Whitbread plc (WTB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's Whitbread Q1 '26 Trading Update Call. My name is Seb, and I'll be the operator for your call today. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand over to Dominic Paul to begin. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Seb. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining the call for our quarter 1 trading update this morning. I'm joined by Hemant Patel, our Group CFO, and we look forward to answering your questions shortly. Hopefully, you've had a chance to review the quarter 1 release this morning. I'm going to start with a brief overview for those who haven't seen it, and then we'll open up the call for Q&A. Before I touch on the first quarter's performance, I wanted to just say a few words on the excellent progress we're making on our key strategic initiatives that underpin our 5-year plan that is set to deliver incremental profit of at least GBP 300 million by full year '30, and generate more than GBP 2 billion for shareholders. In the U.K. we're extending our market-leading position through a combination of network expansion, our Accelerating Growth Plan and our ongoing program of commercial initiatives that mean we are performing ahead of the market. We are on track to deliver the GBP 60 million of cost savings that we have guided for this year as part of our ongoing efficiency program. And in Germany, the scale, quality and value of our offer is raising our brand awareness at the same time as our hotels and brands are continuing to mature. As a result, we remain on course to hit profitability this year. Now let me turn now to our quarter 1 performance. As you will all see from the market data, trading in the first quarter, which ran from the 29th of May, was against a softer demand backdrop, and this meant that U.K. accommodation sales and RevPAR were both back 2% versus last year. However, thanks to the positive impact of our commercial programs, this represented a meaningful outperformance versus the mid-scale and economy sector on both accommodation sales and RevPAR, and our RevPAR premium increased to GBP 5.63. Our outperformance was across both London and the regions and our particularly strong outperformance in London was down to a higher weighting in Central London, where demand has remained relatively robust and where we have been adding more rooms. In Germany, our business is continuing to perform strongly. Total accommodation sales grew by 16% in constant currency with our commercial initiatives and the increasing maturity of our estate underpinning strong RevPAR growth. Whilst the whole estate outperformed the market in Q1, we are particularly pleased with our cohort of more established hotels, which again delivered strong RevPAR growth, up 17%, reaching EUR 72 in the period. While our normal booking patterns mean that forward visibility is somewhat limited, our forward booked position is still ahead of last year and with more of our commercial initiatives in train, we remain confident in being able to stay ahead of the market. I'll now hand back to Seb to host the Q&A. As you know, we have our AGM today, and we only have half an hour this morning for questions. Given it's only a few weeks since our last update, could I please ask you to limit your questions to 2 per person. Thank you very much. Thanks, Seb.

First question comes from Vicki Stern at Barclays.

Just firstly coming on the continued outperformance in the U.K. So obviously, quite a turnaround from last year. I think you were underperforming slightly last year in the market. Now it's sort of well over 1% in terms of outperformance. Just what sort of changed last year to this year in terms of those commercial levers? What in particular is driving the outperformance and, obviously, your level of confidence that, that can sustain? And then second one on Germany. Obviously, you're sort of ramping up nicely, reiterating the targets for the year in terms of profit. I think we've seen a bit of a softening in the market data recently. Just curious your sort of context around what's going on in the market? Your level of confidence in sort of being able to still get to those levels of profit if the market backdrop is just slightly against you.

