Hello and welcome to HBX Group plc Q3 2025 conference call. Please note that this call is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the call over to Isabel Green, Head of Investor Relations. You may now go ahead please. Thank you, Ellie. Thank you everyone for joining us today on our Q3 trading update call. With me today are Nicolas Huss, our CEO, and Brendan Brennan, our CFO. We're going to start the call today with a short overview of trading for the quarter and also the outlook for the remainder of the year. After that, we're going to open the call for your questions. If you're listening on the webcast, you can type your questions into the Q&A box. If you're on the conference call, you can register for a question at any time by pressing star one on your keypad. Finally, before I hand over to Nicolas, a reminder that in our call today we will be making forward-looking statements which are by their nature uncertain and actual outcomes may differ. Thank you very much. Over to you, Nicolas. Good morning everyone. HBX Group delivered a robust performance in Q3 despite the challenging macroeconomic and geopolitical environment, underpinned by strategic execution, commercial agility, and long commitment to long term growth. Group revenue for the quarter reached EUR 182 million, representing a 3% increase year on year or 6% in constant currency. The timing of Easter contributed approximately to 1% point to this growth. For the nine month period, revenue grew 7% or 8% in constant currency. Total transaction value, or TTV, grew 5% in Q3, slightly ahead of revenues. Constant currency growth of 8% was well ahead of the accommodation market, which was up just under 5% on the same basis. Revenue growth was driven by increased accommodation volumes, which grew faster than average daily rates. ADRs reflected deeper discounting in softer markets, a shift in geographic mix towards markets with lower ADR, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and the transactional impact, of course, of the weaker US dollar. Despite the market challenges, activity was resilient with a new peak of 7.4 billion daily searches on our platform in the quarter. We also saw a material increase in shorter time searches as consumer confidence started to return and promotional activities were effective in generating demand. This dynamic favors the larger PAs with their ability to drive high volumes of B2C activity at the last minute. In comparison, our booking data showed stronger growth for arrival in the three to six months window, reflecting the strength of our business model with the higher value. Customers who booked earlier stay longer and spend more in our mobility and experiences. Product performance was impacted by competition in the B2B space, where scale and connectivity are increasingly important. The softer performance in MNE had around a 1% headwind effect on our group revenue growth in the quarter, and performance in this area is something we are very focused on improving. We acted early in the quarter to capture growth opportunities. Our actions included targeted geographic expansion, for example, the addition of Expedia branded hotels in Spain. We have also joined forces with Bakun to integrate its channel management into our distribution. This will help hotels to connect and grow faster with next complexity. In total, we onboarded around 3,000 new hotels in Q3, cross selling and bundling of ancillary products such as signing a new partnership with the travel insurance specialist Intermundial to enable our travel tech Roiback hotels to offer cancellation insurance and travel assistance to guests. Tactical pricing action using our extensive data and insight to support commercial decisions that optimize overall profit and continued investment in new products, which included the acquisition of SIL to enhance our ability to automate the guest experience with features such as mobile check-in, the launch of our AI-powered luxury product, The Luxuries, in new markets and its successful integration into our retail platform Bedsonline, making it now accessible to all partners via web and API. We will, of course, continue to seek opportunities to develop and expand our business with a particular focus on the scale, geographic reach, and technical capabilities that differentiate us in a competitive marketplace. I'll now hand over to Brendan to discuss our Q3 performance and full year outlook in more detail. Thank you, Nicolas. We have delivered 3% revenue growth in Q3, 6% in constant currency, with significant regional variations taking each region in turn. Firstly, Spain saw a 4% revenue increase driven by strong growth in arrivals from the UK, up 38%, and China, which almost doubled year on year from a fairly low base, partly offset by weaker domestic travel in the quarter and fewer visitors from Germany. Secondly, Western Europe was down 3%. Good growth in France was more than offset by lower growth in destinations such as Greece, Portugal, and Turkey, and reduced travel to the UK, down 1%, and Germany, down 12%. U.S. revenues declined 3%, reflecting lower demand and the translational impact of a weaker dollar. Domestic travel outperformed international corridors, with double-digit declines in arrivals from Canada, Spain, France, and Germany. The rest of the markets grew 15%, with strong growth in domestic and regional travel. Mexico was up 12%, while Brazil and the Dominican Republic both increased by around a third on the prior year, helped by our recent agreement with Despegar. Canada was up 9%, mostly due to a strong increase in domestic capital that replaced U.S. trips. MiePak delivered 14% growth, supported by economic growth, airline expansion, and operational investments in Japan. However, growth in the Middle East deteriorated during the quarter, with double-digit declines in travel to Saudi Arabia and Jordan due to the increased unrest and conflict in the region. These shifts in common corridors are challenging the industry and highlighting the importance of our global network and the agility of our systems and teams to respond quickly to changing travel patterns, late notice changes, and large swings in demand that lead to short booking windows and less differentiation in the near term. However, the lower visibility can help us to build market share longer term with our SBA model and global network. In Q3, we added 400 hotels to our SBA network. Being laser focused on profitable growth is even more important in times like these. We are leveraging AI and machine learning to enhance decision making and operational efficiency. 