Good evening, everyone. I'm Aashvi Shah from Adfactors PR Investor Relations. On behalf of TBO Tek Limited, I would like to welcome you all to the earnings conference call for Q1 FY 2026. Today on this call, we have with us from the management: Mr. Ankush Nijhawan, Co-founder and Joint Managing Director, Mr. Gaurav Bhatnagar, Co-founder and Joint Managing Director, Mr. Akshat Verma, Whole-time Director and Chief Technology Officer, Mr. Vikas Jain, Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Anil Berera, President Strategy, Mr. Pramendra Tomar, General Counsel, Mr. Shreshth Mahajan, Associate Director, Investor Relations. We will begin the call with brief opening remarks from the management, followed by a Q&A session. Please note that certain statements made during this call may be forward-looking in nature. Such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that would cause the actual results or projections to differ materially from those statements.
TBO Tek Limited will not be in any way responsible for any actions taken based on such statements and undertakes no obligation to publicly update these forward-looking statements. I would like to now hand over the call to Mr. Gaurav Bhatnagar for his opening remarks. Thank you, and over to you, sir.
Thank you, Aashvi, and welcome everyone to our Q1 earnings call. Based on past feedback and past experience with these calls, we've changed the format a little bit. So what we've done this time differently is we've created a fairly detailed commentary on our financials and uploaded it on our investor relations website a couple of hours before. Those of you who had a chance to review the document, you would have seen that we have a lot more disclosure this time, specifically around expenses. So there was a request from several analysts last time that they wanted to understand the nature of our SG&A. So we have gone ahead and made that disclosure. We have also continued to provide region-wise KPIs as well on how various regions are performing. And we have also included a very detailed FAQ.
So the idea is to use the hour that we have with all of you more for Q&A and a little bit more color on questions that you may have. So I'll just spend five minutes talking about the high-level numbers and a couple of things that we want to share in a little bit more detail, and then we'll quickly open for questions. So just to summarize the numbers, in case you had not had a chance to look at the financials uploaded, this was a tough quarter, and that's true for the entire industry. We saw several headwinds through the quarter, starting with the India-Pakistan conflict, then the Iran-Israel conflict, and then the very unfortunate Air India crash. This caused repeated disruptions in a very important quarter from an industry travel industry perspective. This is also Q1 is also peak summer season for India. So there was impact.
But the good news is that in spite of these headwinds, the business has shown resilience, and we have continued to grow. Our monthly transacting buyers grew by 5% to touch more than 29,500 monthly transacting buyers. Our GTV grew by over 2%. The revenue grew by 22%, and GP grew by 19%. Now, the faster growth in revenue and GP is because the saliency of the hotels and ancillary businesses continues to grow at a fast clip. And that helped grow our GP and revenue much faster than our GTV. On a like-to-like basis, the EBITDA was flat. There's some marginal growth in PAT, but EBITDA was largely flat. As you all know, we've been investing quite heavily in our international markets for growth and new market expansion. So if that investment was not there, then probably we would have seen positive EBITDA.
If the headwinds for the past quarter had not been there, then we would have also seen meaningful growth in EBITDA. So having said that, we do want to spend a little bit of time just giving you some color on how the investments are panning out. These are still early days. Now, you may remember it was January February when we started to accelerate our hiring in international markets. There are some early numbers that we want to share to give you comfort that these investments are actually playing out well. So as you may remember, monthly active agents is a North Star metric for our business. Active. The definition is that at least one transaction in that month. Now, I'm sharing numbers only on the international business because most of the investment is going over there.
You would see starting February, when we started making these investments, there's a very sharp uptick in monthly active agents. A year ago, in the April, May, June quarter of last year, you would see this number was trending between 8,600 to about 9,000 monthly active agents. Starting February, this number has started to grow very meaningfully, and we are touching close to 11,000 monthly active agents in June. Now, this is a very leading metric because these are the travel agents who, over a course of time, become meaningfully productive. So the way we are measuring growth of our active agents is by three important milestones that a new travel agent has to pass to become what we think of as a sticky customer for us. The first one is T1, which is how many travel agents are doing their first transaction in a month.
The second milestone is T5, which is when they get to a fifth transaction. And then a T10 is when they have done 10 transactions on the platform. Our data shows that a travel agent achieving 10 transactions on the platform becomes fairly sticky and churn drops quite drastically at that point in time. As you will see in the graph that you shared here, our T1s were trending at about 300, between 300 and 340 in January. This number has more than doubled, and we have hit nearly 750 T1s in June. Similarly, the T5 number has been growing, and the T10 number has also been growing in a similar manner. Now, the T10 will always have a lag on T1 because travel agents will take these are new travel agents trying out a platform for the first time.
They will take some time before they start becoming comfortable with the platform. So you will see that the T10 numbers will start to accelerate over a period of time as these T1s slowly convert to T5s and T10s. So what we wanted to highlight here was that there is a very marked uptick in our T1, T5, T10 numbers in Q1 compared to the previous quarter, which is largely driven by driving sales efficiency initiatives and adding new CAMs, key account managers in different geographies, which is where most of the investment has been going.
