Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SkiStar Year End Report, Q4, first of September, 2023 to 31st of August, 2024 webcast and conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speakers today, Stefan Sjöstrand, CEO, and Martin Almgren, CFO. Please go ahead.
Warm thank you, and also warm welcome everyone to this SkiStar Q4 and full year report. It will be myself and Martin presenting, and we have an agenda of today where we'll give you, as we have done the last three quarters, a short recap of our Capital Markets Day we had in October 2023, a year ago. And then we will take you through the Q4, where Martin will begin, like, a summary from the drivers from the CMD and also our financial goals, while I will talk about the Q4, and then Martin, again, back to the numbers. And then I will give you a short outlook of what's happening going forward. So, let's go with a short recap from the Capital Markets Day we had a year ago.
We have, of course, now updated the numbers versus how it was a year ago, but there is two important numbers which is still remaining, and one is eight out of ten of our employees are still very satisfied when going to work every day. Of course, our employees are crucial when we also have so many guests in our destinations. Our coworkers, employees, they are enormous and always do the best to deliver a strong guest experience. Also, eight out of ten of our guests are saying that they've got the memorable mountain experience. Of course, that is crucial when you can deliver that such an amazing result to all our guests.
Really proud of our growth number, 4.7 billion SEK, and Martin will then later on talk about how we accomplished that number. I'm also very satisfied that we have increased the number of digitally sold and downloaded ski pass, which is now coming close to 80% of all sales. And the remaining part is when our visitors pick up the ski pass in one of our SkiStar shops. So very good result, and that is continue to grow. And lastly, but not least, really happy to see that 95% of our guests is doing the digital check-ins, and that is also showing that our digital transformation continues in a very good level. So, as a starting point, we have three important parts as a foundation.
Again, our people and our culture, that eight out of ten are very glad to come to work, but they also continue to come. As an example, 60% of our employees are returning back every year, and that also showing that we are a good employer and that it is a good place to work at SkiStar. It's important that our guests feel safe and secure when they come and visit us, and of course, we do everything that we can to deliver a sustainable experience. And, we will also take you through our sustainability updates, where we are during this year.
If we then look into the strategic framework, we are working on the two big areas, which is to deliver high experience in the mountain operations, of course, for our customers and visitors coming to us, but also that we have an important part in the property development, and during this capital market day, we also were very clear about that the property development side, we have no rush. We take it in our pace and the years like we have had the last year and a half, when the market are a bit unstable in this property development, we are saying that we deliver in our pace, in a pace where we can also feel confidence and also that you in the market can feel confident.
In the mountain operations, we're really glad to work with those three areas, with the safe and secure, with the sustainability, and our coworkers and the people and culture part, but also to continue to work with digitalization, to become even better, smoother, but also continue to work with business development, and also continue to deliver new revenue streams within our company. If we take on the big hat and see it from a big picture, SkiStar is a large player in this industry. We are the fourth largest player in the world in this industry, and it's also with proudness, I can say, that we are in a strong position in Scandinavia. We have the market leader position, we have a roughly 42% market share, and we are running the five largest winter destinations.
Also together with Hammarbybacken, the sixth one, we also deliver a full year mountain experience on all those destinations. I think this picture is very important when we often discuss pricing, when we often discuss size, et c. Here, we really would like to highlight the size of our five destinations. As just an example, we have 77 grooming machines running our operations, and of course, that's an important number when you have such many slopes to really take care of from a customer experience. Also, if you look into the other slide, which is very important, you also can see a record in Skier Days, that we deliver more than 6.1 million Skier Days.
If we then add up on these activity days, we have a + 7% this year, which is, of course, a very strong number in those times when maybe the customer are a little bit more reluctant about what to prioritize. We can clearly see that they prioritize to go to our destinations and then explore our products. Another very important part is the number of beds we have, because the number of beds are the engine, and we will come back to that later on as well. The number of beds would help us to get exchange of customers and guests every week. As an example, Sälen, one of the largest destination in Sweden, and one of the largest in the world, actually, exchanges city of Västerås every Saturday, Sunday.