7% of customer service volumes are now automated, and we have built new models that generate content for the hotels. This has enabled us to achieve historically. High customer satisfaction scores while also reducing costs. Next steps will be activating voice bots for some of our hotel interactions. We've tightened cost controls, particularly around variable and discretionary spend, while continuing to invest in strategic initiatives to keep us at the top of our game. As a result, we have protected our margin expansion and continue to see strong cash conversion. This brings me to our full year guidance. We have seen volatile trading this year, but we are performing resiliently and working to capture the available growth opportunities. We have 20 years of experience trading through cycles, and we have been quick to respond to the incremental opportunities and been agile on the elements within our control like pricing and costs. We now expect mid to high single digit TTV growth and mid single digit revenue growth for the full year, both lower than previous guidance. To reflect the market headwinds and currency impacts, we have narrowed our adjusted EBITDA guidance at the lower end of the previous range, implying annual growth of at least 8%. Our cash conversion guidance of 100% is unchanged, and we are on track to end the year with leverage of around 1.7x adjusted net debt to adjusted EBITDA. In this dynamic industry, our midterm outlook is unchanged, supported by our strategic initiatives and operational discipline. It's early days, but bookings for 2026 are encouraging. In closing, Q3 we demonstrated the resilience. Of our business, the strength of our platform, and the value of our strategic focus, we're confident in our ability to navigate near term challenges and continue delivering sustainable, high profitable, and cash generative growth. Thank you. will now open the floor to questions. Thank you. We are now opening the floor for the question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Again, that's star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Michael Reif of UBS. Your line is now open. Yes, good morning in a busy day for results. I missed some of the comments you made at the beginning. In terms of the currency impact for Q4, you're obviously giving TTV growth for the year in Euros, but can you maybe say how much of an FX effect in Q4 we should be anticipating in that? In terms of next year, you talk about getting back to trend volume growth. You mentioned just now I think that booking for early 2025, 2026 looks encouraging. Can you say whether in the first half you would expect to be back at that trend rate? Thank you. Yeah, I'll take that one. Thanks, Michael, for your question. At the moment, we're anticipating in our guidance not dissimilar levels of FX impact from Q3 into Q4. Obviously, you saw in the quarter a 5%- 8% impact from a TTV perspective and 3%- 6% on our group revenue in the quarter. While we do see the dollar strengthening, we do know that markets are quite volatile on the FX ranges at the moment, and we've kind of anticipated in our guidance a similar outturn in terms of the Q4 FX impact. On certain days in terms of our 2026 outlook, it's been a quick-changing market, and we believe that we have reacted to that fast-paced market, particularly to insulate our results from an EBITDA perspective. As I think you'll appreciate in our renewed guidance, we're going to keep a close eye. The initial signs are positive, but of course, we'll come back to you with more details around 2026 as we close out our current fiscal year, which will be closing out September, and give you much more detail at that point given the dynamic nature of the market. Thanks. Just actually a follow-up on the experiences and mobility market. Nicolas, you made some comments about large players having some sort of advantage. Can you maybe quantify the level of slowdown you've seen in that business? I think pre-IPO it was quite weak in fiscal 2024 and what you've done and how that's maybe affected the performance since the end of the quarter. Sorry, could you just repeat so we know that your question is in relation to the M and E business and the large players impacting performance. There was a second part as well m y apologies. What have you done to sort of try and address that, and has there been any impact positively already, or is it too early? Yeah, we. So, i n this market, with a shorter lead time, we saw, for instance, current volts adapting and being more aggressive on prices and therefore impacting the o verall. Prices from the business, but also other activities. What we've done is that we have focused a lot on the more important business, the ones that have a strong track record like dynamic packages. We've also focused on negotiating long-term deals with key players that hopefully we will be able to announce soon. We try, in a nutshell, not only to address the tactical situation for the quarter, but make sure that we also have the right growth rate for the future and the coming years t o your question before. Thank you. Question comes from the line of Victor Chang of Bank of America. Your line is now open. Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe two from my side. I guess if I look at your TTV guidance for full year, kind of implies at midpoint maybe roughly 3% growth for Q4. Are you kind of seeing, I think earlier H1 you see some stabilization in U.S. already, but kind of the guidance for Q4 implies maybe a bit of a slow growth as well. What latest trend you're seeing in the quarter, you just being a bit more conservative or any other factors you're considering? And then secondly, again on MME, if I heard correctly, you said there was a 1% headwind to the group. I guess that's slowed down quite materially. Thinking about long term though, you talk a bit about more competition in that phase. Are you still positive on potentially growing faster in the medium term and still kind of have a positive contribution to take away in the medium term as well? If I start maybe by what we see in Q4 from a growth perspective, I think that the July trends in terms of CPV are supportive with improvements in demand from U.S. and Northern Europe compared to June. However, what we were saying is that the timing of the trading disruption, the fact that it happened when we were building our books for the summer through a low lead time, was unhelpful in building the base demand for Q4 and therefore we have more reliance on the short lead time booking, which typically we said that also are less differentiated and probably with lower margin in a competitive environment. That's why, Brendan, I think we're being also cautious on the Q4 numbers. Yeah, I think just to add to that, obviously as we said, we saw quite a dynamic market shift during the course of our book building period, an important period for us in the springtime into the summer. We reacted to that. Some of those market pieces were more of that short lead time piece, and of course we are really experts in the slightly longer lead time curated experience, and so consumer patterns shifted slightly away from us during that point. I do think it is fair to emphasize and re-emphasize Nicolas's point, which is we have seen stabilizing trends in the very recent past, albeit it continues to be a dynamic environment. As I said in my earlier comments, we very much looked at what we can do, what's in our control in terms of maximizing the markets that we look to. You saw us go very well in the rest of Americas and the Asia Pacific, which were both in the mid-teens in terms of our growth even in Q3 here. We're continuing to see some, obviously in some of our more traditional markets, good growth in our newer markets. I would also just finalize on the comments, add that we have taken a hard look at our guidance profile now, as you guys can see, and obviously reflected in that, as you mentioned, that more cautious outlook for Q4 that is very much in line with where we think is a relatively conservative position at this point. Mobility and experiences, I think we addressed this in Michael's question before. There was a more volatile environment in the last quarter, which we think was driven by shorter lead times, which forced some of the mobility and experiences operators to react. I think it impacted our volume. As I was saying earlier on, we have both short-term tactical actions to recover over the summer and also longer-term actions to make sure that we keep growing this business, which you will remember has good profitability for us and therefore is important. I should have said that we also saw, as you guys are aware, some new entrants into this field being probably more aggressive on pricing in a tougher quarter. A lot has been happening. We have been in this for some time now. We know that it's a market, it's true for accommodation, it's true for mobility and currency. It is sometimes very volatile. We also know that it recovers very quickly, and we are convinced that we have strong fundamentals as a company. Maybe if I can follow up a bit on what you said about some of the new entrants coming in a bit more aggressive on pricing. Are they small players or large players entering that space? I think you mentioned earlier as well that scale matters in this business. For instance, the one that I have in mind, among others, is the fact that Expedia, as you may have seen, is entering this field, which by definition, Expedia is one of the key players in the market. There are also, of course, as usual, new entrants. It's a mix of the two. The key event of the quarter was, of course, Expedia entering the field. Got it. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Fernando Abril-Martorell of Atlanta. Your line is now open. Yes, hello. Good morning. A couple of questions from my side. First, you mentioned that you suffer some weaker U.S. arrivals into Europe and negatively impacted your revenue in rest of Europe. However, I've seen that one of your B2B peers actually cited strong U.S. travel trends into Europe in April and May. I don't know if this points to a tougher also competitive environment for HBX Group. What are you doing to attract more U.S. demand? Second, on the EBITDA guidance and cost flexibility, the midpoint of your revised guidance is just broadly flat OpEx in H2 compared to a plus 6% in H1. Could you elaborate a little bit on which cost items are more flexible or being actively reduced and how confident you are in delivering on this revised EBITDA outlook? Thank you. Thank you very much for the student question. It's a very important topic for us because clearly delivering on our EBITDA and commitment, something that has been very important for us in terms of focus in Q2. We'll address that. Maybe we can start by the U.S. I think that I kind of have in mind the competitor that you're referring to, but I think it's probably a different situation. I don't know the very specific detail. What we see, actually what we saw in the U.S. ourselves is that domestic travel outperformed international corridors and we saw a strong decline at the beginning of the quarter and some recovery afterwards, which I think could go in the