HomeToGo SE (HTG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome all to our first Capital Markets Day as HomeToGo. We will have a strong agenda today that we go through. But first, I will take you on a strategy update on HomeToGo. The first point that I would like to have for you here is a short introduction video about HomeToGo. [Presentation]

So welcome again. HomeToGo, and you just saw it, we built it as a company that should find the home that fulfills your use case as a traveler. And that's what you saw also in the introduction, this is what our logo is also built around and our brand is built around the HomeToGo to accomplish your use case. So that you as a traveler can really like create unforgettable moments from your travels. And when we started HomeToGo, our idea behind it, so we founded in 2014, was that we make incredible homes easily accessible to everyone because we have to gather all these beautiful and incredible homes and vacation renters that are around the world and bring them together in one place so that the traveler can find the right one for their special use case that they have. And this vision transported from our long journey as a company, and I will give you a few more insights over this presentation also what it means for us in the various steps of our company. If we look at the vacation rental market, it's a super fragmented market, consisting of hundreds of thousands of different websites and suppliers. And for sure, this is, on one hand, the pain for the traveler to find the right place to stay, to accomplish their use case. And on the other side, also a big pain for the suppliers, they can access to the right travelers, but on the other side, also around standards, around technology and around data. And this is what we set HomeToGo out when we started to solve all this for the market. So what we are basically doing is matching the right travelers on the demand side through our marketplace with the right suppliers on the supply side. And we will go in more detail about this throughout the day, what is all about that behind, but that's our basical matching that we do as HomeToGo. So if we look back what we have achieved so far. We started in 2014 and launched our first product in 2015 as a metasearch engine. So basically, having a lot of inventory on the site, building up demand fast, but also with a limited take rate because we send traffic off to partners where people book. Then in 2017 on our strategic path to making incredible homes more easily accessible, we added what we call onsite. So basically, the whole transaction happens on HomeToGo, so traveler finds and selects, checks out and books everything on HomeToGo without leaving the platform, and we added this as an addition to a hybrid marketplace consisting of this onsite model and also still of an offsite model where people could click out. This allowed us, on one hand, to give a lot of our partners more bookings because the marketplace today consists of more than 60,000 partners, and a lot of them don't have the tech or data capabilities to really get to conversion and really get a lot of bookings if you send traffic to them. So they were like integrated on our website, now people book on HomeToGo so that they get good conversions and a lot of bookings. It also, on the other side, helped HomeToGo as a brand to become more known. And this means that we get deeper customer relationships with the traveler and can also, and you will see that later, follow up on that. So that drives retention because the brand is more known, and this consequently also drives repeat bookings and add to repeat customers. The next evolutionary step for HomeToGo was around our marketplace, adding solutions and services that actually, we either generate out of our marketplace. So tech solutions we created for the marketplace that we can give to people outside of the marketplace or buying other services around that fulfill also like facilitate the marketplace, but on the other side, help the whole ecosystem of vacation renters to become more successful. And this is a combination leads to the fact that we are different from anyone else in this market. So we're having this marketplace in the middle, and these services and solutions around it that help the whole ecosystem to become even better and is our way gradually to becoming the operating system also for the entire market. And this means we are tackling with every step we do, a higher-value segment. So as I said, take rate, we were limited to 5% to 8% in the offsite metasearch model with the integrated marketplace, it's up to 15%. And if you look at adding additional service around it, that's why we call it take rate because we can charge, for instance, a subscription for a software solution that we give to the supply side. So it adds on top on the normal take rate additional revenues we can get out of the market. So how does it all work? We started with HomeToGo's matching demand and supply. So -- and how does this feedback loop of our flywheel in the end works is that with more demand, we get more data, with more data, we can build better products that means higher conversion. And with that, we can get more bookings. And this get higher relevance for our suppliers. And higher relevance for our suppliers means we get more inventory because people like what we are doing and also higher margins because they want to get more of these bookings they can get from HomeToGo. And what this also means is with the increase of this onsite inventory, we have higher retention and repeat and higher margins. And so as a consequence, we have higher potential, higher marketing efficiency, which gives us the possibility to get to more profitable demand. And then this with HomeToGo, and that's the nice thing about our model, it's even further accelerated by subscription and services because subscription and services with the higher relevance for the supply are also services that are getting used, as we just saw with a 15% plus by the supply side. And this means additional margins that we get on top. And for sure, these additional margins also can be used within driving more profitable demand and higher marketing efficiency for the overall flywheel of HomeToGo and the flywheel starts over and over again and is self-accelerating. We see that this has been quite successful, especially and we will see later on also on the subscription and services part, but these strategic additions like growing our onsite business has been from 2018 to -- so one year after we launched it to this quarter, more than 20x in growth in terms of gross booking value. So what has been transacted over HomeToGo. And this is by far outgrowing the overall alternative accommodation market. And for sure, this was an idea what we wanted to achieve to deliver on our growth ambitions, while improving the customer experience because also the onsite product gives a lot more access, if you think of our vision, to better inventory and nicer unique inventory from smaller partners in a more convenient way for the user. And this also improved our profitability over time because we have higher margins from the onsite inventory, we get higher retention, so it's a positive effect. And as you just saw on the flywheel, it all accelerates the flywheel of HomeToGo. So if we sum it up, we are a healthy business with a strong cash position and have a customer reach in peak months today already of 50 million monthly visits to our HomeToGo platforms. We, on top, have the largest selection of vacation rentals, and that through strong partnerships. Like I said, 60,000 -- more than 60,000 trusted partners with more than 50 million offers that are currently connected to HomeToGo. And our first market, the DACH region, so Germany, Austria, Switzerland, is on an adjusted EBITDA basis already positive. And as you might have heard in the earnings call with Steffen just, we have a high cash balance that we have on the site with EUR 160 million in cash and cash equivalents. And all this is driven by a scalable tech backbone of HomeToGo. We will see a lot of this today in the presentations from my dear colleagues that need these different parts of the HomeToGo business, but you will see where you might not even would expect that we use technology and to which extent that helps us, but we can also use it outside the marketplace to help others. And this all is there to accomplish our vision of making incredible homes easily accessible to everyone. And the result was we have built a truly global footprint and especially have leading positions across many of our regions. So our biggest region, DACH, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, with almost 50% this year of our booking revenues over the first 9 months, already adjusted EBITDA positive. Rest of Europe, the next to follow, you will also see that throughout the presentations that all these regions are basically from left to right, more mature, to less mature, which also means higher onsite share, higher usage of our subscription and services. So if you look at rest of Europe, which is our second biggest region, we are close to breakeven. In North America, we are investing mode, obviously, huge market and rest of world, planting the seeds more opportunistic, how we look at it. And the result of our first 9 months of 2022 were a record high of EUR 126 million in IFRS revenues, which means when you look at the 9 months, booking revenues year-over-year, 30% up over 3 years; 100% up IFRS revenues; 71% up year-over-year, 110% over 3 years, adjusted EBITDA margin of minus EUR 4.6 million with a minus EUR 3.6% in margin, up 72% from last year or 19 percentage points in the margin, a really big step. And that's also what you probably just heard in our earnings call why we are updating our guidance. So having IFRS revenues as a growth rate for this year of 48% to 54%, which is then EUR 141 million to EUR 146 million, and adjusted EBITDA of minus 14% to minus 18% as a margin, which is reflected in EUR 20 million to EUR 25 million minus for the absolute number as an adjusted EBITDA. So that's where we are today, strong track record that we have achieved over the last years and especially in this evolutionary steps that we took with creating our marketplace and now like adding services around it. But what about looking ahead? So HomeToGo was and is driven by a very strong company culture. And this is also embedded in our entrepreneurial spirit that we have in the company. You can see that these are just some examples, but you can see that also, especially in the open reviews that you find on websites like Glassdoor or kununu, where you can see how people that either work at HomeToGo, worked at HomeToGo or applied to HomeToGo are really speaking very well about the company and what they can achieve here, although for sure, it's a challenging kind of environment, but that is good. That's what we want. You can also see that people enjoy working here, not only in their comments, but also how they think about the company, how they do things together. We even have people asking if they can use our brand to tattoo somewhere on their body, which is a really interesting thing. And you see basically that I heard it recently where this picture was somewhere shared in a different company where someone said, "Oh, I would also like to see that our company turns into a love brand like HomeToGo is that employees of ours starting tattooing the logo. So -- and we didn't pay someone for that. We don't take royalty fees for the brand though. So this is really great to see and really touching also, especially for me as a founder that people like treat and think so much about the company in that way. So when we are looking what we are -- where we want to go, and you might know this for sure from some of our earnings calls, but let me remind you on the way to make an incredible home easily accessible to everyone, we have taken decisive decisions and transformations in the past. But we are also working on further steps, especially in 3 pillars to execute on our strategy because we want to enable the next steps of future growth. And the first part, not surprisingly, is on the demand side is the traveler. So we want to create this unparalleled experience to drive repeat demand to our platform. And this will be the next presentation that you will see after me where this is all about the traveler and the demand side. Then for sure, we have on the other side of our marketplace, the supply side. And there, we also have a dedicated presentation, but we take care of our partners and give them solutions, solve their problems in various ways on the demand side, with tech, with data and with other topics and also combining that with targeted M&A on the supply side, but also on the services side that we can offer. And speaking about the central part of all this bringing this together, that's technology and data. The core of HomeToGo that brings together the traveler, the demand side with the supply side on the other side and allows us to enable both sides to be successful and match them successfully within our marketplace. And I will now go a little bit into these pillars already now, but you will get much more details later in the other presentations. But just to give you a sneak preview. So if we look on the traveler side, we see clear progress on our journey to build the go_to destination for vacation rentals. If you look, for instance, at Germany at the HomeToGo Group brands, and if you look how much traffic we have on our platform for rural location rentals, you can see that we are bigger than the next 2 more dedicated to vacation rental websites are, so Airbnb or the German VRBO brand, Fewo-Direkt. So roughly 1.6x bigger than each. If you look at the growth of the visits from our direct traffic channels, so people either directly coming to HomeToGo or typing in HomeToGo as a brand name in search engines, it grew versus 2019 more than 2x. And in the DACH region, where we made tremendous progress on onsite, which drives retention and drives like brand recognition, we even grew 3.4x. And this is also then reflected in the growth of booking revenues from repeat customers, which grew 5.4x over the last 3 years to pre-corona. And in Germany, almost 9 -- or in DACH region, almost 9x. And this is also one of the reasons, and you will see that throughout the DACH that Germany is already adjusted EBITDA positive today. So what do we do if we get someone on the website? We really try to provide them with the most desirable and unparalleled highly created selection of vacation rentals and give them a great customer experience so they can really like fulfill their use case. So finding the home that they want to rent to fulfill their use case and really creating unforgettable moments on the vacation. And there are various parts that are important for that. First, world's largest selection of vacation rentals. This is the basis, the foundation that you can really find the right one for your use case. And this, we help the traveler to highly created and smart tools and especially also machine learning on the ranking side and within other parts of the business to really find the right property or the right home that they want to find. And then for sure, if you found it, you also want to trust the checkout and the best easy payment that really allows you to make your bookings successful so that you can also, if you think of making incredible homes easily accessible, not only find them, but also consequently book them and then really go there and have the vacation that you wanted. And travelers like what we offer, which earns trust. So you just saw that we could increase the repeat customer booking revenues 5x in the last years. And this is not only due to the fact that we have the largest selection, which obviously drives a lot of interest from our travelers. But also when you look at our consumer product, we see that people love the product. So you see it from our NPS scores, that is at 50, we see it with higher ratings for the overall business and customer reviews, and we also see it in AppStore ratings throughout Android and iOS. And this is then, as we already saw, reflected in the high increase of booking revenues coming from repeat customers. When we speak about what we have achieved with executing our strategy, one part of it, and there's this second pillar about the supply is especially the onsite supply. And you see, as I explained that already in the beginning a bit that the