Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Serko Interim Results. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Darrin Grafton. Please go ahead.
Good morning, and welcome to today's results presentation. My name is Darrin Grafton, I'm Serko's CEO, and I'd like to officially welcome Shane Sampson, Serko's new CFO, who joined us last month. Today, we are presenting our interim results for the period ending 30 September 2021, and launching a capital raise of up to NZD 85 million via a NZD 75 million placement and a NZD 10 million offer for retail investors. If we move through to slide 5. As the tectonic shifts of the business travel landscape settle through the pandemic, we believe there will be only a handful of significant market players who will have an outsized opportunity through the recovery. Serko is positioning itself to be one of these global standing players. Today, we're announcing a capital raise to enable us to capture these global growth opportunities.
The pandemic has continued to rock the global travel industry, with each country at different stages of recovery. Although COVID has dampened demand and subsequently revenue, it has also helped accelerate the opportunity for technology to manage the emerging complexities of a post-pandemic world. It is allowing Serko to set some very strong foundations globally. To take advantage of these opportunities, we intend to continue investing in the global growth opportunities being presented in the confidence that business travel will resume. The ongoing headwinds of COVID may impact, but our ambition to execute on our strategy remains resolute. We've continued to guide Serko through the pandemic, focused clearly on the opportunities that lie ahead. The progress we have made is underpinned by the dedicated team that have stayed focused on the strategy and execution needed through a very complex environment.
During the past year, we have rolled out the Zeno platform globally in partnership with Booking.com, laying solid foundations for growth in the unmanaged travel sector. We're at the early stages of our journey to globalize as we realize our vision of a business travel marketplace, and believe we have only just started to capture the opportunities of both our partnership with Booking.com and the potential in our North American market. We've continued executing what we can control, the foundational work that moves us forward in our global strategy, remaining laser-focused on the key opportunities across the three core go-to market initiatives, which we will cover during this presentation.
We're therefore announcing today a capital raise that will enable us to invest for growth into the unmanaged travel segment through our partnership with Booking.com for Business, accelerate the development of our global marketplace strategy, and pursue opportunities for inorganic global expansion. As COVID continues to bring uncertainty in the market, we're prudently maintaining sufficient capital reserves to preserve our resilience and to pursue these opportunities in the event that business travel takes longer to recover than currently anticipated. If we move to slide 7. Executing on what you can control is key during turbulent times, and we have remained focused on delivering what we have committed to our customers, investors, and within our control. Some of the key highlights we have achieved are as follows: We have successfully completed the migration of Booking.com for Business customer base in September 2021.
To date, we have seen over 300,000 business customers migrate and over 30,000 new sign-ups since we launched. At its foundations, we have brought to market a multi-language, self-onboarding, self-management platform for unmanaged business travel. We are proving out the Connected Trip offering and have established flight connections across multiple suppliers and brands, with rail expected to be available in the second half of this year. We are now entering the phase of activating these customers as they begin their journey back to travel through a continual investment in content to enable the Connected Trip and user experience enhancements driven by our customer insights. Although we are still operating under a worldwide pandemic, the recovery across certain markets has seen an increasing transaction growth over this period of 1,000-1,500 per weekday in October.
We expect our future investments in marketing and product technology to increase transaction numbers as we bring to market the solutions that are needed through the recovery of business travel and to really capture the full opportunity. North America continues to present opportunities across an increasing reseller base in this market. Travel management companies are now starting to activate customers as they begin their return to travel. Our focus is to continually invest with these customers in the technology needed specifically for this market and to build the brand to the level we have within our home market. We are confident the North American market remains one of the largest opportunities for Serko, and we're in discussions to roll Zeno out with some of the large global corporations that we've got in our pipeline.
Part of our North American market investment has been the launch of the new Zeno Expense platform, and we believe our continued investment to bring to market a single travel spend management application will be a key differentiator in this space. In ANZ, we continue to demonstrate resilience through strong customer retention numbers. Our volume during the recovery period in New Zealand was up 160% on June 2021 over 2019 volumes before the lockdowns were imposed. We continue to see migrations to the new Zeno platform, with 67% of customers currently booking on Zeno, which shows the growth we are making through our technology investment. Combined with our continued focus on the customer needs in this region, we believe we are well positioned to continue to be a leader in the ANZ market. Slide eight.
In 2020, Serko transitioned into a business with global aspirations. During 2021, we redefined our position from being a strong local player to one with global coverage. We now have global scale, expanding from 5 countries we operated in when Zeno was launched to now having our platform available in 180 countries. With nine languages now supported, our focus is to continue the investment in this area to support complex languages and increase our content offer that will drive additional demand as we build towards our goal of solving the challenges of business travel globally. We are poised for growth out of this pandemic, and the investment to date has proven our ability to grow from a strong local player to one with global coverage. Our focus is now on scaling the business to activate the opportunities we have ahead of us.
We have completed the migration of Booking.com for Business customers. We have received market validation in the North American market to position ourselves for growth in that market. We have maintained our leadership in the ANZ region, and now we are focused on transforming the scale of the business to be a major globally in this sector. This means extending our partnership with Booking.com into new phases. It means adding to the scale of our teams in North America and more broadly to support the demands of a truly multinational customers, along with the aspirations of Serko and our channel resellers. It means creating a truly scalable platform that underpins our transition to become a business travel marketplace. We continue to pursue opportunities to accelerate this transition, both organic and inorganic. Slide 10.
Our vision is to build a business travel marketplace, bringing together the world's travel buyers with the universe of travel content. We're doing this via the Connected Trip. Serko is uniquely positioned to bring this to market. We are one of the few players in this market that has an independence from conflicts on both the supply and demand side of the marketplace. We have strong relationships with key supply channel partners and established partnerships with channel resellers across both the managed and unmanaged travel. The Zeno platform not only fulfills the basic function of a marketplace by facilitating the transaction, our technology supports the change management and servicing requirements needed through our ecosystem connections. Slide 11.