Yes. Thanks, Vicki. Yes, I mean, we're really pleased about the commercial performance in the U.K. and the outperformance. And I'm sure we'll get questions today about the RevPAR outlook. And as I just said, the market has been slightly softer. Obviously, that [ stayed ] data that we're looking at. I think the really encouraging thing is when RevPAR turns positive, which it will at some point, you can never predict exactly when, but when market RevPAR turns positive, I think we're setting ourselves up really well to take advantage of that. And it's not by chance. It's because we've got a really, really clear set of commercial initiatives in place. We've made a lot of changes to how we're running and operating our business commercially. We think of it in 3 broad buckets with a clear underpin of a really strong brand, which we continue to strengthen. In the U.K., our brand awareness and preference is super high, well over 90%, but also a really consistent quality guest delivery in our hotels. That for us is the underpin. And then there are kind of 3 broad ways I think about the business. The first way is we've really sharpened up our approach to CRM customer relationship management and using the data that we've got. And we've got pretty much all of the data from all of our guests, and that is a big advantage. So I'll give you an example. We've done a lot of work on communication to our customers about nudging customers to rebook. So to increase frequency from customers, but also to reduce churn. And that's a really important area of focus. We've upweighted our team there. We've got a really clear plan that sits behind it. And I think it's really taking advantage of the data that we've got as a business. The second area of opportunity is getting more revenue from customers that are staying with us. And that's all about effectively driving ancillary revenue and upselling and cross-selling to our guests, generally offering things to guests that actually they want. So if I give you a few examples, upgrading our WiFi and then charging GBP 5 for ultimate WiFi, but fast, good quality ultimate WiFi. Rooms with a view, which we've rolled out to significantly more rooms over the last 12 months, early check-in and late checkout. We tried that -- offering that in the hotel. It's now digitally enabled. So effectively on the app and online, you'll be offered that in a large selection of our hotels. Premier Plus, it's doing really well. It's GBP 15 or GBP 20 upgrade. So it's a really manageable upgrade amount. The new hotels we're now building, we're actually generally increasing the indexation of Premier Plus because it's performing super well. So a whole set of initiatives that sit behind the plan with more to come in the future about getting more revenue from our existing guests. And then there's this third bucket, which is how do we get access to groups of customers that we're not currently getting access to. An example would be deepening our relationships with business travel agents, for example, which historically we've done very little with. So we've upgraded our business-to-business team. We've extended our business-to-business team. We've signed multiple new contracts, really good opportunity for us. Every company at the moment is, of course, looking at their bottom line and efficiencies. As a strong value brand, we're incredibly well placed to take advantage of that, and we're making sure we harvest it. We talked last time at the year-end a few weeks ago about an inbound trial, which we really think is a big opportunity for us to increase our indexation of inbound customers. We think that's going to be accretive revenue for us overall and really sharpening up our digital marketing and search engine marketing as well, which we've made material strides. I mean, fundamentally, we are a digital business. And I think we've really set the business up to think much more like a digital business and taking advantage of the data that we've got. So I'd say those things underpinned by the product and the brand is driving that market outperformance, and we're very focused on ensuring that we continue to do that. Vicki, the second part of your question was about Germany. And you'll see kind of from the numbers and how I covered the introduction, we're feeling really good about progress in Germany. Again, I know I'm like a track record, but it's important. The underpin in Germany is the guest proposition that we've got. We're scoring super high on guest proposition. The reason I keep coming back to that is that, that is going to make the brand and product super sustainable in the market and I think create this really interesting platform for growth for us as we hit profitability and go beyond that. The German market, I would expect the next few months in the German market overall, there will be lapping euros and things like that. So there will probably be a little bit of choppiness. But we're not seeing anything fundamental at all in the German market in terms of softness. And actually, you've heard us talk about this before, our estate is still maturing. And that means that the overall market backdrop is slightly less important for us in Germany because the estate is maturing and the brand is maturing. But like any year in Germany, there is a really kind of rich series of events. There's an event, quite a rich set of events planned for the year. They don't always line up perfectly week by week or month by month, so you'll always see a little bit of choppiness in the numbers. But broadly, the German market overall is performing well. And within the German market, as you see, we're performing particularly well, we're outperforming, and the estate and brand continue to mature. So we feel good about hitting profitability. But frankly, most importantly, we're feeling good about that GBP 70 million PBT target that we've laid out full year '30. So that's an GBP 80 million improvement in PBT and getting to 20,000 rooms, which will make us the fastest-growing hotel chain in Germany. There has to be material value attached to that, we feel exciting about, too.

Next question is from Jamie Rollo at Morgan Stanley.

First question is just on the sort of forward-looking commentary. You said at the full year results that your booked position was up. Q1 occupancy is down 4%. So maybe you can just discuss sort of forward-looking figures in that context. And is there anything at all to give you sort of confidence at London that weakness can abate? And then the other question, just on the openings. I know you don't always give your openings in the quarterly updates. But if you could just please give us your confidence level here for the full year targets for the U.K. and Germany for this year and maybe quantify how much is under construction currently?

