aided the growth of some of that, right? Because if the train ticket is waitlisted, you do get the option to actually buy the bus almost for free, given you get 3x back.
So what we have chosen to do over the last few quarters is deliberately chase growth over purely chasing more profits because I think there is a phase of the business where this strategy makes more sense, just like we've done in other phases. Like if you asked me about flights four or five years ago, I would have said the same thing. But now flights have reached a certain scale and therefore are producing a certain margin. So I think on buses, the idea is to now we are in the 40s, right, on contribution margin. I mean, our intent would be to stay somewhere in that sort of range and not go down too much from here.
I mean, the idea is if there is an opportunity we see in a certain quarter where we want to invest in brand or in performance because we see more returns from it. I think we'll not be shy of doing that. And just to add, like what Rajnish had mentioned about these new products that we've launched, right? So I'll just give you one example. We launched an industry-first product where if your bus breaks down, we will arrange an alternate mode of transport to take you to your destination. Now, these products involve a cost, right? And if we are doing this for our customers, we're doing it to improve customer experience. This is not very different from our playbook on flights where products like Flight Tracker are built at a certain cost and they involve a certain cost even in operating them.
But we do it because that's the right thing to do for the customer at that moment, right? So I think the way you will see the rewards coming back is in not just growth, but better NPS and better stickiness over time. And just to, it's not a guidance, but I think we would be comfortable to operate even a couple of percentage points, one or two percentage points lower than this, even there. But we would not want this to go into the 30s just to give you some comfort on that.
So just one more thing there, Anmol. As we mentioned in the FAQ, that last quarter, there was also we've chosen to double down on marketing activities and promotions. And it would have had a bigger impact, was it not for the additional safety inspections that led to grounding of some supply in November.
But we've discussed your question also in detail as question three in the FAQ.
Sure. And is there any one-off in this margin? You indicated that some part of the ixigo assured and the convenience fee was also returned back. So is there any kind of impact because of that?
So as I mentioned, so if you take a combination of the convenience fee and I've mentioned as a one-off this time, which I did in the end of the speech, if you take both of these plus what we estimate as the lost booking, it would be around 2 crores, which would have been the effect of those 12 days. Which is already fully absorbed in the Q3. Which is already in the. Understood.
Secondly, in our comments, we indicated that we are adding direct supply in the hotel business. So do we want to scale up this business organically, or are we planning to go through acquisition route to add more direct supply into this business?
Yeah. So see, what Rajnish talked about was the fact that we have kicked off direct supply addition predominantly through the channel managers out to begin with and by tying up with certain budget hotel chains, which we can tie up directly through either these channel managers or otherwise. And at this point, it's not a people-intensive way of adding this supply that we are sort of pursuing as a strategy. The reason is that till the product-market fit that Rajnish talked about, that we are at this point where we want to be in product-market fit on what you see versus what you get, right?
I think that's an exercise happening in parallel with a bunch of interactions with customers as well as the hoteliers to figure out what's the way we could solve for on-the-ground issues where the budget hotel promises something and does not deliver it. I think once we have a better handle on that is when you will see us scaling up supply even faster, right? And both these exercises are happening in parallel. And like Saurabh alluded to, there is a point where you step up those investments to build that even faster. But I don't think we are sort of saying that we are in a hurry on this, right? So the idea is to have better NPS in whatever we have selling directly, which means that customers are satisfied with whatever we are able to do.
Of course, there's a slight pay grade expansion you can go to when you go direct. But beyond that, it's not something that we need to build overnight. The reason is that both these exercises have to happen in parallel. Anmol, though, I would just add one thing on hotels. Look, in case the conviction increases, and I'll request Rajnish to talk about where our conviction is. But in case our conviction increases, and I'll be able to do this as our conviction increases, we will put in more resources and capital behind this idea as our conviction increases. But I will pass it on to Rajnish to talk about.
Yeah.
I mean, so I think just reiterating what Alok said, but I think there are two key points to understand here that we are still in the build-out phase and we are still in the product-market fit phase. That means if you look at our obsession in the past on building for consumers, we've never gone out and spent too much money on a product which hasn't reached product-market fit because that's how product-led growth happens. And so once that point doesn't reach, we won't be burning a lot of money on this vertical. It would mostly be on spending money on scaling up the teams, supply, and bringing about the product-market fit, etc. Having said that, on the inorganic side, we are always on the lookout for great teams and great products. If we do find something, we will always be on the lookout.
