Good morning, everyone. I always have to check. All my colleagues are always worried that I'd forget my glasses. I've often gone onto stage and realized my glasses are down in the audience, but I'm fully organized today. The first thing I want to do is welcome you to our Capital Markets Day, and thank you all for coming along, and thanks to those who are listening in virtually as well. I'm going to start off by outlining the agenda for today. In a few moments, I'll bring you through the vision we have for the company. Roma O'Connor, then our Chief Marketing Officer, will bring you through the very exciting transformational journey that we've embarked upon in marketing. Shane Casserly, our Deputy CEO, will bring you through our growth strategy and explain our rationale for expanding into Europe. Then finally, Carol Phelan, who you all know, our CFO, will bring you through a financial review. Roma and Shane will take questions at the end of their presentations, and if it's okay, I'll step up at the end with Carol and take questions at the end of our presentation. We are finished the schedule here at 12:00pm, and then we'll walk up to our new Maldron Shoreditch hotel, which is less than a five-minute walk from here, and we've arranged tours of the property. Really, if you have time, I'd really encourage you to go on one of those tours. It'll give you a really good understanding of a new, very efficient operating model, where we've combined the efficiencies of operations with the actual design of the hotel. If you have time, that would be great. Buffet lunch will be served in the hotel at 12:45 P.M. Apart from the four people who are presenting here today, there are also many other members of the management team, and if you haven't met some of them already, please feel free during lunch or during the showarounds of the hotel to go up and engage with them. They'd be quite happy to answer any queries you have, maybe even specific to their areas of responsibility. Look, I really hope you find this morning helpful and informative, and you leave the day understanding far more about where we're at in Dalata. As you are probably aware, we released two statements to the stock exchange over the last 24 hours. We announced yesterday that we have concluded a EUR 30 million share buyback program that we had announced with our interim results on September 4th. The company repurchased 7.3 million shares at a weighted average price of EUR 4.08. We issued a trading update this morning, where we outlined that the positive momentum that we saw in July and August on group RevPAR has continued into September and October, where we expect to achieve group RevPAR growth of 2% for the two-month period. We remain positive in our outlook for the remainder of the year. On the back of our anticipated sales of our two Wexford hotels and the net proceeds that these disposals will generate, we announced this morning a new share buyback program of EUR 25 million, which will commence in the coming days. I will answer questions on these announcements at the end of Carol's presentations if there is any. As you can see, in Dalata at the moment, is we have lots of news flow. So now moving on to my own section of the presentation. I will start with our own purpose statement, and I'll try to outline to you how that feeds into the vision that we have for the company. We didn't employ some major consultants to come up with this purpose statement. Actually, when I was applying for the role of CEO and working from home during COVID, I came up with this. And what it does is encapsulates the key principles and priorities from me as CEO, the senior executive team, and indeed all the teams at central office and out in the hotels. Our purpose is to grow and evolve as an innovative and sustainable international hotel company. Delivering excellence in customer service, driven by ambitious people, flourishing within a culture of integrity, fairness, and inclusion. And we've made lots of progress on this over the last three years. In terms of growth, we'll touch on this, and Shane will go into far more detail. We've actually doubled the number of hotels that we have here in the U.K. from 11 to 22, and we've sourced our first two hotels in Europe. We've increased significantly our focus on sustainability, and I could blind you with various statistics, but the one that does stand out is that we have reduced our carbon emissions per room sold compared to 2019 by 29%. We're also building our first hotels that will have zero onsite carbon emissions, as in they'll be completely electrified in Edinburgh and Croke Park in Dublin. We've significantly increased our understanding of what our customer requires through an increased investment in customer research, which Roma is gonna take you through in more detail later. I'm particularly delighted this year that we've grown our customer satisfaction scores in Maldron by one point five percentage points and in Clayton by half a percentage point. Good, really good progress in terms of our focus on the customer. The one I'm particularly happy at when I look at people is that our employee engagement scores in December of last year and June of this year are at record levels. Our people are telling us that they're happier than ever. I suppose, what is the point of our purpose statement? We use this to guide our vision. I want to, this morning, very briefly outline to you what that vision looks like and where we're heading towards over the next six