same direction that you were just mentioning. I was saying earlier on that in July we see. I don't know, it's the last day of the month, some positive number on this side. Do we want to focus on EBITDA maybe delivering a level of confidence? Yeah, absolutely. Yes, we did. I mean it was very important as Nicolas Huss said at the outset, and I think as we said, I'll refer back to our comments that the half won position. We were very clear that we said that if we did not see the market moving in the direction that we would like, we would remain very focused on cost control and delivering our EBITDA. I think that's exactly what we have been doing. We obviously saw some unfavorable market trends as we've referenced during the first few minutes of this call. What we have done is made sure that we have been efficient across our organization in terms of our cost base, in terms of those discretionary elements. Obviously, we're looking at good control from a cost perspective both in terms of headcount, in terms of other discretionary costs, travel costs, other elements like that. I'll bring you back to some. Of the more important pieces that we're really moving as an organization that I mentioned in my script, which is around our use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we've seen a significant improvement as I referenced in terms of some of our interactive chatbots and also web-based bots that we have in terms of managing the flow of our information through our organization. The efficiency has increased in terms of delivery, but also significantly from a cost-based perspective. This is an area where we think we are really just, I kind of referenced, we're now dealing with 7%. We really feel that this has been ramping quickly and will continue to ramp indeed during the second half of the year. Yes, we are absolutely doing all of the things you would expect, looking closely at headcount, looking closely at discretional calls, looking closely at items like travel and other pieces like that. We are also changing the shape of the organization and actually at the time of the IPO this is something we spoke to, that this is an ambition of ours and something we really want to try to deliver on in really leveraging our thought space. You quite rightly pointed out that our expectation on the second half of the year is flat in terms of our cost base perspective, having grown actually in the first half. However, we feel that this is a manageable goal and actually something that beyond 2025 we want to continue to challenge ourselves with to ensure that we are really leveraging that EBITDA as part of our course, our long-term story which remains unchanged. Jesper, thank you very much for the answer. Just only one follow-up. You've also maintained the operating cash flow conversion at 100%, however, with, I would say, softer TTV growth and therefore I understand that softer working capital inflows. I don't know if you are managing better the working capital or are you reducing your CapEx expectations for the year to keep the guidance unchanged? No, we're certainly not reducing our capital expenditure. Continuing to invest, as I said, whether it's internally in the organization or ensuring that we have market-leading platforms is extremely important to us as a tech organization. Of course, it's not that. We certainly think we have enough pieces within our working capital mix to be able to manage to the 100% expectation. As you know, coming into this year, we've often done well in excess of 100% in terms of cash conversion in the past. It still feels like a target that's doable. We're still seeing solid growth year to date. Our expectation is that we should be able to come out of that. Yes, maybe, Fernando, because I see your question. I think the key comment that I have in mind is the market has become, at least in this quarter, more volatile and we have reacted in trying to protect the P&L. The way I look at it, you know, we have this high single-digit top line growth, which I think is, I would say, robust versus what we've seen, for instance, from Booking in terms of room nights yesterday, et cetera. We have a take rate which is only going down by 20 bps when the market has moved to something which is shorter returns, therefore a lower level of differentiation for us. We've always been very clear and very transparent of that, and probably more competitive market. We're protecting absolute EBITDA commitment. We have key focus on cash. We keep our eyes on the ball, really, on a very volatile market. Okay, thank you very much. Your next question comes from the line of Carlos Muñiz of Banco Santander. Your line is now open. Yes, good morning and thanks for taking my questions. I missed some of your initial comments. I'm sorry, you have explained before. I will have two questions. The first one, which part of the Reviews of the guidance of diction is coming purely by forest? Which part is explained by forest? Which part will be explained by the business environment? My second question will be in accommodation. You have said that growth is mainly coming from volumes more than from prices. I would like to ask you, how do you see this in comparison with the industry? Do you think that this is a general trend or this has been impacted more by what you are doing? Thank you. I think, hello. We are focused on driving the business and I think we try to avoid the comments on the environment, et cetera. It is true that the market has been changing fast, so it's relatively unpredictable on the back, as you know, of the macroeconomic changes, the geopolitical tension. Most of our competitors are reporting in dollars, which is probably, they are seeing more tailwind and we're seeing more headwinds right now. We know these things, they evolve as time goes by. What you will see is that the foreign exchange has had a significant impact for us in this quarter results and it's the same for the prices. We