And if we find something, well, that always goes without saying, irrespective of whether it is hotels or buses or any vertical for that matter, in travel or AI for that. Sure.
Thanks, guys. Just one last question from my end. We have seen very strong growth in our flight business despite weaknesses in the sector, particularly. So is this largely driven through our own platforms, or is there any increase in volumes through our partner platforms as well during the quarter?
Yeah. So I'll take that. I think this was asked last earnings as well. But just to reiterate this again, the fastest growing channel for growth on all three lines of businesses are organic for us. In fact, I would say that if you look at, if we were declaring just organic, the growth would have been faster, way faster. That's another way to think about it. Yeah. Sure.
Thank you, guys, for answering my question. I will join back in the queue.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Swapnil Potdukhe from JM Financial. Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for the opportunity. My first question is with respect to some announcement you had done on the BSE regarding a Singapore subsidiary. Can you elaborate a bit more on what you intend to do there and what kind of engagement you intend to have through that subsidiary?
So Swapnil, as we mentioned during the pre-IPO raise, that if we are and even Rajnish talked about during his section about how we are looking for ideas, looking for great teams, looking for great companies. So Singapore subsidiary, in some sense, would be a channel for the overseas investment that we would be doing.
As we've said and we've defined how and why we would be doing the investments through the past. So it's that channel that we are looking for and setting it up for.
So would it be fair to say that these investments that you would do will be for localized travel in those countries, geographies, and targeted towards these low?
As we just said, Swapnil, as Rajnish just said, so it could be a range of things. It could be technology. It could be travel. It could be anything that's adjacent to us. What the key always has to be is it has to be a great synergy. It should be a great team. It should be, in some sense, like what we have done with either ConfirmTkt or AbhiBus. Okay. Rajnish, could you talk about the AI part, which you mentioned?
Could you just, again, touch upon that?
Yeah. I mean, see, the adjacencies in travel, of course, that goes without saying, and global markets are great as well, so adjacencies anywhere, any market is always good. Like I said, we always keep looking out for great teams, great products. They could be anywhere, so that's one. Second is the adjacency with respect to how obsessed we are with AI and how it's going to change the world and how transformative it is as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. That's the other aspect that we are very closely looking at.
You can see that the opportunity that it presents. Like, I think globally, all smart tech folks right now, they are all kind of looking at building something big in the next two to three years because there's a massive amount of opportunity that AI presents, not just for the fact that software is dying and it's going to be completely rewritten. It's also because a lot of adjacencies across not just the compute layer, but beyond services, compute like things like life sciences, quantum, etc., and even in the foundational layer as well below the AI vertical native layer. All of those present massive amount of opportunities. And I think every smart person on the planet sees that. And so there will be like a flurry of really smart people assembling smart teams and building AI-native products in the next two to three years.
I think one of the goals for us also is to kind of scout for such teams and invest in them.
Yeah. Thanks, Rajnish, for the good answer. Pardon me for probing you a bit more on this piece. The reason I'm doing it is because there was a mention of some organic inbound topic that you are targeting. In the past, we had instances where some of the Indian OTAs built some platforms specifically for Indian diaspora in Middle East kind of region. So do we have those kind of plans? That is what I was asking. It will be the other question related to this.
I think just to answer this directly, this is Alok here. See, there are two kinds of things here. One is something which could be within travel outside, which excites us.
But like Rajnish said, it has to fit into our broad lens through which we look at team, technology, synergies, etc. But it could also be just something which is more AI-led and where we believe that there is a way in which we can benefit from it in the long term as well, right? And I think that's the broad way we are thinking around it. At this point, we don't have any as in when we have any specific investments or acquisitions to announce, obviously, we'll come to the market with. But at this point, like Rajnish said, we are living through a moment in history where in the next couple of years, the kind of things we will see out there will be unprecedented, right?
And so if we don't, as a company that is at this scale, that understands technology and AI and has a massive user base, if we are not able to take boulder bets at this time, when will we take them, right? So I think that's the broader thought process behind why we want to look at both organic and inorganic strategies for making these kind of investments.