DACH region always leads the front because that's where we started initially the company, but also started rolling out onsite first. And the DACH region is now almost at 80%, whereas rest of Europe is at 37% and North America at 70% of share of booking revenues that onsite does. And you see that this is always moving up, if you look at the past from DACH because DACH was at some point also at the value of Rest of Europe and at some point, at the value of North America. And you can also see that on the right side, the more mature the market is, for sure, the smaller the growth rate gets on this share because at some point, you get closer and closer to 100%. So if we then look at the third pillar, technology, data and AI that are at the core of our business, because they are like matching supply and demand and removing the friction also that might be there to matching the right traveler with the right supplier. So as already said, we have 15 million offers. We have so far processed more than 3.5 billion images throughout our data pipelines. The same amount of images, but it's one of them -- for sure, one of the most important things if you book something online that you want to understand how it looks. And this, we combine with these 50 million plus users that we can have looking for the best accommodation in the peak month. And this altogether runs into our machine, and then we have a ton of proprietary algorithms built to solve various problems around combining the data we receive and bring that in a very convenient and sizable way to the customers. So really like happening down in the machine in the background. And just to give you a few of these examples, there are a ton more, but -- so for instance, what we do, we beautify images because all the images we get, not everyone has the best lighting, the best contrast. And what's happening, we automatically do this by AI algorithms and machine learning to make them look nicer and give a better view and a better consistent view also over the whole amount of properties that we get from our partners. What we also are capable of is understanding what is on the image, for instance. So we analyze automatically these images and can understand what amenities on the images that might be missing what are the amenities that are showing up, for instance, in the first picture that you are showing to the customer on your product, which is very important because it's the first impression that counts for most of the properties. And with this, we can do a lot of nice things and also utilize this within our platform and utilize this also for our A/B testing and experiments because at HomeToGo, we usually run more than 100 A/B tests in parallel. So basically putting new experiments out all the time, launching new experiments all the time and also having them successful. This is just an example of our flexible date search, for instance, that we already innovated in 2015 before the market thought about. And with all this, for sure, we have the possibility what we do within our marketplace, and we will come to that later to also utilize parts of these topics, for instance, image beautification also outside of our marketplace. So -- and when we speak about that, that means that we really try to build around our marketplace additional services and solutions, especially on the tech data and supply side that are for our partners on the supply side and enablement and a service that they can use because we could build it on scale, you can only build a lot of products on scale because you need a lot of traffic on a product to really build great product test. And so we -- and on scale also these things like image beautification or other things that then can be used also outside of our marketplace. So basically, utilizing our technology solutions that are already existing and selling them again, outside of the marketplace. What we also do is developing new and integrating new supply solutions around the marketplace on top. So solutions that we didn't have coming from our marketplace that we buy, for instance, via targeted M&A. And the third step of this strategy is basically combining our native marketplace technology and supply solutions with the external solutions that we acquire for HomeToGo and not only getting synergies from bringing the tech together, but especially utilizing things from the marketplace within the software. And as an example, so you can see we have acquired some time to go, and we will have a more deep dive on the software later an all-in-one SaaS solution called Smoobu, which is basically there for the self-service host. And it's a fully subscription model where people get more easily connected to the demand side. So for instance, if they want to think their bookings, availabilities and prices between channels like HomeToGo, but also Airbnb booking or the above. We have another software that we acquired, which is SECRA, which is a property managing system for agencies and destinations, especially in the northern regions of Germany. So very focused on the DACH market. But what we're also doing at HomeToGo is leveraging our own marketplace technology. And this especially comes into effect from 2 sites so we can offer it, as just said, to externals as a service, but we can also combine it, for instance, for data around yield management or pricing with other solutions that we have around the marketplace and make them even better and have additional services that they can sell. And what this technology also allowed us, so our whitelabel technology is so advanced today. It is allowing us to build up and replace technology with our marketplace front end for our acquisitions. So you might recall that in 2018, we acquired CASAMUNDO and not even 10 months after the acquisition. So the net time the actual integration or the actual tech work was much, much lower. We had them fully live on the HomeToGo technology without any CASAMUNDO technology left. And now it's really like running from one technology backbone that serves CASAMUNDO as a second brand besides HomeToGo. And just recently, a few days ago, and you might remember we acquired this e-domizil, we just fully switched e-domizil also to our front-end marketplace tech. And this 7 months, even is a more complex case than CASAMUNDO was, 7 months after the acquisition and the net time of only 3 to 4 months that we took on the actual tech integration, which is a large project, but now like runs under HomeToGo. And this shows you how well we can also not only use our technology for our own purposes, but theoretically for any vacation rental business that is out there and also shows the success of HomeToGo when acquiring companies to really move fast also to create synergies and lift synergies, especially from a tech side. If we then look ahead also around what we believe at HomeToGo around sustainability. So a HomeToGo Green, how we call it. And so sustainability will take a huge or will have a huge impact on a lot of businesses going forward. And for sure, like vacation rentals as a whole, are really well positioned for sustainability because normally, it's a more domestic vacation, so you don't have so long troubles. It's connected with the fact that you have a sharing economy because people renting out maybe second but also first homes. And so you have more usage on already existing inventory. But in general, for us, it's more than that, not just the market. We really want to build a platform that also enables and empowers the traveler and our partners to make more sustainable choices. And we won't go into too much details here today. But for sure, you also see we have an owned logo even for the HomeToGo Green, that there will be much more following around this initiative. So the opportunity, and this is, for sure, known to everyone is super high because we want to incentivize going forward, our partners to cooperate more sustainable practices and also amenities by rewarding and highlighting green offers. Same for building a product where travelers can more easily choose and better be educated about sustainable solutions. And because if you look what travelers want, they already say today that this is a very important topic for them when they do a choice on the traveler site. And also, it's very important for employee retention, getting new employ because a lot of job seekers also want to work in an environmental sustainable companies. And we believe we are very well set up for that and want to foster a culture that is focused on climate preservation. So what we have already done in the past, so HomeToGo is a certified climate partner since 2019. We are climate neutral in Berlin headquarters and in our Lithuanian office also since 2019 and will be climate neutral in all our offices by end of this year. And other things are there to follow where I don't want to show too much today. But you can see that there is a clear angle that is very important for us, and that we want to tackle further in the future. So a lot of people ask themselves what is about the current macroeconomic situation? How does it affect travel? How does it affect maybe our business? And how does it affect business in general? So for us, the most important thing around this would be see and have seen in the past is that people always travel. And especially vacation rentals are super resilient vertical, not only within travel, but in general. So if you look at this survey from McKinsey, you can see that travel for holidays, yes, the recent survey is the one thing that is the most important thing still for consumers that they want to spend on. They're rather sacrificing everything else prior, they are sacrificing travel for holidays. And this is important to understand in the first place that the travel industry is by this already as a total, very well positioned if you compare it, for instance, to outdoor living, the very bottom. And then if we look at vacation rentals, they have traditionally fared very, very well during periods of weaker economic momentum and consumer uncertainty. So if you look in the past, for instance, at the global financial crisis, HomeAway, nonetheless, grew with a CAGR of 46% throughout these years and went public after that. E-domizil that we just acquired, same time frame almost same growth CAGR at that point, whereas hotel businesses, cruises and others were much, much less growing or even declining. And if you look at HomeToGo, we were obviously -- we founded the company in 2014, so we were not around to witness as HomeToGo, the global financial crisis, but we saw from -- in 2016, where you had like terror attacks and people like having a certain type of uncertainty, you have had the Arab spring that also, in this time, we had a tremendous growth in our CAGR, whereas other travel industries or part of the travel industries were looking much worse. And why is that? So it's mainly 2 reasons. So vacation rentals are resilient because they are normally a cheaper option, and you have cost control, because you can cater yourself, you can go there with a family on a per person kind of [ view ], it's really like the better option if there is uncertainty, especially if there's uncertainty about prices or about a recession where you have to saves money. And then also vacation rentals feel safe. And this is especially something in times of uncertainty, you want to stay maybe home domestic, you want to stay secluded from others. And this is also something that we obviously observe firsthand as HomeToGo during the COVID-19 pandemic, where our booking revenues were more or less stable, even slightly grow, and we could come out very well out of the crisis in 2021. And our 9 months this year are already higher than our full year of 2021. And for sure, this was because travelers seek safety and privacy because it's separate -- to separate themselves in rentals versus crowded hotels. And also, for sure, due to water restrictions, we had a lot of domestic travel that boomed. And through this, there was a lot of education of people coming into the vacation rental market. Already prior was vacation rentals the fastest-growing market within travel, and this got only accelerated on top by this crisis. So coming back to the beginning, where you saw that travel for holidays is the last thing that people want to miss out, and this is particularly strong for people in the Generation X and Baby Boomers. And 50% of our customers, so more than 50% of our customers are actually in that age group, which is also important to understand because it's not only 48%, but more 57%, 56% in these age groups when you look at this. So in total, we are very well prepared for a macroeconomic environment that might be on the horizon, especially if you look at the resilience of the vacation rental business in the past. So long term, what do we want to create as long-term value? So you know our near-term milestone is achieved adjusted EBITDA breakeven by next year. And for that, we continue on our road map of topline growth, but also taking cost efficiency and operating measures to foster our path to profitability. And we have told you about these measures already in the past, and we are well in progress in getting our topline measures like contract consolidation within the HomeToGo Group, so leveraging different contracts from acquired companies. And so on to get better take rates, we also leverage our inventory better. We implement a very fast tighter steering of ROI-based marketing approach, scaled our repeat business, where you will find a lot of topics later and for sure, also on the operating side, reviewed resources and lifted more economies of scope from our synergies. Everything to create the foundation for being adjusted EBITDA breakeven by next year. And our midterm milestone continuous margin improvement to drive profitable growth. So we want to bring our growth ambition to reality. And there are 2 things to it. One, you heard it already, become the go_to destination for the traveler. And by this really increased the share of repeat demand and repeat bookings and on the other side, execute on the supply side on our strategic levers, onsite business and subscription and services and increasing by this higher take rates and by this, also higher margins for our business from various revenue streams. As a reminder, we already had a look on it, how it works. So the HomeToGo flywheel that creates in the end, our higher margins also over time because it accelerates and accelerates over and over again and creates these higher margins in the long-term way that we can have long-term profitable growth. And this is all in order to capture our ambition to achieve EUR 1 billion in booking revenues by 2028, 2029. Because if you look at the market, so the total accommodation market, EUR 1 trillion market, 2020, set out to grow to EUR 1.7 trillion in 2030. And if we as HomeToGo are growing with executing on our strategy, we can reach 0.5% of this market in GBV when we reach EUR 1 billion in booking revenues by 2028 to 2029. So still a lot, a lot to grow into, but a huge opportunity and an exciting opportunity because we anyway grew multiple times faster than the market. We actively manage our onsite and services businesses, and we can enable growth through targeted M&A. So our path to profitability. If we look at our EBITDA margins, adjusted EBITDA margins this year, minus 14% to minus 18%; next year, breakeven; and then long term, 2028 to '29, around 35%. So come to the end of my presentation. Key takeaways. First, we operate in a resilient growth market, demonstrate our resilience through COVID-19 and are well positioned for the current macro environment. Secondly, we have built a strong franchise in our markets with a global footprint, but especially if you look at our first market with Germany, where we are the most visited platform already today for vacation rentals. We have the largest selection of vacation rentals and a proven technology value proposition, which help us also paving the way for becoming the industry's operating system. And we have a very, very strong execution track record. You saw it onsite GBV 20x in 4 years, much faster than the overall market, upgraded guidance several times since IPO, DACH adjusted EBITDA positive and just in a record Q3 in 2022. And last but not least, we have a very strong cash position and are well positioned to breakeven on adjusted EBITDA in financial year '23, so next year. With that, I conclude my part of the presentation and happy to take questions.