mentioned it briefly and I'm conscious that you guys are on at the same time, but actually our growth overall was slowed down by prices going down from countries like the U.S. It's a mix probably of foreign exchange and some of the global chains and other chains being more aggressive on price brand and maybe we can give details there. Yeah, certainly. Maybe I'll start off on the FX piece and then we'll come more into the pricing piece. Just to mention, because you asked the question in terms of the split of the FX element versus the operational performance, the outlook for the guidance and I think what we saw obviously in the quarter just referred to the TTV was a 3% headwind in the quarter in Q3. I mentioned earlier that we expected a similar outturn in terms of our guidance and of course I'll remind you guys, but you know that our second half of the year is much more impactful than the first half. We do see that drag effect being significant enough in terms of the overall revenue generation and outlook for the company. Certainly something in that 2%- 3% range for the full year is probably to be expected in terms of the pricing piece. Yes, I think it's been competitive. market, and we have certainly been reactive to that market. One of the points that Nicolas made at the earlier part of the conversation is that our margins and our takeaways have been relatively robust. We've been very efficient at actually finding the growth, as I mentioned earlier, on some good growth in Western America, the MEAPAC, and also being able to optimize our margin flows even in a more competitive pricing environment. I think that's really kudos to the experience of the company and the ability of ours to flex in our markets either through different supply and distribution channels or indeed, as I said, through the different geographical pieces that we have as a global organization. I do think even though we have seen them, we're certainly dealing with a very dynamic marketplace. I think we have reacted quickly and reacted well from a shielding our EBITDA and our overall pricing environment perspective. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Roth of Barclays. Your line is now open. Great. Good morning, all. My first one is just to double-check. Click a bit on what you're describing about the shorter booking cycle and more volume flowing through the APAs. Can you just help us to understand? As to kind of why you're weak in that area, what you can do to fix that longer term, and then anything you're thinking about shorter term, more tactically, to try and drive share in that area? That's the first question. Second question, I appreciate that you're not here to talk about FY 2026 today. When we kind of look at consensus, 10% GCD growth, kind of $485 million of EBITDA, I also appreciate a lot of the FY 2026 year is not going to be made until next summer. How do you feel about that consensus as it sits today, given the kind of exit run rate in the business and then the visibility you have around cost? Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Andrew. Maybe I'll take the first one, Brendan. If I look at the sequence of events, if you remember, we started to see some impact in the U.S. in March, a lot in April and May, etc., and then a form of recovery in June and July. For us, the impact was absolutely not ideal because you may remember that we insisted on the fact that we have longer lead times and therefore we are building our books six months before date. We had stated previously that we had a very strong order, a group of orders, when we entered the calendar Q2, our financial Q3, and then we saw some drops on the demand. That's what we were saying last time we spoke. The second comment is what happened there because of the macroeconomic uncertainty, because of all of the events that you see from a trade perspective and also some geopolitical events in the Middle East. What we saw is that people expected longer before buying, possibly expecting to see a lower price or to be able to decide where to go and how to travel. The third aspect that happened is that in significant countries people shifted to domestic travel rather than international travel. It's the case, for instance, in the U.S. or Canada, etc., as we commented. Also, often in times of uncertainty, people don't travel that far away from home. This combination of a higher short speed time and domestic travel or nearby travel makes it more difficult for us. You may remember that we insisted on that during IPO time. We have a differentiation on long lead time, long haul travels, our clients book long in advance, etc. Last comment. Of course, in a market which is less differentiated, we again insisted on that again and again as many times as we could at IPO time. The way to differentiate is pricing and also which is putting probably more pressure on revenue for most of the players. That's the way I would explain it. I know if it's clear, Andrew. Yeah, that is helpful. I guess as a follow up to that, is there anything you can do to change that, or are we just kind of stuck now in this twitch cycle until the macro gets a bit easier for you guys? No, what we do is twofold, of course. The first one is to work on grabbing as much as the short return demand as we can. I have the feeling that we have done this in Q3. We reacted, we mentioned that, and we grabbed some of this at the same time. What is very important, if you think about it, is that we want to make sure that we keep on rebuilding our boost for next year, as Brendan was saying. For the moment, we see a very positive trend on this. A last comment, but you know, is I wouldn't want this to sound at all as an excuse because it is not. This substitution away from long lease booking to also a shorter lead time driven by the event of the cure may have taken some demand away from some of our key channels of clients. That's an industry event. Maybe just to comment on your