Yes. Thanks, Jamie. So let me take the first part of the question, and then I'll hand over to Hemant to talk about the openings. I mean, you're right, the occupancy was down in quarter 1. Actually, I think we got that right overall. The price elasticity was slightly lower and, therefore, holding rate overall was definitely the right thing to do. I think that contributed to our market outperformance. And I think it proves the agility of our model as well, which is, remember, what we're doing is aiming to maximize revenue in every hotel, in every night of every day of the week. So it is a complex set of algorithms, and we need to be agile by price, by hotel, by market, by catchment area. And I think the indications are we're getting that right. Yes, we are booked ahead of where we were last year. Obviously, the kind of peak summer period is a really big period for our business. Bookings into the peak summer period, as we said before, are looking good. We're really focused on that and doing well in the peak summer period more than makes up for the market being slightly softer in, let's say, Q1. So I think our focus is very clearly on driving that performance during that peak period. Overall, as a market, as we said before, it's impossible to say the point at which the RevPAR will reflect -- inflect positively. It will inflect positively at some point. Obviously, as the months go on, we're lapping relatively weak numbers as an industry. And the run rate average is about 2% RevPAR growth per year. So it will turn positive at some point, impossible to say exactly when. But that's why we remain resolutely focused on outperforming the market and setting the business up so that when the market does inflect, and we are in a super strong place to take full advantage of that. And then in terms of the openings...

Yes. So in terms of openings, Jeremy, yes, we're not changing guidance at all. We're still very happy that we're going to be able to get to guidance of about 400 rooms or so in Germany this year and about 1,000 to 1,200 rooms in the U.K., including 500 to 700 expansion growth plan rooms as well. You'll know that over the next 5 years, again, very comfortable we'll get to 98,000 rooms in the U.K. and 20,000 rooms in Germany by FY '30. The run rate this year is lower than the run rate we'll see over the next few years. But as you'll remember, that is entirely due to the fact that 3 or 4 years ago, COVID when we were signing contracts, the level of contracts we signed to add to our pipeline was muted because of COVID and the restrictions that we had at that point. Since then, we've been adding rooms to the pipeline. It takes a few years for those rooms to mature from -- sorry, to build those rooms from the pipeline. We're just in this period at the point in time where we're now seeing an acceleration over the next couple of years in terms of the rooms. So very confident we'll get to 98,000 rooms in the U.K., 20,000 in Germany by FY '30, and very happy with the guidance we gave at the beginning of the year for this year's room openings.

The next question is from Jarrod Castle at UBS.

I know a very, very small part of your business in an associate part of it, but any comments on kind of recent events in the Middle East and how it's impacting your JV there at the moment? And then any update that you can give in terms of how the property valuation exercise is coming along, please?

Yes. Thanks, Jarrod. Let me take the kind of second part of the question first, and I'll briefly cover the JV point and then Hemant can build on that if necessary. So I think in terms of property valuation, we articulated a few weeks ago, our plan was to do the property valuation and communicate that at the half year. So at our interims, which is at the end of October, and we're on track to do that. We're feeling good about the market overall. You will have seen that one of the aspects of our 5-year plan is that we're going to recycle approximately GBP 1 billion worth of property by full year '30. It's an important part of our growth program. And overall, we're making good progress on that. The market is opening up quite nicely. So our confidence is good in that area. And then, from a property valuation point of view, we will talk about that at half year. That's our plan. In terms of the JV, the short answer is no. I mean it's -- to your point, it's a very small part of our business. We haven't seen any particular impacts on that and wouldn't particularly expect to, but it is a very small part of our plan. I suppose one other point, just to kind of reiterate on our business with a big and successful business in the U.K. and a growing business in Germany, we are very insulated from things like the tariffs situation and actually generally more so from the global events. Although we are now getting a slightly higher proportion of the inbound market, we don't particularly focus on the inbound market. We're more of a domestic business actually in both U.K. and Germany. And so if there are travel swings globally, but I think we are relatively insulated from that. We've got a very, very kind of sustainable, strong business model that is somewhat less impacted by these events than a lot of our competitive set.

Yes. And just to add to that, I mean, we are -- Middle East is obviously a big place. We've got hotels in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha, a bit about 11 hotels there with the joint venture. As Dominic said, we haven't seen any real impact yet. We don't know if that will happen over time. But in terms of booking levels and traveling levels, we'll watch that over time. But I mean, it is fairly insulated from what is going on at the moment. But clearly, we'll watch that. We won't be complacent about that.

Next question is from Richard Clarke at Bernstein.

Two for me, please. Just a question maybe on the Fitch report from a couple of weeks ago where they took you down to negative watch. I think on their assumptions, you'll run quite close to your 3.5x leverage, sort of target your leverage -- maximum level of leverage. Do you kind of agree with that math? Would you allow the business to be downgraded to BBB- in the short term? Or if you were getting close to that, would you slow down buybacks, slow down CapEx? Just what would be your reaction if you felt you were going to get close to that 3.5%? And then secondly, I guess, if I look at your release, a quite small part of the business again, but a big inflection on German F&B. Last year, it was growing slower than accommodation. This year, it's growing 7% faster than accommodation. So what's the F&B strategy? Why is that now outpacing the accommodation sales?

