Flight Centre Travel Group Limited (FLT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to the Flight Centre Travel Group Full Year Results Presentation. [Operator Instructions] And finally, I would like to advise all participants that this call is being recorded. Thank you. I'd now like to welcome Haydn Long, Investor Relations Manager, to begin the conference. Haydn, over to you.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us for our full year results announcement. As you will know from our previous announcements this year, it wasn't a game to half this one. It was a story of 3 strong quarters followed by 1 quarter a pretty significant disruption. Today, we're joined by the usual crowd I've got Adam, the CFO and CEO of GBS; Chris Galanty, the Corporate CEO; James Kavanagh JK, the Leisure CEO; and Skroo, our CEO and MD; Greg Parker, our Supply CEO, is also here in the room and will join us for the Q&A. I'll now hand over to Adam.

Thank you, Haydn, and welcome to everyone who's joined us on the call this morning. Actually, can I just start by saying that whilst our underlying profit for the year was obviously a disappointing result -- there's actually a lot to like about the year that we've just completed. TTV, statutory PBT, underlying EBITDA, profit after tax, earnings per share overall cost reductions through the second half and record NPS for our brands were all positive metrics. And as Skroo will talk to you later on the call, we've had a reasonably good start to FY '27, particularly in Leisure. Throughout the year, we've also continued to deploy initiatives to create shareholder value across capital management, portfolio optimization and a number of operational strategic initiatives. Since March, all of our businesses have, however, been impacted by the war in the Middle East, primarily our leisure brands, but our corporate and touring brands were also affected. Before we delve further into those areas, I'd like to spend a couple of minutes just reinforcing the company's unique strengths and defensible moat. The nature of our large diversified company is a true unique and valuable asset. As you'll see on Slide 5, our size and structure allows us to combine the economies of scale of a global enterprise with a customer intimacy of focused expert brands. And we believe that combination is not just rare, but also extremely difficult, if not impossible for our competitors to replicate. But what that means in practical terms is that we can navigate complexity and provide expertise for our customers where it truly adds value that we can reach those customers that our supply partners struggle to access, but who they do value very highly. It also means that our brand and geographic diversity provide a natural hedge in times of crisis or market disruption, and it means that we can utilize our global business services platform to support top line growth without a proportionate increase in cost. Something that we saw in the second half with underlying costs decreasing year-on-year, whilst TTV continues to grow. Hopefully, many of you will know that our purpose is to open up the world for those who want to see. Again, practically, what this means for our customers is that we can provide expert led end-to-end travel that comes complexity and anxiety into confidence for them, and we can see this in our NPS results. For our people, it means that we can provide them with a career that spans brands, disciplines and geographies. It's somewhere to build a life and not just a job. And again, we can see this in the longevity of our teams. And for our supply partners, we can provide access to highly valued customers, global buying power and a trusted long-term partner. And once again, we can see this evidence, particularly in times such as we've seen over the last few months. And our view is that if we look after our customers, our people and our partners, then our shareholders will undoubtedly be the beneficiaries. So building off all of that on Slide 7, you'll see the core elements of what we consider to be our defensible moat. Our supply relationships, the human expertise to navigate through complexity backed by differentiated proprietary travel and tech platforms and product ranges. Brand equity and trust has been built over decades in the industry. And finally, customer loyalty and proprietary data. All of these elements are powerful in their own right, but collectively, they form a strong and effective defensible moat for the company. I'll just highlight that on Slide 8, we've got a summary of some of the key strategic initiatives that we're focused on as a company. I'll let Chris talk to productive operations, our investment in rapidly growing corporate traveler in our key markets, and the corporate product suite, and JK to talk to World360 and our investments in the cruise and luxury sectors. We continue to invest in TPConnects to be able to secure a wider range of airfares for our customers and our consultants through aggregated GDS, LCC and NDC content and the benefits of this investment are certainly being seen in the corporate and leisure brands. Obviously, as a company, we also continue to strategically invest in and utilize AI to enhance our customer experience to increase productivity and efficiencies and to generate new revenue growth opportunities. As mentioned earlier, our results have been heavily impacted by the war in the Middle East. And on Slide 10, you can see this impact fairly clearly. In the third quarter and in particular January and February, we really started to see profit and margin trends pick up. And at the end of March, we considered that we were comfortably on track for the upper end of guidance. We saw around $60 million in FY '26 profit impact in our leisure brands alone from the Middle East war, as well as significant impact to our curing brands as you can see in the HQ segment results in Appendix 5. Our corporate brands were also impacted, but the impact has been masked somewhat by the productivity improvements seen in the business and the recovery in the Asia region. As you can see on Slide 11, year-to-year profit comparisons are also negatively impacted by $5 million FX on translation and the exclusion of the pedal profit share in the current year, although the prior year includes a $3 million contribution. Even with the impact of the war, underlying EBITDA increased by 4% year-on-year, which is a great result, but this growth didn't flow through to underlying PBT, given the $16 million increase in net interest expense. Before handing over to Chris, I'll just highlight the work done on capital management this year. with the buyback of $200 million or just over 7% of our share capital and a new up to $200 million buyback announced, the proactive management of our convertible note balances and increased dividend payments. These all reflect the strength of our balance sheet and our belief in the business. At the same time, as noted on Slide 14, we proactively managed our portfolio of brands with the divestment of Cross Hotels and our share of the Pedal Group. The acquisition of Iglu and Fresh, the investment in Block Sky and organic expansion across loyalty, touring, luxury, travel money and digital commerce. We've got a close eye on our short-term results and shareholder returns, but this is balanced with a longer-term view that will ensure that we continue to meet and exceed our customer, people and supply partner expectations in an ever-changing market. I'll now hand over to Chris.