second question, Andrew, on the 2026 consensus position and outlook. It is early as you imagine for us to be commenting too much on 2026, if you're quite right, our bookings will be developed certainly over the winter period. It's in summer, spring for the 2026 period. What we do see, of course, and I referenced in my prepared remarks, we see positive trends in relation to our 2026 bookings period at this point. We do feel that we are a resilient organization in a resilient marketplace. We have a lot of experience in dealing with that. We have seen fast movements. It has been a very dynamic marketplace over the last couple of months. We feel that we've responded to that. It is not perhaps the second half of the year that we would have liked. However, we do feel that we are responding, we are being agile, and that as I said, the outlook for 2026 is looking better. Yeah, and I think just to one last sentence on that, to Andrew's point, I think we're closing the loop here. Domestic and short lead times, we always see this pressure and pressure when things go wrong. You know, we saw that in COVID times a lot. We also know that the normal market recovery leads normally to longer hold travel and also a longer lead time. We're confident for 2026. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Nisha Nair of Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open. Thanks. I have two questions. On the first one, Nicolas, I think you partially answered but it was really on. Have you seen a volatile market like this in HBX Group 's recent history and how long did it take for those short-term booking shares to sort of normalize and for the longer lead bookings to come back? Maybe a bit more elaboration on that would be great. I guess connected to that in terms of what you're seeing right now, the stronger growing markets like A PAC, the rest of Americas outside of the U.S., they grew by double digits. They continue to grow at these levels even in Q4, sort of supporting maybe the rest of the weakness in other markets. That would be question one and question two is in terms of your EBITDA margin expansion in the midterm, you're still referring to that guidance and it was sort of 62% or north of 60% going forward. The implied midpoint for this year is already at around 59%. I look at your guidance range if I'm right. What more measures do you have in place to sort of reach that 60%+? Some color there would be great. Thank you. Okay, maybe I'll start by the market recovering and what we see in recent trends. As I was saying earlier on, I think that the July trends in TTV are supportive in terms of top line. We see improvements from some of the markets that were impacted for us like U.S. and Northern Europe compared to June. We have seen encouraging signs for next year in the recent weeks, like strong double digit increase in bookings for FY 2026. That's something which I feel is important in terms of sustainable growth when it comes to wholesale markets. You know, this is our industry. We have been there for a long time and some of you have been following this industry for a long time. There is some volatility and it happens often. It's driven by a lot of different reasons and we are seeing some of them here. We also know that usually the recovery doesn't take more than a season, which means give or take a window of six months. Historically we've seen that during COVID where in 2021 we had a beginning of recovery with a lot of domestic, a lot of shortfalls travel if you remember, and then a very strong acceleration. My last comment if I may to nuance from a market perspective is that the market is stabilizing for the moment at very high levels. You may remember that last year was one of the peak years in the market history. I would say that there is a market resistance and of course you are being impacted differently based on the structure of demand. That's very normal, Elizabeth. Yeah, just actually before I go to eVisa, you also asked around the regional performance in relation to Asia Pacific and Latin America, which was very strong during the quarter as I mentioned, kind of both in the mid teens where we saw some very solid performance both from those regions being hot regions from a perspective of travel, but also from some of our new relationships that we've developed over time. Obviously, Despegar being a part of that story in the rest of Americas region, we still see continued good trends from them and we do think that in Q4 they will continue to help us very much so in terms of the balance of our growth and again reflects the importance of our global nature of our organization. Thank you for that question on EBITDA. Yes, we are making obviously probably faster progress actually than we probably initially anticipated from a margin EBITDA expansion. Of course, some of that is related to the fact that we said we would be more careful with our cost base in the second half if we did not see the trends that we were looking for from a growth perspective. Obviously, we are now implementing those changes and seeing that flow through EBITDA. You're quite right that we said that in the medium term that we would be in the low 60s. From our margin profile perspective, that's still very much on track. Our expectation is we can still develop our leverage in our business as we go forward into 2026 and into 2027. Obviously, the EBITDA trend is one that's actually making good progress towards objective. I think in terms of the additional. Pieces, it echoes some of the points. We will continue to look at our machine learning, we will continue to look at AI. We are a technology-driven company and we are really trying to be as efficient as we possibly can be. Don't forget the numbers of searches and the number of transactions that we transact on a daily basis. There's an element of relationship of what we do, but there's a huge, huge part of our business company that is very much platform-based