Now, looking at the same data with another lens of saying that how much new business has come in this year, so how much of business is organic growth of the travel agents who were already active on the platform last year, and how much business has been contributed by new travel agents added in the same financial year. So if we look at the numbers for Q1 of last year and Q1 of this year, you would see roughly 2.2% of the business in Q1 last year was contributed by the travel agents added in Q1 itself. So just to be clear, out of the $361 million of GTV that we did in our international business organic last year, $7.8 million came from travel agents, which were also added in April, May, and June of 2024.
Now, looking at April, May, June 2025, out of the $435 million of GTV that we have done, 18 million, or 4.2% of the GTV, is actually being contributed by new travel agents added in the same year. This is very significant for us because if you remember our cohort analysis and you remember how the stickiness grows with time, typically, travel agents will take time to become fully productive on the platform. And if the 4% of our business in Q1 itself is being contributed by travel agents added within the same quarter, by the time we start to get to Q3 and Q4, these travel agents will start to add significantly more volume to the business. So while you can see that the old cohort, which is the cohort which has been active on the platform till last year, that is also growing at a fast clip.
If the cohort that we are adding this year adds meaningfully more business in the same financial year, then you will see significant operating leverage play out in the latter half of the year and probably towards the end of the year. Finally, some data to give you color on how we are measuring CAM effectiveness and efficiency of new CAMs. Several initiatives have been taken up, and investment has been made in making our existing CAMs more effective. Effectiveness here is really how many new travel agents we are onboarding on the platform at this point in time. Our data is showing that existing CAMs, that is, CAMs that were hired before Q4 of last year, right, so until December of last year, in Q1, they have shown 22% higher efficiency in just net new travel agent addition.
So if they were adding, say, as an example, one travel agent in a quarter, they are now adding 1.22. These are not actual numbers, just to show you the increase in efficiency. Interestingly, the efficiency of the newer CAMs is higher than the efficiency of older CAMs, which does make sense because the newer CAMs are being added in markets where we are under-penetrated. So I showed you numbers on T1s and how many new T1s are happening every month. 41% of those T1s are being contributed by the new CAMs, which have been added since February onwards. Right? So the fact that within three or four months of adding new key account managers, they are starting to meaningfully move the needle for the organization is very heartening for us.
So what this is leading to is, on a year-on-year basis, there is a 69% growth in new customer additions. So just to be clear, it is not that total number of customers have grown by 69%, but the rate at which we are adding new customers has grown by 69%. And 21% of the business is now being handled by the new key account managers. The caveat here is that this is not necessarily new business because we showed that the new business is about 4%. But we have also been able to shift some of the existing accounts to these new key account managers, which frees up the bandwidth of our existing key account managers to farm their large accounts.
So these are some of the numbers that we want to share with you to give you confidence that the investments that we've been doing are being very carefully monitored. We are building a strong view and conviction that as the year progresses, we will start to see more efficiency come through both from our existing CAMs and from new customer addition by our new CAMs. Our hope also is that we continue to believe in the previous hypothesis that by Q4, we should start to see a lot more operating leverage flow through in this part of the business. Okay, with that, we'll take a pause here and open for questions.
Thank you, sir. We will now begin the Q&A session. Participants are requested to raise their virtual hand to ask a question. Request you to introduce yourself and the firm you represent before going ahead. We will wait for a moment till the question queue assembles. We have the first question from Mr. Manish Adukia. Sir, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Yes, hi. Good evening. Thank you so much for taking my questions, and really appreciate all those detailed disclosures. My first question is on the demand. Clearly, you called out a lot of headwinds in the June quarter. If you can maybe give us some flavor as to how are you seeing things progress post-June in the month of July? And the question is specific to the three key geographies of India, Middle East, and Europe. And maybe a related question is, when I look at the quarter, the June quarter, surprisingly, your Middle East growth was quite resilient at north of 20%, but Europe was quite weak, and Europe actually saw a meaningful slowdown versus what you were growing organically until now. So you can also maybe help us understand that dynamic would be helpful. That's my first question.
Okay. So, Manish, you're right. Middle East saw a very improved growth, and this is in spite of the fact that we lost significant days of sale in Q1. Part of it is timing as well. And you know this because when Ramadan happens and when summer holidays start. So a little bit of it is timing. But a lot of it is also just the fundamental initiatives around new customer addition and just improving our customer service. We've been investing in creating a new customer operations setup in Egypt, which has helped us improve our quality of our service. So that's one. Europe, you're right. Europe has slowed down in Q1. Part of that slowdown is because we count Israel as part of Europe, and Israel is a top 10 source market for us.
And that is one market that went to zero, in fact, negative sales for the period of that time. And a little bit of a trickle-down happened post the end of the conflict as well. Having said that, at least on Europe and Middle East, July has been very positive. We've seen a very quick recovery, and that is a secular pattern now in travel that we see that while business gets impacted by disruptions, it tends to come back very quickly. So our hope is that this quarter is going to be significantly better than last quarter, especially for Europe and Middle East, and demand has pretty much normalized to where we expected it to be if these headwinds are not happening in Q1. Ankush, why India?