The network effect of a marketplace is achieved through scale, and the Serko board have recognized the opportunity by earmarking funds to create an open platform that will enable service providers to help Serko scale across the global market. Through a single platform, we are looking to service multiple channels to market to solve the distinct needs of both the managed travel, which is generally done through travel management companies, and unmanaged travel, which is generally done direct with a supplier or through an online travel agency. Moving to slide 12. Central to our proposition is removing the friction that is inherent in business travel. The core challenges, such as the spend control and risk management, are consistent regardless of the size of the business. The problem just becomes exponentially harder, the bigger the company and the larger the overall business travel spend.
Getting approval to travel and purchasing itinerary elements before and during a trip requires travelers to interact with multiple disparate systems and websites. Couple this with an increasingly complex COVID travel requirements. The environmental considerations that are now in front and center, and the authentication requirements of new payment standards and the opportunity for technology is simply as clear. This is the opportunity for Zeno, a single managed platform that removes the complexity in a frictionless booking all the way through to payment and reconciliation. Moving through to slide 14. Key to this is making the right investments ahead of the shifts needed with the return to travel in a new and emerging environment that is now exponentially more complex to traverse. Our strategic vision is our pathway to ensure that when travel returns, we are well-positioned to capture the opportunity.
We remain focused on executing against our strategic objectives in Australia, North America, and our partnership with Booking.com, building a global marketplace through an open technology and application framework, and building the foundational organization capabilities needed to meet the scale of our ambitions. Slide 15. The Booking.com for Business platform targets the unmanaged travel space and our vision for this to become the leading digital platform for small and medium-sized businesses. The global travel shutdown in 2020 gave us the opportunity to accelerate what had originally been planned a three-year program of works to migrate customers from the legacy Booking.com for Business products. We have built a migration system that is scaled to handle thousands of customers migrating onto the platform every day, and maintained and built a platform that is scaled with the demands today.
This project has been a huge effort from the Serko and Booking.com for Business teams, and is a credit to their efforts during a time where the teams could only work remotely. Despite the ongoing travel disruptions from a zero base, we have seen bookings grow to the range of 1,000-1,500 transactions a weekday, and we are pleased to see Serko's average revenue per booking was above NZD 20 in October. We expect to continue to see variability in booking volumes and an average revenue per booking as businesses adapt to COVID travel requirements. As seasonality and factors such as the length of stay and occupancy rates deliver a different mix of transactions as travelers also gain the confidence in traveling for longer.
As we start to model the data that comes through, we will in turn be able to provide the market with additional metrics to assess performance. The acceleration of the program to migrate customers from the legacy Booking.com for Business platform brought forward the onboarding of customers, but was prioritized based on key customer segments only. The development work to invest in product capability to capture the full opportunity of the SME unmanaged travel market remains a multi-year project that we'll now be investing in. Slide 16. Serko and Booking.com are now focused on the next phase of the rollout to activate and engage users with a Connected Trip offering and enhancing the user experience to ensure we are positioned to capture the revenue opportunities as global business travel recovers.
Through the initial migration phase, we believe we have captured less than 10% of the pre-COVID opportunity, presenting an exciting growth opportunity for Serko and Booking.com as global business travel recovers and the planned investments are made. Key focus areas for attention and intention and investment as we move into the next phase include activating the existing customer base of migrated customers, the launch of a new mobile app offering to capture what will become an increasingly significant booking channel over the next 18 months. We're also focused on growing the base of SME customers through investments in content to support a more complete Connected Trip offering, enhanced servicing options, and expansion into regions that require complex language sets. Slide 17. The validation phase in North America is complete.
The Zeno brand now has a presence in the market that is driving pipeline growth, and Serko's focus is now scaling customer growth over a multi-year period through two primary market channels. Serko has six active resellers in the market with transacting customers, and we expect more to follow. Transactions have steadily increased over the last few months as businesses started to reengage and work through the vaccination and COVID restrictions with their customers. However, they still remain at low levels. We expect these resellers to start to widen their Zeno user base as business travel recovery in the U.S. starts to take shape, and they become operationally proficient in onboarding and servicing Zeno. We've also continued to develop our expense referral partnership, including NetSuite and OMNIA Partners, as we introduce the recently released Zeno Expense to the base in North America.
A secondary channel focus is the Fortune 500 companies whose travel programs are large enough to command a direct relationship with their travel technology partners, as well as white label opportunities with non-travel management company resellers. We're seeing an increase in inbound inquiries from Fortune 500 companies to participate in RFPs, and we are currently in discussions with several global companies after being selected with their TMC partners to roll out Zeno to their travelers. We're also exploring requests for companies that we want to white label our platform to enable their own business customers to use our technology to enhance their own marketplaces. Slide 18. Despite the turbulence of lockdown, we have continued to occupy a strong position within the Australasian region for managed travel.
This has underpinned our regional growth, which saw a recovery to 160% relative to the pre-COVID 2019 levels when lockdowns were lifted in New Zealand. We saw a rapid return to 50% of 2019 levels as the borders opened between New South Wales and Victoria. During the lockdowns, our resellers have continued to work to move customers from Serko Online to Zeno, increasing from 53% of transactions a year ago to 67% now. We continue to win new business off our competitors within the region, which also positions us well for a strong recovery. Our investment in Australia will continue with innovations such as the recent release of the Mission Zero sustainability features, the TravelSafe technology to identify a traveler's compliance with COVID-related travel requirements, and the work we are doing with the airlines on their NDC programs.
