Helloworld Travel Limited ($HLO)

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Helloworld Travel Limited Trading Update. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Andrew Burnes, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us this morning. My apologies for my somewhat raspy throat. In any event, we brought a trading update out at the end of last week, and I wanted to take the opportunity and thank you for taking the opportunity to go into this call and listen to us, but I wanted to take the opportunity to just firstly explain some of that to you and secondly, to take any of the questions that you might have. As you can imagine, the period since the 2nd of March has been a challenging one for a travel business, any travel business, including ours. I read something the other day late last week from IATA that airline profits were expected to halve in the current year as a result of what's going on in the Middle East. And chiefly, that's not our situation, but it certainly has had an impact on our trading and as well on our margin. I just wanted to explain a bit about that because, obviously, it's getting towards the end of the financial year and the trading -- current trading period that we have in front of us is just another 3-odd weeks until the end of the financial year. But what happened from the 2nd of March onwards? It took a while to actually get the pattern to get established. But people who are booked, particularly on Middle Eastern carriers, obviously, had to either, one, accept the cancellation and in most instances, a full refund or alternatively, they had to find an alternative carrier to take them to wherever they might have been going on one of those Middle Eastern carriers. Initially, of course, those Middle Eastern carriers stopped flying completely. So 100% of our bookings and in aggregate, all the bookings that those carriers were holding at Emirates Qatar and Etihad and to a lesser extent, Oman Air, and other more regional local carriers. They just stopped from one day to the next. And initially, those who were booked on those services were very keen to take up a flight to get them to wherever they were ultimately intending to go. And in most cases, that was the United Kingdom and Continental Europe. And so we had a lot of people redirecting towards Singapore Airlines, towards Qantas, Cathay Pacific, Thai, but what I call the Asian midpoint carriers as opposed to the Middle Eastern midpoint carriers, midpoint being there's a stopover on the flight. So a lot of people changed their bookings to the midpoint carriers across Asia, including China. Our China Southern bookings and China Eastern bookings certainly significantly increased over this period. Throughout April and to a much lesser extent towards at the beginning of May, many people were still engaged in trying to change carriers and not travel via the Middle East. But as, firstly, the war went through its various phases and most particularly once -- any bombard of the airports in both Doha and Dubai, once that came to an end, people started to book with a little bit more confidence, a stopover -- not a stopover, I should say, just a quick stop in Dubai, Doha, and we're happy to go on those 2 airlines. However, in the meantime, many, many people, of course, did not and were not. And we've refunded thus far about $170 million worth of tickets to customers. And those refunds predominantly went to -- not all of them, but many of them, slightly over half went to rebooking on alternative carriers. So not always to the same destination though. Many people who might have been booked through to London were booking on one of the Asian midpoint carriers and we're going to somewhere in Continental Europe because many people, as you'd obviously be aware, would have been going through to London and then maybe staying there a couple of days and then going on to another place where cruise might have been departing from or where they had a coach trip going from or they had land arrangements booked. But people were grabbing initially pretty much any seat they could get to anywhere in Europe in the beginning of all of this. So one of the things that happened reasonably quickly was that availability on both Qantas and Singapore Airlines with which we have very strong commercial relationships, availability on both of those carriers really shrunk away to virtually 0 within about 2 or 3 weeks. And every available seat that Qantas had either on its nonstop flights from Perth to London and to other ports in Europe or alternatively via Singapore every one of those flights was full. Singapore Airlines as well filled up pretty quickly. And then we started moving them across to other carriers, significant carriers for us, Cathay Pacific, Thai, Malaysian, as well. We got a lot of business out of this. And as well, it went to Chinese carriers. They are also very good carriers. And we do have very strong relationships with those carriers. But they obviously don't sell as much as the Asian carriers and the Middle Eastern carriers. We've now got to the position where -- when we went through and looked at all of the bookings that have been made. Most particularly, I'd just draw your attention to the fact that come the 2nd of March, we had a whole lot of data that we've been running as to what our June quarter was looking like. And our June quarter was up 30%. The forward bookings were up 30% for travel in the June quarter as at the beginning of March. As at today, the June quarter is minus 4% in both Australia and New Zealand. So that 30% represents several hundred million dollars worth of TTV. And it's -- we've got several hundred million dollars less of TTV. We were expecting a lot of it to come back and a lot of it did come back out of those cancellations. But at the end of the day, what didn't come in, in March or April were any or many, we've got a few, but there weren't a lot of new bookings for travel for that period up until the 30th of June. So we would have expected -- and we did expect as at the beginning of March, not only were we up 30% on the same time -- at the same time last year, but we were expecting continued bookings to come through for travel for departure prior to the 30th of June. As I said, that didn't happen anywhere near as much as it would have in normal situation -- in a normal situation and plus the cancellations. So it took a long time, and I don't -- I apologize if it did, but we spent a lot of time sitting here with Mike Smith, our CFO, who's got bags under his eyes because he's been -- they've been going day and night just trying to calculate all of the differences to our revenue outcomes as a result of these very significant changes and ultimately, we finally settled on where we believe we are for the full year. And I know we've got the $57 million to $62 million. And you may well ask why a month out, is there still such a range? I mean the previous range was $64 million to $72 million, $8, million gap. We've now got a $5 million gap. But why isn't it tighter? Well, it's not tighter for 2 reasons. Firstly, because exactly how some of the override arrangements we have with our Asian midpoint carrier partners, exactly how they settle come 30th of June is still a little bit up in the air. The other reason is that this war does not appear to be over. So for those of you who read various articles in the