and technology-driven, and it's the automation and further automation through AI of that platform where we feel that we can really continue to drive that leverage ability. We still feel that we have a lot of ability to continue to look at that and continue to variableize the total cost base, but also make sure we get significant good leverage out of the fixed elements that we do have. Very helpful, thank you. Next question comes from the line of Thomas Prosper of BNP Paribas. Your line is now open. Hello, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I have a couple of questions if I may. First of all, maybe on the sequence of growth within the third quarter. I think you mentioned in May when you reported the H1 results that airpool was trending in line with H1. A top line perspective. I think the message was also quite constructive on May. I just wanted to make sure, does it mean that June was just flat year on year on the top line basis at constant currency? Secondly, on promotional activity, you mentioned promotional activity from hotels as a headwind to revenue growth in the U.S. in particular in the quarter. On the H1 result call, you mentioned how important the platform was for hotels to optimize their promotional offers. What has changed in the quarter versus H1 for promotions to turn from the terrain perhaps to your business in H1 to where headed in the process? Maybe I start by the sequence of growth. If you remember what we explained back then, we had entered April with a very strong book of orders, but the on-the-month booking were well lower than what we have seen in the previous year. I think we had the same sequence for May. We were back then May, so it was hard to predict the 10 month. Do we want to then go on to the promotional activities? Yeah, I think that was, you know, some of those pieces that trend obviously, you know, as you referenced, did, you know, peter out as we came into June. It was a much more challenging month for us, and I suppose that really set up a sequence of our caution around, or sorry, some of the headwinds we saw particularly in the third quarter and obviously then colored our kind of bookings period as we came into the fourth quarter as well. Yeah, the trend was becoming more positive. You recall we talked about it earlier in the year where we said we had seen a dip obviously around early April, which was a challenging period. We did say we had some tailwind in April, of course, because of the timing of Easter. May was recovering. We just never saw it kind of come back to the levels we would have wanted to. June was much flatter, period. That, unfortunately, was the sequence of events. As I said earlier in my comments, it was a very dynamic change in the marketplace, and there was that element of speed that impacted our ability to. Make our previous guidance and on the promos, actually, if you remember, we did say back then that we saw a lot of promotional activities from the hotels going on, trying to adapt the matter, which I think is reflected in the average daily rate impact that we mentioned earlier. Our intention and support is always to help hotels to optimize. They can only optimize to the extent that there is a demand, and they have to do their own arbitrage between volume and margin optimization. We leave this to them to answer. On our side, what we see is that we will discuss that afterwards. We have a strong demand for 2026, like a strong pipeline when it comes to FTAs, you know, our preferential agreement, which I think is a good sign of what you were just mentioning right now. All right, that's good. Thank you. Thank you. I will now pass the call over to Isabel to read the question from the webcast. Thank you very much, Ellie. It will be verbatim to honor. The analysts have both written them in, but in some cases they wrote them a little while ago. If you think you've already answered, they will repeat. It's not that they're asking you for a repeat, it's just that now we're getting to their show. I'm going to start with Nick Tusher from Redburn, who is asking what led to weaker trading in Europe in more detail. Last night reported strong EU environment cover some of those points. If you have anything extra to add. Thanks to Nick. I'll start off on that one. I spoke to it a little bit in the script. We do see a mix of performance across our European territories, and what we saw specifically was very good trading in France, obviously, which had a very good season, but obviously that wasn't enough to offset some of the weaker elements of what we saw across that book of business. Particularly, places like Turkey and Greece were impacted during the course of this season, and it has been a more difficult season for them. There are some important markets for us in terms of our overall geographical distribution from a coverage perspective. While we did see a mix of performance, I would say that some of our primary markets just weren't quite where we would have liked to see them during the course of this summer. Yeah, it's true that for HBX Group being in Europe, if that's. Their role. I know we're running a little long on time, but I'm going to clear out the ones we've got for the sales line at least. We've got DM Stampio from Tosha. He says, could you provide some more color of what is considered for the low and the high end of guidance in terms of underlying demand? Can we quantify the FX back to in the guidance cut, and is the fiscal Q4 run rate a good reference for the coming quarters based on the visibility you have at the moment? Okay, so I'll ask you maybe to repeat the last one again in a moment. In terms of the low and high ends of our guidance, we obviously feel that, you know, as always we're looking towards the midpoint and trying to achieve those numbers while particularly on the top line, we need to see continued decent trading. We've seen that we have had a quick to change environment. We're going to keep