For those who want to ask a question, please state your name and company, and you will get them the microphone. And for those who are not in the room, please feel free to write e-mail to [email protected] and ask your question.

Okay. Patrick, can you give us some more idea of what your plans to foster the U.S. business are? Definitely here, you're lagging somewhat behind the DACH region and the rest of Europe. But what will the push look like?

So the U.S. or North America in total, but mainly the U.S. is, for sure, a giant market. And so it's definitely a market we are looking at. As shown, we have a clear kind of strategy or a playbook that we roll out over our regions. First region was basically the DACH region, where we started and where you see also how our strategy works, increasing onsite share, increasing usage of subscription and services over time. Now onsite share almost at 80%. The next to follow Rest of Europe, and the next to follow North America. You saw basically the increase in onsite share like 12x versus 2019. So it obviously increases at a faster pace, but there's still a way to go. It's also a much bigger market with much more inventory. But in the end, that's our strategy. We just follow on our strategy to execute on market by -- or region by region in that regard. And we have and we know what we need to do with our playbook from the other markets because we see that it's working basically what we did prior. And the nice thing on top, a lot of things we have done for the other markets are now existing already when we roll it over to newer markets, all markets that are not as mature as the DACH market because the technology is obviously always the same, so there's even an advantage for that in the future.

The name and the company, please.

It's Silvia Cuneo from Deutsche Bank. I wanted to ask a little bit more color around repeat customers and repeat booking revenues. You gave us some hints about how this has grown over the years. And just wanted to know if there is anything more you can share in terms of, for example, what share of those 50 million monthly visits are repeat and any color on adoption?

Yes, we share it actually in the next presentation. So if we don't answer your question, we come back at the end of that presentation because there, we will have a deep dive especially on that with our colleague Thomas, that is the expert for retention. So I hope, and if it's that we shortly look after that, if all your questions get answered because I don't want to already tell the details prior.

Additional questions?

It's James from [indiscernible]. Just wondered if you could talk a little bit more about the -- I was really taken by the side which put you ahead of competitors by this since actually in the that market. Can you talk a little bit about how that's progressed over the last few years, that kind of gap? And just confirm to me, is that's -- that's German customers booking globally? Or is that -- just remind me, is that how you do that? Is it German customers booking globally? Or is it global customers booking in the DACH?

Thanks for the question. It's based on demand market because we look at basically who -- or we compare with similar web. So as a objective comparison, so not using our own kind of visits because we don't know the visits of the others in detail. So we take the objective comparison over similar web. And then we look at how many people are visiting the site. So -- and that's then the demand side. So basically, looking at German domains, so the German traveler that theoretically can book over the whole world, for sure. So it's really like from a demand side of view. And for sure, we have progressed very well in the last years overall as a company. So with a very fast growth rate and especially also in our DACH market where you can see that's now also due to the high onsite share, one of our -- the biggest market we have in the company from a revenue share perspective.

Additional questions?

It seems I'm not anticipating the next topic.

Let's see.

Just wanted to ask about some of the other regional segments. In one of the slides, you talked about how you are planting the seeds for growth in other markets. Is there any market in particular you want to call out in what we should expect?

Yes. So thank you, Silvia, for the question. Like, it's the same pattern actually that we have with DACH, Rest of Europe, North America. And basically, we put everything together under rest of world where we have just put out some websites because the nice thing about our technology that is for us, it's very easy to put out a new website. And we just look if there is something coming up at some point. And then once we see that there is an opportunity, we would go into a certain market even further. But prior, we have the bigger regions, I would say that we already are under that we are looking at, as you saw, like especially rest of Europe and North America that we want to bring up to the DACH kind of maturity over time. And so for sure, there are some markets that look more promising, but you saw like overall, it's not a particular focus at this point in time because we rather focus on the markets that we identified and already are at a certain scale at this point in time. Thank you.

We are now back live from Berlin with our demand deep dive. And in case if you would like to address any questions, feel free to reach out to [email protected]. I'm handing now over to Thomas, Mahendra and Caroline.

Many thanks, Jan. Yes, I'm Thomas, the Director for Customer Retention here at HomeToGo. And together with my colleagues, Mahendra and Caroline, will guide you through the demand section of today. So first of all, we'll show you what our overall vision is and then highlight some key initiatives and especially focus on, yes, how we are going to contribute to the way to profitability with our initiatives. As Patrick already showed you, the Vacation Rental market is highly fragmented. So yes, from the demand side, our pain -- our main goal is to reduce the pain for travelers in finding the right vacation rental. Now as you know, vacation rental, especially holidays in terms is a very emotional topic. So we are not only trying to reduce the pain, but in the opposite, we want to generate unparalleled experience for our customers while booking the journey to come back over and over again. Now let's first hear from our customers how well we are actually performing in this dimension. [Presentation]

I hope you heard most of the points that are important for us, directly from our customers. But yes, just to reemphasize on the main 3 goals that we have in order to achieve this unparalleled experience that we want to create. On the one hand side, we have the world's largest selection of vacation rentals already, right? So the pain point of really finding something we fulfill. Now what we are going to build and what we already achieved building, as you can see from the customers, this first is digital experience. And there, we've mainly focused on having a personalized and yes, joyful experience. That means personalized, if you have that lots of inventory, it can be a pain still to find the right thing if we don't show you the right objects, but that's what we are focusing on to really find the perfect vacation rental for someone based on data and then showing them the right thing to speed up the overall purchase process. Then lastly, at least for me, always when I want to give money to a company after I decided for it. And there are frictions, yes, I'm really frustrated. So there, we're really focusing on having a joyful experience and a trusted checkout process and payments. Now as Patrick already showed you, we are already profitable in Germany. And I want to deep dive here and show you exactly the drivers of why we achieved profitability already and how we're going to take it to the other countries and markets. First of all, we have already generated a very high on-site share in the DACH region. So yes, above 75% since a couple of quarters, which then helped us to get a lot of direct traffic. So direct traffic again is the traffic where users directly typing in HomeToGo in the web browser or they're opening the app. So all of this comes for free and supporting our margins. The relationship between on-site and direct is that in the off-site model to the opposite, we linked to our partners, right? Someone came to our website and then during the booking process was linked out to our partner websites. And then even finishing the booking there. So in the end, they didn't really travel with us, but they traveled with our partners. Now in the on-site product, this is substantially different, right? They do the whole booking process on our side. Thus, it's far more likely that they come back directly to us because we are top of mind and at the same time, then repeat more and more and that you can see on the right-hand side graph, strong growth of the repeat revenue over time in the DACH region. So to summarize, the scaling of the on-site product and the inventory helped us a lot to fuel the flywheel that Patrick was already sharing and becoming profitable in the DACH market. Deep diving a bit on direct traffic, which is, for us, so important because, as already said, it's free traffic, right? As you can see, over the past years, on the left-hand side, direct traffic is continuously improving and growing even during the COVID times. You can -- you don't really see this COVID dip that you can see everywhere else. So again, the supports the resilience of our business, plus it supports the contribution margins. So yes, numbers, 34% year-over-year growth in terms of direct traffic. And a second traffic source, we are really focusing on here is traffic from acquired users. Acquired users are users where we have the e-mail address, for example, or they have an app install or maybe they did the booking in the past. So all of these users, we can contact with cheaper channels and again, have better profitability on those. The app was already shortly mentioned here, just the traffic numbers again. We are strongly growing app installs and not only the installs, but we managed to keep the ones that installed in the past active, right? So it's not only the app installs that are increasing over time, but the monthly active users are increasing in the same growth rates. And the CAGR is above 90% for both of them. Now if you put this into perspective, we have some benchmarks from competitors. And in the overall vacation rental industry, the apps, they have a CAGR in the same time frame between 2% and 20% compared to the 90% that we are showing. Lastly, being top of consideration means here, even if we -- users search on something Google, we are shown on top. And this, we can nicely track with this cystic visibility points. And here, again, that's for the German market, we can see that, yes, we are nearly twice as high in this SEO visibility compared to our both biggest competitors, Airbnb and Virgo. Lastly, as already mentioned, our growing share of on-site customers translates into a lot of repeat purchases. And if you just check the customer lifetime values on the right-hand side, you see, first of all, we are increasing the revenue that we get with the first booking, that's the intercept on the left-hand axis. And you can see every year, we are growing there. And then secondly, due to the repeat purchase, we have been steadily growing revenue of these users over time. Important to notice here that we focus on reaching our efficiency targets for the marketing spend already with the first booking. So that's, again, the intercepts on the left-hand axis and then over time, all the repeat purchases that come in are actually just contributing to our overall margin. With this, now handing over to Mahendra, who will show you how our product plays into this.