years. Not surprisingly, and my colleagues won't be surprised, that I'm gonna start with people, which is absolutely top of my agenda as CEO. Hospitality is all about people, and in Dalata, we have great people. Our employer brand says, "Dalata, a different way, a better way," and that's something we live every day. Where we want to get to, and we're not fully there yet, is be an employer of choice that attracts talented and ambitious people. We've invested significantly in our employer brand over the last two years, and we're widely recognized in Ireland now as an excellent employer. But obviously, still in the U.K., there's a lot to do in spreading the word about Dalata. Inclusion and diversity is something we all hold dear within Dalata. And when I think of inclusion and diversity, I always think it's not just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do. The more inclusive and diverse we are, the greater pool of talent we have to fish in terms of recruiting people into the organization. We want to be an employer that really cares about its people, and if I look at us, really particularly happy that last year we received accreditations in both Ireland and the U.K. for our well-being strategy. Critically, underscoring all of this is our decentralized decision-making model, which empowers and motivates our people at central office and especially out in the hotels. We believe our people strategy delivers shareholder value every day, and we want to increase the value it is creating by enhancing that strategy further. The vision for our brands. When I took over as CEO, one of the first things I did was separate the sales function from the marketing function, because I honestly believe they're completely different disciplines. I felt there was an opportunity for us in terms of marketing, in terms of creating brands. So what we want to get to is that our brands are truly adding value to our hotels. That people stay in our hotels because they feel connected to Clayton or they feel connected to Maldron. They understand at Clayton, it's personal, or at a Maldron, it starts here. Roma will share research with you that shows that we've got a long way to go for that connection to be established, but we're starting that journey. I also want our strong brands to be recognized as industry-leading in terms of messaging and delivery across all platforms. That there's consistent, clear messaging that creates that feeling of belonging across our websites, social media, within hotels, and traditional media. And again, Roma is going to outline the progress we've made over the last 12 months there and what we've planned for the future. I can't tell you today that our brands are delivering shareholder value, but by 2030, or hopefully before that, I will be able to stand up in front of you and say they are of true value to the shareholders. In Dalata, we've always been agile. Our reaction to COVID was really impressive. We were able to quickly change our approach, and survival was a hugely challenging period for the industry. However, I've always argued that innovative was something we weren't, because innovation is very different. It's a state of mind. It's where norms are challenged, and there's a hunger among all the people for new ideas, and we've made great progress in Dalata again over the last few years. We rolled out an accommodation project, which not only delivered productivity in how we clean our rooms, it also improved employee satisfaction among our housekeeping staff, and we maintained customer satisfaction scores. We introduced signature dishes, which again has increased productivity in our kitchens, has increased employee engagement in our kitchens, and has actually also increased customer satisfaction with our food. You'll see when you go over to Shoreditch, the success that we're having with our check-in pods, where we actually use the pods to actively engage with our customers more. It is these sort of initiatives that have delivered the productivity that has helped us mitigate the impact of rising pay rates on our margins over the last two years. However, we've much, much more to do. We're now really looking at how we can do smart things smarter in central office, and our investment in IT is continuing. It has been transformed over the last few years. In 2024 alone, we've introduced a new multilingual online training platform, a new leisure center system, and we're starting the rollout of our new property management system, Duetto. Next year, that rollout of Duetto will gather pace. We're also introducing a new customer experience platform, a new CRM, and a new recruitment system. So a huge amount happening in terms of technology within Dalata. Where I would like us to get to over the next number of years is we really embrace AI and technology in those high-impact areas. Payroll is our biggest cost, so can AI do something for us in terms of rostering? Revenue management is absolutely key to us. And again, our investment in Duetto is key there. We're looking at ways in which we can further improve our performance in terms of energy consumption. Now that we have automated meters in every property, that's giving us data every quarter of an hour. And as I said previously, in terms of our customer experience platform, we want to better understand how our customers behave on our websites and our social media, and generally get more detailed research from them. So our culture of innovation, I'm happy to say, is very much embedded, but