Just to imagine the number of people going on the roads and in buses, et c., to come and visit our destinations during this period of time. If we then look into the development of our destinations, we put up also very clear strategy. Those four pictures is really showing a showcase of how it looked like a year ago, actually. Up to the left, how it was in Lindvallen, Sälen, where we had one ski lift in which needs to be exchanged. In Söderåsen, on the left side of that picture, up to the left, a couple of months it looks like a construction place. Up to the right, how the lift looked like when it was up and running this winter.
And then down to the right, how it will look like in a couple of years when we have really developed the whole, area around the ski lifts. And this is exactly how we developed our areas now, when we also invest in new lifts. Exactly the same will happen in Hemsedal, where we will open up for a lodge number three, which we bought the land a couple of years ago to really continue to extend the customer experience at our destinations. Another very important part was to show that the international customer drives average spend, and that has been the case during this year. We have clearly seen that the British guests, the Danish guests, the guests from Netherlands and Germany are really driving an average spend versus the Swedish or the Norwegian guests.
So really grateful to have a lot of international guests, and we can also see at this booking pattern we have this year, that there is more international guests still continue to choose our destinations versus others. So I stop there, and I will hand over to Martin to summarize what I just said a bit, and then also we will go into the Q4 quarter.
Hi, everyone. So let's start, as Stefan said, with an update on our financial target and dividend policy that we have. Now, we have finalized our financial year 2023-2024. And we had a strong organic growth. The goal is 6%, and we managed to achieve 10% organic growth when we adjust for currencies and acquisitions. So the growth this year, we are really satisfied how it has been developed, and we will come back a little bit more to details, but we see that we have organic growth in all areas, which is really, really nice. The operating margin, we have a goal of 18%. We reached 16, so it's halfway from where we started last year, where we ended up at 14. So we are moving in the right direction.
We are not yet fully reaching the goal, but we are continuing our work to be more efficient and find more profit in our business. So we are moving towards the 18%. Then we have a financial goal leverage, net debt to EBITDA, excluding IFRS, that should be not higher than 2.5. This year, we ended up at 1.7, so we are building for future expansions, like Stefan said before, which feels really, really good. And then finally, our dividend policy, which should be between 40% and 60%. And, as you probably have seen, our suggestion to the annual meeting to decide about the dividend is that we increase the dividend to SEK 2.80 per share.
So it's an increase with SEK 0.2 to SEK 2.80. Moving into our strategic initiatives then, how we should be able to reach our financial targets. The first initiative is to keep the development of the all year round operations that we have started a few years back. To continue to increase capacity, to build more attractive destinations that will continue to drive new visits. And that's what we are doing. We are this year we have invested in new lifts, for example, in Hemsedal, Sälen, and Åre, and we will continue that journey during the year, the following years. We will also continue the work to strengthen our margin and growth.
We are always looking into and try to be more and more efficient and fine-tuning our pricing model by developing our dynamic pricing, and also try to increase average spend on the different customers, and also the mix of different customers. Here we see that, for example, the airport in between Sälen and Trysil is an important part for us to attract international guests, and then to the main driver that Stefan said, increased number of commercial beds. This is really the engine in the volume growth. Today we have thirty-six thousand one hundred beds, and it's about growing that number. This can be done both by that we build in our own books.
We can use Skiab, our joint venture, or there can be external developers that build cabins or apartments at our destinations. But the important thing is that we continuously add new beds into the system. The fourth strategy is about securing sustainable future mountain experiences. Here we are talking about really securing the white winters, investing in snow systems so that we can secure that we have a good product when we start up the real season in Christmas. But it also is about environmental and sustainability about decreasing our CO2 footprint. And here, the transformation of Hammarbybacken here in Stockholm to become a fully electrified and fossil-free ski destination is one step in that direction. And the fifth initiative is about normalized investments over time.
So we will pay our investments based on the cash flow that we generate over the year. So it's important to continue work with an efficiency when it comes to cash flow. So now I'll lead over to Stefan.