Nice. So thanks, Thomas. So hi, everyone. My name is Mahendra. I'm part of the product teams, so the consumer product team at HomeToGo, I'm basically responsible for the machine learning and the search platform at HomeToGo here. So what we saw from Thomas basically the whole organic demand and the marketing efficiency and what we do with acquired demand is something I'll dive deeper and we'll see how exactly we convert these users going forward. So just to orient ourselves a bit. So the main product DNA for us has been being laser-focused on being user-centric overall. So how can we put consumers first, how can we solve their problems? So this has been the core DNA of our product. This, combined with the data informed decisions we make. So this has been the North Star metric that has been driving us. If you look at the graphs here, so engagement has been a key indication of how the users actually engage on our platform, so do they enter dates? Do they communicate what exact requirements they need? So this has been the main engagement driver, which eventually then results in conversion. So do I get to see what I want. So can I convey my requirements properly. So this drives conversion. Conversion eventually drives repeat. So if I have a really good experience, do I find the right offer? Do I find the right amenity? This all channels up and results in a really nice repeat booking rate. So if you give a good experience, users will come back to our platform again and again. Like I mentioned, the key DNA for us has been being data informed, user-centric which eventually leads to multiple AB test experiments. So what Patrick touched upon in his keynote. So we run hundreds of experiments in parallel, which actually help us to identify patterns, user behavior and tailor the personalized experience for the users more and more. Where does everything start? So basically, users taking a user journey, so we started to user's search. It's great that we have 15 million offers. So having a ton of inventory really helps but then it's like finding a needle in a haystack if you have ton of inventory. So which one should I book? So making sure that we surface the right offer to the user but at the same time, don't give this impression that, "Right, I don't have a coverage. I didn't check everything." So balancing this is key. So we pick up all this 15 million offers in our search. We have a sophisticated machine learning pipeline that then scores and recommends the right offers, basically fulfilling our HomeToGo dash promise. So can I go for skiing? So can I go to a nice beach? So is this beach close by? So really recommending that one right offer is a massive challenge that we encounter. So our machine learning pipeline then takes this, does the sophisticated recommendation, lists out exactly the curated results that a user expects for those use cases action. All this is supported by a sophisticated tech backbone. So we basically run all this within a few hundred milliseconds. And this is super important because users don't want to wait and be engaged in a slow, laggy website. So all this is done within a few hundred milliseconds on our platform. So right from the time we fetched the offers to being recommended, this is done within a few hundred milliseconds. So once we recommend the office, so how can we include the users and make it a bit more engaging for them. So how can we include them in what they communicate with us? So this is where we have smart search tools. So let's say, I want to travel with my electric vehicle, can I find the right charging station, for example? I want to go to a beach, how far am I from a beach? So I want to go to a ski destination, where is my ski lift, for example. So all these requirements, can I really communicate in a clear way? And do I see the right results that I expect out of it? So this is, in a way, engaging the user and asking them to like also communicate with us, so going towards the conversational approach. So once we give this transparency in a way. So the other key DNA that we also follow is what you see is like what you pay basically on the prices. This is super important because users are price sensitive, of course, so nobody wants to pay more than what's the value for money. So we try to be as transparent as possible on our platform, so where users can really tell, do I want to see service fees included? Do I want to see price per night with taxes? So we try to make it as transparent as possible on our platform because prices are one of the key decisive factors on the platform here. So now this is for the users who know exactly where to go, but then we have other category of users where they are what we call as low intent. So they're a bit more explorative. They don't know exactly where they want to go, but they have some time. So they have a time range, let's say. So for this, we did flexible dates, what you also saw in the keynote, we had this way back in 2015. So the technology already powered this. We could do something called rain search where users can flexibly say, these are the ones that I want to travel. So I don't have a fixed time range, but I have, let's say, a use case in mind. So I want to go to a beach, but I don't know in which month. So show me the cheapest prices in a particular date range. So flexible rates allows this. Next set of users who know exactly when they want to go, but don't know where. So this is something like, "Oh, I'm tired, I want to have a relaxed weekend." So we had something called Radio search, where you can specially say how far I want to travel and where I want to go, basically. So I have a budget range, I know when, but I don't know where. So this is something we try to give this as an option for the users who want to do like weekend trips, for example. The next set of users. So we saw this as a trend, especially after COVID, so people who are more flexible, what we have as well as a remote working policy basically. So people want to work when on vacation as well. So workcation was a big trend for us. So here, people want to know, can I have a desk? So do I have right Internet speed? So can I have space enough for me so that my family can spend time while I work, for example. So do I have a fenced pool for my child to play around? So these are -- then the use cases that funneled into so workcation as a specific use case. So we always listen to our users and try to be as user-centric as possible, actually. So for users who know where they want to go. So we have the smart search tools being transparent and so on. But for low intent or exploratory users, we try to be flexible, so both in terms of dates, for example, especially in terms of distance and then also in terms of use cases. So can I go work here and also have a vacation at the same time? So going forward, so once the decision has been done, so I know where I want to go, I know which property I want to book. So how can we make this booking and checkout flow smoother and more secure? So this is what Cara has been working on, and she can tell you more about this.

Wonderful. My name is Caroline, and same as Mahendra, I'm part of HomeToGo's product team. And more specifically, I lead payments and add-on services. So building up on what Mahendra has already told us, we are seeking to create an on-site experience that is both, convenient and complete for our users. And we are seeking to do so also with our on-site payment solution. And how do we want to do that in practice? So what you can see here on the left-hand side is 1 example for it. We have pre-selectived idea for a user with the billing country being in the Netherlands. What you need to know is that ideal in the Netherlands has a market penetration rate of about 70%. So by making sure that we have the most relevant local payment methods available for our users in the checkout and by potentially even preselecting it, we can positively impact user success and therewith also conversion. Another element of owning our on-site payment solution is that we can experiment with more contemporary payment experiences really. And one of those being Buy Now, Pay Later. You might know that actually from the classic e-commerce shopping experience nowadays. And we are currently live with 2 product variants in that regard, one being paying in installments and the other one being by an integration with Klarna, pay now -- Buy Now, Pay Later solution. Overall, we are live with 12 payment solution -- payment methods in 13 European markets across 6 of the HomeToGo brands. If we zoom out a little bit from the feature level, what we want to achieve is creating experiences that users love and partners want. And as a tech company, we aim to achieve that by replacing the solutions that our partners would otherwise offer, and they can be really frictionful when it comes to payments and improving them by inserting our solution instead. And the really exciting piece about this is that this is just the beginning because it enables us to launch so much monetization potential across our platform. So throughout COVID, we have seen an increasing awareness for cancellation policies of our users. And very fittingly for that, we have launched our first add-on service as -- or an insurance as our first add-on service and more specifically, a cancellation protection insurance for the user to choose. And actually, what we have seen has exceeded our expectations very much when it comes to the performance of that product, specifically so in the DACH region. So while we had initially launched this post booking, we have by now also launched this in checkout for the user to choose. So how this works is, the user -- and you can see that illustrated here on this desktop screen on the left. The user can add insurance to their basket and check out for it together with the accommodation actually with one single payment, super convenient and really great for conversion. And what we are now going to do to build up on that success is adding a comprehensive policy to our overall insurance offering. So the user has greater variety to choose from. And you can see that illustrated here on the right in the mobile screen. Beyond that, we also want to pursue other opportunities when it comes to additional monetization of our platform, namely experiences or anything flight or transportation. And then if we look at monetization in general on our platform, something or a specific touch point that we find that we have identified as a very high potential is the post-booking journey because of the many touch points that it actually has. Think of a post-booking pre-check in e-mail that you are receiving, that is showing you all the relevant activities in your destination or offers for your airport transportation. So overall, why this is such an exciting milestone for us is that it adds this potential for us to monetize our platform across the entire user journey much better. And what we are seeing is that, in fact, 15% of our users with the booking have a post-booking interaction and those users are 68% more likely to return to our platform and 82% more likely to leave another booking. So it's a great lever for us also to drive platform monetization and repeat. When talking about user touch points, we cannot forget to also talk about our guest relations because they are in a prime spot of interacting with our users. And Patrick had mentioned it before. Actually, we can see this that our guest relations teams have achieved -- have reached outstanding trust with our users across various platforms where they have left their reviews. So how does product and guest relation actually interlink? To a great deal, in fact. So as one example, we have launched a chat bot on our property details page where the user can interact and ask small but critical questions such as which house rules do apply to this property? Or can I bring my dog, can I bring my 3 dogs? And through these technological advancements, basically, we are working very closely together. What you can see on the right-hand side is what we refer to as our booking detailed page. The user can go there to interact with their booking. They can cancel their booking, they can review their payment, they can see house rules or anything check-in, check-out dates. And what we have additionally done is we have by now also launched an insurance banner on that side. So the user can post booking, actually navigate there and purchase insurance on top of their booking. So yet another simple but effectful way for platform monetization. Overall, we are aiming to leverage the different entry points and interaction points that we have with our users throughout the entire user journey more. And this is how we are interacting here to really drive conversion and repeat. And on that note, I hand it back over to Thomas, who is actually going to talk us through the long-awaited deep dive on repeat. There we go.

Yes. Thanks a lot. Repeat, yes, I think we've heard the word a couple of times today already. So now I'm going to talk you a bit more through the details there. Why is repeat so important for us? Essentially because it drastically lowers the marketing cost that we have to pay in order to make a customer book. So as you can see on the left-hand side, it's actually 87% cheaper to serve or to sell to an already existing customer that has a history with us, compared to a newly acquired user. So yes, that's why we really focus on these repeat customers. Why are they so much cheaper? On the left-hand side, you can see, it's actually -- it's 2 main reasons. On the one hand side, the marketing mix that we need to apply is substantially different. And on the other side, the conversion of existing customers for us is higher. So in terms of the marketing channels, when we want to acquire a new customer, someone who doesn't really know us at all, we mostly need to go to paid search or other rather expensive methods. While serving existing customers, we can rely a lot on free traffic. Free traffic here is the direct traffic that we called out before, but especially e-mail marketing, push notifications, all of these free messages that we can convey to a customer and make them come back. And this is very important. So linked to what Caroline just said to post booking. What we see is really when a customer comes back to us after they're already booked, the likelihood that they're going to book again is increasing tremendously. So all of these free channels help a lot to make the customer come back and then purchase again with far lower marketing costs we need to spend. Now we use these logics in order to prepare a simulation, just in order for us to understand. Keeping all else being equal, just focusing on the shift in marketing mix by, yes, a shift in the relationship of on-site -- sorry, of existing and new customers. We see that, yes, there's a linear relationship of increase -- decreasing marketing costs and thus increasing margin. This is a result we did internally, where we can really identify, okay, if we increase our repurchase rate by a certain amount, how much will the margin increase in the same time? Don't want to go into too many details here. I guess what's important is, we are right now in the lower 1 -- 2-digit percentage numbers. And if you compare that to Airbnb, who published the repurchase share of around 69% in 2019, we can see how much potential there is out there. Lastly, showing how the repeat purchase developed over time. On the left-hand side, this is the absolute revenue that we see coming from repeat customers. And on the right-hand side, because the 50% is a big number. But in the same time, you heard we are growing quickly anyways. So just increasing the absolute revenue from repeat customers is only part of the story, but we need to focus on the share on our overall revenue to really understand how much more efficient we get over time. And there we can see, in the last year, we grew this share by 54% compared to around 30% in the last year. So this is actually the flywheel effect that you can see here, right? It's not only that we are growing the repurchase share over time, but it's actually growing with an increasing number. Now what are we going to do to really keep our customers loyal and make them come back? This is now, again, the link to our tech part and to what Mahendra already said. So when we want to understand our customer, and we want to show them the really relevant objects to them and inspire them for the next holidays days. The more we know from a customer, the better we can serve them, right? So the key is really to understand what our customer wants, which kind of use case they have and then related to the use case actually show them the right content. So that's what we are building currently just on top of showing offers. It's, yes, I would say, more inspirational content which can either be destination-based, if you know exactly where someone wants to go. It can be object based. So yes, I guess you will see in the next presentation, a lot of what great offers we actually have to offer. It can be experience-based, amenity-based and occasion-based. And all of these different types of content, we link exactly to the user who is interested in this kind of content. And thus, yes, improving the understanding of our customer and increasing the conversion rate. That much for the demand side. Happy to take any questions.