Perfect. I got it. My second question is with respect to the operating leverage, which is visible in your business in a way. Your contribution margin growth has been significantly slower, but still you have been able to deliver a very strong EBITDA growth. And I can see that mainly that is coming from employee cost, ex-office ops, which seem to have been coming down on a quarter-to-quarter basis, INR 46 crores in one Q to INR 41 crores now.
I just wanted to understand, is this also because of some AI investments that you have done or are there some other reasons why our employee expenses, especially the fixed cost side, have been coming down on a quarter-to-quarter basis? There's a decent decline that has happened over the last couple of quarters.
Look, two parts to it. Remember that employee, as we increase the verticals, there will be costs. So as in, remember, as Rajnish mentioned to Anmol's question, if the product-market fit starts connecting, starts working, that will be there. On technology part, remember, we were always working on technology. So in that sense, nothing has really changed because if you see, even on customer service use case, Tara has been there forever now. So it's been there since the Google Transformer models age. So it's not something new to us.
Everything that we are doing right now has a technology layer in between. As in, again, on a personal level, I love getting into Rajnish's meetings or calls just to see where the world is changing, what's happening, the new thing which is happening. And we've always been that. But I won't call it something very differentiated. It was something that was there from the start for us. It's in the DNA for us. And the other way to see this is that on the mature businesses, right, you start seeing operating leverage come in. But on new businesses, you are still investing, right? So when we talk about growing hotels, there will be a stage once you have product-market fit where you think that expanding that team for direct supply or for whatever you want to do on the ground, I think, makes more sense.
So I think there are phases for this. Last one year, obviously, on our mature businesses, we started to show that there is operating leverage coming in. And part of it, obviously, is because of all the things Rajnish talked about, that if you don't need to deploy 100 more people to service peak time calls, I think that shows up also on the bottom line in some sense, right? So I think that's a mix of both. But don't think of it as we'll not be shy of, let's say, investing and putting more people at work in areas where we believe that it's required. But on the core business, when you talk about mature categories like train, right, we are seeing that operating leverage coming in. On flights, you can see it coming in. On buses, we are investing like we've always been calling out.
I think it just makes sense to invest when the category is at 20s penetration. Hotels category is at 20s penetration. So you want to grow more new users from it. So these are areas where we'll not be shy of investing. Yeah. Okay. Is there any EBITDA margin in your mind that you work with or the range that you are targeting? Right now, you're at around reported basis, around 8% margin. But do you have any plans to go to low teens kind of a number? And is there any thought process on that side? I understand that there could be investments on hotels and in between. But still, directionally, how do you look at the margin expansion going forward?
Swapnil, I think of it in a very different way.
Again, I am not giving you a quarterly guidance because, as I've always said with you right from the start, the first time we talked, that especially in our stage of business, a quarterly guidance doesn't make sense because we are in the growth stage. Having said that, think of it this way. I, as of right now, am not declaring what is widely considered as the highest margin business just because I'm investing in that business. So if you believe like I do that we will succeed in it, and I'm not saying we'll succeed tomorrow. I've always said it's a long-term vision. But we believe where we are right now, we are at par or probably better than what we expected ourselves to be when we started this journey. But that is the highest margin business. So you can see that.
You can see that growing over the next five years, and I believe, as you can see from every business segment that we have, once we get the segment right, we do give a higher margin than what anybody else can give in that segment, and trains are the proof of the pudding that I'm able to give the contribution margin for trains because I've got it as a profitable business. While, again, I don't know other numbers because people don't give it out, but I would be very surprised if anybody can match our margins in that kind of a business, so what I'm saying is, if you look at it in the long run, it will improve. On a quarter-on-quarter basis or the investment phases, as in due to competition reasons or due to reasons while we are building it up, you might visually see number varying.
But visually, if we don't invest, we'll never make a great business. So yeah, I think the answer to this question will be more obvious, let's say, in a three to five-year time frame rather than in a, let's say, six to twelve-month time frame. That's the way to think about it, which is why we are not guiding on any sort of margins formally to the market.
Got it. I know it is an absurd question, but that's the truth. Yeah. No, it's fine. Now, just a quick question. On your hotels business, any sense as to how much business in that side is happening on the direct side, given that you already started getting some supply, you said, through channel managers? We'll probably come back with it over the future call. We are not going to put the card before the horse.