Slide 19. The foundation of a marketplace model is connecting the suppliers and buyers together at scale. A strategy to achieve this is by creating an open platform that leverages a content hub, making it easier to connect new suppliers and unlocking the ability for third-party developers to build onto our platform. Extending the breadth and depth of content available across the markets and product categories much faster than Serko could do on its own. Of course, business travel bookings are not simple transactions. They are made in an environment of a complex policy, risk, and environmental information. We believe technology has an important role to play to reduce the inherent friction in business travel through integrated content to support effective business decision making and ultimately driving greater visibility and control over pre-trip and in-trip purchases to optimize travel spend. Slide 20.
Key to achieving our goals is a high-performing team, and we are focused on developing our employee experience to engage and retain global, diverse workforce in a competitive talent landscape, and effectively aligning our people to an organizational objective. We're developing our operational model to support the transition to a marketplace platform, ensuring we have the right organizational design and leadership to scale. We are investing in people and technology to support a next-generation data platform that can deliver enhanced in-trip experience and intelligent customer preferencing. Slide 21. Organizations are facing increasing pressure to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability, and delivering a more sustainable travel program is becoming a key priority. Serko is helping to drive this shift by supporting customers on the path to carbon-neutral program with our Mission Zero solution in Zeno.
Mission Zero enables organizations to reduce their environmental impact of their travel by preferencing more sustainable booking options, by visualizing the footprint of their itinerary, and then by purchasing and retiring carbon offsets to the equivalent of the emissions, all within the Zeno booking workflow. We're also continuing to develop our ESG program to ensure Serko acts as a reasonable, responsible corporate citizen. Slide 22, an update on M&A activity. As indicated previously, Serko continuously assesses both organic and inorganic opportunities for accelerating the realization of its strategic goals. During COVID, we have been assessing market players that could enable Serko to fast-track its marketplace strategy. To this extent, Serko is working through due diligence on a global travel technology business.
Consistent with Serko's rigorous approach to assessing potential acquisitions, a transaction will only proceed if the strategic business case has proven our due diligence is successfully completed and binding terms that meet Serko's investment criteria can be agreed. Were the transaction to proceed, it is expected that the estimated value range would be between NZD 50 million and NZD 75 million. The majority of the value would be structured as a deferred performance-based scrip consideration to align to the synergies we would expect over a three-year period. Further update on the potential acquisition will be provided at the relevant time. Serko is looking to set aside part of the capital raise for investments and acquisitions of companies that will assist Serko in delivering our marketplace vision. I'll now hand over to Shane.
Thanks, Darrin. Before I start, I just note all percentages I refer to are based on the movement relative to the prior comparable period of the six months to 30 September 2020, unless otherwise stated. Now, looking at our key metrics, total operating revenue increased 81% to NZD 9.2 million from NZD 5.1 million. While total income increased 16% to NZD 9.9 million from NZD 8.5 million. The higher growth in operating revenue reflects lower wage subsidies and higher travel-related revenues as a result of higher travel booking volumes. Total travel booking volumes rose 157% to 1.3 million from 0.5 million, lifted by limited lockdowns in Australia and New Zealand during the first quarter and the new Booking.com for Business transactions.
We continue to invest strongly with product design and development expenditure increasing 52% to NZD 13.4 million as we implemented Booking.com for Business and continued with other initiatives. Overall, operating expenses grew a little more slowly at 42% to NZD 25.3 million. The higher investment resulted in a 50% increase in the net loss to NZD 15.2 million. The key metrics slide picked up most of the key points on the net profit and EBITDA slide. However, two points to note, particularly here. One is that EBITDA losses increased 76% to NZD 11.8 million from NZD 6.7 million, reflecting the increased investment levels. Other income, predominantly grants, decreased 79% to NZD 0.7 million, primarily reflecting lower wage subsidies in the period.
I also note that in the period we moved from the Callaghan Growth Grant scheme to the Research Development Tax Incentive or RDTI scheme. We expect to receive RDTI payments of NZD 0.7 million in relation to the period. However, we've deferred NZD 0.6 million of that revenue on the basis that we capitalized the related costs. Looking at revenue in more detail. As shown in the highlights slide, our operating revenue increased 81% to NZD 9.2 million from NZD 5.1 million. Travel revenue grew by 170% to NZD 5.8 million, reflecting the bounce back in travel in the first quarter. Expense platform revenue was flat and content commissions grew 94%, reflecting the increased volumes of travel activity.
Average revenue per booking or ARPB was NZD 7.38 compared to NZD 8.76 during the full year FY 2021 period as a result of a change in revenue mix. The expense platform has a higher average revenue per booking and in the prior comparable period, the very low travel levels meant the expense platform revenue had a higher weighting. If you look at the purely travel-related average revenue per booking, that was flat on the prior comparable period and slightly up on FY 2021 as a whole. We note that Booking.com for Business platform-related average revenue per booking in September was just below the NZD 20 mark, and we've seen it go above that in October. By geography, the rebound in Australia and New Zealand stands out.
Most of the U.S. revenue is expense platform-related, but the travel revenue grew by an average over 10% per month from May. Looking at transactions, this is a subset of the graph that was on slide 18. You can see that strong rebound in the first quarter with New Zealand bookings averaging 151% of pre-COVID levels, reflecting market share gains as well as the recovery from COVID. In June, we peaked at over 160% of the pre-COVID level. In Australia, there was also a rebound to 62% in the first quarter, with a peak of 72% in April. Australia had more intermittent travel restrictions, with the key Sydney-Melbourne route being a key one that made the recovery more modest than in New Zealand.
In the second quarter, travel restrictions kicked in as Australia locked down and then New Zealand followed in August. In Australia, transactions in the first half of November 2021, however, I would note, are averaging 52% of COVID-19 levels. We can already see those starting to normalize. Looking at operating expenses, as I noted on the key metrics slide, operating expenses grew 42% to NZD 25.3 million relative to the prior comparable period. Relative to the second half of FY 2021, however, costs did not grow, which you can also see in the headcount, which jumped 60 versus September 2020, but only eight since 31 March 2021.