Thank you, Martin. Then bear those five strategies in mind when we take you through both the quarter and the full year end results. We continue to drive the sales growth with +3% if we clean out the extra revenues we got last year from support from the government in supporting the electricity part. If we take that out, we actually drive 3% growth. We are really glad to have this subscription continue to grow of Ski Pass, SkiStar All Year. This subscription method has gone from actually 0% up to around roughly 20%-25% of our total seasonal pass. This does become very interesting product.
However, we're doing a negative result within the quarter, and one explanation of that is that we have some one-time offs connected to our joint venture, Skiab, where it costed us around SEK 20 million . And then the other part is that we increased the marketing activities, mainly connected to our retail side, but also how we could increase the year-round business, and also to secure a more safe and secure areas by putting in more maintenance and repair in our destinations. Again, back to the retail growth, really stable, and we continue to grow both online and these physical stores. So it's interesting to see that we have had more guests visiting us during this summer. And when we have more guests visiting us, we can see...
Sorry, also beside Åre, which we haven't had so, more guests, and that is connected to that was a big event there last summer. But if I take out Åre and look into Sälen and Trysil, for example, and Hemsedal, we can see that we have had more guests, and they also are renting more bikes, and they also buy both, this subscription card, but also a day card. So that has been good. And they're also buying some clothing products. When we presented our Q3, we showed an increase in bookings of 9%. And we actually added an extra activity in Denmark to attract more Danish guests, since this is one of our important strategies to get the Danes to book early.
We are really glad that we got them into the systems, and we are probably getting a lot of new Danish customers coming in to visit us this winter. That activity was very important for us, and now we are very glad to have a more stable booking. If I then look into a historical perspective, we say that in Q3, we should have around 25% of the bookings done, and in this quarter, we should have 60%, and in next quarter, we should have 80%. We are really following that line. We feel very comfortable and also glad that we have such an increase of the international guests. However, we also would like to highlight that we see a potential now that the Swedish guests will start to book more frequently.
We also have numbers that, roughly around, 70-75% of the Swedish guests still haven't booked the winter holiday. We think that's a very important message to deliver, that there is a lot of Swedes out there who have been, spending some time in the sun up to the last two weeks, where we can clearly see, and specifically the last, four or five days, when we can see some snow in Hemsedal, Trysil, and Åre, that people start to book their winter holidays. If I then, just make a short summary of the financial year 2023-2024, it's extremely, I am very glad to just follow up the Martin slide, that we, versus the goal of 6% organic growth, we present +10%.
We are really taking some steps within the margin development on the way to reach the 18% by delivering 16%, and we're also delivering our second-best result ever. With an adjusted result, it's actually SEK 759 million, and it's a very stable result in those uncertain times. Really glad to see that all our segments delivers growth. Again, 8 out of 10 of our guests likes us, and also, I must say, give a high applaud to our coworkers and employees who really give all of the most out of themselves to deliver this guest experience.
We're also glad to have a lot of guests returning year on year, and 73% still are returning year on year, and almost the same number still haven't booked the ski holiday for the upcoming winter season. That's, of course, very interesting. Also glad to see MySkiStar members increase to close to 2 million, increase with almost 13%. Record in skier days, 7%+, all-time high. We had our doubts, will we ever beat this record we had during the pandemics, but we did. Very glad to have that.
And we have invested in a lower level compared to the last two years, and like Martin said, a more stable level, and it's very focused on the guest experience, like we have done with new lifts in Hemsedal, Sälen, and Åre, and also automatic snow systems, and also glad to have invested in the first, actually, in the world, 100% climate neutral and fossil-free ski destination in the world, in SkiStar Hammarbybacken, so super glad. We have presented this digital engagement, and if you look into these numbers, you can see that we are both during the quarter, as well, during the year, have a high increased, actually, digital engagement. We have had a little bit of lower conversion rate over the year, but we can see that.
Sorry, in the Q4, but over the year, we have had an increase of our conversion rate with 7%, and we are actually coming up to a 2.7% of conversion rate, which is a very strong number in those digital terms. Lastly, but not least from my side, is a little bit of the retail growth. We can read in the newspapers, we can hear in the news a lot about that retail has some issues, especially in the sports industry. We are going the opposite way. We are presenting a very strong retail growth, and I'm really proud to show we are coming up to close to SEK 450 million in turnover, and this starts to become a very important business in our portfolio right now.