Wolfgang Specht from Berenberg. One question from my side. For sure, you're trying to find the best inventory for each individual customer. But what about -- you also have duties on the inventory side. So you also need to have a certain filling rate per inventory or at least for customer cluster maybe an inventory holder that has several objects? So how do you do that matching that you do not overbook 1 inventory and completely under book some other inventory?

I think the partner team to comment on that in more detail how the conversation with our partners go. In most of the cases, I'm not aware that we have these really goals per partner and per-object type of them. So for us, it's really -- yes, if we make better offers to our customers and they convert quickly, yes, actually, we fill the demand early on, right? And then we tried to actually make them purchase even more, right? So for example, if they already booked the summer holidays, then the goal for us is to see, "Okay, they booked the summer holidays already. We know what they booked, so we know, they live in this area. They tend to travel there. They might have a family or maybe they have a dog, so we can serve them as a very concrete offer. So that they keep on booking more." So it's not just selling this main holiday occasion but really inspiring them to purchase more. So in that sense, we should be able to fill even more inventory. Mahendra to comment...

I wanted to add some more context. So what I meant with user-centricity. We have what we call as an ensemble approach in machine learning itself. So we try to be as user-focused as possible because if you drive more bookings, then it will eventually drive more demand or supply basically. It's not about 1 or 2 specific objects because a partner usually has more objects. If we drive more bookings, then we try to identify what inventory works and doesn't work. And this also is a good indication to say, okay, what we can improve. These are insights that we give to the partner saying, "Hey, look, your images should be good, your whatever price should be lower." So we try to give these insights and actually bring the entire supplies utilization much higher.

Yes, just on payments. Can you just remind me in terms of the relationship? Do you have merchant acquirers as well and do you have any idea in there as a go between, if you like, between yourselves and the end payment provider? And can you just remind us how that works? And also, do you have any plans to expand payment methodologies beyond the [ 12 ]. And maybe, I guess, just my experience. When you're booking holidays tend to do on credit cards just because you get that kind of the insurance around, if things go wrong, maybe how much of the business goes through just the normal payment rails around Visa Mastercard? Is it the vast majority? And all these are other add-ons? I know in certain markets like in the Netherlands is different, but maybe if you could just touch on that as well.

Yes, absolutely. I'm happy to do so. Actually, out of curiosity, what is your home market, so where you're coming from? Yes. There you guys. So the U.K. actually has a very strong likelihood to book with credit cards. So what we are really seeing is that local trend, depending on the individual market dynamics. You have pointed out that actually correctly already. So it depends on the very individual markets, which payment methods hold which majority. But if you wanted to look at it overall, globally, for sure credit cards, if you narrow it down to Europe, the split becomes ever so slightly more differentiated, but credit cards are still in the lead. So that in general, and you have asked about our payment setup. So we do indeed work with payment service providers that are external because I'm to go itself and the group, we don't hold the money license. So also for the security of our users and anything data protection, we are working with payment service providers that are processing the payment and they are integrated with our marketplaces.

The expansion to other payment methodologies, if you're moving to other markets. Is that something that's important? Or do you think you're kind of where you need to be?

Absolutely. So we are continuously actually evaluating the market for any new local payment methods that are being launched. And with any market that we are expanding into. So you have heard Patrick talking about us having acquired and now also launched e-domizil on our white label technology. So for the e-domizil brands in Switzerland, we took a on deep dive on which payment methods would be most relevant for the Swiss market. So with these expansions that we are driving for the group, we are also continuously evaluating our payment method performance.

Also, sorry, just on the cancellation add-on, can you just talk through the economics of that? And is it -- are these add-on opportunities material? What's the customer proposition there?

Yes, absolutely. How much did they pay? That's very delicate information. No, there are different models for this. So either you work with providers that have a very fixed fee or you work with providers that have relative share. We are aiming so that our pricing is competitive in the industry, really what you are seeing in other platforms such as [indiscernible], for example, we are on par or below that. Generally, when it comes to the economics of the product, we see great potential in this. And I've spoken about the different entry points to that product across the user journey. So we definitely see substantial potential in it, and we have seen great conversion results already.

We also received a question from our virtual audience. Volker Bosse from Baader Bank is asking about travel booking websites are developing further to the next level with additional services. So for example, offering dynamic packaging, meaning the individual and flexible combination of accommodations with flights and services, like insurances. This dynamic packaging, something you also will have on your agenda and to be developed soon.

So we are generally, again, continuously evaluating the market and what would make sense for our platform. So we have recently launched our pilot when it comes to insurances. We are building up on that offering now on our platform and are generally open also to other opportunities. When it comes to dynamic packaging, this is something that we could definitely consider in the future, but it's not on the immediate horizon.

I just wanted to ask for some detail about the lifetime customer value chart. In particular, I think the 2021 cohort showed quite a steep improvement after like a few months. That wasn't visible in the prior cohort. So just wondering if the most recent users are somewhat more valuable and why?

Yes. Actually, it's a part of what we saw before is corona. So when you see the other ones being flat, especially from '18/'19, '19/'20. Right after 1 year, we will be roughly running the corona period. So there, you don't see that spike. But then the other one, it's mostly 12 months after the first bookings really the yearly holiday patterns and then you see a steeper increase. So I would expect actually the steeper increase to be the normal after corona.

And maybe to add. Yes, I think like we had a long kind of investment as you might remember, '21 in the on-site bookings. So on-site booking increased a lot. And even like as you saw, it was on-site CAV, but also like the -- we invested a lot more into these customers and getting more of these customers and also improving the customer experience for them. So this is also then reflected in the cohort like going again, good in 2022, which also you see then in the repeat customer bookings and so on and so on. So you basically see it throughout like the whole customer lifetime value that already this investment from 2021 is then having a steeper uplift. [Break]

So we are now back from our coffee break, and we have our partner team here on stage, who will give you a nice update on our partner strategy, and I welcome Valentin, our COO; Charlotte, our Director of partnerships as well as Inga, our Director SaaS products.

Good. And so a warm welcome from my side as well. We are excited to take you into the partner deep dive together with my dear colleagues, Charlotte and Inga. We are excited to tell you something more about these amazing properties that you might occasionally dream of when you think of your next vacation. But making 1 thing clear in the beginning is, if you are running a vacation rented business, and you want to be successful with it, you will want to work with HomeToGo. Because just like we've heard before, it is an incredibly diversified and fragmented market. We have well over 100,000 participants in this market, all offering different services but all significantly lacking standards, common technology and data, and many also lacking finding the right customer. We, however, solve these key pain points of major market participants. Major market participants, we, for us, segment into 3 groups. We are talking about online travel agencies, the OTAs as our partners. We are talking about property managers, and we are talking about hosts. For each of these groups, we have amazing solutions that help them not only to be better by themselves, but to participate in this global market environment. We are starting off with access to highly attractive domestic as well as international travelers that we bring to each of these groups. We are continuing with providing features as well as infrastructure. That would be just what we heard from payment to image beautification, natural language processing or customer service options that help our partners being better in collaborating with us. And third, we're enabling them in many more ways. So as OTAs benefit from property managers and hosts from us being brought to their pages. At the same time, we are empowering our properties managers and hosts to even do so and to participate in this global and online market, making it quick. For online travel agencies, we are bringing incremental customers, supply that we add through our solutions, as well as data. Property managers benefit from more bookings, attractive bookings and can leverage HomeToGo's technology solutions. For hosts, we enable them at all to participate in the online market in the modern world, that it be cross channel management and many other solutions that you will hear about shortly. So one thing is clear, and that is, we amaze our partners. And with that, handing over to my dear colleague, Charlotte.

Thank you. And hi, everyone, also from my side. My name is Charlotte. And shortly talking a bit more about how we amaze our partners. So we are trying to solve some of the main pain points that these partners have in their everyday life. And when I talk to these partners, they often bring up a couple of very dominant factors. One is that we bring them bookings. But not only do we bring them many bookings, which is extremely important, but more important is, what kind of bookings do we drive them? And here, what stands out also apart from other bigger players in the market is that HomeToGo drive extremely attractive customers to their websites and extremely valuable bookings to them. So how are these bookings valuable? With a 7-day average length of stay, we drive very, very high basket sizes. Why is this important? It is important because it means each booking drives more value for them. And more value ultimately means higher revenues. And with that, also lowering operational costs, especially for costs that only happen once per bookings. Let's think about, for example, cleaning costs, right? More bookings, more cleaning costs. So it's very valuable to have high booking values and long length of stays. Another thing that they often mention to us on the other side is that those bookings are coming in much advance. So often we see, or we have an average booking window of more than 90 days. Why is that important? It allows for planning security and financial security as well as occupancy security. So we not only drive high basket sizes, which each of the bookings that we bring to our partners but they also often bring up that it's super great that these bookings come in early because they can actually plan ahead and can take measures to drive more big bookings, maybe in times with less bookings. And lastly, this is only amplified and shown in these steps is that the customers we drive are special kind of customers because 70% of our customers are older than 35 years. And also, we have a very high international share, adding to the security and to the diversity of our guests. So this is 1 thing that really sticks out for our partners. But what also often comes up is the fact that we cater to their individual business needs. So we acknowledge that they all have these diverse business models that Valentin just highlighted in the prior slide. And basically, we cater to their individual needs. Why is this is so important? Because we want to grow together as partners. So for example, looking here at 1 quote that we have from a leading property manager in the U.S., it really shows, "Allowing them to stick to their cancellation policies especially looking at the last couple of years, brings them security to their business, but also caters to the needs, again, of their partners and the homeowners." And this is something that we see with great quotes that we have with long-lasting partnerships. Someone like Michael from HHD Group into Home [ Interchile ] is someone that we've worked with for a very long time, and we're continuously driving this collaboration even after so many years. And 1 thing that they, for example, value is that we have let them keep their guests' communication, right? So they can also strengthen their partnerships with their guests moving forward. So all of this together, amazing guests as well as individualized solutions to their platforms or to our platform and to their inventory, allows for really hassle-free bookings that drive a high value to them. So what does that mean? It ultimately means that we see this as an interesting and attractive package to our partners, that really caters to their individual pain points and needs. And this is something that shows in the numbers because what we've seen over the last 3 years, we have tripled the amount of partners that we work for -- work with from 20,000 to 60,000 partners. And this is also even more signaled by the fact that we drive higher value and higher revenues for our company with each of these bookings with a take rate increase over the last 3 years of more than 50%. Seeing here, we are right now at an all-time high of 9.7% tech rate, which is also coming from the fact that more and more partners that we bring to our platforms already use on-site solutions with us. And thus also again, drive higher and deeper integrations and more value. Ultimately, this amount of partners led to the fact that we now cater more than 15 million offers -- let's see, there they are, 50 million offers to our users. And this is something that, again, our partners can amaze our customers or guests with. Handing over back to Valentin.