Yes. Thanks, Richard. So let me -- I'll start the second question first. I'll touch on the answer to the first and then hand over to Hemant. So in terms of Germany F&B, I mean, overall, if we step back from it, I think we're really benefiting from this very specific market focus that we've got in Germany. So we now have a leadership team in Germany, Erik Friemuth, who's our leader in Germany with a dedicated team in Germany, and we're really seeing benefits from that. We've got a group of people who wake up every morning and they just think about how are we going to become #1 in Germany, hit profitability, become #1 in Germany. And I think that's a sign of us really growing up and maturing as a business. And F&B is a micro example of that. So they've done a number of really good initiatives in the hotels, whether that is things like cocktail hour in the hotel to get more guests into the bar, for example, where margins are high. We've updated the menu in the restaurant. It's a really -- it's a nicely simple offering. It's a relatively small menu. It's good quality food, but a relatively small menu. And we're doing well from repositioning that menu. And then, of course, the kind of happy hour focus encourages people to stay and eat something. And then our breakfast ratios have improved. We've improved the breakfast overall. We've made it more continental as well to what German guests like. We've included improved point of sale. And we've done good old-fashioned things like have incentives and focus from the front desk about upselling breakfast, et cetera. And we've improved the digital journey, where you can -- it makes it even easier to add breakfast, for example, as you book through it. So utilizing our digital platform, utilizing our people in the hotel and then simplifying and improving the product to get more people, to spend more money in the hotel. We've also got some really cool things. We've got spending machine proposition, which is like a mini shop in a number of our hotels, which is performing well, which gets some incremental revenue from guests when they kind of check in late, for example, or want something for their journey. So I would describe it as a really entrepreneurial approach, and it gives us -- the whole performance in Germany, I think, it's giving us real confidence in what we're building there and the progress that we're making. In terms of the investment grade, the Fitch point, I guess I'd just step back from it and say it's important that we remain investment grade to our business model. We have plenty of room to still remain investment grade, but maybe Hemant would add.

Yes. So as Dominic said, there's no accident at all. These are very deliberate. The very first thing we say when we talk about capital allocation is that we want to remain investment grade. You're right that we are BBB flat at the moment and Fitch had put us on a negative outlook of being BBB flat from a stable outlook, but they're still happy to keep us BBB flat. They recognize that we are going through a high level of investment moment for a temporary period of time through the exciting growth program. But we've had very strong historic capital discipline. The fact that we do talk about remaining investment grade as part of our capital allocation framework and our commitment to being so and that we're limiting our net capital spend to GBP 500 million a year over the 5-year plan. The 5-year plan itself assumes that we remain roughly the same leverage ratio that we have at this stage, and that will allow us to fully invest in the business and achieve the room growth and profit growth that we've talked about. The fact that we're BBB flat, to your question about will we be okay being BBB-. I'd say, we remain investment grade. We're happy that we are staying BBB flat. We would still be okay being BBB- as well as long as we stay within those investment grade thresholds and give ourselves some headroom against that, which as you say is 3.5x leverage ratio.

Our next question is from Jaina Mistry at Jefferies.

I've got 2 as well. One bigger picture question. Your answer around the commercial levers earlier was really, really helpful. Am I right in thinking that your commercial levers are far superior to your peers right now? And how easy would it be for your peers to replicate the abilities that you have today? And then second question is around your shorter-term RevPAR premium. When you reported full year results in your 7-week kind of current trading update, your U.K. RevPAR premium was GBP 6.79. For the whole quarter, it's GBP 5.63. So just wondering, has anything changed in the competitive environment that's driving the narrowing somewhat in the premium through the quarter?