papers over the weekend and again yesterday and today, this war still seems to have legs. And unfortunately, the conflict has not been resolved despite the rhetoric flowing out of some people's mouths. But it's still going on. And it could flare up again at any moment. So we're just taking a fairly conservative approach as to where we think it's going to -- what might happen, but it's within that range of $57 million to $62 million. So the previous year was $55.6 million which I thought was a good result at the time. We would have been in the midpoint of that $64 million to $72 million had this war not come about and maybe even towards the top end of it. But as it turns out, that's not going to happen this year, unfortunately. And that's one of the joys that we all have in working and investing in the travel industry. It has its ups, but it also has its downs. The other thing I just wanted to point out, 2 points really. The first is in relation to our land partners. Within land, we include everything non-air. So cruise, hotels, touring, trains, et cetera, et cetera. Our land partners and cruise partners did not, by and large, offer any refund opportunities for customers who were booked with Middle Eastern carriers and had to -- were forced to cancel their flights. What this meant was that many of those customers had to obviously accept the cancellation of the refund from the Middle Eastern carrier that they were booked with and they had to shift across to other carriers if they were going to not lose their either deposits or alternatively for many of them because of the relatively short time frame, many of them would have forfeited their entire upfront payment to the land operators. So this, in a certain way, forced many of our customers to actually get on different carriers to get to where they were departing on a cruise or a coach tour or whatever it was. And I think made the situation not as bad as it otherwise might have been had everybody decided to refund everything. That was really a very significant stimulus, I think, for the market to rebook and find some alternatives. The other thing is that DFAT, for all the right reasons, DFAT has a Level 4 warning out for ports in the Middle East. It's obviously had that now since really the beginning of the conflict. And that Level 4 warning is still in place. Now currently, the Middle Eastern carriers are operating 85 flights a week out of the 150 that previously operated. But because it's a Level 4 warning, you can't get insurance for the flights. So I think people are getting on those flights either, a, uninsured. And the insurance does cover them when whatever they're going, U.K., Europe, et cetera. It does cover them when they are in trip over on your coastal or your cruise to somewhere and are injured, you're covered by your travel insurance, but you're not covered for the flights to -- from the Middle East. So I know that ATIA, Australian Tourism Industry Association, has been calling for the downgrading of that from a Level 4 to a Level 3, but that still hasn't occurred. And I think that once that does occur, we can only hope that it does sooner or later, we'll take sooner rather than later. But I think until that actually does get downgraded, we're going to see some continued constraint in our bookings on the Middle Eastern carriers. And once it does open up and people can get full insurance coverage for their trip that, that will actually encourage a lot more bookings by the Middle East. So that's the nub of what -- where we're at and what we've been doing and what's been happening. As I said, last year, $55.6 million, this year, $57 million to $62 million. We made the point in the update that we would expect that the travel will recover to previous levels within 60 to 90 days of the resolution of the conflict. We had hoped that, that would have occurred already, but it hasn't as yet. And so we're just standing by waiting and hoping that, that happens. The other thing that I think is important to note is that this stuff normally, as I said, and I mentioned it takes 60 to 90 days. But our forward bookings for July and for the September quarter are up significantly. As we sit here today, they are up significantly on the same time in the prior year. Now it's low double digits, but it's not minus. So some of the business that we've missed out on in the period through to the 30th of June has pushed forward into the September quarter and in quite a few instances, into the December quarter. So we would anticipate that assuming that this doesn't get any worse, and that's an assumption, obviously, we can't really take. But assuming it doesn't get any worse, the September quarter is stacking up reasonably well at the moment. And as I said, the December quarter as well compared to the bookings that we held at the same time last year for both the September and the December quarters. So that is a very important point from us to make. We've disclosed there at the bottom of Page 1 of our trading update that we are planning to. We haven't obviously made the decision yet, but we are planning to declare a final dividend around the same level as we did in the previous year, which would mean that our dividends for the full year would run at about $0.10. And at our closing price of $1.40 on the 4th of June, as I said in the release, that represents a fully franked yield of 7% which is, we think, quite positive. So our situation in New Zealand is very similar to the situation here, and they are holding good bookings for the September quarter and the December quarter as well, up on the June quarter. And again, as at the beginning of March, they were also looking very solid at that point. So we've set in there some of the breakdowns between our air sales and our land sales. And as you can see there, in fact, our air sales as a proportion of our total sales have gone down. Our land sales have gone up. And the good news in that is that our land sales are always at a higher margin than our air sales by and large. So finally, I'd just note and happy to take any questions that I can answer. About our stake in Webjet, we hold 78.25 million shares in Webjet. As a result of their share buyback, I think we got to [ 20.95% ] and stock pulled the brakes on there, but it's now 20.118%. And we've kept over that 20% line, but that is fine under the corporation's law because of the fact that it's due to the buyback that Webjet has been undertaking. Our intentions with Webjet, we think it's still a good company. We think it's not been particularly well run at the minute. They don't have a CEO. They don't have a COO. They have an advertising campaign that I think is not particularly helpful and a few other bits and pieces going on in that business there. But we continue to obviously work with them to try and achieve some better outcomes. We think that they should hurry up and put a Helloworld director on the Board because it would be useful to have a director, useful, not useless, but it would be useful to have a director on that Board who actually understands the travel industry. And we are encouraging the current Chairman, acting Chairman, Gary [ Weis ] (sic) [ Hounsell ] to hurry up and get that done. Anyway, that is enough for me for today, and I'm very, very happy now to throw it open to questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Kseniya Chadayeva with Jarden.