Yeah. So Manish, I think you also saw one of the toughest quarters, probably post-COVID, right? And I must say that in spite of that, if you remember our GTV growth, the growth was about 11% of Q4 FY 2025. We actually did grow by about 9%. We actually gained 2% in spite of what we saw as a real tough quarter. So this actually reflects the underlying strength of our platform and obviously the early stages of recovery. And also on the good side that we still grew 4% on our hotel business YOY. And keeping in mind the peak of summer, I think India literally was badgered for about 45 days with the airports being shut in North India and obviously the Air India crash.
So I think to be fair, we did. I would say rate ourselves we did well in the quarter, right, keeping in mind the situation we were all facing. And for this Q2, I think we do kind of anticipate some GTV growth and some turnaround, which we can already see. But obviously, the margin pressure on the airline business still remains from, yeah.
Thank you for answering that question. My second question is just on the mismatch between GTV and revenue growth. And I understand the mix shift towards hotel, but even, let's say, within the hotels segment, low teens GTV growth translating about 30% revenue growth. And I think last quarter also the difference between the GTV and the revenue growth was quite stark. So when we think about, let's say, the TBO business and from a forward growth perspective, and let's say in the past, you've talked about wanting to grow at least north of 20%, 25%, should we think about that growth in terms of GTV, or should we think about that from a revenue perspective? And why should those two numbers not, let's say, trend in line over the medium term?
So I think that's a fair question, Manish. And in the medium term, I think the two numbers will trend in line unless we find meaningful unlocks on take-rate expansion on the hotels business standalone. Right now, what's happening is that a fair bit of saliency mix is changing at a very fast clip, right? Every quarter, there are three, four, five percentage points improvement in saliency towards the hotels business, and that is disproportionately improving our enterprise margins. And that is the reason you see our hotels, the revenue grows faster than GTV. There are a couple of other unlocks that we did in this quarter, Manish, and specifically on certain parts of our business, there is income that was dependent on a third-party vendor.
And we won't get to disclose too much detail on that, but there was an income dependent on a third-party vendor, and we brought that technology in-house, which had a meaningful improvement in our retention of that revenue within our business. Otherwise, it was sitting as a cost with the vendor. So that is one change that happened. Other than that, anything else, sir, Ankush, that you want to add?
So other than that, primarily, as we highlight that in hotels business, also there is a mix of suppliers. Some suppliers work on the net rate model, but there are some suppliers on the commissionable model as well. So while on the revenue side, when the mix is towards the commissionable model supplier, the revenue increase looks higher. But correspondingly, on the expense side, there is a parting to the travel agent. And that's the reason you will not see similar growth on the GP side. And that's what is reflected on the numbers as well.
Got it. Thank you. Just my last question on the cost and the margin profile. And you mentioned in the shareholder letter that starting May 4th of this year, revenue should grow faster than the SG&A. So again, when we think about, let's say, the margin path, and of course, the quarter, June quarter was impacted by headwinds on demand as well. But again, is there room for margins to deteriorate a little bit more in the near term, given just the investments before it starts recovering? Or would you say that now we are broadly, let's say, the low point of margins from here on, they shouldn't deteriorate further? And by 4Q, we should start seeing EBITDA growth maybe faster than revenue growth?
Manish, it's a little bit difficult to predict it very accurately because, and I think we have talked about it, about two-thirds of our investment and hiring has happened. One-third is left, which will get timed over the next two quarters. There was a plan to accelerate and get it done in Q2, but at the same time, because of various reasons, including just the ability to find the right talent at the right time, it can spill over to Q3 as well. But definitely by Q4, we are hoping that if you were to start comparing our SG&A growth, same quarter year on year, then you would start to see the growth slow down. And hopefully by Q4, we'll have we would have finished our investment, and that is where we should be able to stabilize margins.
Got it. Thank you so much for taking my questions and all the best.
Thank you, Manish.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Mr. Swetank. Sir, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Hi. Thanks for the opportunity. And our first question is on your GTV that you reported this quarter. I understand there were a lot of one-offs that were there affecting the GTV. But if I were to just take a guesstimate from you, how much incremental GTV would you have done had none of these one-offs been there?
This is very hypothetical, Swetank. And I think, look, you also have to bifurcate GTV between airline GTV and hotel GTV because the revenue impact of the two is very different. One way to look at it, and I know there's no perfect science to it, is that the Iran-Israel conflict was 12 days of war and probably had a spillover effect before and after. So maybe there were like 20 days of serious headwinds in about 40% of our business, right? Thumb rule, I'm just saying. And so that is one way to project and say maybe that is a portion of business we genuinely lost during coming into the high season. I think India had a similar issue, right? There was complete two weeks of clear headwinds in the peak of the season. I think the India side was even worse because huge cancellations happened because of it.
And then second wave of cancellations happened because of the war as well, because of the Air India crash as well. So very, very hazardous to guess what it would have been had these issues not happened.
Understood. The second question is with respect to your gross take rates in the hotels business. You mentioned that there were some changes in the technology thing that you've mentioned, and because of that, the take rates have increased now, 8.3%. Going ahead, do you see those take rates staying there, or will there be any volatility on that side? Because ultimately, your gross margins also took a dip, right? There was an associated cost with that. So I just wanted to get a sense as to what will be the steady-state numbers over there.