Thanks, Adam. I'm pleased to say we delivered some very good results in our corporate business last year, in line with our long-term strategy of grow win. We delivered record TTV and revenue and TTV in constant currency was up 5%, though slightly lower in Australian dollars due to the exchange rate. Revenue growth exceeded that and pleasingly due to very good productivity gains we've been working on for a number of years. Underlying PBT was up 28% to $240 million. This was despite various headwinds in the market. the Middle East conflict, obviously being the most notable and impacting many of our businesses, particularly those in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and some of our European businesses as well. We had some very strong wins in SCM, which were heavily second half weighted, and we're in the process of implementing these customers now. The pipeline in STM is very strong at the moment. with lots of RFPs coming out across many of our core markets. I'm pleased to say we had a very strong performance in our U.S. markets with corporate exceeding USD 2 billion for the first time, up 10% in local currency. And this is the world's largest travel market where despite our strong growth, we have a very small market share and a very large runway for further growth. Also, our global corporate traveler business achieved its target of reaching AUD 5 billion TTV for the first time and congratulations to our trading New Zealand business, which had a record year in TTV and profit further entrenching our #1 position in the market. A lot of this growth in profitability has come through gains in productivity. We've used the term productive operations to describe the transformation of our business over the last couple of years. Pleasingly, if you look at the measure of TTV per travel consultants, it's up 34% since 2023. This is due to transforming our operating systems and progress towards our single global operating model. which has driven great automation, greater levels of productivity by integrating our proprietary customer digital platforms with our consultant platforms to give a much more seamless experience. We've empowered our customers to self-serve far more than they did before, meaning faster responses, more personalized service and lower human intervention when it doesn't add value. However, what's really important when we talk about productivity gains is that our customer experience improvements have moved in lockstep. We've actually seen record SLA, record NPS and record CSAT scores across our business this year. So productivity for us is about improving the customer experience alongside improving our operating performance. I also want to stress that these gains are structural, not one-off. As we grow and add more customers around the world, we expect these games to continue. And importantly, the cost of productive operations is now simply part of our normal cost base. If you want to call out Corporate Traveler this year, as I think they were the start of the show, CT is our extending offering and its customer proposition is simple. It's the only global TMC entirely built around and dedicated to the SME customer. We have a unique position in the market, combining fantastic proprietary specialty design product called Melon, with a dedicated travel consulting per customer. This means customers don't need to compromise. They get the best model technology with dedicated personal service via our online and off-line channels. And to get the widest access to content and savings tax of license buying power. We're also introducing a payment solution, Melon pay or CT pay in the Southern Hemisphere and a meeting and event solution, which are both being requested by our customers. We continue to focus on organic growth in Corporate Traveler. CT delivered 8% growth in which is actually 13% in constant currency. Again, the other dollar strengthening reduces the percentage growth since most of our CT business now comes from a tie Australia. I'm particularly pleased with the growth in North America, both Canada and the U.S., huge markets, where we have a small market share and a great opportunity for growth. And where the combination of Melon and our consultants is winning. We will be investing more in growing key locations