We had provided guidance to market of average monthly cash burn of between NZD 2 million and NZD 4 million, and we held to that, delivering average monthly cash burn of NZD 2.9 million just below the midpoint of the guidance, despite the lower revenues due to lockdowns. The trade-off was that we held back investment that had been planned for expanding our product development capacity. A core part of the capital raise is allowing us to move our focus from managing investment based on COVID-impacted revenues to allowing us to focus on delivering against the opportunities in front of us. In product design and development, costs grew 52% from the prior comparable period to NZD 13.4 million. Of the total product design and development costs, NZD 7 million was capitalized, an increase of 42% from the prior comparable period.
As a proportion of total product design and development costs, the portion capitalized reduced from 55% to 52%. Product design and development expenditure also grew relative to the six months to 31 March 2021, with growth of 30%, unlike overall operating expenses, which did not grow. Finally turning to the balance sheet. Serko ended the period with cash and short-term deposits of NZD 62.3 million, down on the NZD 79.9 million at 31 March 2021. As noted earlier, we held the cash burn over the six-month period at NZD 2.9 million, which is slightly below the midpoint of the guidance range of NZD 2 million-NZD 4 million. Other current assets increased by NZD 1.1 million since 31 March 2021, primarily reflecting government grant income and Booking.com for Business revenue.
Intangibles grew by NZD 4.2 million to NZD 27.3 million, reflecting capitalization of product development costs of NZD 7 million, less amortization of NZD 2.9 million. I'll now hand back to Darrin for the outlook.
Thanks, Shane. Okay, slide 31, outlook. While the impact of COVID on the travel industry is continuing longer and perhaps than analysts first predicted, we believe with Booking.com for Business now live on our platform, we have an opportunity to capture transactions globally as travel resumes unevenly around the world. The impacts from the pandemic and other factors significant throughout the period continue to make it challenging to determine the timing and realization of revenues from the opportunities outlined today. Overall, we are expecting significantly stronger full year results than last year, which shows some signs of recovery. While we expect some of the disruptions to our home market to continue in the second half, transactions are expected to rebound as domestic travel restrictions ease, as we've seen in the past.
We are pleased to have already seen positive uplift with the first wave of border restrictions being removed, resulting in transactions increasing up to 50% of pre-COVID levels. Serko currently anticipates full year revenue and other income between NZD 21 million-NZD 25 million, and this outlook assumes general reduction of domestic travel restrictions within Australia and New Zealand, and no significant lockdowns in Europe and North America. The upper end of the FY 2022 range assumes Australia and New Zealand transaction volumes in December quarter at 50% of 2019 levels, rising in March quarter to 75% of 2019 levels as lockdown restrictions lift. booking.com for Business revenues grow from current levels through to March 2022 as enhancements are made to the offering with a similar COVID-19 rebound as assumed in Australia and New Zealand.
The lower end of the range assumes Australia and New Zealand volumes in December quarter at 50% of 2019 levels, rising to only 60% of 2019 levels in March quarter. Limited growth in Booking.com for Business revenues, with increasing COVID impacts offsetting the impact of new features and new offerings coming into the market. At the lower end of the revenue range, monthly cash burn in the six months to 31 March 2022 is to be expected closer to NZD 4 million as investment has accelerated. In the second half, Serko does not expect to be eligible for the New Zealand Government wage subsidies due to the growth in revenue from Booking.com for Business. Serko continues to see strong growth opportunities, and we believe our target of reaching NZD 100 million in revenue in the midterm remains achievable.
We're raising capital now to allow us to continue to invest in these growth opportunities either organically or inorganically, while retaining a prudent cash buffer to guard against potential ongoing impacts of COVID and their uncertainties. Slide 32, capital raising overview. I'm gonna move through to slide 33, in the use of proceeds. The capital raise is strategic. With around NZD 62 million of existing reserves as at September, the board of Serko has decided that the uncertainty COVID continues to bring to the market requires strong long-term working capital set that will enable the company to preserve our resilience as we continue to invest and execute against our strategy. We're prudently maintaining sufficient capital reserves while investing in the opportunities we see in front of us.
The majority of our investment is forward-looking, driving ahead of the midterm revenues, and we recognize a faster recovery may result in stronger than anticipated balance sheet, which Serko will use to further invest into growth opportunities. Serko is a growth business, and with the foundations laid to date, we believe it is time to step up into the global arena and drive towards the aspirations we have for Serko, and the requisite amount of capital. We are raising capital to continue investing for growth in the unmanaged travel segment through our Booking.com for Business partnership, to accelerate the development of our global marketplace strategy and to pursue the opportunities in the inorganic global expansion. The pandemic is reshaping the business travel landscape, disrupting legacy approaches to travel management and accelerating a shift to technology to solve the emerging needs of business travel in a COVID world.
We believe the market potential for Serko as the business travel recovers is significant. The revenue opportunities are expected to be large and investment Serko needs to make now is essential to capture these opportunities. We ask for your support to enable Serko to become the global world leader it aspires to be. Slide 34. The capital raise announced today is to be conducted by a fully underwritten placement of up to NZD 75 million and up to NZD 10 million non-underwritten retail offer. Serko retains the ability to accept oversubscriptions at its sole discretion to ensure it has sufficient flexibility to cater for demand from institutional and retail shareholder base. The placement will be conducted through a book build in which institutional and other select investors will be invited to participate by Craigs Investment Partners Limited, Ord Minnett Limited.