If we just compare this number to many other retailers, I must say this is a strong number, both from a growth perspective, but also from a size perspective. Martin, I hand over to you, and again, talk a bit more in depth of our numbers.
Thank you, Stefan. I started with this, the financial targets, and I will remind you as the same way as we remind all our employees about these numbers, because these are really, really important for us. Moving on to the overview and the development of our operating profit for the full year. We ended up at SEK 740 million, as Stefan just said, and we are. It's a stable result, the second best, if we look over a six-year period in time. Yes, we are satisfied with this result, and also it's include, as Stefan mentioned, a change accounting principle around properties in Skiab Invest. I will come back to that.
And what we have said over the years, and we have talked about it this year as well, we aim to end up between 70 and 100 million in exploitation capital gains. This year we managed to reach 67. So we were very close to the 70 that we said. Those transactions ended in the Q4 , mainly in Åre and Sälen. So digging to the net sales per category during the quarter, and we can see that we have the strongest growth actually in the retail, as Stefan said. 8 million of those 10 comes from web, online sales, but it's also positive to see that we managed to increase sales in our physical stores with SEK 2 million.
We're also happy to see that we continue to grow the ski pass sales, and this increase is driven by the SkiStar All Year. We see that the guests using this card is increasing year over year. For your information, we split the income from the SkiStar All Year in 12 months, and that's the period that the customer are locked in or using this ski pass. I also wanted to mention that the accommodation is a bit lower this year, and that is mainly driven by the event in Åre, that we had a big event in Åre last year, and we didn't have the same event this year.
Also, a little bit less bus guests in Hemsedal due to a change in travel routes, but we are hoping that they will come back to next summer. Also, you see that we have a loss of volume in others, and here you can see the electricity subsidies that we received last year, SEK 16 million . But there is also a changed behavior when it comes to processing of reinvoices, and that amounts to 13 million in that. So we have changed the process around how we reinvoice within SkiStar, meaning that we had 13 million higher invoices and also cost last year compared to this year. So if we adjust for that electricity subsidies, we had a growth of 3% this year in the quarter, which is really, really good.
Looking at the development of the operating profit, and I guess that most of you have already recognized that we changed the procedure of how we account for properties in Skiab Invest. And if we look at the quarter, we adjusted the quarter four operating profit with a negative effect of -SEK 8 million last year. And that's mainly because we adjusted the market valuation and also added the full year depreciation of 20 million to last year's result. So there are two adjustments that we did in the quarter. We also have, if we move into our operations of ski resorts or operate, what do we call it?
Operational mountain experience, which decreased SEK 38 million, and here we see that we had mainly higher maintenance costs and advertising costs in the quarter, and also a little bit higher personnel costs related to the Trysilguidene, the new acquisition that we did in Trysil, that added some new activities to Trysil, but also added some personnel costs. Moving to hotel, or sorry, moving to properties development, which decreased the result with -SEK 10 million. In this quarter last year, we had a capital gain, actually, in Skiab Invest of SEK 10 million. So that's one of the effects that we can see here. Otherwise, a quite stable quarter in that. Finally, the development in the hotels. The positive trend that we had had in the first three quarters continue.
A little bit lower sales this quarter, but the continued work with efficient organization in hotels continue, and that's really the reason behind the better result this quarter. So all in all, we end up at a minus, a negative operating profit of SEK 279 million. This includes SEK 19 million in increased depreciation or lower result from Skiab Invest. Moving on to sales per category year-to-date for the full year, we see that we had a positive organic growth of 10%, that we already said. Ski pass is the highest contribution to the growth, and also retail shop. But it's a positive development in all categories, categories which is really positive to see.
The lower income in others, in the column others, is related to the changed re-invoicing that is lower this year compared to last year. Moving on to the operating profit by segment. Here, we have adjusted the last year, started at SEK 616 million now, and for you who remember, we had SEK 604 million here. The effect from Skiab and this changed accounting policies has had a positive effect in last year of total SEK 12 million. This is due to that in last year, we had high revaluation or negative impact from revaluation of fair value of the properties in Skiab. This year, we are adding depreciation, but the effect was really the return of the market valuation was higher than the depreciation for the whole year.