such as New York, London, Toronto, Montreal as well as many other large cities across North America and the U.K. We're also accelerating into new verticals within the brand, Meetings & Events, Energy & Marine, Performance Travel and VIP. This is about taking our personalized technology and our personalized off-line model and specializing our sales and marketing to these verticals. These are demanding verticals, which generate higher margins and areas we're already very good at serving. The productivity gains I described earlier has been very important to CT's profit success. TTV is now 50% higher than pre-covid with 35% fewer consultants and record NPS scores. It's a really good business transformation story. And Melon booking product launched a few years ago in the Northern Hemisphere now makes time virtually all of our new business is by far our largest products in these markets and we'll see more volume migrate on Melon from long-standing customers this year. Something I spoke about before I want to reiterate today, we're consolidating 3 previously fragmented areas of our offering into one modern seamless digital experience for customers. This is about solving more problems for customers and therefore, generating more revenue for our business. the 3 areas of travel management, meetings and events and professional services. Meetings and events and professional services now make up 11% of our revenue, up 2 percentage points year-on-year, and we intend to grow that meaningfully over the next few years. There are 3 key benefits in the strategy: first, better personalization. The more customers use our products and services a deeper and richer ad data, meaning we can give customers a better, more personalized experience because we understand them better. Second, deep integration makes the customer relationship figure and makes us harder to replace because we provide an end-to-end solution and solve more problems for the customer, reducing their need to look elsewhere. This is especially valuable for SME customers who often don't have a dedicated executive for meetings, events, travel management or professional services. We become their all-in-one solution. And third, the more the customers use us more they save and the greater our commercial return. CT and FCM are in a very good sweet spot in the market, competing with the digital disruptors on product, while differentiating through the combination of great technology, great people and an end-to-end solution across travel management, meeting and events and professional services. Our real opportunity in corporate now is growth. We've invested a lot of time and money last year on productivity, transforming our business, and we now need to focus more on aggressively taking this fantastic new proposition to market and winning more customers. The starting point is our proprietary digital experience using our own product, FCM Booking and Melon to give a best-in-market unique experience to customers and integrating AI with both our products and our people. We call our AI intelligence layer, Sam in FCM and Mel in Corporate Traveler. That leads us to give customers a more personalized, more automated experience while streamlining our cost base through gradual automation and making our people more productive. I'm generally excited about what we're doing with AI. A lot of it is industry-leading, and that's what we're hearing from our customers. It's important to note that although we have 2 brands and specialized businesses within those brands, we operate under a clear philosophy in corporates. Build once, use to scale. Everything we now build our data and reporting our proprietary product, our AI solutions, et cetera, is built once at corporate level and use across both brands in all markets. That gives us real economies of scale. So in summary, a good year, but we now need to focus on growth. We need to bring our products and services to a wider range of customers. And I want to be very clear, we will be investing more this year and the year after in growth in sales, in marketing in being present and talking to customers than we ever have before. To finish, I'd like to thank all of our customers and our fantastic people, and now I'll hand over to JK to give an update on our leisure business.