The trading halt will be granted by the NZX and ASX prior to the market opening today. Further details of the capital raising are set out in the documents released to the market today, and retail investors will be able to subscribe for up to 50,000 new shares under the retail offer. Expect to announce the completion of the placement and resume trading tomorrow. The retail offer will be open on the 30th of November and close on the 14th of December. That completes our presentation. Before I turn to the Q&A to slide 36, I draw your attention to the appendix slides from slide 37 for further information. With that, I'd like to conclude the presentation and open up for questions. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speaker phone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. A voice prompt on the phone line will indicate when your line is open. At the tone, please state your name and company before posing a question. Again, press star one to ask a question. We'll now take our first question. At the tone, please state your name and company before posing a question. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
John O'Shea from Ord Minnett, Darrin. Can you hear me okay?
I can. Welcome, John O'Shea.
Yep. Yeah. Thanks, guys. Morning. Just a question from me, as to how we should think about, you know, the medium sort of term opportunity. You've reiterated you see the target of NZD 100 million over the medium term. How should we think about this capital raising in the context of that? Is the opportunity the same? Does the capital raising accelerate the timeframe for you to get there? Does it mean the opportunity is larger than that, but take longer to get there? Or how do you think. Do you understand what I'm asking? How do you think we should see this capital raising in the context of that stated target that's been there for quite some time?
Yeah. Some of the opportunities are definitely outsized on there that are coming in through there, John. It's definitely to look to actually widen the pipeline of what we would probably be investing, you know, maybe towards the end of the year and following through into the next year sort of thing. It's starting to bring some of those investments forward and actually using some other players to actually help us get there faster with the pipeline of interest coming in and actually widening up other markets that we may have done at a later stage, increasing that. Which increases our likelihood of having a strong run rate into FY 2023 as well.
The overall part is that the capital for us enables us to not be as cautious and enable us to push, kinda widen the pie wider than where it is today. Even though we've got a COVID effect, we're able to actually bring more of the pie, and then as that recovers, get a wider opportunity scale in the later sections of that as well. It does kinda overweight that sort of thing. Then the acquisition, which is part of what the capital is for, we hope that when we bring that in, that could actually fast-track us by almost 18 months ahead of our strategy out 3 years as well. The combined effort is really to create a faster outsized opportunity. Shane, have you got any other-
Yeah. I think, kind of going over the call, it would be particularly the portion around the marketplace. You know, that's a medium-term investment that increases the opportunity significantly in the medium term, but doesn't deliver, you know, doesn't deliver in the short term in the same way that the other two components do.
What was that, Shane? I just missed that, sorry. When you said it was the other two-
Right
two components, so what do you mean?
The portion that's the global marketplace portion, if you like, that's a medium-term investment. That's if you like, building the next growth curve beyond the initiatives we already have underway.
Cool.
So it's-
In other words.
That-
The second or the third. The one that's not booking.com and not acquisition.
Correct.
That's correct.
Yeah, there's a marketplace point too. Yeah.
That's that particularly.
That's more of a-
You know, the medium to long-term growth opportunity.
Yeah. With the other ones have a faster payback because they're based on known investment information. We know we can pull some of those forward into there.
If I could summarize, if I've interpreted what you said correctly, what you're really saying is the acquisition, if it happens, fast-tracks the delivery of the NZD 100 million. The Booking.com and the global marketplace. Sorry. The Booking.com, we know what that opportunity is, and it's about, you know, continuing to broaden out the Connected Trip. That's what the
Correct.
What the procedure you use for. The global
Yeah.
Marketplace one increases your medium- to longer-term opportunity beyond NZD 100 million.
Correct.
That...
it enables us to long-term re-
Fair comment?
Yeah, correct. It enables us to also reduce our cost base. The more open the platform, the more capacity we have by other parties building onto the platform. If we were connecting a new airline in, that airline could work with a local system integrator to connect that into the API framework, and it no longer requires a cost on our side. As we open the platform, we also get wider scale in countries where we would normally have to scale teams to do that work. Making that investment into that enables us to fast-track all of those connections externally and to make sure, you know, the compliance that's needed around, you know, the really tight legislative areas around globally can all be met through opening that platform as well.
A lot of work has to go in to make sure that as people connect, it still meets, you know, the policy and security requirements needed, in some of these markets that are, you know, very tightly regulated now.
Sure. Thanks very much, guys. That's all from me.
Hey, you're welcome.
We'll now take our next question. At the tone, please state your name and company before posing your question. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Jamie from Fora. Just check my line's working properly.
Yep, all good, Jamie.
Well, this result has actually provided more questions than answers for me. If I start with what I think are probably the three most important areas, my first question is on guidance. You're coming in 40% below consensus for revenue in 2022. You know, to me, that cannot be COVID impact completely. Question A, you know, why so large a delta? B, what proportion of that NZD 21 million-NZD 25 million is booking contribution, please?
Well, as you know, the revenue target on just even our home revenue, which was sitting, I think previously 2019 at over NZD 24 million, you know, we're down. We notified that, you know, Australia being the biggest portion knocked that back to about 35%. That does play a huge portion of that. The booking.com sort of side, I can hand over to probably Shane, who can give you some metrics on that.
Yes. I think definitely one challenge with consensus was that all but one of those reports were dated back in May, at which point Australia and New Zealand were both tracking extremely well. Definitely ANZ has an impact. Obviously, the other thing that we had communicated to market subsequent to those reports was that the Booking.com migration was being delayed by a couple of months. If you like in terms of Booking.com revenues, the rate to grow those revenues has shifted to the left. Then certainly the complications of COVID in terms of activating that market hit on top of that. Those are really the two components. Lower revenues than people would've been expecting in May before the lockdowns in Australia and New Zealand.