Thanks, Jaina. Let me answer the first part of the question, and then I'll hand over to Hemant to talk about the RevPAR premium kind of phasing within the quarter. We always assume that our competitors are going to catch up with what we're doing. I mean we're #1 in the market. As you said, our outperformance has improved and increased versus our competitors overall. But we always assume that competitors are going to see what we're doing and learn from it. It's why it's really important to us that we have an ongoing set of initiatives, and we keep doubling down on the success that we're seeing. We have a really strong commercial focus as a business. We haven't shot all of our bullets in terms of potential, far from it. And we will continue to execute extremely well, but also improve what our offering is. And we can see real opportunity in that as we project forward over the next few years, we can see real opportunity. I mean, fundamentally, we are advantaged. We've got a super strong brand, and we've got scale. What that means is we can invest money in things like marketing because of our scale that helps drive kind of customer acquisition and customer retention. We have the vast majority of the data from our customers. We're thinking much more like a tech business that enables us to harvest that data. Again, not all of our competitors have the data from their customers. And we have this incredibly strong network of hotels of 850 across the U.K. and, of course, growing in Germany. That means that locally, we can build our awareness as well. So I think we're hard to compete against for those reasons. That scale and the vertical integration we've got gives us real advantages. It means we can execute at real pace. If we make a decision, for example, we'll try a happy hour in a hotel. If we see success in that, we can roll those kind of things out very quickly. Room with a view, we trialed it in a subset of hotels. We rolled it out rapidly, and we can do that because of diverse integration. So the kind of privilege we've got is our core model gives us an advantage in terms of executing at pace. But to do that, you need a really clear plan and you need very strong execution. And we've got a very clear plan. And I think what we're showing is we are resolutely focused on very strong execution.

And Jaina, just in terms of the RevPAR premium, yes, you're right, our RevPAR premium extended across the quarter versus last year to GBP 5.63 as our market performance has got stronger. The phasing across the quarter actually, it's really very much about Easter. When we announced the first 7 weeks, we weren't the full way through all of the Easter phasing, as you might remember. Now normally, that just means it's a shift of Easter. So across the quarter, do really make a difference. But the difference in phasing is actually because the week going into Easter was a much stronger business week in terms of state outcomes and the week coming out after Easter was a much weaker business week relatively. We do particularly well in midweek in terms of our RevPAR premium extends. So therefore, it really is just a phasing thing between a business week and a leisure week year-on-year switching from before and after Easter. If you look at the overall quarter and take out the Easter phasing, it's been fairly consistent in terms of the RevPAR premium and the market outperformance.

Our next question is from Alex Brignall at Rothschild & Co. Redburn.

One quickly on the trading commentary and then one on just forward expectations. On the trading commentary, could you just talk through a little bit of how your kind of yield management systems are working? Obviously, for several quarters now, your trading has been up year-on-year when you've given your update. And then obviously, when it comes to it, it ended up negative. So I suspect it's to do with how far in advance you're selling your rooms. So if you could give us a little bit on how that actually works, that would be incredibly helpful because it's just hard to know whether that -- whether the forward bookings being up suggests that it's actually going to end up, up, or whether it's to do with the way you manage your room sales. And then just in terms of full year expectations, Obviously, you're running a little below in terms of RevPAR for the quarter you've had so far and the summer has been strong than previous years. So is it probably right to think that PBT will need to come down a little bit versus where consensus study is about 474?

Thanks, Alex. Let me just start the first part of your question, and then I'm going to hand over to Hemant, who can build on it and then cover the second part of the question. I mean, so I think you know we've got what we call our automated trading engine. We believe it's best-in-class. Our vertical integration, i.e., that we run the pricing and yield management for every single hotel centrally gives us an advantage. We can -- the system has access to all of the data, all of the booking patterns and automatically adjusts. I mean, obviously, there is a centralized pricing team who work with the system. But the algorithms will automatically adjust the pricing to optimize the revenue that's a combination of the price and the occupancy by room, by night, by hotel. It is complicated. I guess if we step back from it, the fact that we're consistently outperforming the market is a real kind of proof point that actually we are optimizing revenue successfully. I'll give you a little example. A bit earlier in the calendar year, we dropped some of the prices in some of the hotels. The trading engine actually didn't necessarily call for that. But we could see that actually that potentially could work to just drop pricing a little bit. We didn't see the elasticity was particularly strong in those off-peak periods, so we very quickly reverted to the pricing structure that the system by hotel was calling for. That was the right decision. And you can see that from a RevPAR outperformance point of view, the elasticity was relatively low. And in that situation, by dropping the price, you also lose occupancy, but you also lose price. So -- but that will change by day, by week, by month and by season. So you'll see a higher -- in the summer, for example, you'll definitely see it will be less elastic and, therefore, you will want to keep the prices relatively high. But it's changing constantly. Our kind of super power is the automated trading engine and critically, our implementation of that automated trading engine. We won't have individual hotel managers overriding it, for example. It is done centrally. Does it get absolutely perfectly right in every hotel room? Of course, not. There's always learnings from it, and we have a training team that meets daily and weekly on the outcomes. And I think this centralized approach is clearly a super power for our business, but we're not complacent, and we continue to learn from it and continue to improve.