Thank you. And with this, we get to the emotional part. Because as a marketplace, you just saw it from the very first slide of Patrick, we are the deal makers. We are the matchmakers between supply and demand. And when you're thinking about your next vacation, you have a certain dream, and the stream usually starts when you see the very first picture, the very first offer card, you start dreaming and you're already setting yourself in the scene of how it will be once you get there. Once you get to this dream, to that HomeToGo that is just yours. And it can be whatever you want it to be because we have it all. It can be in the summer as well as it can be in the winter. It can be just by yourself, with your significant other, with your family or even with a bigger group of friends. It can be somewhere hidden in the woods, can be at the beach. It can be just something really nice where you're proud to take Instagram photos for and share them with your crowd. Yes? It can be something, however, also where you're just all by yourself and watch the polar lights. Whenever you see these pictures, whenever you dream of being there, this is when you should think of HomeToGo because these are all properties that are supplied to us from small partners of the 60,000 you just saw on the previous slide. However, not just amazing properties. What is equally important to us is that these kind of pictures are backed up by a really nice value for money. And so with an amazing value for money offer around the world. It doesn't matter if you're in Croatia, if we're talking about Switzerland, if you're talking about Hawaii. We have Norway, Italy or the Baltic Sea for your annual vacation. We'll have you covered, and we make sure that in these direct relationships with over 60,000 partners, we make sure that our small partners and us, we get a really, really good price together for this highly attractive group of customers. Because with someone who's willing to stay 7 days on average, you're willing to make it better price than just for 3 nights, yes? Because you significantly save on operational costs. And we can go all this -- all the way. It doesn't matter. Our small partners are supplying our solutions if you want to go camping. We have, from many small partners, over hundred castles on our website when you ever want to sit on a throne, or if you simply want to be away, want to be away, somewhere amazing, some way unique, something that just feels amazing. And it's great that all of these properties that you just saw are coming from small partners. This is underlining the point that we are not dependent on large partners. Yes? Even if we bring together the largest 3 partners, and we would all turn them off from tomorrow on, on a global level, we would not even lose 1/4 of our inventory. If we look at our stronghold markets, just taking Croatia as an example, not even 10% of our inventory would disappear. So these amazing accommodations get provided from a huge variety of partners that we have strong bonds with, that we are constantly further elaborating on. So early in the product presentations, but what you will also see about just now, next coming up. However, there is another tweak to the smaller partners. Of course, if it makes sense for us and for our customers, it also makes sense for them, and it's all monetizes in both ways. We can see that while we do have very large partners that you see on the further right, the high revenues per offer are actually generated among the small to medium size of partners where they make a lot of money, where we make a lot of money, where we are really relevant to each other. And just as a nice little sneak peek on the right. This is our champion of 2022, the house that actually we made the most revenue with. Well, you saw the DACH market. So it's not a secret, it's on Majorca. So -- but we see we have amazing inventory that we can support small partners with, that equally is valuable to us in a financial sense, but there is more that we do for them because -- and I end at because?

Because we've seen now that we amaze our partners in the way that we cater to the needs. We also amaze our guests in the way that we cater to their needs with the diverse inventory and properties that we have. But how can we continue this growth together even further? And for this technology comes in quite handy and it's just like in line with what we heard in the prior presentations, is that data and technology are really key drivers to keep growing together with our partners and ultimately create more value for the guest, but also for the customer and partner. So one data point that we always get from our partners. You all see it every day and it's very vivid on our pages is basically the image. Why is an image so important to the guest? It is the first thing that they see, especially the primary image, and it is the entry point into the booking funnel, right? So you've heard before, we are processing more than 3.5 billion offers to create logic around this. And this is actually our in-house build algorithm concerning image performance. So what does this technology help us with? Again, repeating, but we want to highlight it because it's really quite amazing because it is such an important factor for a guest and ultimately also driving revenues and value for our partners. On the left-hand side of the slide, you see how this algorithm manages to improve colors, the lighting or also just the general scale of the image. And this leads to a higher attractiveness and there's higher conversions for our guests. The second example that you see here is, the algorithm allows us to detect objects within the image. And this has 2 key factors that we derive from this. On the one hand side, we can enrich data by the fact that we simply now know, this offer, for example, has a TV, which is maybe not something that we've known before. On the other hand side, it enables us also to understand what kind of image this is. So is this an image of a bedroom or is this an image from the outside of the house? And as you can imagine, since I mentioned it before as well, the primary image is very crucial in driving this customer journey. And here, we've seen crazy impact when we switch the primary impact -- the primary image from, for example, a bathroom image to pool image, makes sense? But it's very great if you can see it also in the data afterwards. And lastly, this algorithm enables us as well to detect duplicates. Why is this important? You've seen the slide, we have plenty of diverse partners. And sometimes they have exactly the same offer. But it's important that we don't show the offer 5 times to the user on the website, right? So in that case, we detect duplicates and with this are able to provide the highest converting offer to our guests and with this also the most attractive image. So images is a very crucial data point that we receive from our partner, and we are not only driving information, but we're also driving an experience with it. Moving forward, a second point of information that we get from our partners is text. And text can mean a title, but a text can also mean a description or something that we simply receive in the connection that they provide us with. So here, we use natural language processing-based text analysis to enable multiple different factors that, again, enhance the user experience, but also really improve the offers that our partners give us. And how is that so? On the one hand side, we see that we now can drive or generate more meaningful titles to our users. Why is that important? Because something like Itaca 043R, not naturally very attractive and also doesn't really tell us a lot about this offer in the end. So what we've done is we, on the one hand side, seen the description, the word beach, which is something very important to a guest. And on the other hand side, also see information like the 200 square meters that you see on the left-hand side, which allows us to derive the knowledge that this is a spacious offer. And with this, we now have a beautiful title that actually says Spacious villa by the beach side, which is a lot better than what we originally received from our partners. Another example is the fact that we can enrich the amenities that we show. Again, we might get some information, but other information we simply don't get in a structured manner. And so this tool allows us to basically derive additional information. And with this also, again, the user journey has improved. Lastly, we get information that maybe the partner didn't even think about to highlight and send to us in a structured manner. You've seen sustainability is a key factor right now for the user, but something that we don't yet get very structured from our partners. And ultimately, something like 100% electricity from renewable energy can make it something super, super conversion-driving and important that, on one hand side, caters to the need of a partner -- of a guest, but on the other hand side, also drives value for the partner. So we've seen that we have great technology that comes to an already great selection of offers that we have. But what this really means in the end is we can use technology to drive performance. And this is now a prime example, which we love to show, and it's very cool to see because ultimately, what we did this year, we managed to multiply the bookings between 2017 and this quarter, this year -- the last quarter this year by 140x. So you've seen an incredible performance increase over the last year, primarily driven by technology and by our on-site booking functionalities. Ultimately, this really all goes hand-in-hand because it shows that the relationship that we have together with our partners increases their performance. And it's also something that is visible in the much mentioned on-site share that we see on our platforms nowadays, which is by now more than half of the entire booking volume. And this is something that now also got externally attached to or just recognized just recently by Skift Magazine, which pointed out that we were able, together with our partners, to grow also in our business model forward by saying, we are the only ones that really mentioned to move from a meta-search model really into a booking model and growing together with our partners towards successful business. And with that, you've seen how technology enhances performance of partners on our platforms, but also around our marketplace.

So, good afternoon. My name is Inga, and I work with our Partner Solutions team and would like to give you a little glimpse of what we're doing in this part of our business. So to pick up again on where Patrick left you in the beginning of today on this, what is it that we're actually doing here? How do we approach providing these solutions for our partners? First, we leverage our technology from the marketplace and make it accessible for our partners externally. The classic example is that we white label our own website and hence, give partners a chance to provide such an offering to their customers as well. Then in a second step, what we do is we develop and integrate new supply solutions around our marketplace, also through M&A. Patrick already mentioned earlier today, for example, Smoobu is one of these acquisitions. It's an all-in-one SaaS solution for smaller partners that helps them to better connect to demand marketplaces and hence, optimize the quality of the data of their properties on these demand marketplace for them, obviously driving the usage of their inventory. A second acquisition that we've recently made SECRA, a property management solution for agencies and destinations, which actually has multichannel distribution integrated. And then the third building block in how we're doing this is actually that we combine the native technology solutions from the marketplace with these new supply solutions. And hence, by combining them, multiplying the impact and the effect of both. Just imagine, what it can yield actually if you take, for example, SECRA's PMS system and you combine this with the inventory enhancement, AI solutions that we have that you've seen presented by Mahindra and Charlotte today. What is the result from this? We drive the growth of our subscription and service revenues profitably and quickly. So if you look at what we've achieved since we started this, year-on-year, we actually saw fantastic growth rates, 66% in the first year, almost 40% in the second. And this year, year-to-date Q3, we're already on track to outperform this with 165% growth year-over-year. The result of this is that we are actually able to scale our subscription and service revenues as part of overall group revenues really quickly, already being at 13% Q3 year-to-date this year. So this is what we have -- what we get from it. But to dive deeper on how we do it. Patrick already mentioned that, first of all, if we acquire, we acquire EBITDA-profitable companies, which allows us to really look into how we integrate them and basically do this properly. But then to dive deeper in how we're actually doing it, whenever we choose to acquire a solution, we not only go after EBITDA-positive companies, but also companies that have really healthy business fundamentals and that we can scale quickly and even further once we integrate them in the group. Smoobu, our 2021 acquisition that we have been working with for 18 months now, actually, has been brought to -- with the management team, together with us working with them to almost 100% year-on-year MRR growth year-to-date Q3 this year. And this not by frenzily buying, this MRR growth, but actually backed by a very, very strong customer base. As you can see from the DBNER end of Q3 this year of 148% and also the NRR of 130%. At the same time, we have also brought the business in shape to actually invest further in growth in the year to come, as you can see from our magic number above 1 equally end of September this year. Now business fundamentals. Obviously, there is always something very, very specific to each solution that we buy. But also here, we are looking at least after one thing that they all have in common, which is really, really important to us, which is that actually the solutions we acquire really resonate with our partners. And they do so in actually tackling core pain points these partners have and on this, providing them tangible benefits, convenience benefits. But also, as you can see, for example, in the case of SECRA, real monetary benefits that partners obviously love. And before I actually dive deeper into explaining to you what the partners love, I would like to have our partners speak for themselves. [Presentation]

Wonderful. And like we managed to amaze our partners, our partners have managed to amaze our guests. And yes, we simply love our partners. And for everything, particularly the nice and warm recommendations that we got across so many different brands and across so many different business models. But let me give you your last key takeaways, what you should remember from the session you just heard. First, we have solutions to a very large and fragmented market. This starts with amazing customers that we bring to our partners, and it goes down to Advanced Software solutions that can benefit the entire ecosystem of vacation rentals. Second, we never stop getting better. We grow in partners, we grow in take-rate, we grow in on-site revenues. Third, we are vastly independent from large providers because just all of these amazing and inspiring accommodations that you saw are provided to us from small, amazing partners that we have long-year relationships with and that we can offer for a great value for money. Fourth, our partner solutions and therewith, the subscription and service business and revenues profitably grow with a great resonance from all our partners that you just heard. And with these 4 key takeaways, I would open the round now for any sort of questions that you may have. Thank you very much.

Do we have a question here from the audience? Otherwise, I would also have one from the web.

Just wondering, obviously, Smoobu is doing really well. But in terms of how -- its coverage of the market. Can you just explain -- are there any other solutions that you might need to cover all kind of suppliers, if you like? Or is this -- can this product work for almost everybody that that's on the platform?