So Swetank, just to clarify, the take rate is looking higher mostly because of the fact that there are suppliers who are commissionable in nature. And if the share of business increases for these suppliers, the take rate goes up. But like Vikas mentioned, correspondingly, gross profit will not grow in a similar manner because of the fact that once we receive the commission, we share part of that commission with the travel agent, right? So the take rate that you're seeing increase, increased take rate is largely driven by the fact that we have shifted some of the business to commissionable supply from a net rate supply.
And also, I would like to add, Sweti, that if you see the overall gross profit of the hotel business, it is at around 5.56. So while versus last year, same quarter, it may look high versus 5.06. But if we take out, iron out the things, and we see the yearly average, we were at a 5.5. So as it has been our strategy as well, that whatever benefits we will try to get on the supply side, we'll try to pass on on the agency side so that we are able to grow business faster. On the basis of that only, if you see the improvement on the GP compared to the yearly average, it is nominal only.
Understood. So will it be fair to say that instead of looking at the revenue growth, one should focus on your gross profit growth because that is where?
Absolutely. GP is the number to focus on.
Right. Right. Cool. And just 2Q is typically a very strong quarter for us because Europe, since holidays are in 2Q generally, is my understanding. Correct me if I'm wrong there. So anything to call out here, given that we are already one month down? Any trends that you would like to highlight, and how should we look at this quarter trending for you in terms of GTV as well as your gross profit?
Swetank, it is trending in line with our expectations for the European and basically Northern Hemisphere summer. We would expect it to be in line with what we were hoping to do in this quarter. What is hard to say right now is that will we be able to do some sort of catch-up on Q1? Unlikely, given that the impact in Q1 is quite significant, right? But if you have to look at Q2 standalone, irrespective of what happened in Q1, Q2 is pretty much in line with what we were budgeting for.
Will it be fair to say that your GTV growth at least should come back to double digits this quarter? Why? Why?
Look, we don't want to do specific guidance on this, Swetank, especially given that we are in the midst of this quarter. But it would be fair to say that we should see GTV growth in line with what we were expecting it to be before all the headwinds in Q1 happened.
Got it. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. I'll come back in the queue. All the best.
Next question is from Mr. Aman Maru. Sir, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question. Mr. Aman, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Hello?
Yeah, please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, sir. I wanted to know that the fees which you receive from airlines or hotels is like how many days commission?
When you say how many days, what does it mean?
As in you get the fees which you get from airlines or hotels, the take rate. So is it like five days, 10 days? How many days you receive your commission?
Airline commission. There are multiple types of commission that we receive from the airlines, basically, and other stuff. One is basically the commission which we get on cut-and-pay basis, which is on a transaction basis, which generally will get paid for at the time. We get reduced from the gross amount of the ticket as well, so which is received at the time of the booking itself because we'll make the net payment to the airline. But there will be some performance-linked incentives, etc., which is based on the targets. The targets could be quarterly, yearly. And those would only be received after the year is completed and the airline has completed the working for the calculations of the PLB incentives, etc.
Okay, so it is like a combination of both?
Yes.
Okay. Got it, sir. And what growth do you expect further on revenue side?
We don't provide specific guidance on revenue.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, sir.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Mr. Mohnish Chandani. Sir, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Yeah. Hi. Good evening, and thank you for taking my question. My first question was on your monthly active agents in the international market. So that's seen a sharp growth this quarter. So is there a particular geography that has driven this sharp growth?
The good news is that the growth is fairly secular. And in fact, I think we have given monthly transacting buyers numbers by regions as well in the commentary. Yeah. So we are not giving growth numbers, but broadly, it is very secular. And the reason is that the playbook is pretty much the same that we run in every market, which is getting new sales team on the ground in cities or in countries where we were not present before, and then start activating through a very tight sales efficient process, right, with strong governance on it. So we've seen growth come pretty much in every geography, and really, there are no exceptions to it, actually.
All right. Understood. And the next question is on North America. So that's grown at about 11% year-on-year for you this time. And you've mentioned that this is probably the largest source market in the world. So obviously, there's a lot of room to grow here. Can I understand how your progress has been in the American market? Because last quarter, also, you were talking about hiring a leader to lead this North American growth sector. So just your thoughts in terms of growth in that particular geography.
Yeah. We hired Valerie to lead that region for us. It's been only a few weeks, so very early days. We are restrategizing that market right now. We have also redone some of the sales team and brought in some new more sales people on the street as well. We do acknowledge that we should be growing faster in that market. At the same time, it is a tough market because of the way it is consolidated.
But we remain very, very confident that we will find a solution for it within this year. And towards the end of this year, we are hoping to show more growth in that market.
All right. Great. And then just lastly on LATAM. So again, I think there were some one-offs, particularly with Brazil, which you mentioned, where there were new rules and regulations that came in. So again, is that market going to be somewhat structurally challenged, given that those taxes are typically permanent, or do you think that there could be some growth recovery even for Q2, Q3, and Q4?