Yes. And then just to finish Dominic's point, I mean, the key point that's made there is that absolutely the evidence in market outperformance has been consistent. It proves that actually, we've been able to -- we've made the right decisions in terms of pricing across the booking window. We don't know exactly what other documented booking windows look like and their booking profiles. But that will probably indicate that we're getting it right across the forward booking window because it'd be very difficult to get wrong in one part and massively get better in another part. That's not how we work. So it will just be a question of behavior of -- guests' booking behaviors year-on-year, which is why we'll see changes in those projected occupancy levels. And then to your second point, regard to consensus this year, I mean, you're not -- we don't guide specifically on PBT expectations of consensus nor RevPAR. We know that it's a very transparent RevPAR performance in the market because of the weekly data that kind of comes out and we talk about what we expect to see in terms of how we'll perform in the market. So I can't give you any specific guidance. You'll see what you and your peers are projecting at the moment on visible outflow of Bloomberg. There haven't been many. What we'll say is, we've had some of the analysts update. Those that have updated have assumed that they're going to get to something like negative 0.7% to negative 0.1% RevPAR. So that's just for information. Yes, clearly, that is an increase against the first quarter, so a projection for the full year. As we talked about already, there are easier comps though still to come. But beyond that, there's no other guidance we will give on RevPAR overall.

Thanks, Alex. Seb, we've probably got time for 1 more question.

Next question is from Estelle Weingrod at JPMorgan.

Two quick questions, please. The first one on the U.K. You recently mentioned some sort of weakness in the short lead and off-peak leisure demand with pockets of strength and stability elsewhere. Have you seen any material changes in recent trends? And the second one on Germany, I mean, back to the point on potential weaker RevPAR momentum, not helped by challenging comps in terms of a busy events calendar last year. Would you be able to provide some sort of PBT sensitivity for Germany?

Yes. I mean let me -- Estelle, I mean in terms of patterns, we're seeing no material changes. I mean, obviously, we're going into a busier and more peak time. So one of our messages was that kind of off-peak leisure has been a little bit softer. There's a bit less of off-peak leisure in the peak time by definition. But broadly, I'd say no material changes overall. I mean the RevPAR kind of reductions that we are -- that we've reported, relatively small swings. So broadly, our occupancy in our hotels is still very high overall. So it's relatively edges, which is why it doesn't take much for the RevPAR to inflect positive. And as I said, we're very focused on that. But critically, we're just focused on how do we consistently outperform the market because when the market does inflect, we will be, therefore, in a very good place. Hemant, do you want to add?

Yes. Yes, so it's -- I mean, the biggest part of what's happening in the German market, obviously, for us is much more about how our sites are maturing over time. So I mean, we can give -- you can try and predict from the market what might be happening. But the reality is the market -- using market data as kind of clients isn't really going to help you, Estelle. [indiscernible] is obviously to the overall material position of Whitbread, Germany is a relatively small part of the business still in terms of profit contribution at this stage. The guidance we've given that we're going to get to profitability this year between GBP 5 million and GBP 10 million still stands. We're still happy that we're on track to be able to do that. Clearly, as we go through the year, if we feel that's not the case in a material way, we will update you go forward.

Estelle, if we just step back from looking at Germany for a moment, you kind of think what we're building in Germany now, I mean, we're really excited about it. You can see the progress we're making in terms of RevPAR and RevPAR growth, also in terms of our confidence about hitting those 20,000 rooms in 5 years' time by full year '30. And the outperformance versus our competitors in Germany is super encouraging. I mean it's across the whole estate, but our more mature hotels are particularly strong. So I think that's giving us overall really strong confidence now as we're looking at the business that we're creating. And of course, our key competitor in Germany, Motel One, they're performing well. They're very profitable. They've got a model that works. It's a proof point of what we're building in Germany. And if we look at our kind of share price overall for Whitbread, you could argue, there's very little in it for Germany. And I think the time is rapidly approaching where I think we are really displaying that there is value that we're creating. We're on track to become the #1 hotel chain in Germany. That is definitely going to have value attached to it. And we think we're building a fantastic estate of hotels with a strong brand. I'm conscious of time. Firstly, I would like to thank everybody for their time today. I mean we've covered it briefly, but our 5-year plan is transformative. We're making excellent progress overall, and we're really confident in our 5-year plan delivery of GBP 300 million incremental PBT and at least GBP 2 billion worth of shareholder returns. We appreciate your time today and your support. Thank you very much.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.