a close eye to that. There's obviously only a couple of months left in the year to go, but we need to see continued positive trends. I would say to get to that mid to high end of our range. Obviously the other end of the spectrum is what you would expect. If we continue to see, or if I should say we should see a slowdown again, as I mentioned in my previous comments, June was relatively flat. July has been better. We need to see that continuing trend as we go through August and September to sit out the year in terms of. Sorry, the second question. The FX impact on the guidance cut. The FX impact we've said obviously in the quarter we were impacted by about 3% from an FX perspective. Obviously we included in guidance something similar in terms of our mindset for what will happen in future Q4. Given the proportion of our H2 versus our H1 that has more of a 3% overall, certainly 2.5%- 3% overall impact to our full year guidance. That has not been an unsubstantial element to the overall impact on guidance. Q4, maybe I'll start and you go through the numbers. I think Q4 is always a tougher quarter for us. I think we had explained that last year we see usually that in H2 we have a lower margin because of the usually hotel occupancy because of the geomics. Some of the regions like Mediterranean having a higher share, etc. I don't think that you should take Q4 as a proxy for 2025, and we mentioned it a couple of times, the new financial year is performing significantly better than Q4 as we have said. Yes. The last question I'm going to fit in today is actually a four-part question, but the first part is on one theme. The last question that we're going to be, so the first part is, has there been a channel shift? As I, Leo Carrington, at sitting, has there been a channel shift at the demand level? The late bookings tend to come through direct or OTA channels that bypass HBX Group. That's the third part. I'm going to give it three goes, but I'll stop with that one. To start, I would say that the second part of the question is accurate. We've always been very clear that when you go into short early times, it's usually because it's a less complex travel and therefore accumulated would be more domestic, more social, and people would need less of our traditional intermediaries and would build it directly for B2C. We say to ourselves in the original opening that we think that this favors OTAs versus ourselves. Is there an industry and market shift? I'm not certain. What we see is that, first of all, I said that earlier on when the market gets tougher, people tend to revert to flying further from home or sometimes not even flying in the same region or country. When there is a better macro or geopolitical, they start to go long haul, which I think plays in our favor. If you allow me just one additional comment, we see, for instance, that the younger generation, they tend to book at a shorter time but with a very different characteristic than the one that we've heard. They do not trust very much established brands. They have this brand skepticism, which is very important. They fly more often and experiences are a part of the travel. Therefore, we see that we travel a lot of them. You remember we said that they are already a very important part of our bookings. The final part of Leo's question and our last question that we have time for today is does competition in mobility experiences change appetite to invest in a sector? Short answer is not at all. We still see mobility and experiences as a very interesting market for the future. We see that the connected trip is part of it every time when we launch our ecosystem approach. Two years ago not every one of the key players was interested in distributing multi chain currencies, but today what we see is that we have a strong demand for very established players that like the fact that they have a contract with us, we work well together, and they're asking us if they could buy this from us. We see, summarizing, a shift in the market, which is probably important for a further acceleration. We want to keep investing in that market. Thank you very much, guys. I'm going to leave the Q and A from the web there, but if anybody wants to come back with extra questions to the Investor Relations team, please do send me an email directly or via the IR inbox and I'll be happy to help. Any final words before we finish the call? Yeah, I think summarizing what the key messages that we have tried to pass on and hopefully through our answers to the question. The market has been changing fast. I think it was unpredictable. This evolution, and this is on the back of the macroeconomic uncertainty and the geopolitical tension. As we just said in the last question, domestic travel and shorter times outperformed international corridors and longer lead times, and this evolution, at least for the summer, as we were saying, maybe has taken away some demand from our key channels. What we did at HBX Group International plc is that we reacted fast to protect the P&L. As I said in Q3, in constant currency we have a high single-digit TTV growth, which I think is good. If I compare with some of the other players, our take rate has been going down very slightly versus last year, which was a very strong Q3 for the travel industry. This is despite a more competitive market and some promotional activities that we have done. I think that we've managed it. As Brendan was saying, we're absolutely focused on protecting our ABC commitments and the cash flow, as we've been saying. Last comment, if I may. I think that we have a solid EBITDA outlook for the year. Our company is profitable and that's important. If I look at 2026, I think my key message here is that fundamentally the growth potential for the business is there, it's based on very strong fundamentals and that's something that we want to reiterate to close this call. Thank you very much, and thank everyone. For now, just click.