There is, in the short term, a structural challenge in that market because this is a new tax. As you know, currencies are volatile right now. Foreign exchange is getting expensive for most of the developing world. So there are some structural challenges in that market. We are reacting to it, taking various actions to see how we can bring the cost of sales in that market to a lower number so that we can pass on the benefits to the customers and reduce our pricing in that market to gain a bit more demand share. I just want to be clear that this is specific to the market per se. I don't believe that we have lost share in that market, but the market itself has seen a bit of a headwind come in because of this very unexpected fact that came up.
In the short term, there may be a little bit more pain, especially in Brazil. But having said that, in a medium to long term, it is a very large, very important, high-spending travel market. So we remain hopeful of full year growth on that market. But yes, I think for the next few months, there is a structural challenge which we'll have to overcome.
Okay. Got it. Thanks. That was all the questions. Thank you.
Thank you, Mohnish.
Thank you. The next question is from Mr. Chirag. Sir, please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Hello. Am I audible?
Yes.
Yeah. Sir, I have a question on this SG&A expenses bifurcation, which you have provided in the shareholders' letter and press release. So if you can throw some light, if you look at the year-on-year change, there is an increase of around 31%, and mainly this posting and bandwidth. That is, if you look at the revenue growth, that is not in line. So when can we see that it will go down or it will be in line with the revenue growth? And what caused this increase disproportionately? The expenses, yeah.
So Akshat, you want to take it to the hosting bandwidth?
Sure. Sure. So essentially, what we have seen in this quarter is a very significant increase, especially for the wholesale business. So we have seen close to more than 100% kind of growth in search traffic. And that's essentially ballooned the cost. Plus, we essentially made significant investments as far as the AI infrastructure is concerned. So these two are the major factors that have increased the cost. We have also essentially been looking, and in fact, may have when we started to see this trend, we've essentially been looking at essentially optimization in terms of how we serve this traffic. And that has led to what we call a metric called cost per search, how much cost we pay for every search. And that, we have seen meaningful decrease. And we essentially are going to work on this going forward as well.
I think we started to see a little bit of moderation. While the traffic is increasing, actual costs now on hosting are essentially now moderated, trending slightly lower as opposed to going there.
So in H2, it will be lower than H1?
See, that is, again, very hard to really see. See, we don't know how much again, right, the business may grow faster, the traffic may increase a lot. The metric that is completely in our control from an infrastructure perspective is, again, what I call cost per search. There, we do expect to see meaningful improvement. So if more traffic comes in, in some ways, we consider that as a good thing. And we'll try to serve the traffic as efficiently as possible. And there, we will make meaningful change. But if the overall traffic increases significantly, then that may or may not be. We may not be able to offset with just the efficiency improvements.
Okay. Thank you.
Chirag, just for the benefit of everyone, we would like to explain that the business support services, which is part of the other expenses, this is primarily the expense being incurred for the sales and contracting personnel who are not on our rolls because we don't have legal entities all across the world. So they are working more as consultants or retainers with us. And that cost, obviously, as we have explained, we have been making investments in this field. So that cost has grown by around 24% year-on-year.
Okay. Thanks.
Thank you, Chirag. The next question is from Mr. Karan Uppal. Please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Yeah. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Yeah. Hi. Just a question on Europe. So we are already within the summer travel season in Europe. So our understanding is that the bookings happen one quarter in advance. So going ahead for Q2, are you expecting Europe GTV to remain at these levels, or do you expect some slowdown here? That's the first question.
Okay. No, Karan, you're right. Europe does see bookings happen in advance. But a lot of travel agents confirm or what we call voucher those bookings closer to the actual travel date. And that is when it converts into revenue for us, right? So the booking may happen, which is more like a hold on a booking that, yes, I'm holding the room, but I'm not really confirming or paying for them. So in that period of time, we don't book it as revenue. So that is one. So you should see that flow-through happen in Q2. The second bit is that the actual booking windows have also shortened this year. And that's a secular trend across the world, actually. Because of all the uncertainties, I think people have been holding off on booking their travel a little bit. So that will also show up in Q2.
So net-net, compared to Q1, and Q1 was also impacted because Israel business had gone down to zero, and we count Israel as part of Europe. So that should also recover. So we should see some improvement in the Europe as a source market in Q2 compared to Q1.
Okay. Thanks, Gaurav, for that. Secondly, on the Middle East market, the TCV, sorry, the GTV growth rate has been very strong. So going ahead, what sort of growth are you picking in? Any color there would be willing to see?
See, we try and not provide this level of granularity on growth rate. I will just point out that a lot of this growth is happening because of the initiative that we've been taking and a bit of a market timing that happens typically around this time of the year. So we are hopeful that we will continue to see significant growth in that market. But I don't want to comment on, is it going to be even higher than what it is already, or is it going to be significantly lower? But we should expect to see growth in the Middle East, absolutely.
So in the base quarter in Q4, there was Ramadan, which was there, which was not in Q1. So that would have also contributed to this sort of a growth rate. Is it the right timing?
Yeah. That's the timing. Yeah. That's the timing I'm talking about.
Okay. Okay. And lastly, on margins, so between the reported EBITDA margins and the adjusted EBITDA margins, I believe that that is mainly driven by ESOP costs. So by when these costs will settle down? Can you please provide that clarification?