Can you please share what is your new EBITDA guidance implying for margins, both revenue and EBITDA? And is it fair to assume that revenue margin should come down given you're shifting more to Asia carriers?

No. Sorry, Mike, do you want to...

Yes, no. So at this point in time, we won't be disclosing the margins. I think Andrew has made some comments around the revenue margin that we still need to wait to see where they will land given the mix of airlines and in particular, the shift that's sort of taken -- that's gone towards some of the Asian carriers. But at this point in time, we're not providing those margins.

And can you please share on the trends you are seeing in your forward bookings? You said July, you are seeing it's getting better. Can you share maybe what regions you are seeing and whether demand for cruise is improving?

Well, what regions are we're seeing? I mean we're seeing -- there's no real shift in the traditional destinations that people are heading to, particularly this time of year heading to the Northern Hemisphere. People are heading to U.K., Europe, North America and also heading to Asia as well. We haven't seen a significant shift thus far in the key destinations that we would sell, generally speaking, at this time of year. So initially early on March, April, there was a bit of a shift to North America, and there was a shift as well to Asia and into the Pacific shorter-haul destinations. But that's pretty much now returned to the normal breakdown of key destinations that we sell and it looks a lot like previous years.

Your next question comes from [ Josh Simat ] with Citi. [Operator Instructions].

There is no question from me.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Philip Pepe with Shaw and Partners.

Just a follow-up on, obviously, a very complex how you guys account for the overrides. Just on the -- given how things like this can happen people switch carriers. How do you accrue for overall, say, first half versus full year? Do you take a pro rata at the half year? Or do you wait until you're in June and say, right, these are overrides for the airlines and then put it in your final numbers.

Phil, so I'll pass over to -- I can -- we can both answer that question, but I'll pass over to Mike, who's been heavily -- obviously, is heavily involved in this every year, but it's been up to his neck in the weeds in the last few months.

Yes. So Phil, as you're aware, from past discussions, each of the airlines have slightly different agreements in place. Some will have called super overrides or targeted overrides Some just have a baseline. So each of them is a little bit different. What I raise that? What it means is that at each reporting period, and in fact, at the end of each month, we need to look at each individual contract and make an assessment as to where we expect to finish that contract year. And to the extent that we have visibility or a high level of confidence that we'll reach a certain target level, then we accrue based on that basis. We try to take a reasonable and conservative approach. There's no use halfway through the year saying you're going to achieve the top target when there's still 6-plus months to go. But yes, basically, we look at each individual contract and assess where we are in terms of the various override steps that exist in each of the contracts.

Your next question comes from Belinda Moore with Morgans.