On the Booking.com side, effectively the growth curve being moved to the right and also being impacted by COVID. You can see that in the guidance where you can see between the low and the high scenarios, a big component of that difference is in relation to Booking.com, with the two key variables being with launching new initiatives that will engage more of those customers and see us have more transactions. Google also seeing some headwinds, particularly in German-speaking countries at the moment, which are a significant part of the Booking.com business. At the moment if you like on the low scenario, we're assuming that we can offset those impacts with the initiatives that we're doing. On the high scenario, we assume that those initiatives bear fruit and that there's a slight COVID recovery.
The contribution of Booking in that NZD 21 million-NZD 25 million , please.
We're not specifically communicating that. However, you can to some extent derive it. If you look at the ANZ numbers, if you look at the low scenario and the ANZ number, that's gonna be similar to the first half. You take off the wage subsidies because we indicated there won't be any of those. You can kind of work out. I think the other call out would be we've indicated 1,000-1,500 transactions per day at an average revenue per booking of NZD 20. If you take the midpoint of that gives you a run rate of around NZD 550,000. In the low scenario, we're assuming that we stay on that run rate in the second half.
In the high scenario, we're obviously assuming that we can grow that materially, with the exit rate being significantly higher than where we are today.
Okay. Second question on Booking. You know, there's a lot of metrics here. If we cut straight to the chase, you know, how much revenue are you or were you expecting when you did your DD from Booking in a normalized year as part of the JV, please?
I think our key challenge there is that Booking.com don't want us releasing their information on their behalf. That's one of the reasons why you're seeing us communicating a range for Booking.com rather than an exact number. However, you know, certainly what we can say is we've made that statement that we think we're less than 10% of the opportunity. That is just less than 10% of just the opportunity relating to what was there pre-COVID. That gives you some idea of the scale of the opportunity. That's before we take into account any of the opportunities to connect other products or work with them to enter the North American market more strongly, et cetera. Just if we look at the pre-COVID 2019 volumes they were doing, we're less than 10% of those.
Definitely significant upside. Some of that will come through COVID recovery, both COVID recovery in terms of volumes, more businesses taking more trips and also the average revenue per booking of NZD 20 we think is, you know, probably in the order of 30%-50% lower than the 2019 levels, with the drivers for that being people taking shorter stays. Effectively, I go on a business trip, I'm making that trip shorter than I would've in pre-COVID times. And also hotel rates are down due to the lower occupancy levels of hotels. COVID certainly has a significant impact, but there's also a number of initiatives that we're working on to increase.
You know, as you would've seen when we put our annual report and in this investor presentation, first focus was the migration stage now into the activation and engagement. You know, we're still steadily working through delivering the things that will allow us to realize the other 90% of that opportunity.
I mean, I'll ask in a different way then, your 300,000 number, and for clarity, can we just confirm whether this is individual people accounts or 300,000, like SMEs, that you've onboarded? 'Cause there's a big difference.
300,000 SMEs.
Okay.
Companies.
The final question.
Companies.
Okay. Yeah. The final question on booking, you know, the ARPU is, or you've just put out, is around EUR 12. That's significantly less than what you're previously guiding at about EUR 30. What's the difference here? Is that down to purely occupancy rates and hotel yields? I'm just trying to figure out what the delta's driven by.
We're talking about our portion. That's what Serko receives in our hand at the moment, as well. Just making sure you're aware that that NZD 20 ARPB is Serko's take right now, over NZD 20. What increases that take is if length of stay and rates are compressed due to high availability, that reduces the opportunity. As the people increase their length of stay, so does our take. As Shane indicated, there could be a 30%-50% gain in average revenue per booking. Last week we released multi-traveler, multi-room per booking. All of these things make a huge difference to the average revenue per booking that we'll receive across those transactions. You know, COVID, what it does is it affects people's ability to stay longer.
They do shorter trips to balance their risk. As they become more confident, they stay a bit longer, and because of that, occupancy goes up, and we saw that in October. We saw under NZD 20 in September, over NZD 20 in October. You're seeing the stuff change in there. As the world starts to travel again, the rates go up and the length of stay goes up. We get a win on transactions, and we get a win on the other side as well. As we enable more pieces in the technology that enable wider transaction scope of the Connected Trip, we can get an even higher ARPB over that as well. It's a combination of the investments we make into the Connected Trip, the length of stay, and how the traveler patterns actually map through.
COVID has this double effect on us at the moment, shorter stays, low occupancy, lower rates, and people not as, you know, activating. Although we've got the 330,000 customers, including new ones, you know, there's a percentage that are ready to travel. There's that level of customers that have said they're going to travel and they want to use the system, and then it's actually making sure that they're activated. That's why we call this stage the activation stage. It's getting them in and through the pipeline into that platform. That's really how we look at it. We look. Can we go wider through what we're building to capture more of the business section of those people traveling and people that want to travel?
Can we build the tech wider to do that, to fill the pipeline even under the COVID effect, which gives us a faster scale coming out? The COVID part we can't control. So there's a certain amount we can control. Can we market and influence them to travel? Can we make sure that we've widened the content and added Rentalcars.com and added rail and added more air content and the like in there, and can we shop more? So those are the things that are within our control. The rest of it sits outside that.
Okay, thanks. Final question from me. What are your assumptions around marketing costs in the JV, as a percentage of the revenue you're generating from it, please?
Yes. Today at the moment, we've got an arrangement with them where we contribute a portion of their advertising spend that's specific to business, as opposed to a particular percentage. One of the things within that booking.com 35% of the proceeds that it does give us the opportunity to do is to expand the amount of marketing at some point. At this point, we're still described as being in test and learn, given we've only been kind of live, you know, fully live for about seven weeks. As we get clarity on metrics around CAC, and obviously LTV will take a little bit longer to see how often people come back, then we may look to invest harder.