it's an ongoing journey and will continue to deliver value for us. Shane is going to take you through our growth strategy in detail later on, but I want to touch on it here. We will continue to grow our portfolio through a balanced mix of leases and ownership. And if I look at it between existing hotels and new hotels, that's how we grow, and that's where our track record is. So if we're for existing hotels, we can acquire freeholds like we did with Finsbury Park and London Wall last year, or we can acquire the leasehold interest like we did in Amsterdam also last year. We've also successfully developed extensions in the past to our existing hotels, which tends to give very good returns, and we're currently looking at opportunities for that in Cardiff Lane and Manchester Airport. We've been hugely successful in development of new hotels, and we've got great skills in designing those hotels. Sometimes we develop those hotels with our own funds, like we have with Shoreditch, which we'll see later on, and like we're currently just starting with in Edinburgh. But we're also partnering with fixed income investors, as we have for the last eight years, and this year the examples there are Brighton, Liverpool, and Manchester. And what we're doing is we combine our hotel operational experience with our ability to develop hotels and acquire very good hotels to deliver very strong financial returns for our shareholders. As I said, we've a successful track record of securing and delivering opportunities that add value. 11 hotels added in the U.K. in the last 3 years, and two hotels in Europe. So what does that all look like in terms of what the group might look like in 2030? Our ambition is to be the largest hotel operator in the four-star segment in all the major cities in Ireland and the regional U.K.. We're already clearly there in Ireland, and we're well on the way to that success in the regional U.K. when you look at the city of Manchester, where we already have four hotels, and in places like Glasgow, where we have two. We want to have a growing presence in London and Europe, 'cause that'll provide the future pathway for accelerated growth as opportunities in regional U.K. start to run out, and that is something Shane will take you through in detail. We're aiming to have 21,000 rooms by 2030, either open or in development, which will represent a 75% increase on our current portfolio of 12,000 rooms. I hope that my short presentation gives you the context in what you will hear about our marketing journey and our growth strategy over the next two presentations. Now I'm gonna hand over to Roma O'Connor, who's gonna bring us through our very exciting marketing journey. Thank you. Hello. Sorry, what? The glasses. Thank you. During this segment, I'm going to take you through the marketing transformation of Dalata. We started this transformation in 2022, and we are really happy to share with you the progress to date. Starting with the why. Why are we doing this? I know you already know this, but it's nice to set out the rationale as to why we are reshaping our marketing efforts at Dalata. The marketing team, we set out the brand strategy, the brand positioning, the brand identity for the organization, and this is really powerful for an organization, as it has the means to galvanize the company together and also for us to have a common language and approach. It also uncovers customer and business insights for the business, which is critical as we grow and move forward, and it manages and executes the digital customer relationship, which in the e-commerce world, is absolutely critical that we focus and enhance our digital customer relationship. This then feeds into book direct and our direct relationships with our customers and building that connection as we grow. It sets out and creates the advertising and communications for the business, which then drives the brand awareness. So it does actually feed into lots of areas of the business. And this will, as Dermot said, in 2030, as we grow and maintain the momentum around this journey, it will feed into our company and business outcomes. So it feeds into customer perceptions, because the brand, the brand journey is how we show up in the world, which is very important. It will help influence market share, because if customers' perceptions increase and our market share increases, this will feed into the share price. It obviously has a lot of influence over employee perceptions and the language of the business. It heavily influences corporate reputation for the business, and this, in turn, will help the quality credentials of the business and feed into the value equation. Because if the customers believe us, believe in us and love us, this will give us permission to charge more, which will then influence revenue. So we just thought it would be interesting just to set the scene as to why we would focus our marketing efforts as we grow. So at Dalata, we have been forensic and focused in our approach, and we have set out four strategic platforms to deliver this transformation. As Dermot cited, we started with customer insights. We created a digital transformation, which I will share with you. Employer brand was a key component of our journey, and as Dermot has cited, we are a people business, and we were emerging from COVID at the time, so getting our brand out there as being a great employer was absolutely critical. Then we repositioned our brands as an organization. Customer insights. Our journey