That's why we have a positive effect of SEK 60. And in the SEK 740 million, we have a negative impact of depreciation of SEK 19 million. Here, we had a good growth in the mountain operations of +SEK 104 million . This comes mainly from the increased sales. And we see that we had also a good combination of increased number of guests and price. That's the primary driver for the growth in mountain operations segment. Looking at property development, who delivered a result of minus SEK 7 million, lower result than last year. Most of this has to do with a lower property gains, which were SEK 8 million lower than last year.
As I said, we have had a positive trend in the hotel, which is really good to see that they are getting closer and closer to a zero result, or break even. Now, they ended the year at - SEK 5 million in operating profit, and they have been able to increase the profit with, in total, SEK 27 million . And that is a good cost control in connection with higher sales. That's the reason behind the increase in hotels. Looking at the summary, we are continuing to build a strong balance sheet. We had a 56% equity ratio if we adjust for IFRS 16, so the balance sheet is strong.
It's also very positive to see that we had a really strong cash flow if we look at the year to date or the full year, and we managed to increase our operating cash flow with SEK 415 million Swedish krona, mainly driven by the higher result, but also efficient work within capital allocation. Also, we are lowering our financial net debt with SEK 256 million. Net debt to EBITDA of 1.7, which means that we have a good position to start investing and building an even better experience for our guests at our destinations. A few words about sustainability and what we have done during the Q4. We mentioned the skier days and the activity days. Skier days increased by 7% and activity days by 6%.
We had a good growth here, continue to grow those days, which is getting closer and closer to the goal of 7 million activity days and skier days per year. If we move on to ecosystem and impact, this quarter, we have received our first greenhouse gas emission from a lift, the Söderåsen lift that we built in Sälen. And we can see that, over 50% of the greenhouse gas comes from materials, mainly concrete and steel. That's the main driver to our greenhouse gas and emission when we build lifts. And this quarter, we also had a first meeting in a collaboration that we started together with selected industry colleagues, where we discuss how we can advance development within sustainability.
For those who have follow us in our media, you have seen that we, during this quarter, has started and also finalized our recruiting for the coming winter season. We have almost two thousand five hundred seasonal positions filled during this quarter, so it's really a positive trend that we see in this, and a lot of people are returning. 60% of the seasonal guests are returning, so finally, as we said, both in our sustainability and our strategic initiatives, together for white winters, it's really a positive thing and one of our strategic initiatives going forward. So Stefan.
Thank you, Martin, and I will try to give you some outlook and how it looks like with this strategy we have put up, and we are really working according to our strategy to reach our financial targets. Like, Martin have just said, we have had a very good year with +10%, and we believe that we will continue to grow according to our financial targets on the growth side. We are really working on our margins, and gladly, we can see that our financial position has been strengthened during the year, so we have a very stable business, and we can also see that a lot of people are prioritizing going for a winter ski holiday.
And if we then look into the bookings for the upcoming winter season, which has been a question of many, and see how can it looks like. And if I then look from the stability, we had our record year, 2022, 2021, 2022, when we had this pandemic, when people wasn't able to travel. Then we had a bit of dip during the first year of these tough market conditions. Last year now has been very strong, with +7%, and now we are on to the same level during last year, which is, of course, a very stable result from a historical perspective, and I think that's very important. We can see that from a long-term perspective.
If we then look into the periods, which has also been very important since we started to show them a year ago, and we have heard from many of you that they are important. And of course, we have a calendar effect this year, that week 51 doesn't exist to be as a big week, but has changed to be fifty-two, and week one will instead be a strong week. So if we look into that, we have a very good result that we are minus two during this period. It's a thousand nights. It's not nothing to actually talk about. It's very minor, and it's very stable during that time.