ESOP cost, Karan, is obviously dependent on what are the balance grants left. And if there are any new grants given during the year, it would be an additional cost. But having said that, this is the grant that we have given till 30th of June. The expense that we had in the quarter was around 6.8 CR. And we expect that overall, for the full year, it should be in the range of around 25-38 CR, depending if there is no further grant. Obviously, if the further grant would be issued, the overall cost will increase.
So are you expecting this ESOP cost to continue even in FY 2027?
Yeah. Look, Karan, I think ESOP is a very important tool for attracting talent. And really, as shareholders, this is one cost we should build some comfort with because this does allow us to bring in the right talent for the amount of growth that we are aspiring for. While there is no immediate commitment to any additional ESOPs, we would expect that as we hire people, as senior people start to have a lot of their ESOPs vest, there is going to be incremental cost that will come in over a course of time.
Just to clarify, the ESOP cost gets amortized over a period of four years. It depends on the vesting period and the percentages we get vested every year.
Okay. Great. Thanks. Thanks a lot and all the best.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Mr. Prateek Kumar. So please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Yeah. Good evening. My first question is on this SG&A expense schedule which has been given, this 29% increase with almost all.
The voice is lagging off.
Similar or very high intensity. Sir, hello? Can you hear me?
Yeah. I believe you.
Hello. Yeah. So I'm saying that the schedule of this SG&A expense, which has been given, most of the line items are sort of increasing upwards of 20%-90%, depending on the base. You said that you were expecting slower growth of expenses versus revenue from 4Q kind of. So which particular line item are we talking about here? Or these all line items sort of expected to grow slower incrementally?
I think the two big line items that contribute most to the SG&A are payroll and personnel costs, essentially, and the hosting and bandwidth. On both these, we are taking initiatives to make sure that on payroll, actually, we know what our plan is, and most of the investment, as we had discussed previously, was front-loaded into Q4 and Q1, and hence, we've seen the spike happen. We are expecting to wrap up the rest of the investment for this year between Q2 and Q3, so that is one cost that, on a year-on-year basis, should start to slow down on a quarter-on-quarter basis and then on a year-on-year basis as well.
Hosting and bandwidth, like Akshat talked about, this cost is very hard for this cost and the dollar value to come down because it's somewhat direct in nature in the sense it's linked to the amount of traffic that we are serving. But we are building efficiencies over here. So this cost should hopefully not grow at the same pace as the traffic growth and hence booking growth, right? So for what we call a wholesale enterprise part of the business, that business growth should start to outpace this cost. That's the way I would think of it.
Okay. So but this ballpark, this 29% growth, can it come down to low double-digit growth, low teens growth? I mean, that's when the margin expansion will happen, right? Or how are we looking at because that's where your top line has gone right now?
Yeah. So see, Prateek, what should play out, and it is hard to put numbers on it, and that's the reason you showed the data that we showed in our presentation right now. What should play out is that all this new travel agent addition that we have started to do through the last four or five months, they should start to meaningfully contribute to the business by Q4 because these are travel agents, small businesses. They are trying a platform right now, but a lot of them, thousands of them are trying a platform as we speak.
If we are able to retain them and nurture them, then by Q4, all of these should start to become productive, which will mean that from a CAM efficiency perspective, that how many travel agents are active per key account manager or how much GTV is being driven by per salesperson, that metric should start to increase by Q4. This should outpace the growth in SG&A, right? I don't want to be very precise on exactly how much of outpacing is going to happen because it's early days. Also very hard to say how much investment will happen in Q2, Q3, and if there's going to be some spillover in Q4. But broadly, the hypothesis that we are working against is that on one side, our investments are slowing down now because the investments have happened.
On the other side, the return on those investments will start to happen, and both of them should converge in Q4.
Sure. I understand. My next question is on air segment. So air segment, which obviously had external factors impact this quarter, but is that something which we expect to return to growth this year on a quarterly basis?
So Prateek, we saw some very 2% kind of decrease in the improvement in the air business, even in Q1, in spite of all the adverse events we are facing. So we do kind of believe that we will have some kind of growth in Q2, and let's see how it plays out. But as we said, we can't give you any guidance. But so that would be my answer to your question.
Sorry. 2% growth, I thought 11% decline.
Yeah. Currently, we are at a recovery of 2% growth in Q1. I mean, for decrease. I mean, the decrease was lesser in Q1 in spite of the challenges what we faced in the last quarter.
Okay. And one last question on the numbers which have been discussed on the call earlier on ballpark 30% growth in hotel GTV and mid-20s% EBITDA growth. Where do we stand here on these numbers?
Sorry, I didn't understand the question, Prateek.
We have discussed about ballpark 30% kind of GTV growth in hotel segment and mid-20s% EBITDA growth expectation for the full year, around 25% EBITDA growth for the full year. So where do we stand on these numbers in terms of after Q1 performance?
So Prateek, given the headwinds that we have seen, obviously, Q1 was behind the budget. It is hard to predict at this point in time what kind of recovery and catch-up can happen on what we lost in Q1 over Q2, Q3 for top line. For bottom line growth, I think it's a toss-up between holding back investments and driving higher EBITDA and also seeing how we pace the investments. It's very, very early days for us to kind of be able to give some kind of a view on how that will play out because on one side, we have seen very promising results on the investment we have made so far. So we are very hesitant to kind of pull back on investments when it's going so well. But given what we have seen in Q1, it will be. We'll have to take a call on it.