At the moment, I think if you look in the interim result, you can see within the other sales costs, you can see an increase there in costs, which is us starting to hit some booking.com spend, also a little bit more for our marketing team sitting within those numbers. At the moment, on the contractual arrangement, that sort of commitment is quite a low percentage of where we'd expect to be on revenue. The potential, though, is that we may decide that we actually want to invest beyond that level over time.
Just to be clear, should Booking want to ramp up marketing spend, you're forced to essentially take that?
No, it's an agreed approach, so the amount's agreed annually between each other. What we do see today is a high volume of new customers just through their normal retail advertising, which is the organic sign-ups that we actually get through there. We don't have to contribute to that. It's only for the targeted paid business stuff, and that's agreed annually between both parties on an annual amount.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you. We'll now take our next question. As a turn, please state your name and company before posing a question. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Morning. It's Chris Byrne here from Craigs Investment Partners. Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can. Hi, Chris.
Morning. Hey, just on this Booking.com, you sort of talk about you've captured sort of under 10% of the pre-COVID opportunity, and it's sort of you're tracking about 300,000 SMEs signed up. I mean, has it plateaued at that level, or are you seeing still rapid sign-up going forward? I mean, it seems to be 90% that haven't signed up from-
Still seeing-
the pre-COVID times. Seems like a lot of SMEs.
Still seeing customers sign up daily through there, Chris. The target was, you know, between, I guess, 200,000 and 300,000 activating through there. We're over that large number, and it's now actually the second phase of customers still actually subscribing to the system every day in there. Yep, we're still seeing decent numbers come through every night.
Were those customers, I mean that sort of talks to 2-3 million customers pre-COVID. I mean, were they all sort of active or was there quite a few there that you can sort of determine and say, you know, they hadn't really booked in a decent period of time?
Well, yeah, I think when we talk about 10%, we're talking about the revenue opportunity. The average revenue per booking has an impact. The other point is, while a lot of customers-
Yeah. Okay.
have chosen to effectively select to have their data passed to us. They're not necessarily traveling yet. Rather than thinking 10% of customers, think 10% of the trips that were pre-COVID. You know, a significant proportion of that pre-COVID base has elected to register on our platform, they just may not have traveled yet.
Okay, cool. Thank you.
We'll now take our next question. It's your turn, please state your name and company before posing a question. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. It's Tom here from Macquarie. Thanks for taking the questions. First one, j ust on booking.com and some of the content development. Hey, Darrin. Hey, Shane. You know, could you just give us a bit of a status update in terms of how the content development has been progressing in those key, you know, initial regions which have activated, being the U.K. and Ireland and Germany? You know, I guess just what's really included in that ARPB number which you guys have put forward today? Is it simply just hotel rates, or are we starting to see some other tangential, booking contributions there? Thanks.
Mostly hotel content. A lot of the migrated customers come in with the intent initially to book hotel because that's like for like how they actually transacted previously, and then are learning and searching and seeing how the air component. We get a little bit of air componentry booked in that Connected Trip. Rail is going live hopefully in this half and that will go live in the Germany market. We should start to see some of those types of Connected Trips as well. As we start to bring those forward, we should start to see that start to flick through from there. It's still mostly driven out of hotel content today and a little bit of those-
Got it.
Transactions picking up air.
Yeah.
The big two points would be air and hotel at this point.
Okay.
Mostly hotel.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's helpful. Thanks, Darrin. Appreciate it. You know, some of the target regions you guys have sort of highlighted you'll be looking to sort of roll out. Is that in Europe, U.S.? Can you give us some more detail in terms of that regional expansion? Obviously, you're live in 180 countries.
Yeah
The content development will take some more time, obviously, right?
Yeah. It requires legislative changes in each country to get the air content activated, you know. Every time you launch an air program, we follow on the back of booking.com doing that work, and then we activate it within that market. It does go market by market. I don't have the total number. I think they advertise that they're in 27 markets, but I might have that number wrong, for air. And so we kind of follow how they get through permission to sell flights and stuff like that within those regions. There's certain things you follow behind in there as they get permission to do air travel in those regions.
The rest of it for us is, you know, globalizing is that, you know, some of these large enterprise customers might be in 70-80 countries. We're making sure that we've got the support structure to support those rollouts across those different departments. Some of our retailers may have, you know, a five-center regional support structure to support those global accounts and making sure that we've got all the systems in place to do that as well.
Got it. That's helpful, Darrin. Thank you very much. Second one just on the New Zealand recovery. You know, you guys saw the, you know, bookings have increased pretty drastically over 2019 levels before COVID impacted.
Yeah.
Where do you guys, you know, obviously, within the guidance frame, you said 75% in the last quarter if we recover to that profile. Where do you expect New Zealand bookings to level out at post-COVID recovery? Should we be expecting, you know, some meaningful market share gains to remain within the business? Should we expect 120%-
Yes. Yes. I mean.
of, you know, pre-COVID? What's that number?
Yeah. Like we've indicated, we've continued to win and we haven't had any material losses to date. The answer to your question is yes, we would expect it to be up significantly as the recovery. You know, I think we got as high as 80% on customer to customer. We would expect another 20% on our peak of 160% growth on top of there. We do believe there's more room and that's assuming people get back to 100%. In some cases, we saw in other recovery models after, you know, September 11 and other impacts, up to 120%. The answer to your question is, yeah. You know, some of the market leaders are predicting.
You know, they've turned around to us and say, "Hey, can you build the technology? Because we think there could be a travel boom and we don't have the team to answer all of those support calls. Can you make sure all the COVID stuff and all of this information is in the technology? Otherwise, we won't be able to handle those types of questions coming in." We've pre-built all of that. There's different views in there. Yeah, generally, we've been expanding, well, through that sort of sign.
Interesting, Darrin. Thank you. Just a final one from me just on the workforce. You know, obviously, you know, wage inflation and pressures getting louder down here, certainly a problem for other tech companies in the market. You know, how has hiring been for you guys? You know, how are you looking to diversify that with some of your other development regions as well? Thank you.