Thanks, Chris, and hi to everybody. I will briefly cover the leisure results, including what changed in the fourth quarter, how our people responded and where we see value ahead. So through the first 9 months, leisure was performing relatively strong. And at the end of March, underlying PBT was $136 million, which is ahead of the same point in the prior year. We entered the fourth quarter, and we're on track to exceed our previous TTV high and deliver a record result. But ultimately, the year closed at 7.4% up to $12.6 billion in TTV. Iglu was acquired in December 2025 and contributed approximately half of this growth, about $500 million, while organic growth was up around 3%. The final underlying profit before tax was $139 million and the difference between our trajectory and this was one highly abnormal quarter. So on the next slide, you can see Q4 is where the year really changed. It's normally the largest profit quarter for leisure. And in FY '25, that contributed approximately $45 million of underlying PBT, whereas quarter 4 in FY '26 was approximately $2 million in profit with April and June, delivering losses, our first and profitable months since the pandemic in 2022. The Middle East war disrupted major aviation hubs, slowed bookings and triggered approximately $250 million in refunds and we estimate that the total impact on leisure was approximately $60 million, which includes a range of repatriation costs and other affected numbers at that point. So without it, we would have delivered around $200 million of underlying PBT. But encouragingly, as we start the new financial year, July has started reasonably well. And what we saw was inquiry was certainly coming through, but we started to see a lot of conversions occur in the month of July. And in that month, we've delivered a record TTV month starting the year well. The next slide, we talk about our 3 big moves. And this disruption has certainly not changed our strategy, where we're focused on 3 big moves across number one, growing the core, which restores customer growth and productivity across Flight Center. Bedding on winners, scale for businesses that can diversify our earnings and embed and enlisting loyalty increases customer frequency and creates new partner-funded revenue. AI accelerates all 3, and we recently launched an AI accelerator that will help our people convert more inquiries, serve customers faster and operate more productively. And you'll see a slide included in the pack that will show how we're building up an agentic customer journey experience across the entire customer journey. On the next slide, we look at growing the core. And Flight Center remains our largest leisure business and our largest earnings opportunity. Last year, we added consultants and store capacity ahead of the growth we expected. When the war removed quarter 4 volume, we did not really receive the operating leverage from that investment. However, we still remain set up to do so. The customer value proposition is very strong and it's strengthening and Adam touched on record NPS. What we saw on the Flight Centre brand, NPS increased 14 points to a record 63. And this is really exceptional when you consider that anything above 50 is really an excellent result. Growth in Flight Center is coming from multiple channels, and flightcentre.com grew 8% TTV and it's nearly $1 billion in TTV with online profitability improving sharply. So our focus in this area remains win more customers capture more of the trip and increase productivity across the network to deliver underlying growth in earnings. Next slide talks a lot about betting on winners. And leisure is no longer dependent on 1 earnings engine. We now have scaled platforms across luxury, crews, foreign exchange, independents and digital I'll just call out a few key areas here that are really actually performed in the year that was. Scott Dunn an acquisition we made a number of years ago, increased PBT by 20% and with the U.S. business performing particularly strongly following our recent investments. The cruise category is now approaching $1.8 billion of annualized TTV and is expected to exceed $2 billion in FY '27. Our assets across wholesale, digital, retail and packaging position us as one of the world's leaders in this space. And we're now dominant in 2 of the top 4 markets. So on to Travel Money. While Travel Money grew 31% to approximately $1.6 billion. And wholesale, a new category or a new channel that we launched a couple of years ago has really been a major contributor, albeit off lower margins. When we look at digital TTV, we grew about 17% to $1.8 billion, and this continues to be a large focus and investment area for our group. And independents grew about 36% across Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in profits. However, this was offset by our emerging markets in the U.S. and Canadian operations. So our opportunity here is really to convert the scale that we've built across these platforms into stronger, more diversified earnings. And on the next slide, we'll talk about embedding and lifting loyalty. World360 Rewards customer loyalty program launched at the end of November with free and paid years. So customers can earn points through our travel brands on all travel, which is quite unique in the travel industry. along with earning points with everyday shopping partners in food, fuel, health and 350 retail brands, plus 5 financial partners, which we now have 5 banks live along with a home lending service proposition. So then with this solution, you can redeem travel across any travel product that's available through 3 participating Flight Center brands. Our customers can also accelerate and earn more points, bonus points with a range of selected travel partners who pay to participate in the program. So what's really unique about this is that customers can actually fly any airline at all in the industry, earn points, stack rewards, double dips, triple bit, which is quite unique. We're now up around 600,000 members and approximately 66% of sign-offs that are either new are actually reengaging with the Flight Center Group, and we are actually engaging and interacting with members who are young or young at heart ranging across all different demographics. So for our company, what's really exciting about this, it actually reaches new customer access, greater frequency, new partner-funded revenue and rich data to be able to actually interact more with our customers. So it's a new program. It's still early days, but it's scaling rapidly, and we expect big things to come. So in closing, our focus now is on converting the recovery and scaling our growing customer ecosystem into stronger earnings. I'm really proud of how our people have responded to a very difficult Q4, and I'd like to take this opportunity to say thank you to everybody that actually navigated these turbulent times, but also congrats on a great month to start off the new financial year. Over to you, Skroo.