started with keeping customer insights at the heart of all that we do. We set up the 1 Dalata customer panel. We talked to customers in the U.K. and Ireland, and also in the Netherlands, to build robust insights as we move forward. We also did mystery shopping, where customers went to our hotels and visited our locations and came back with feedback. We also did eye tracking in properties. So our customers would go into the properties, and we would survey what they look at and where the customer moments were working. So that was really interesting and informative and really helped guide our journey in our marketing efforts so that we could build out robust customer strategies. We had 150 customers that we talked to extensively in these markets. We also did quant research. So this was a survey, 20-25-minute survey with customers in Ireland and the U.K.. We had 500 customers in Ireland and 1,000 in the U.K. market to uncover different insights around the business. So in terms of this quant data, what we found, which was very interesting for our business, that the category in Ireland was 1.2 million customers used hotels more than three times a year in Ireland. That is 29% of all adults. So it's a robust category. It's actually, it a lot of people. This is not including international hotel guests, so it's just domestic guests. And then when we looked at the research in the U.K. market, we found that it was 20.7 million customers use hotels at least three times a year in the U.K. market, and this was, as I said, 39% of all adults. So this was interesting in terms of understanding the usage of the category. And from this data, this is our first dip. We are going to continuously measure ourselves year on year, twice a year, this dip, so that we understand the trends in our business. So this is the first dip, and you can see in the Irish market, this is unprompted awareness. So this is when customers were asked: "What hotel can you think of?" And Maldron and Clayton is number one in terms of brand awareness. And as you all know, this is connected to visits. So if your brand is known, the visit penetration is connected to your business. So as you can see, in the Irish market, Maldron and Clayton, strong brand awareness and strong visits from the customers that we have spoken to. In terms of the U.K. market, as you can imagine, we are a small player in the U.K. market, so the picture is different. You can see that Premier Inn has the highest unprompted brand awareness, and they visit the highest penetrations of visits, followed by Hilton Hotels. We are nine and 10 in our comp set, but as we grow and continue to grow the business, as Dermot has outlined, we will track this and hold ourselves accountable to move this forward as we grow. In terms of this quant data, we also found out what drives customer visits, and we know that location is the number one driver. Of course, this is not surprising to you all, but it's great to get the robust data to back up our business decisions and understand where we point our efforts. Location is the number one driver of hotel visits in the domestic market, and I'm delighted to say that our location strategy is absolutely exceptional at Dalata. It scores exceptionally in all the data that we review. As we were discussing this, this is the only part of the business mix that you cannot change, so it's absolutely a core competency for our business. In terms of price, now is the second driver, which is unsurprising with the dynamic pricing model of the hotel business. In Ireland, it's I knew about the brand, and in the U.K., it's quality and reputation. This is really interesting because then we know what communications we should focus on, what strategies we should craft, and how we can drive impact as we move forward. That's just the general drivers in the hotel category, and our brand portfolio, as you can see, excels in these categories. Location, price, and I know about the brand in Ireland, we resonate well with our customers against Clayton and Maldron. In the U.K. market, our sample size is small at the moment in terms of people that have stayed with Clayton and Maldron, but it's still very interesting to reflect on this, and it's interesting for us to continue to measure and make sure that we're aware how we're tracking against location, price, and quality. Quality and reputation is a slight nuance in the U.K. market, which again reinforces the fact of elevating our brands and giving more meaning to our brands as we grow. We also look at the NPS. I know you all know what an NPS score is. That is if you would recommend staying in a particular hotel. We've actually put out the names of our competitors in this chart, but we worked with Shane's team to set out our competitive set that we'll track ourselves against. And as you can see, our customers love Clayton in the Irish market with the number one NPS score, which we were really delighted to have to see. And in Maldron Hotels, we've got opportunity to grow. But this is great data because then we can point our efforts to close the gaps as we continue as a business. Then in the U.K. market, as I said, the sample size is small, but you'll all know there's a lot of similarities between the U.K. and Irish market, and the trends are very similar. Clayton Hotels, the NPS, is number one, and Maldron Hotels, there's opportunity to grow, so we will work on that in the coming year. We've repositioned our brand, which, you know, feeds into the will feed into the customer