So you have to be a little patient for the answers to these questions. What I would recommend, sorry, what I would recommend, though, is you should use our app and continue using it, and you'll keep on seeing the difference in the product as it comes about. I've seen some of the upgrades that we are planning. And you should just keep on using the product, and you'll get an idea around it. Got it. Just the last one. I did highlight that there could be some base impact because of Kumbh. But you didn't happen to quantify those numbers in your letter. If you can quantify some impact on the base that we should work with?
Yeah. I believe I did talk about it.
But just to reiterate what I said, last year, Kumbh was a mid- to high single-digit GTV contributor, right, so in the Q4 numbers for last year. And remember, because of that, there were secondary effects like higher average transaction value. I still remember we even sold buses in 10-14,000 sort of ticket price range. So I think we'll have to see how this year pans out. But basically, for most travel companies, right, not just for us, I would say for the whole industry, all OTAs, all airlines, buses, etc., you will see a base effect because of the Kumbh factor.
Okay. Thanks for taking those questions in all of this.
Thank you, sir. Thank you. Next question. Thank you. Next question comes from the line of Pankaj Mehndiratta from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good evening, management. I just have one question around your hotels strategy.
So just some big picture thoughts around how do you think about the product-market fit? So for example, if the penetration in hotels is already at about 20-odd%, let's say five years, 10 years down the line, if that number doubles or 1.5x, what would it mean for you to achieve it? Is it, let's say, discounting lower take rates or getting some sort of supply which is not out there on other platforms? And what does it take to convert those guys which are not already online? So just wanted to understand how do you define what sort of properties do you already have live on your platform? And incrementally, what is it exactly that you are looking for?
Yeah. So I think in terms of inventory, there is more or less parity in the industry, right? I mean, because the way people source it.
I mean, one thing is that if you have direct relationship, you will have better take rates, which is obvious. So we are investing on that side. But in terms of very, very unique inventory, as of now, that's not really something that we will be able to focus on because right now, our bigger focus area is on creating product-market fit by very, very deeply looking at customer pain areas and solving for them, right? One of the things that we keep talking about is what you see versus what you get, especially in the budget category, right? I mean, if you happen to walk into a five-star hotel, I mean, the pictures would look worse than the hotel actually is if you go and see them. But if you look at the budget category hotel, then the picture is completely different. It's completely the opposite.
Pictures look way better than the hotel, actually. And that leads to a lot of dissonance. So there are these kind of pain areas that customers have or customers ending up at a hotel only to find that their booking is not in the system or there's no room left or it was sold to some walk-ins. Those are the kind of pain areas that are much, much bigger pain areas. And also the fact that consumers who are still walking in and booking offline still do not have the confidence to kind of book online. So we are entirely focused on these kind of customer pain areas and how to solve them with product solves and AI and technology in the context of the customer base and customer cohort that is most relevant for people who visit or who frequent our platform.
That's the thing about creating this product-market fit. The reason it takes time is that if tomorrow I need to figure out a way in which are the hotels which have consistently given good experience or which are the hotels which have consistently given bad experience, etc. This will also depend on a lot of data that we are collecting as of now in the form of AI reviews and AI calls, customer check-ins, and stuff like that, which over a period of time is getting baked into the algorithms as well, right? This is how we are trying to create a product which is going to create product-led growth and not rely too much on marketing expenses. Having said that, the fact that we've been the brand, even if it's so built organically, it has always been built with transportation as the primary focus.
A lot of people who kind of know our brand or name, they only relate to us as a brand which does flight booking or a train booking or a bus booking. So at some point of time, when we are confident about our product-market fit and the product and the experience, we would obviously definitely want to create that perception that we also stand for hotels as a brand. Yeah. I would just add to what Rajnish said. I'll take a small anecdote. Varanasi gets about 140 million footfalls a year. That's about 380,000 people landing there in a day. Now, not all of them may need a hotel or a room. Even in a small town, you can imagine that a large part of that demand is still not being tapped into online.
And we saw this last year during Kumbh as well, that offline and just walk-in remains a dominant channel. The interesting thing is that if you look at our user base and you look at the number of segments that we are doing today, we're very close to 4 lakh segments a day now. And these passengers, a lot of them who actually need hotels today, their behavior is actually to just land in those cities and look for a hotel. I think we are talking about changing that behavior through superior product experience and superior customer experience, as well as some sort of solve on the what you see, what you get problem that Rajnish talked about. But once that happens, remember, that will change this penetration.