All right. Thank you. Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. So today, I'll walk through where we stand heading into the trading momentum we're seeing, how we're navigating the disruption in the Middle East and the structural growth dividers that are in our confidence in the years ahead. In terms of current trading, leisure momentum is building, as you just heard. We posted a record July TTV that surpassed our 2019 peak and our best profit results for July since 2015. I think this is a signal that we're returning to the healthy TTV and profit growth we are delivering during the third quarter of last year. Early in the new financial year, our key growth drivers include Flight Centre brand, the Link Travel Group, Ignite Travel, Luxury Travel Collection, Scott Dunn and Cruiseabout about. And each of these brands is contributing meaningfully to the recovery. We're also seeing a rebound in 2 of our most important outbound markets from Australia. After the prolonged tariff and immigration-related downturn, U.S. sales have now returned to year-on-year growth for 2 straight months, both in June and July, which is the first time we've seen that since financial year 2025. Thank you all for that. Sales to the U.K. moved back above prior year levels in July. -- a positive lead indicator ahead of our upcoming early bird airfare sales and the return of our Travel extra export program in Australia, which comes in this October. At the same time, air fare pressure between Australia and U.K. and Europe is stabilizing with premium Middle Eastern carriers sitting around the 2,500, 2,600 in fares return fares in August and September departures, and that's based on late July pit. On the corporate side, TTV trends remained consistent with last year's fourth quarter. with the business delivering solid growth on a constant currency basis in July 2026. The Middle East instability continues to obviously affect businesses located within the region, which is mainly or the ones with heavy links to it, which is Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Corporate results this year are expected to be second half weighted with first half profit likely to below prior year comparators. Now this reflects front-loaded investment in corporate travelers Northern Hemisphere expansion. Secondly, productive operations employee costs moving above the line into trading results and current FX headwinds on profit translation. And also the timing of recently won accounts that are starting to trade now. The business also has a large RFP pipeline globally, potentially unlocking further TTV growth late in the year and into the 2028 financial year. Importantly, our corporate customer base remains resilient. Around 80% of responders to our state of the market survey, which was run in July and August, expect to increase or maintain the travel budgets. Our SME customers through corporate traveler are even more upbeat with about 83% planning to increase or at least hold their budgets. Elsewhere in the business, Flight Centre's Travel Group's headquarter segment is likely to continue to be impacted by increased net interest, but this should be offset by ongoing cost control and referring to normal profit profitability levels for operating businesses within that segment, particularly in the fourth quarter trading period, which is obviously at the end of this financial year. On the financial framework, we'll provide formal financial year 2027 guidance at our AGM in November, consistent with our normal practice. In the meantime, I'd note that the gap between statutory and underlying profit continues to narrow as productive operations and World360 Rewards move back into business as usual. Our response to the Middle East on rates has largely been built around 5 key actions. First, cost discipline, we're building on the momentum we established in 2026 financial year, holding discretionary spend, freezing support roles and prioritizing our investment in CapEx. We're generally keeping costs fairly flat, which is a challenge in an inflationary environment. Secondly, we're looking to increase market share. During the peak period of unrest, we heavily promoted short to mid to international travel and domestic itineraries, reinforcing our value proposition during [indiscernible] period with a renewed focus on U.K. and Europe as conditions stabilize on key transit routes. Thirdly, leveraging our supplier relationships to secure preferential content, better pricing tiers and capacity commitments, all of which translate directly in stronger unit economics. We are working very closely with the Middle Eastern carriers as they resume normal service. Fourthly, maintain balance sheet strength. We are well placed to capitalize on opportunities as the market moves into recovery. And fifthly, preparing for a rebound in demand as conditions raise. This will be in line with traditional trends that would underline just how resilient the outbound travel sector has proven to be. Now outside of these 5 priorities, we continue to monitor, the Eastern Middle East volatility and every -- any flow on macroeconomic impacts on both our Leisure and Corporate Travel businesses. Some of our growth drivers. Stepping back from the near-term picture, I want to spend a moment on why we remain confident in the underlying growth story. As because TTV growth is what ultimately converts into disciplined profit growth. On the TTV side, we benefit from ongoing market growth. [indiscernible] example, expects 3.1% CAGR in global [indiscernible] traffic between '24 and 2050. We're also expanding rapidly in key sectors. In leisure, that's cruise, tools, foreign exchange and luxury. In corporates, it's meetings and events and in the U.K. and the U.S.A. SME businesses. We're growing our non-intermediary owned product businesses, too. These businesses include our tour operators, back road touring and Top Deck. Our destination management business discover and our [indiscernible] business gross offer, and I expect merging to become a much larger part of our story in the future, both through economic, both through organic growth, and through various acquisitions that we're looking at. We're expanding our addressable markets altogether, moving into new sectors, including payments, oil and gas, Software as a Service, loyalty and [indiscernible] FX, as you've heard. On profit side, we are focused on network and business optimization, strengthening, adding discipline and driving turnaround where needed. Our cost discipline is already showing results. We achieved a record low-cost margin, 9.5% in 2026 financial year, driven predominantly by cost initiatives in Global Business Services as well as supply. We're capturing efficiency and productivity gains, as scale benefits flow through productive operations in both our corporate and business as usual initiatives. And we're investing in AI, embedding it into every role, every day to create supercharge consultants across the business. In closing, the summer, leisure momentum is building, travel to the U.S. and U.K. appear to be rebounding corporate travel remains resilient even as a result skewed in the second half. And our 5-point plan gives us a playbook for navigating the Middle East disruption without losing sight of our long-term growth opportunities. We do, however, recognize there are also potential headwinds, particularly the simmering geopolitical tensions. Conditions remain volatile in the Middle East as well as in Ukraine, and we're now seeing the rise in U.S.A. Canada trade tensions. This means we have to be agile and ready to respond to any challenges that arise. We'll have a clearer picture of the world at our AGM in November and will provide financial year 2027 guidance in as usual. With that, I'll now hand over to questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Michael Simotas with Jefferies.