But as of now, it's very hard to say what the full-year numbers are going to look like.
Sure. Thanks, Gaurav. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Mr. Ravi Purohit. Please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Yeah. Hi. Am I audible?
Yes.
Yeah. Hi. So thanks for taking my question. I don't have any quarter-specific question, but just wanted to kind of understand our business a little bit more. So especially on the hotel side, so how do we kind of approach onboarding new hotel properties or building inventories for new hotel properties? Is there any specific area that we focus on, the kind of hotels that we focus on, given the difference in take rates between, let's say, five-star hotels or three-star hotels? And secondly, how do we make our platform attractive for the offline agents from the point of view of, say, a good spread of inventory geographically or helping them the right kind of hotels for their customers? So a lot of OTAs provide these ratings and feedback and reviews.
From our customers' point of view, offline agents' point of view, how does this kind of become a very, very attractive platform from them? So if you could just share some insights on that. And connected to this is also, if you could help us understand the entire payment cycle, right? So right from a customer making a booking on an offline agent's page or the offline agent making a booking for the customer, then the customer making the payment to the offline agent, who will make the payment to you? And then when do you make the payment to the hotel, right? So if you could take a very, very rudimentary example for our simplicity's sake and explain how this entire cycle and chain works, that would be very helpful. Thanks. Those are my two questions.
Ravi, I'll answer your question on how we look at supply. Then I'll pass on to Akshat to just talk a little bit about platform hooks and how do we make the platform more attractive for a travel agent to discover the right supply. And then maybe Vikas can spend a minute on just explaining the payment cycle. So the business is focused on the outbound premium traveler. So this is somebody who's traveling from their country to some other country and likely to book premium to luxury travel. So our supply strategy is also anchored around it. We look at hotels, typically five-star hotels, maybe four-star, high-end of the four-star hotels that we do want to work with directly. These hotels would typically be in attractive inbound destinations, so large destinations where a lot of international travel happens to.
You can think of Dubai, London, Paris, parts of Spain, Italy, etc. Our model of onboarding is that we have a freelance supply contracting team on the ground combined with a team which is focused on, for smaller hotels, doing more of remote contracting. We have a fairly sophisticated tech stack which allows us to rapidly onboard a new hotel. So yes, the commercial negotiation needs to happen with a hotel on the ground. But once a hotel has been onboarded, getting their supply inventory and rates on the platform happens fairly through an automated process, which allows us to continue to add inventory fairly quickly. We also work directly with chains, with several chains directly, which is more of a tech connectivity combined with commercial negotiations. Akshat, you want to discuss the platform itself?
Yeah. So coming to essentially how does an agent discover the hotel with the right value for their customer, right? It's not very different from the way B2C platforms approach this problem, right? So we also have essentially a review rating that agents can look at and look at hotels that would make sense for them. In general, anyway, we do not offer a lot of really low-rated properties in any case. So that's essentially on the hotel selection part. But what is very crucial for travel agents is this. Are there comparable properties that are giving better value, either in terms of exclusives that TBO provides to them or in terms of rate and all, right? So we have essentially what is called a standard sequencing algorithm, which order we show hotels for a search, and there we take all of these factors into consideration.
We also essentially run digital campaigns educating customers on what would be the relevant inventory that they should add a lot of value on. So in a nutshell, right, I mean, we have to do exactly the same kind of things you have to do on B2C with the caveat that in our case, we can actually talk about things which are slightly more difficult for a B2C customer to understand. So exclusive things like early check-in, late check-out, those kind of things are something that B2C does not highlight as much, whereas in our case, we essentially need to highlight those in a much better fashion. So that's essentially how we help the customers discover the right value for them.
On the payment cycles, basically, especially in the hotel business, it is a highly negative working capital business. What it means is basically we work with travel agents either on the advanced model or on the credit model. In case of advanced model, a travel agent would have to maintain some funds with us against which they will be able to make the booking. On a credit model as well, we may be giving a fortnightly, weekly, monthly credit based on bookings or check-ins. However, on the supply side, generally, we would be making either payment near to the check-ins or when we are working with third-party suppliers, etc., we make payment to them on a monthly basis or a fortnightly basis based on the check-in, and that results in a very good negative working capital for our hotel business.
What's the typical length of this negative working cycle? And I think you mentioned an important point earlier that there is a difference of number of days between booking and the voucher creation, right? And so when does the customer make the payment? Let's say if I am standing on day zero or let's say day zero, and I'm a customer who wants to kind of make an overseas booking for a hotel, and I confirm to the agent today that, "Yeah, I would like to take this, whatever. Can you go ahead and make the booking for me?" So how does the entire thing if you could explain in days or let's say make it very simple if it's possible to kind of understand that sense?
Sure. So in terms of what are the payment terms which a travel agent offers to his customers would vary, again, from whatever relationship he has with his customers or not. So there might be some walk-in customers where he might be charging upfront before booking a package, and there might be some repeat customers he might be offering some credit. So for example, what I can explain to you, let's say, for example, there is a booking which is for a check-in of, let's say, we are sitting on 4th of August, and their booking check-in is happening on September, per se. So in our model, basically, if a travel agent is working on an advanced model, he would have to pay upfront before he can voucher the booking.