Also, if you look into the period of week two to six, you can see that we continue to grow that period, and we are a little bit lagging behind during the winter breaks. Normally, the winter breaks are the period we are leastly worried about because they are always full. So, since we have this pattern, we are really pushing for Easter, which is coming late this year, and we will also continue to celebrate our 50 years anniversary during the period after the winter breaks, since we have a big birthday coming up of 50 years in this business.
So, as end of this session, we will open up for a Q&As and also actually celebrate a bit of second best result ever for the end of the year, and also a very stable situation for the upcoming winter. We hand over to all of you guys for some Q&As.
Thank you. To ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To restore your question, please press star one and one again. We will now go to our first question. One moment, please. And your first question comes from the line of Magnus Bernet from Direkt News. Please go ahead.
Hey. Yes, thank you for taking my question. It's about margin and your financial goals. As Martin mentioned during the presentation, you're halfway to the financial targets that should on average be 18%. Could you elaborate on when this margin can be reached? Are you expecting a gradual improvement of this margin? Or, and is it possible to reach this already in the current fiscal year?
That's a good question, and thank you for that. And as we said at our Capital Markets Day, these goals are on a midterm period.
We are aiming to reach 18%. If we will be able to reach it already next year, it's too early to say, but we are working towards reaching an 18% margin. Is it possible to reach it? That's our. We believe so that we are able to do it. With increased number of international guests, which is one driver, and also continue to the work that increase the average spend per customer, and also looking into more cost-efficient ways of driving our business. So I think that's the answer. Do you want to add something, Stefan, to that?
I think also very good, Martin, and what we have done, which I think is important, that we have added new business, like, for example, open up restaurants, and that is lower margin than the average. And now we are actually, since we are opening up the new restaurant in Hundfjället this year, we will create a larger volume. And when you create larger volume, we could also be able to put some pressure on the prices, the purchase prices, and that's what we are doing in that sense. And then if you look into our retail business, we also decided not to go into this race of cutting prices, which has been very clear in the market from some competition, and we have decided to stay out of that price race.
So I think that has also helped us to keep up the margins a bit, but we will also continue to improve our margins since we increased the number of sold goods in EQPE, our own brand, and that has also higher margins than average. So we're working on all areas to become better.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Stefan Stjernholm from Nordea. Please go ahead.
Hi, Stefan here. A follow-up on the margin question. Your midterm target reaching 18%, is that depending on a better property market, or can you do it without that?
We believe that we can do it without that, Stefan. We believe that in the numbers we have right now between 70 and 100, as we are guiding through. But of course, as more we come up in the higher, what do you say? In the higher part of that 100, it will become better. And we can see that 2024 is still a tough year, but we can see that 2025 will open up for some more business in the property side. I think, Martin, would you like to add something there?
No, but it's as Stefan said, when we say that we will reach 18, it includes property gains of between SEK 70 million and SEK 100 million in that range.
Range, yes.
Sounds good. A question on Q4. You write in a report that the summer was somewhat slower than you expected, and that it differs how to market the summer season versus the winter season. What's your learning, and what can be done differently ahead of next summer season?
Yeah, I think it's a very good question, Stefan. I think every year now we are stepping into this, we learn more and more. Gladly, we can see that we have many more visitors, actually using biking activities and also this hiking activity, and also the sales of this SkiStar All Year is really good for us, that we can see an increased part of that side, but when you look into the marketing, we have seen that we must also differ from a customer perspective. We are using our existing customer database to go for marketing activities, but we can also see that there is the potential to go broader in that side.
As an example, also, I recently visited Italy for some summer activity destinations and Switzerland last week, and they have a much larger area of guests to... It's much shorter distance to their destinations than we have. So we need also to be better in the target of both the length of the area of where we find those guests, but also to find another guest than we normally try to work with. So that's type of learning we are learning, and we are all the time growing, but not as fast as I want.
But, again, we are on the right pace, and if we then clean out this effect of this Q4, we had an increase of 3% in revenue, and we actually had more guests. We had around close to 7% more guests visiting us, actually, and areas in our destination. So we learn, not as fast as I want, but we will be better also in targeting new guests next week, next summer, sorry.