First question from me is on leisure. I think Slide 10 paints a very interesting picture, particularly when we look at your comments on July and the strength of both TTV and profitability in Leisure. Based on what you're seeing now, customer inquiries, the results you've already got in the bank, if we don't have a deterioration in the geopolitical environment, is there any reason you won't claw back the majority of that $60 million headwind that you had in the FY '26 year?

Michael, it's JK here. We're reasonably optimistic about it so long as we have, as you say, now geopolitical events that happen. And it's attributable to all the investment that's been made in Leisure over the last few years, including Scott Dunn, Iglu, Cruise and then site tender performance is lifting as well. So it is reasonably promising around that, that inquiry is starting to convert as we enter July, and also August has performed reasonably well, too. But remember, we're 2 months in.

Yes, that's fair. And then the second question, probably 1 for you, Chris, on corporate. The corporate business is not 1 that I've tended to worry about in the past, but I just want to understand the comments around the first half headwinds. And if you could help us pick them apart. It looks like FX might be a $5 million or $6 million headwind at the PBT level for the business. Maybe you could give us a little bit more color around productive operations costs that come above the line? And are you confident that you'll see growth on a full year basis in that business?

Michael, yes, look, I think the first half is a few things. One is FX, as you say. The other is the productive operations costs are now above the line. What we mean by that is that all the people who've been working on that project for the last couple of years. We are now absorbing those costs on a monthly basis. However, the work they're doing and the work they have done means as we grow and add top line volume with new customer wins, we get much better returns on that volume because of the productivity gains. I think really also the wins that we had, as you can -- I think we released earlier that we had a very, very strong Q4 for wins. But all that in FCM, all that volume will be implemented over the next few months and will really significantly hit our second half. We've also had the strongest start to a new financial year in FCM over the last 7 weeks in terms of wins. And again, all of that volume will really hit the second half. So we're expecting an increase in top line over the second half. And because of what we've done with productive operations, that will flow through much more strongly in the second half. So it's certainly not feeling down about the first half, but we think we'll be much more second half weighted.

Based on that volume, you can see, is that going to be enough to more than offset the full year of costs in productive ops that come into the business?

Yes. We think at this stage. And as Adam just mentioned, sorry, I forgot to mention that we're also heavily investing in growth, particularly in Corporate Travellers. So we're investing more in salespeople, in marketing because that model is going really well. They had a record year last year. And we -- our team have sort of taken a view that whilst things are looking really good in terms of product to market fit for CT, we want to double down on growth investment. We probably -- we've really focused on investing in productivity. We now want to invest in growth. So we'll be spending a lot more and are spending a lot more already on marketing and sales.

Your next question comes from Ben Gilbert with Jarden.

Just on costs. You guys obviously did a great job covered consolidating and driving productivity. But it seems we're just not enough not withstand the Middle East disruption. It just doesn't seem like we're getting any benefit of that. And then to the point before, there's just more costs going back into the business. Do you think you're actually getting these productivity gains because we're just not seeing the numbers and then you had $1 million a month, whatever it is above the line for productive operations[indiscernible] should be taken place out not adding more costs in. How are you thinking about actually judging if you're getting a return on this investment? And if you're actually driving productivity gain for the business it's just not evident when we look at it through the P&L moment.