So Smoobu being a young solution also is still at the beginning of its life, I would basically say, very much at current following the geographic footprint that overall HomeToGo is displaying, which also means that actually with Smoobu, we can still do the same journey as HomeToGo group overall can do. The good thing about Smoobu is, the way the solution is built, it allows us to really play it as a global product. So it's not particularly tailored, let's say, for a deep dive on the DACH market, but it actually really caters to the needs globally of partners, of homeowners specifically. And hence, with this, actually, the synergies we can create with HomeToGo expanding the footprint. We can also leverage this for further expanding Smoobu's footprint.

So we got the question again from Volker Bosse, Baader Bank. And Volker would like to know, given that the travel booking market is, yes, getting more and more intensifying, peers of us are expanding to the offers into the alternative accommodations market, too. And how do we make sure that we have the best inventory to offer? And do we see any dilution of exclusiveness of our inventory?

So the -- I think the partnerships that we have, and you see it through our growth as well as through the growth that we drive with our partners is continuing and driven by the great and trustful relationships that we have. Of course, supply has many options to fill their calendars. But they are, of course, looking for who drives the best booking to my calendar. And I think this is where we are strongly advanced, and why we are a primary source and will stay a primary source because we cater to these long stays. We do not provide customers that ask you 10 questions via a chat just before booking, but we have attractive customers with long stays that book well in advance. And that customers -- that our partners like to see coming back. So we will stay one of the primary channels.

Someone here from the audience would like to raise a question.

So earlier, you talked about how e-domizil is being integrated and obviously, the acquisition has been completed for a few more months than SECRA. But wanted to ask about SECRA, what's the plan? And anything that you can share in terms of development for that business?

Sure. So SECRA caters pretty much to the middle part that you saw in my interest, so property managers. It's a solution tailored to property managers that allows them to operate and distribute their vacation rentals as well as to destinations. So let's say, islands that have strong tourism offices that are also seeking solutions to -- for the tourists that are coming to provide them a booking platform. This is what they are doing. And we can, of course, with all the technology solutions that you heard, leverage these kind of activities and features and infrastructure that they have without needing to create a total overlap or integrating it entirely. We are seeking the maximization of synergies between the companies.

So we received another question online. And we got asked, do we see any M&A potential, which would fit our parcel in terms of our subscription services? Is there anything still missing in our portfolio?

I think ultimately -- so I can imagine a world of solutions we can still add. And we actually have -- let me put that way, Smoobu is a marketplace solution that offers integrations to partners, which for us is obviously a very interesting play in field to see what works, what does not work. And I think we have good ideas in mind. But on precise targets, I would rather refer to Patrick or maybe Steffen taking up that question later on. There is definitely still a lot of room to grow. As I just mentioned, we have ideas.

And we are opportunistic and quick when we need and want to be. So stay excited.

And as we are basically like working with everyone in the industry, so we are for sure also know what could be interesting for us in the future. And as we said also during our IPO, we will continue also with our M&A strategy. So looking basically to add what fits our strategy in terms of supply, but especially also in terms of service subscription solutions.

Do we have one more question here? If not, then I would like to ask Steffen on stage.

Okay. So also a warm welcome from my side. Happy to be here. And yes, let's take a little financial deep dive. So before we look into the future, let's just quickly look at our track record so far. And if you listened to our earnings call earlier today, you are used to these numbers, but as you can see, we have been growing our booking revenues steadily even during COVID times when some of the market participants have rather declined, we continued to grow. So there's like a strong growth through the past years. Our on-site booking revenues, and Patrick has shown that already in his strategy update, have grown even faster. And we have improved profitability over time. Looking at our revised upgraded guidance now at an EBITDA midpoint of minus 16% compared to minus 22%, which we had last year. And we did that while continuing to work on our strategy. So scaling the on-site business, increasing the take-rate step by step, of course, helped by the strong on-site business and scaling the subscription and service business, as outlined by Inga. Now looking ahead, you heard it before. I mentioned it in the earnings call, Patrick mentioned it, this is the #1 goal of the company, achieving adjusted EBITDA breakeven in the next year, and we are very confident to achieve that goal. Why are we so confident? Well, as already mentioned, we have already achieved adjusted EBITDA positive in our biggest market DACH, which was like EUR 70 million of IFRS revenues in the first 9 months. You heard it when we announced the acquisition of both e-domizil and SECRA, they are operating profitable -- full profitable for quite some years. So we are in a very good position in the DACH market. In the rest of Europe, we are not yet profitable. But when we look at it on a market by market, there are some markets, for example, the Dutch market, pretty close to the German market, not only by geography, but also pretty close in terms of achieving the profitability. North America, you heard it, huge potential. We see lots of opportunities there. But there, we are still investing. So how are we getting there? You have seen that before by Patrick, we have top-line measures, we have marketing efficiency measures and operating measures. Now what kind of impact does it have? When we look at the consolidation of the contracts, et cetera, we see what kind of contracts, for example, e-domizil had what we had, et cetera. And that has about an impact of around roughly 1 percentage points of EBITDA margin, so relatively low. Then we look at the add-on services that were explained by Carol, be it payment, be it insurance, et cetera, that already has an impact of more towards 2 to 3 percentage points. The biggest driver of reaching the profitability was the part that Charlotte mentioned earlier on, increasing the marketing efficiency, increasing the repeat customers. And for the ones of you who have listened to our earnings calls already in the last year, we have invested quite a lot of money in our on-site business. We have invested quite a lot of money in getting people to use our app. But now is the time where we see that this is starting to pay off, and that will be the big driver in turning to EBITDA breakeven in the next year. And then finally, the operating measures. We have already been living a quite frugal life as a start-up company and have been very cost-conscious. For example, when I was joining HomeToGo, that was in 2020, at the time when there was COVID. And what impressed me most in my first interviews with Patrick was how cost-conscious the company was and how quickly they decrease the cost when there was not a real visibility what would happen. And that just amazed me and that we continue. We were very careful with hiring new people, and we continue to be hiring new people, but only if it's really strategic of importance. And we also have a lot of measures in place. So if worse comes to worse, we know what to do to achieve operating profitability. So what does it mean in terms of when we look at the P&L? Our gross margin will continue to stay around 95%. That is -- server cost going a little bit up, a little bit down, depending on the traffic. But there is not much change to be expected. Sales and marketing costs last year, almost 100% of our revenues; this year, going down to 90%; next year, going down to 70%. So this is the biggest driver, again, driven by repeat business. Product development as well as admin cost, we will see a gradual decline based on economies of scale as we continue to grow. That will help us to reach around minus 16% of EBITDA margin this year and breakeven next year. When we look more at the revenue and whoever you need to build a model, we also want to help you a little bit on what we're expecting. So booking backlog. I mentioned it in our earnings call, we are focusing right now at our booking backlog. The full focus is on getting bookings in -- with a check-in in '23. And we are investing money into that. I got the question early on in the earnings call. So how does that fit with your new guidance, the implied EBITDA margin for Q4 isn't really good? Yes, if you just look at the IFRS revenues, that is a fair point. But when you look at the booking revenues and when you will look at the booking revenues, you would see that we are constantly already building up a nice backlog. As I talk now, we have already more than EUR 20 million of booking backlog in our books, which, of course, help us because that's ultimately 100% margin for next year. Second point, the repeat demand. I will not stress it again, but this is, of course, also helping our revenue growth. Basket size. Although the U.S. inflation data today was a little bit better. So we might come to the end in terms of rising interest rates. But it will drive higher ADRs. And that, of course, will also help our revenues by higher basket size. Take-rate, we discussed it earlier on in our earnings call, we expect them to be more or less flat compared to what we have seen this year. That doesn't mean that we are not expecting them to grow. I will talk about it, what's the big driver of reaching our EUR 1 billion booking revenue growth. And as we mentioned in earlier calls before, when we look at new partners who have signed up recently, they already have a take-rate of more than 13%. And adding the add-on services that were mentioned before, even comes on top. So there's still a lot of room to grow, but we are not assuming that for next year. Quick reminder about the seasonality of our business because, again, it's a topic which constantly comes up when people look at our numbers. We have basically 2 halves. First half of the year, people make bookings. So in particular, in Q1, many people booked their summer holidays. But giving the Northern Hemisphere, it's not really a nice time to travel unless you go on an Easter holiday or unless you go skiing or you go to the Canary Islands. So lots of bookings in the first half of the year, relatively little IFRS revenues. And there, we are building up lots of booking backlog. In the second half of the year, that turns around. We realize revenues, as we just did today. We're announcing already EUR 70 million of IFRS revenues just in one quarter because in -- Q3 is always our biggest quarter. And then we are eating up on our backlog before we then by the end of Q4, building it up again. And you can see that here, the very right-hand side is just the Q3 number to put into perspective. And that, of course, also has an impact on our EBITDA margin. And as you can see, it's still -- in the first half, it's in the red and most likely will continue to be in the red in the first half of a given year because there, we will get the bookings, but not the check-ins. But as you can also see, it constantly keeps on increasing. So second half keeps on increasing. First half, the losses keep on getting smaller and smaller, and that will drive our overall profitability. So talked a lot about 2023. You will ask what's your expectation in terms of revenue growth. You know us by now, we are a little bit conservative. We want to play it safe. Therefore, we are internally having a goal of 15% to 25% of revenue growth. Could we achieve more? Yes. But then again, having all these uncertainties in the macro environment, recession, et cetera, we are very confident, and Patrick made that point very clear and vacation rental has done very well, be it the great financial crisis, be it the terrorist attack, be it COVID. So we are very confident to get there. But nevertheless, we want to play it a little bit safe in order to achieve that big goal of breakeven of 0% adjusted EBITDA margin. Looking at the next year, we expect to go back again to our long-term growth rate of 30% to 35%. And gradually increasing our profitability. So that 5% to 15%, you should read in a way that the 5% is more the margin we see for 2024, the 15% is more of the margin we see for 2025. Looking at cash generation. There's very little between EBITDA and free cash flow. So we have very little R&D -- we have very little CapEx. The kind of CapEx we have is a little bit laptops, mostly capitalized R&D. We are currently implementing SAP. So there's also some capitalization for the SAP implementation. The working capital, which is, as I mentioned before, the seasonality, quite significant during the year, but year-end to year-end, it more or less equals out. And then we had in the past and we might have in the future some cash outflow for the payment of taxes and social contributions coming out of the share-based compensation. But that's it. So once we achieve profitability on an EBITDA basis, we are pretty close. And then we will generate cash. Speaking about cash, we have a lot of cash. So we have by the end of September, cash of EUR 167 million, gross cash. When we look on a net-cash basis, it's more than EUR 145 million. So really strong cash position. And combined with reaching breakeven and profitability thereafter, that puts us in a very good position to use that cash. And what are we doing with the cash? Well, first, we will reinvest it in organic growth, profitable growth. We want to grow. We see a lot of opportunities to grow. Number one focus is to reach adjusted EBITDA breakeven and then to continue on our profitable path. But we will also want to grow. And if profitable acquisitions come along, like we did with the acquisition of e-domizil or SECRA, Smoobu, we will take use of it, but we are very disciplined in using the cash which we got from you as shareholders and make the best use of it. So what does that mean long term? You have seen that slide before from Patrick's part. Even if we reach EUR 1 billion of booking revenues by 2028 or '29 as which is our big goal, we still only have like a little bit more than 0.5% of the overall market for accommodation. So we are still really tiny, but that just shows you what kind of huge opportunity there is to grow and to get there. And to put that a little bit more into perspective, how to get from EUR 124 million of booking revenues last year -- this year, we are already way more ahead, to EUR 1 billion in 2028? So first of all, we will grow -- continue to grow our core markets. There is still a lot of room in the DACH market in the rest of Europe, et cetera. The U.S. expansion is huge. I mean just think about how big our DACH market is, how big the U.S. market is. And we are making the necessary steps to get that building up our partner network, building up supply and that is just opening up that opportunity. The take-rate expansion I mentioned. So just as a reminder, when you look at the big OTAs, they have a take-rate between 15% and 18%. We are, at the moment, year-to-date at 9.4%. So there's a lot to grow. And then finally, the subscription and service business. As Inga has mentioned, there are many opportunities, many more solutions we can roll out. Patrick has mentioned it when he talked about our technology and what does it mean in terms of white label solutions, et cetera. So there are many, many opportunities we can get. And EBIT payment, if it's add-ons or if it's maybe some additional profitable M&A, we will go for it, if it makes sense for you as the shareholders and for us as a company. And that gives us the comfort to reach that EUR 1 billion of booking revenues by 2028. Once we are there, what does it mean? So gross margin, also, if we had EUR 1 billion of booking revenues, we'll continue to be at that 95%. There will not be much change. Sales and marketing will go down even further because by that time, we have built further on-site customers, further repeat business. Charlotte has shown you that nice graph of where we were at the very left side where some of other players in the industry are significantly further to the right. Give us 6 more additional years, and we will get much, much closer to it. So that's a huge step in order to increase our marketing efficiency. Product development as well as admin will continue to go down together with economies of scale. And that will bring us to 35% roughly of adjusted EBITDA margin. And we get very often asked the question. So why is it 35%? Well, when we look at our own 10-year plan and our Excel sheet, you come to a higher number, but as we all know, once you have a business which is continuously producing 35%, you might also get some competition, which helps you or makes it harder to go beyond that. So that's our ambition for now. If we can get more, of course, we will go for it. So summarizing it before I hand over to Patrick and -- after your questions, of course. So we have delivered and we have scaled our business while we continuously improved our margins over time. We see, and we have already seen that this year that we have a higher marketing efficiency and that we continue to increase our marketing efficiency, mainly driven by repeat customers where we have invested a lot of money in building that up over the last 2 years. There are other measures in place which help us to reach that EBITDA breakeven in '23 and to deliver profitable growth thereafter. The opportunity for us is huge. And it will continue to be huge. It's a resilient market, and we are very confident to reach that EUR 1 billion of booking revenues by 2028. Once we are at scale, our marketplace is really built for high margins and high cash generations, and we are in a good place to be there. With that, I open up for your questions.