I see. Sounds good, and a final question from me, regarding the bookings flat year over year, beginning of October. What's the number for international guests? Is it fair to assume an increase of some 10%?
... Oh, we have, yes. It is actually. Yeah, yes. Very good. No, it is actually around, no, no, I think it is 8%. I think it is around 8%, Stefan. Now, I'm guessing I should not do that. But we are slightly-
Around that level.
Yeah. Yes, we are around that level, and the Danes are the ones which are the largest group. You can see that we managed to catch the Danish guests very early, and now we are seeing that the other ones is booking. The Swedes has been slow in the start, but we also see that Swedes picking up the last couple weeks. You can see a very clear difference. The last weeks, you can see how it increased, actually.
Good. Okay, thanks.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Karl- Johan Bonnevier from DNB Markets. Please go ahead.
Yes, good morning, Stefan and Martin. Coming back to the booking situation. When I look at the number of mediated beds you now have in your database, it seems to have continued to decrease, and I guess it's Airbnb and maybe Facebook that is them taking share from you. How difficult is that, what kind of difficulty that kind of pattern create for you when it comes to controlling the clients and driving your total offering towards the client base, if you continue to lose, say, such volumes in the mediated business?
Thank you for a very good question, Carl Johan. And I must say, we haven't really updated that number of beds. We have actually gained a couple of hundred more beds this year, so it has been a little bit larger base. However, we haven't been, let's say, I will not use the word maybe aggressive, but we haven't been really focusing within our organization. So we are making an organizational change to put more focus onto this area of getting more beds into our system, actually, to get a little bit better control of that, since we also see that guests who book within our system also spend more. So that's why we would like to get them into our system.
However, we can also see that this situation in the market, where the interest rate has been increased, many more have actually opened up to rent out the beds or rent out the cabin for external people, which haven't happened before. Which means that this is also an opportunity for us to get more guests, even though, even if we don't get control of them. And I think that's what we saw last year, that we had an increase in our bookings, but we had actually a larger number of guests coming to our destination. So I must say, it's positive that we gain more guests, but however, we would like to control them in a better way, so we know a little bit more, because then we can plan a little bit better also with staff, e tc.
I don't know if that was an answer on your question.
No, it's a good indication, and I guess if you control... I guess historically, I've talked about controlling maybe a 3rd of the warm beds at the destination or something like that has been enough. But do you see there would be a bigger opportunity to drive the model if you could increase that, or is that sufficient, so to say, to be able to capture what you want to do in the other parts of the businesses?
I think we can increase the revenue. We can increase the revenue per visitor, so to say. That is the positive thing, because one of our curves we showed during the call was that the red bar was showing booked in our system, and the gray bar is showed the revenue booked outside the SkiStar system. So we are managing to sell up more to guests who are booking via the skistar.com versus let's say, Facebook or Airbnb. So that's why it's important, also.
You mentioned Q4 included some extra marketing costs from the Danish campaigns and similar kind of things. Should we expect something similar during maybe Q1 to bridge the gap that you now see in the booking situation?
No. And the marketing campaigns was also related to our SkiStar Shop, and also our brand, EQPE, to run the e-commerce sales. So, I think it's more related to that side, Stefan, okay, Cody, sorry.
Excellent. So year on year, we shouldn't expect any, say, escalating marketing-
No.
going into Q1 or in this year?
No, they are stable, actually.
Excellent. And, looking at the accounting changes that you mentioned, Martin, when you look at what this will mean going forward, is that a less volatility in these kind of associated incomes coming out of Skiab there that you capture in your accounts? Or how does it how will it work going forward?
Yeah, exactly. We have had a dialogue with our auditors this year. And the reason we have changed this is because in the history we have been using two different accounting policies when it comes to properties. Fair value for the Skiab properties, and then cost and depreciation on the properties that we have had in SkiStar. And our auditors, they didn't like that. So that's why we had a dialogue with auditors and our board, and then we decided to change this in this quarter. And the effect is exactly as you say, KG, that it means that the result from SkiStar will be less volatile going forward. It will be more stable.