In case a travel agent is working, let's say, on a credit period of monthly booking kind of thing, he will be making first to 30th of month payment by, let's say, next month of by 5th or 10th. We would be paying to the supplier in the month of check-in. So it could be at the time of check-in if it's a VCC supplier, which is a virtual credit card supplier. Or if it is a third-party supplier where we enjoy a fortnightly or a monthly credit, we will be making payment of the September check-in in the month of October. To give you perspective in the number of days, per se, at an overall enterprise level, we would generally be sitting on a negative working capital of three to four days of GTV.
Okay. Okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Mr. Nitin Sharma. So please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks a lot for taking my question. Firstly, how one should see your airline GTV over the next few years translating into? But what I meant is that what percentage of GTV do you see is coming from the airlines since there has been kind of the growth has been slowing? What is the thought process there?
So airline GTV, I see overall, currently in this quarter, was contributed around 38% in terms of the GTV. But if you, and 62% was contributed by hotels and ancillary. However, if you see the gross profit number, therein the airline business would be contributing around 11-12%, and hotel business contributes more than 85%, per se.
So, is that where you expect it to remain? Is it a comfortable number, or could it go down further as a percentage of revenue?
So Nitin, obviously, as our hotel business keeps growing as an enterprise, the absolute percentage of the airline business will obviously shrink. But historically, our hotel business, our air business has grown about 10%-12%. Yes, we had some de-growth in the last three quarters, but we are confident going forward, we should maintain the same levels of growth. But in the overall scheme of the GTV, obviously, our focus remains on hotels and ancillaries, which will keep growing in other markets as well as an enterprise. So I think, to be fair, you will see some growth in the air business, but overall, GTV would probably remain in the same line what we anticipate.
Understood. And the second question on the hotel take rates. So are there any factors that you want to point out that could drive your hotel take rates up from here over the next 12-24 months?
Nitin, that's not a focus area for us right now because it's hard to drive top-line growth as well as margin expansion at the same time. There is obviously significant effort and investment going in improving our quality of our supply, which will often lead to just better pricing. But at least in the short term, our view is that let's continue to pass on the benefit of that pricing to the customer or the travel agent to remain competitive.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you, Nitin.
Thank you. The next question is from Mr. Mohit Motwani. Please unmute yourself and go ahead with your question.
Opportunity. My first question is on you spoke about how a large part of your investments should be done by 4Q. So can you share with us how long does it set you up in terms of growth, maybe, let's say, for the next two, three years? Given that you have a sense of which market has what kind of opportunity, and you have been investing in markets like Australia, so you're already investing in having more sales agents, and ultimately, you expect to extract a lot of efficiency out of them and have higher booking. So the investment that you're doing right now, what kind of result and how long do you expect to get growth from that as the investments taper down in the subsequent years?
So Mohit, I think one way to look at it is to see how the old cohorts typically perform in the business. And we have seen that it takes roughly two years plus to truly start deriving full value out of a specific year's cohort because for any given year, the full-year cohort is only active in the business for half of the year. So we usually see them double their business the next year. But then they have significantly outpaced the overall growth in the subsequent year as well, and then they start to flatten out a little bit. So that is purely from travel agents or the key account managers, salespeople that we are adding this year. We would expect to see at least two, three years of runway of fresh growth because of these CAMs.
Having said that, there is also work happening on CAM efficiency, which should make our existing CAMs also more efficient, which should also drive some uptake. Now, having said that, Mohit, it is important to kind of take a pause and look at the size of the market and how large or small we are in context of that market, right? It's hundreds of billions of dollars of CAM. So once collectively, the management has built the conviction on the fact that adding new sales drives disproportionate value, we might continue to invest in building out new markets or building depth in existing markets in the subsequent years as well. But yeah, I think it is reasonable to expect that because the size of the business will be larger and there'll be a trickle-down effect or roll-on effect of the fact that this year new agent addition is strong.
In subsequent years, this quantum of investment compared to the quantum of growth we expect from the investment should be lesser, and hence, we should see some margin improvement happen.
Sure. Thank you for the detailed color on that. My second question is you spoke briefly about how you lost 20 days in this quarter of April to June where there was an Iran-Israel war, there were disasters for India as well. Now, given that your international GTV, hotel GTV, is primarily international in nature and is a basic source of demand, so can you give us a color how were the months of April and May for you? Did you see a good growth in those months? I'm assuming that there will be having a sharp decline in June on a year-on-year basis. So how were the months of April and May if you can share some color on that?
I don't have the numbers top of my mind, but I think we were seeing north of 20% growth in April and May, right? So we were seeing north of 20% growth in April and May. Unfortunately, June saw the headwind it saw, which was just bad luck.
Sure. Thank you for the clarification. That's what's on my end. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. That was the last question for today. I would like to now hand it over to Mr. Gaurav for his closing remarks.
No, thank you, Aashvi, and thank you, everyone, for the detailed Q&A. Would love to get feedback and share if it's available for that on this format and as well as any incremental feedback on the format of the shareholder letter. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.