So if you roll back 10 years and I asked you what the hotel penetration in India was, the answer would still have been the same. And I think, or maybe slightly less, right? But if you look at what is needed to change that, it's basically to solve that problem, right? And we are fortunate to have the right audience where once you solve that problem, you can see growth in bookings very rapidly, right? So look at the train vertical. Before we got in, the OTA business would have been around 14%-15% of the overall train tickets sold. We got in, and today it's closer to 20%. And we are the leaders there. On the bus side, we have grown the market after we entered it. I think on the hotel side, we expect to do the same.
Understood. And just one quick follow-up on that.
When I, let's say, browse the app and website, on some of the hotels, especially in a few cities, I saw something that was a best price guaranteed applicable for the hotel. So on a real-time basis, how does the team essentially ensure the pricing which is available to an ixigo user is probably one of the cheapest or cheaper out there compared to other guys out there? And what is the sort of effort you are putting in? So is price actually the moat currently for whatever the supply is today? And that's it from my side. Thank you.
I'll just start with the first part, and then I'll pass it on to Rajnish.
If I had a moat which was very clearly defined and public right now, I would have been putting it out as a separate LOB, as I've always said, and you can read through my past FAQs. I believe that we are in the process of defining what it will be, and that is why we don't break it out. But I'll pass it on to Rajnish for the other part of the question.
Yeah. I mean, of course, there's a certain percentage. I mean, we use a lot of data science to figure out what we have in terms of deals and pricing and commercial relationships where we can actually afford to do that.
Also, remember that this is a build-out phase, and I think you will never be able to figure out whether there's a product-market fit if consumers don't even know about your product or haven't used it once. So there's obviously the cost of kind of acquiring a first-time customer. And I think some sort of inducement on the customer side, discounting side, etc., is needed to get customers to come on board and use the product for the first time. These are strategies on the same lines. There's nothing new that we are doing here that has not been done before. So yeah, I mean, what was the second part of your question? Sorry.
No, I'll look, Rajnish. I just basically wanted to understand that is pricing the lever right now for users to come in and, let's say, try and book?
Pricing will always be a lever, not the only lever, though, okay? But like I said, if you are looking at building a great product, I mean, customers don't come. For example, if somebody has never booked a flight on ixigo, they would never understand the kind of post-booking experience that we offer, right, in the form of the ability to get a refund instantly or to be able to get checked in automatically or to be able to kind of track flights with the flight tracker, which provides predictive AI-based alerts and predictions on flight status. Nobody will get exposed to that kind of a user experience unless you've not booked the flight first, right? And obviously, there's a word of mouth that would kick in after that.
Some form of customer inducement cost will always be incurred in order to kind of scale the product in the beginning. There are very, very few products in the world which have been able to scale purely by word of mouth and the ChatGPT kind of success, right? I mean, that's very, very rare, right? Maybe one in a million product, right? But otherwise, for the normal human beings, there will always be a combination of a great product and some sort of marketing spend in the form of discounts, etc.
Understood. Yeah, that's helpful. Thank you so much and all the best for future quarters. Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Vinamra Hirawat from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi, sir. Am I audible?
Yes, sir, you are.
So congrats on a good set of results. Just a couple of financial bookkeeping questions.
Your other income for the quarter has basically doubled or more than doubled. What is the reason for that?
It's simple, right? Last quarter, we raised primary capital. It's the interest on that. Okay. Okay. Got it. And your revenue versus contribution margin, what are the costs basically that you take out from your revenue to reach your contribution margin? So last quarter, we have talked about it in detail in the FAQ and earlier too, but let me still give it out. So what I do is we would take out any directly attributable cost, which would include performance marketing. It's a classic CM2. It's partner expenses, payment gateway expenses, performance marketing, any kind of distribution. Everything would be included. Anything that can be directly attributable. Got it. Got it. That's it from me. Thank you.
So in the case of remember the other thing that you should realize is that we have a large amount of what we call the peace of mind stack, which is our value-added services stack. And if you see, the attach is about 29%-30%. And the cost of that product also gets deducted at this level.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, in the interest of time, that was the last question for today. I would like to hand the conference over to management for the closing comments. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, everyone, for joining our Q3 earnings. And once more, wishing you a happy new year and see you all in the next quarter. Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of DAM Capital Advisors Limited, that concludes this conference.
Thank you for joining us, and you may now disconnect your lines.