Andrew and Mike, a few questions. First of all, Mike, can you talk to us about operating cash flow and just sort of any BSP payment cycle issues we need to be aware of and just sort of how you're seeing your balance sheet at year-end? Secondly, on the RBA surcharging ban, I suspect that impacts your agents more than yourself and just your strategy around that. And then Andrew, are you expecting sort of -- once these warnings come off, are you expecting the Middle Eastern carriers to have some fantastic offers that you'll benefit from and they'll reward the agents accordingly? And then I suppose from this crisis, which says everything about why you need an agent, do you feel your agents are sort of winning new customers out of it?

Yes. So a few questions there, Belinda, hopefully, we address them all if we don't, just to let us know. In terms of cash flow, as you know, the second half of the year is always stronger than the first half for us. And we'll continue -- that will continue into this half, be a lot stronger than the first half and will generate cash. We don't have any concerns around our cash levels. And overall, the balance sheet remains strong. We've got the -- obviously, the investment in Webjet there as well. Andrew has already talked about. In terms of the surcharging, you're correct. That doesn't have a significant issue on Helloworld. But for our agents, it is something that they need to get their minds around. And with our assistance, we're working with them to sort of come up with them as to what the options might be around how to best deal with the removal of the surcharging concept and whether they decide to implement a service fee. So were there any more questions that you had for me, there was some for Andrew. Can you just remind me?

Yes, the one for Andrew were just is he expecting some great deals for the agents so they can help fill these Middle Eastern carriers when they properly return? And then just sort of from a crisis where AI really can't help you as your agents sort of winning new sort of customers, do you think, from this?

Well, I think to go to the first question you raised about will the Middle Eastern carriers come out with some amazing deals and to stimulate the market. Firstly, that's a double-edged sword because we make a percentage of the third-party deliverables. So we sell a $3,000 airfare, we make x on that. We sell a $2,000 airfare, we make obviously a similar percentage or even a lesser percentage to the extent that the aggregated volume of those sales is less than it would have been in more normal times. But the other side of that sword is that obviously, the lower fares do stimulate the market and get people moving. So we would expect -- and we're certainly having conversations with them almost every day about when they could come out with and when they might come out with some very strong sales to get the market moving again. Now I'm not suggesting that the market is not moving because it is, but it's moving at a slower rate to the Middle East. 85 flights a week compared to 150. So that the seat capacity is diminished, but we think that will return back to that previous level sometime in the September quarter or very early in the December quarter. And that's when -- particularly as winter starts to take hold across the U.K. and Europe, that's when I think we'll start to see some very keen fares out there, which will, of course, push the Asian midpoint carriers and Qantas to obviously as well try to be competitive in the marketplace. So look, the importance of the Asian -- and thanks for raising the AI point, right? I think AI is probably occupying a lot of our minds at the moment, certainly been occupying mine. We have a conference of 500 people in Cairn starting on Friday. And in my opening presentation, I'm still considering exactly what I'm going to tell the agents about AI because it is having -- to your point, Belinda, and thanks for making it. It is having a positive impact for our agents. Now we saw this at the beginning of the year in January and February that the demand was actually -- as I said, we were up 30% beginning of March compared to last year. So we're seeing that this continued proliferation of AI, and it's not going anywhere as we know, but people don't trust it. And people want a person that they can deal with if anything goes wrong along the way or to help them with what they're planning. And AI is not the solution for a lot of this. So how long that lasts? Well, that's another good question. But I've seen various surveys, including in North America and in the United States to say that 70% of people don't trust AI. So trust is the fundamental premise upon which our entire agency network business is built. And we have very, very high levels of trust from our customers through our agents to what we all do in selling travel and managing travel and looking after problems and so on and so forth. And so I think that from our perspective, AI at the present point in time is really a net positive. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. Now I could talk about the CEO of Anthropic calling on AI development companies to pause development as at right now but only if all the other companies do, and that's not going to happen, all the other countries do, and that's not going to happen. But it is something that I think people are getting very wary of. And if you look at our particular demographic, what is our key demographic, it's 55 plus. They are not overly confident in any AI solutions. There's no doubt people are using it to get information. It's fantastic if you want to list of the best restaurants in Milan or wherever else, what's the best attractions to see in any given destination. All very nice, all laid out very nicely and pleasantly. But it might also send you the things that don't exist. For example, the Eiffel Tower in Paris is one that's been cited quite frequently that AI -- sorry, the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The Eiffel Tower in Beijing is actually what AI has been suggesting people should go and visit. And there's many other examples of that. So for the foreseeable future, I think that AI will actually push our customer demographic in the door of the agents and people trust people.

There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Burnes for any closing remarks.

Well, thanks very much, everyone, for joining us. I know it's a busy time out there at the minute, and we really appreciate you taking the time to tune in and listen. Thanks for your questions as well. I wish you all the best. Over the next few weeks as the financial year comes to a close, and I look forward to speaking to you after we report out our end of year results. Thank you.

Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.