Ben, it's Adam, I might start with that and then I'll hand over to Chris and JK to talk specifically about the productivity benefits that that they see in their businesses. But as you say, we did take a lot of cost out through the COVID period. A lot of that was what I'd call generic cost of operating and running the business. And we're continuing to do that. So if you look at a lot of our underlying cost metrics in the second half, we saw quite a reduction in the growth rates they're almost flat, I think, from memory in the second half versus first, even with the reduction that we saw in that top line. So I think we're actually seeing and bearing in mind a lot of inflationary pressures, particularly in technology, at the moment. So I think we're actually doing a pretty good job from managing those costs. What we are doing though is we are investing more and more now compared to pre-COVID on specific areas such as technology, enhancing our customer experience and enhancing the consultant experience, et cetera. So there's a lot more that we're investing. So we're taking a lot of the benefits that we've taken out of the, if you like, historic cost base of the business, and we're now targeting that into specific investments like the productive operations initiative that Chris was looking at. And like a lot of the digital initiatives and tech initiatives in leisure that we're focusing on as well. But Chris, do you want to talk from a productive office perspective on the investment that we're making there and the returns you're expecting?

Sure. Yes. We've certainly seen productivity gains. And I think what we called out was typically, we used to grow by adding travel consultants. We no longer need to do that. So travel consultant productivity is up. over 30% in the last 3 years alone. And the longer is down to the fact we've automated that business. And what this means moving forward after productive operations is that we can add a lot more volume in moving forward without adding personnel costs. Obviously, we need to add some people in some cases. But as a standard we're a much more productive business. That means we can pay our people better because there is inflationary pressure than there has been in recent years to retain talent, but we don't need to add anywhere near as many people scale up. So I think this is all about -- the last 3 years has all been about investing in future capability, and that's why we're now talking about investing more in growth. We are a more productive business. We need to add more volume in, and that's certainly how we view Corporate.

Chris, didn't you say you're just adding a whole bunch more consultants into the business because the demand is strong. That was the point I thought as you've done all the stuff around your online platforms, your agentic side, leisure, you've obviously got the agency model or the third-party model. I just thought you could scale much more quickly, but it sounds like you're having to put a bunch more cost in now because your TTV is getting better and all the wins.

So I think you're cutting out there a bit bad, but I think it was around the -- you're referring to the productive ops costs that are coming in above the line [indiscernible] not consultants. They're just -- what we're doing with those costs is we've got the people there that are really doing a lot of...

Many technology people I really struggled to catch the question, Ben, you broke up on our line. But the costs that are coming above the line are not traditional travel consultants at all. They're technology people, most of our investments over the last 3 years has gone into tech, whether it's AI or automation of the business or [indiscernible] like a congestion.

Okay. That's helpful. And then just around leisure, like you've obviously had a really strong start to the year for leisure, which is great. I appreciate you've got that $60 million impact in Q4. You've guided to your corporate potentially being down the first half. Do you think you can still grow your leisure in the first half given the strong start you've had and the gains that you're getting through the business?

Yes. We're expecting some growth in the first half this year. And so far, it started reasonably strong. And so we'll see how it goes as we progress throughout the next few months. But unless there's any kind of major shocks coming our way, we don't expect to have any like major impact to things are looking reasonably promising so far.

Your next question comes from Tim Plumbe with UBS.

My question is a bit of a follow-on from Ben. In terms of the activity that you're seeing to date in the leisure business, obviously, there's going to be people rebooking previous stuff. When you break that out and you just look at the underlying new customer bookings. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing there from a volume perspective, but then maybe also like any changes in terms of consumer, not so much going via Asia rather than via the Middle East because that's an obvious one. But in terms of end destinations?

Yes. Tim. Well, firstly, there was a shift in destinations first and foremost. And we've seen that a lot of customers have been traveling closer to home. And the other trend that we're seeing is that customers are more comfortable to book 12 to 18 months further out. We've got a lot of packages that we sell in that space that are geared up and they performed really well in that space. What has been impacted is kind of that late last-minute booking where we see long haul to Europe and so on, that certainly has been disrupted. And we're also seeing a lot of premium customers return a lot faster any kind of the major event, that's typically the cycle where you start to see premium customers return first, and then mass market follows thereafter. And so that's kind of some of the insights right now. But what we have seen on a year-on-year basis now when we look at travel to places like the U.S. and Europe, we're starting to see growth in that space pretty much from June through to July. But remember, it's off a lower base in the corresponding period because that was somewhat disrupted as we began the new financial year last year.

Your next question comes from Sam Seow with Citi.

I appreciate you taking the questions. JK, maybe just for you, I just want to pick up on some of your comments you've just made down, you're expecting first half 2017 growth in leisure. Is that at the PBT line firstly? And then when I think about the $60 million impact, could you perhaps pass that out, what was refund related versus negative operating leverage or lost overrides? Just trying to get a feel of that impact.