Yeah. Hiring for us, it's a good question. Hiring for us with our brand hasn't been too bad, because we've got a very strong brand. It's quite an appealing place to work in the sector that we're working with, the type of customers that we have. Of course, we've got a diverse global workforce now in China, Minneapolis, Australia, and New Zealand. We wanna diversify that further. The global operating model for sourcing talent is definitely something. It is something that if we were to proceed on the acquisition, it would definitely help us out with creating a multi-regional approach to this and solve some of those labor issues as well. It's always a tight market.
You know, we seem to be able to still source the talent into there. I think from memory, we had 17 people come in in October or something like that. We're still able to pick up the talent in there. We've boosted up our what we call our P&C area and that ability to have talent managers filling the pipeline ahead of the need as well. The board's kind of signed off an additional five teams to come on board to really help us boost that up as well. Yeah, we're trying to get ahead of that curve as well.
Cool. That's helpful, Darrin.
I think.
Thank you very much.
I think your other-
That's it from me.
Yeah. Your other question, Tom, you know, related to, you know, travel. You can see the demand that's pent up within New Zealand. You know, even the likes of Ian Taylor referring that he lost deals by not being face to face and, you know, pushing to be able to get business trip, business people, and people just leaving with no ability to come back into New Zealand. It just shows how important face to face travel is. It's complex. You know, fundamentally, what we provide is the governance and the safety net that even if you're a small business or a big business will need.
The wider we scope that and go through, the more customers that we fill into that pipeline, whether it's in the unmanaged side with Booking.com or whether it's in the other area. Our ability to then take that investment we've made with Booking.com and replicate it to other brands they have in airlines and other areas is our next part of that investment curve as well. We're seeing that we've got this two-sided model, which we talked about today, which is this unmanaged spend and the problem SMEs have in traveling and the technology to solve that. Then we have the managed travel one, and you've seen the storefronts with Flight Centre, with Sabre, and Orbit with Orbit Online and Booking.com with Booking.com for Business.
Replicating these out, which is what Zeno's about, and overlaying that need to connect and travel, but with the compliance, that's what we do. That's where we see the opportunity coming out of here. That's filled that funnel now at the top, and we have to widen it and really put our foot down to take a big chunk of what we consider will be an outsized opportunity.
Makes a lot of sense, Darrin. Thank you very much for the color. Appreciate it. That's all the questions from my side.
Yeah, you're welcome.
Thanks for the time.
We'll move on to our last question. As a turn, please state your name and company before posing a question. Your line is open. Please go ahead.
Hi, Darrin. Hi, Shane. It's Siraj from Citigroup. A quick question. You make a mention about increasing consolidation in the sector. Just wondering whether the capital raise and the acceleration spend for you is driven by that. Do you actually see it as a threat? Because I see a mention that you lost one of your customers to a consolidation, because of consolidation. Just keen to hear your thoughts on how you think this consolidation plays out in the scheme of things.
I mean, it was a non-trading reseller contract, you know, and that sort of thing. The consolidation is more that, you know, you've got the content providers merging together, and you saw, you know, Booking.com just acquired Getaroom. You've got different travel management companies like CTM acquiring travel and transport, and you've got other players doing this consolidation. That always occurs when a market's disrupting. You've got some of the major players that have been pretty badly hurt through this process, which leaves an opportunity for companies like ourselves that are a little bit more agile in ability to deliver the technology. What you've got is a tectonic shift. When we talked about this shift in the industry, we've got multiple things occurring.
We've got all of this consolidation happening in the marketplace, and then we've also got the technology that's actually needed to actually bring all of these new disruptions and connections together and how that's going to actually play out. The great thing is that we foreshadowed a lot of this and invested ahead of that curve, knowing that we could predict that NDC would become a shift and travel management companies would need to move that because airlines would start to push commissions through there. Our research told us that people were gonna buy via environmental choice, so we just didn't do carbon offset for air. We pushed carbon offset across the entire trip. We now know that payment and everything is gonna influence because of the way that cash is done.
We're going, "Hey, expense management can be totally disrupted, and we can use payment and the ability for the Northern Europe, the Europe region to move to this real complex payment model. They need to virtualize the transaction, and we can move all of this technology forward to create a seamless payment and spend management, which potentially can disrupt the whole space of expense management." We know that we can't just own one payment provider because Booking might use a payment provider. CWT and Flight Centre may use a different one, and so we have to be independent. A true marketplace doesn't lock itself down. It creates that flexibility to do that. We're seeing the shift in payment, expense management and travel. What we've done is we've built the technology.
We've seen, you know, the top four players in North America start to work with us, start to look at their customers to build that pipeline. The opportunity has widened. It hasn't shortened. It's actually increased. We wouldn't be making this call to go harder if it hadn't increased, and we had some level of certainty around this. You know, it's not only increased at that level, it's increased. You can imagine if you're an airline and you need to get business customers secured through into there, what, you're gonna rebuild your same platform that's failed multiple times or could you do similar sort of things to what Booking have done? Our ability to replicate this platform over and over again for SMEs in the unmanaged space is phenomenal opportunity as well.
Yeah, it's an outsized opportunity. Because we've built the foundations, you know, we've scaled to tens of thousands of customers a night across one of the most complex and compliant markets in the world, being Europe with GDPR. We've done all that successfully. We've brought on over 300,000 customers in there and 30,000 new ones, and we're still onboarding every night. Yeah. We believe we've got the foundations right. We believe we've got the top-end funnel of customers coming in, and now it's about how do we get a wide enough system in place to meet the COVID impacts that are occurring. If we can go wider, we can mitigate some of those impacts at the same time as actually increasing the funnel long and midterm as well.
All right. Thank you.