We're using the same principles as we are doing in all our land banks, et c., on other and all other properties. I think that's also very important. Maybe it was a mistake to do this from the beginning, when we created the Skiab JV, but now we have, yeah, changed. I know you have said this before, but now I think we are coming back to how it should look like, actually.
Yeah, no, it makes sense. Makes sense. And just one final from me. Looking at the CapEx budget for this year, is it still prudent to expect something just below 400, or where do you see it end up for the 2024-2025 season?
Sorry, looking at the-
CapEx, you said, or?
Yeah, CapEx for the new year.
Yeah, CapEx. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For the full year, 2023, 2024, 2025-
Yeah
... probably it will be up. It's actually a little bit too early to say for the financial year, and the reason for that is that we have our investment process decision in December. So I would say you should aim at more or less the same as we have this year, maybe a little bit lower.
Yeah. It depends on when you get an invoice on a certain month, et c., but it is roughly that number Martin is saying, actually. Around the same number we have today, and again, stabilize the investment pace and on this level, and according to our cash flow, like we have said as well. So I think that's important.
Yeah, and also what you see now in the numbers is that we decreased the CapEx for this year. We said that we will do three hundred thirty, and that's what we are keeping for the annual year 2024 . We've, as you see, we are coming out with a better financial position. We have more headroom, so that's why we could maybe increase a little bit more than the three thirty. But that decision is really taken in December this year. That's why it's a little bit too early to say. But, as you said, KG, probably a little bit higher than the three thirty. That's what you should expect for the whole year 2025 .
Excellent. Thank you very much, and all the best out there.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on one on your telephone. We will now go to the next question. One moment, please. And your next question comes from the line of Fredrik Lithell from Handelsbanken. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much, and congrats to great results for the last year. I had one question. I wanted to follow up a little bit on the international guests. You said they were up maybe around 8%. I heard you said you were guessing a little bit. That's fine. I also wanted to sort of connect that to the SkiStar members. You're up to 1.98 million SkiStar members now, up from 1.76 the last year before that. Do you get a lot of international guests becoming members? And the following question is really, when you get the new international guests, you pay commissions to an agency abroad, will you sort of lose that cost once the guest, the international guest, is part of your membership club and all that stuff?
Fredrik, I'm glad you're asking this important question because this is exactly how we want it to happen actually, is that, when a new guest coming independent, actually, if it's a Swede or international, we try always to connect with the email and so on. And since you need to put in some name into your purchase, we collect those addresses quite quickly and immediately. That means that we can also be much more precise in our marketing activities. So yes, we will then get rid of some commissions. At the same time, we should not forget that many agencies also sell selling group travel, for example, UK, etc . But we also see that we can be much more precise in our marketing and also gladly be without those commissions.
A follow-up on, as you mentioned, U.K., you have two new air routes coming into the airport from this season that you didn't have before. What is your assumption on how this will impact you positively with number of new guests that way? Have you any insight into that at this point in time?
No, we haven't done any forecast of that, more than exactly like we have said, that the international drive higher growth and the international guests buying more. So from a revenue perspective, we can expect that the increase of the international guest is very helpful for the total revenue, of course, so that is positive. And those guests are mainly going to Sälen and to Trysil,
and Which is also very good for us because these are the two largest destinations, where we also have actually higher margins in average and also higher offers to the customers. I could also.
Elaborate a bit on just to give you a flavor of the Swedish market. Since the international guest has been very positive for us, they continue to grow. And I mentioned it during the call that there is a lot of Swedish people out there who still haven't booked a ski holiday for the winter period. And I think that's very important to say that that's one part. And then the other part is that we have normally 73% of the guests coming back year on year, meaning very loyal visits to our destinations, and many of those still haven't booked their holidays. So I think just to give some sort of can I use the word calmness, or we are not worried about the numbers. We are really satisfied about where we are right now, actually.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. There are currently no further questions. I will hand the call back to you.
Thank you very much for all persons being on this call and the interest showing our quarter report. It has been really good to answer and try to answer on all your questions. And now we are looking forward for the upcoming winter season and also glad to see that snow has arrived in Åre, Trysil, and Hemsedal, and more to come. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.