Yes. So we do expect both top line and bottom line growth in the first half this year if things continue tracking with the momentum that we've started with. And then when we look at the Q4 impact I called out that there were refunds to the tune of about $250 million related to air sales. We didn't detail the full amount of everything else that was impacted from crews and other product lines, but it was material. It's also important to note that in some of our markets, particularly like the U.K., because of local regulations there, we are required at the agent to repatriate a lot of customers when they are disrupted. So there's a material impact here as well that hit brands like Iglu during the month of April. So in that quarter, effectively, all of those things consolidated resulted in 2 of those months being unprofitable, which is highly unusual for us. And we really haven't had that since the pandemic, but that's kind of a broad overview of where it comes from a combination of refunds, repatriation costs and a variety of other things that hit us, including the type of travel that we sold was our lower-margin products.

That's really helpful. And then maybe as we think about a more normal year, just thinking with that 9-month result and extrapolated $200 million that you put out there. Do you think that's a reasonable assumption of what a normal year would look like for Leisure?

Yes. Look, I definitely think that, that's achievable. It's also important to note that we had some loyalty investment costs last year that were taken below the line. That will be in our results this year. But that investment will start to pay off as we see returns from all the uplift KPIs that we expect to come through. And they will come down the line. But remember, there's been a lot of effort put into rebuilding and reinvesting in the leisure portfolio. So we see it as a business that's very capable of achieving the numbers that we've outlined.

Thank you. Appreciate the color.

Your next question comes from Mitch Sonogan with Macquarie.

Just a quick one on Corporate with productive ops and rollout of the AI platforms. Is there any -- can you provide how much further upside do you think there is on productivity in terms of maybe the TTV over FTE, where you've seen a 20% improvement. I guess following on from that, do you have a target for PBT margins of where corporate could get to in the coming years?

Yes, we -- as I said earlier -- thanks for the question. I think productivity transformation is structural. So we don't see that this is going to tail off. So -- and there's 2 areas for this. One is the customers self-serving. And whether that's using AI to bring our technology more into our customers' technology themselves. So it's much easier for them to self-serve. That means they don't need to engage with our people and less our people are adding value. We see that to keep continuing. So almost every quarter, we're releasing enhancements to that experience. We've got more customers using our own digital product now, and that really enables us to tailor that to help our productivity as well as improve their experience. And then with our operating systems, which is what a lot of productive operations is, we're seeing a lot more automation through our entire end-to-end business. So look, I think as we add volume, which obviously we are because our wins were very strong towards the end of last year and the start of this year. We will expect to see more of that revenue converting into the bottom line into profit. So as long as we keep growing the top line, our business is now set up, it is a transformed business. It is set up to better convert revenue to profit.

Yes. And maybe just a quick comment on the tender pipeline. You've obviously talked about the $1.6 billion in FY '26 with, I think, almost half of that in the fourth quarter. Can you just talk to how you're seeing that overall RFP pipeline? Are your win rates stable? And then just a quick follow-on with all the tech investment that you're making, is it actually getting easier for you to onboard large customers in FCM or is the timing still pretty consistent?

Yes. It is -- I'll start at the end of that question. It is getting -- it is getting easier for us to onboard because as we move to a single operating model, it's much faster for us to engage with customers, do the systems design and really get them trading faster. So that is actually improving -- has improved already and will continue to improve. The RFP situation at the moment in most of our core markets is very active. Some markets are obviously stronger than others. But we probably -- I think it's fair to say I haven't seen as many RFPs out and our pipeline is strong for a number of years. So we're actually feeling very good about it right now. And I think we're going to have some pretty good wins over the next year.

Your next question comes from Wei-Weng Chen with RBC Capital Markets.

I guess there's been a bit of industry consolidation in the corporate space with Amex and CWT. Wondering whether there's any opportunity for you guys to scale and corporate through M&A, too. Have you or are you considering buying CTM?

No, is the short answer to that. Look, there is opportunities for M&A. The market is consolidating. And I think something I've said over the last couple of years is that as we move to a single operating model, which we're well through and well along that path now, it's much easier for us to actually acquired businesses and integrate them much faster and get much better economies of scale. So we are always looking and things come across our desk all the time. It's just got to make sense. And I think if we do acquire volume by TMC, it will be in one of our core markets. So yes, we're open to it. And I think it's all about the right acquisition at the right price, but we're in a much better position to acquire businesses now because of our single operating model.