Steffen, Wolfgang Specht from Berenberg. We are aware that the U.S. is really important for your future growth. Can you give us some more indication how the contraction is, for example, how do you adding inventory in the country? Or can you give us an indication for how the costs for winning a new customer versus the DACH market?

So the -- we have a sales force on the ground in the U.S., and there was just a big trade fair in the U.S. and the kind of feedback and -- better way would have been Valentin because he was present there at the trade fair so he can give you more detail, but the kind of feedback we got from the partners there, being it existing partners, being it potential partners or being it future partners was very positive. And you remember from last year, the partners really value the kind of flexibility we offer them. And that step-by-step is helping us to increase that network. The cost of acquiring these customers and I assume you were talking more about the demand side or the partner acquisition?

More on the demand side.

More on the demand side. So that is also something which continues to go down. But at this point in time, it's still relatively high compared to the DACH region. One of the reason, of course, being that here, we have many opportunities also to cross-sell other opportunities, but we have a clear plan in hand in order to get there. But maybe Valentin wants to add on the partner acquisition?

There's not much that I can add, but I had a very travel-week 2 weeks ago in the Vegas at the largest trade of the VRMA for vacation rentals. And as Steffen already mentioned, the feedback and the resonance from already existing partners of ours was very positive. They see the same behavior of customers as they see it in Europe, however, in the U.S. because the operational part, the labor cost is so high for cleaning, maintenance, operation stuff, longer booking times are even more important for these partners, and they see the same from us. And if you look at what are the choices they have, we have even higher concentration on large OTAs in the U.S. So someone who cannot provide necessary young folks or hotel-used folks is very attractive to them. And yes, I think we were very successful at that conference. And of course, we are picking out the partners where we know that we have a certain attractive market at hand already from the demand side, that then if we fill it up with nice on-site supply, it will make this flywheel spin again where supply works with demand and the other way around.

We also got a question from our virtual audience, and they ask for clarification for our margin trajectory in the years 2024, 2025. If they read it correctly that we started the lower bound of 5% and work us up to 15% by 2025. Can you confirm that?

Correct. It's -- to maybe provide a little bit more color. Reaching the breakeven is a big step for us, but it's not the end. And the kind of measures we have in place in order to get there will continue to be implemented. And as we have seen it before, DACH is the biggest market for us, but we can continue to implement that also in other markets as the on-site share is growing, and that is increasing the repeat customer. And that, again, is increasing our marketing efficiency, that, again, is helping us to increase our margin. And then we'll be around 5% in 2024 and towards 15% in '25.

Just a follow up to this question, maybe to make us more comfortable about the step-up in the margin and conversely, the step down on the marketing expenses as a percentage of revenue. Can you maybe talk about what you've seen in Germany or in the DACH region, like just to make us more comfortable?

Yes. So when you think about our marketing costs in general, the traffic, the bookings, et cetera, we got from different buckets. Biggest bucket being the paid marketing, which is also responsible for the relatively high cost. But then we have the brand bucket where people just come to HomeToGo. We have the app bucket where people just come from using the app and then they have to repeat bucket. And what we have seen over the last years is how we have been able to increase that kind of bucket from time to time and from year-over-year, and that we will just continue. And now having had the investment into the on-site, into the app, et cetera. We now have a pretty big group where we can already see now by the kind of bookings we get, and it's still early because at this point in time in Q4, there are people who book for next year. That's why we have that high backlog, but the real time will, of course, come in Q1 when the majority of people are booking. But there, we can already see that the kind of repeat customer continues to increase. And that gives us the comfort to reach this, first, the breakeven next year. But given the trajectory we have seen over the years, already in '21, '22, what we expect for '23. There's no reason why it shouldn't go any further, like in '24 and '25, and that gives us the comfort. Again, remembering the slide that Charlotte has shown early on, we are still at the very far left side of the building, and there is a lot of players further, further right. So a lot of low-hanging fruit in front of us.

Just a quick one on take-rate, Steffen. So obviously, it's gone up incredibly fast and really impressively. But you're looking at flat for the -- is that flat for the next year? Is that -- because it's gone up so fast is a bit of consolidation to -- but can you maybe talk about the moving parts there? You've been conservative, et cetera?

I mean, ultimately, we are conservative. And the reason, as you mentioned, it has gone up quite fast. So there's always an element of cautiousness. But when we look at the actual contracts, so the contracts are getting higher and higher. So we are renegotiating contracts with existing partners to get higher take-rates or to have higher bonus scales, which was a big driver last year in Q4. And having achieved these bonus scales helps again to get a higher take-rate. In addition to that, I mentioned it, we get the new partners online. And one of my favorite example is a big partner who actually didn't want to become an on-site partner directly, but who was willing to pay us 11% as an offsite partner. Now we are very pragmatic about it. And if there's someone who's willing to pay us 11% as an offsite partner, we go for it.

So when looking at our target picture, where we say, okay, on average, we want to achieve 35% EBITDA margins. How would that look then on the specific regions? Do we see, for example, the DACH region above that 35%? What the markets are lagging there?

That is a good question. I have to admit, I haven't -- I don't have the detailed split of our profitability in 2028 by regions in my head. But in general, I would see that we make -- continue to have the highest margins in our DACH market, and we will continue to invest in markets where we still see lots of growth opportunities. So pretty much, yes.

And also longer term, how long would it take for us to ramp up the U.S. business to achieve a certain level of scale, which allows us then to achieve breakeven there be it 5 years, be 10 years? What do you think is feasible?

It's a question -- like, as always, we can achieve breakeven in the U.S. rather quickly if we want to. So by being very disciplined, by focusing on certain regions which are already having an attractive profitability. But that would come at the expense of growth. And we see a lot of opportunity in the U.S. market. So for the foreseeable future, we would rather see ourselves in an investing mode. So generating the profitability in DACH and rest of Europe in order to be able to continue to invest in the U.S. market. But if for whatever reason necessary, we need to achieve already profitability, we can do that very quickly by being really disciplined about our expense management.

Do we have here a question from the room?

I hand over to Patrick.

Thank you very much, Steffen. So, I hope you had a great Capital Markets Day with us. We have guided you a bit through not only what we see as the foundation for HomeToGo, but also what we have achieved, how we have achieved it and what we are looking for in the future. And how to achieve especially our next bit step in getting profitable next year. And so let me quickly summarize it again in my closing remarks. First of all, we operate in a resilient growth market, demonstrate our resilience throughout COVID-19 and are also well positioned for the current macro environment, not only the market vacation rentals, but especially also HomeToGo what we have proven in the past, also how fast we can react in any kind of environment. Secondly, we have built a really strong franchise. So we have a global footprint. And we are, as a proof of that, also in our first market that we opened, Germany, the most visited platform for vacation rentals. Thirdly, we have the global -- the world's largest selection of vacation rentals. And as you have seen today, a lot of technology that has already proven to work on our marketplace and helps us like driving this massive amount of 50 million offers from more than 60,000 partners through our system and provide the customer, the traveler with that specific property. That home that they are looking for to accomplish their use case and to really get to their vacation that they want. And this core of technology allows us also to build solutions for the supply -- for our supply partners around our marketplace and combine it also with solutions that we develop newly around our marketplace. So really paving our way for becoming the industry's operating system. And fourth, we have a strong execution track record. You have seen it with all the details with the different presentations. But to remember you again, one of our strategic ambitions was on-site. And since 2018, we grew it 20x, much, much faster than any other alternative accommodation business that is around there. And we upgraded guidance several times since our IPO, as Steffen said, we are conservative. But for sure, we want to rather over-deliver than under-deliver. And so we are very proud that we were capable to over-deliver since we have been going IPO. And also, you heard throughout the presentations, DACH as a further proof point is already adjusted EBITDA positive today. And also was part of our record Q3 this year, including highest profitability ever recorded for the company. And for the future, we are very well prepared. We have a very strong cash position that we can use for organic growth, but also for further M&A. And this all together makes us very well positioned to breakeven on adjusted EBITDA level next year, which is our common goal as a company, and we have shown you today what are all the different levers that will help us getting there. And with that, I would conclude our Capital Markets Day for today. Thank you my colleagues for presenting all the details around our parts of the business. And if there are any further questions, I'm happy to take them now as well. Thank you. Okay. If there are no questions, then we end it for today. And thank you very much for coming over either in person or virtually. And see you, hopefully, next time, and thank you very much.