perceptions of Maldron. In terms of the Booking.com data, we have our qualitative data, our Hundred Voices, we have our quant data, our surveys, but we also look at our Booking.com data, and we can see that our overall scores for both brands are really strong. The location, as I said, our location strategy is exceptional and really ranks ahead on everything. We're continuing to use all our consumer data to craft our strategies and to make sure that they are strategies that will drive our business forward into the future. That's the customer insight part of my presentation. The second strategic platform is the digital transformation for the business. We took a data-driven tech approach, resulting in streamlined processes, enhanced visibility, and measurable growth for the business. We completely overhauled our digital marketing activities. We moved from 100 Google Ad accounts down to five. I know you all know what a Google Ad account is, but it's basically where you host, put your money, host your ads, target your ads. We had 100 of them in the business, and we moved down to five, eliminating a lot of complexity in how we delivered this for the business. We had 300 social pages. We moved down to 133, because we still wanted to keep that local relevance in the heart of hospitality in Dalata. We had 50 manual reports in 2022, and we've moved to zero manual reports, and everything is automated. So enhancing, really streamlining our processes, processes for the business. We relaunched our websites. As I said, we need to work really hard to get a more direct relationship with our customers online, so we've refreshed our websites. So before April, we had 59 individual websites for the organization, and we moved to six consolidated next-generation sites. And when we looked at the data, over 7,300 of the individual pages, just, only 300 of the pages drove 80% of the website traffic. We knew we could simplify a lot of, a lot of pages that would drive more function and impact for the business. So that was a great journey and has been working really well for us. Social media is very big for the hotel category, so we wanted to look at this and so and look at our processes around this. We did an independent audit externally. We didn't want to mark our own homework, and we just looked at our posts from across the organization. And we saw that 14,000 organic posts, these were all the posts from the whole hotel group for a whole year. One social ad with EUR 5,000 spend can generate the same revenue. So think of all those fourteen thousand conversations, ads, things that they wanted to market, and you could just do one ad and drive the similar revenue. We knew there was great potential to drive efficiencies and impact around the social media area. We consolidated social media. We went from fifty hotels acting independently. We had hundreds of hours used by hotel teams. We had over 60 accounts competing against each other, and we moved to all content being planned and managed by one central team, allowing for premium, consistent brand messaging to be delivered. There's been huge efficiencies and performance, and the results have been very strong since we have made these moves, and we only have two ad accounts now. So in terms of the look and feel, you can see before April, there was a lot of fragmented messages, a lot of different messages from the hotels, and now we have a really clear, impactful message, messages going out to the world, driving our brand recognition for the organization. And in terms of the performance, to date, the revenue generated January to September through our direct channels, our websites, is EUR 80.4 million. It's up 7.6% year-on-year, so good results, positive. But as Dermot said, it's only the beginning, and we'll continue to put our focus and energy in driving that book direct customer. And in terms of efficiencies, we have created the same period last two years ago, EUR 340,000 in agency fee savings and removed 12 full-time employees from the business, and also, we haven't grown the marketing function, so all the efficiencies you have seen have basically really helped the business and also with performance, and then I'm not going through the employer brand because of time, but the employer brand was another important aspect. As Dermot cites, we are a people business, and we did a lot of work around this. I'm going to move on to the repositioned brands. When we researched with our customers, they said that our brands lacked meaning, that they were vague, and they wanted to see how these were articulated. We have repositioned our brands, completed a lot of deep work to get to this stage. They're much more contemporary. They're much more in step with the modern customer, and we really do now show up as a modern and progressive hotel group. Dalata, the heart of hospitality, as we articulate it, and this is how we show up every day in our business. Hospitality, you need a lot of heart in hospitality, and that is what we are as an organization. In terms of Maldron, Maldron is an epic base camp. They're in great locations, city locations, and how we articulate Maldron is, "It starts here." And Clayton, when we look to Clayton, it's more about the experience, more about the dwelling in the hotel, so the positioning for Clayton is, "Where it's personal." And the data actually explains why, the points of difference, differences as well from our customer research. The Clayton Hotel, the social grading is more affluent, and in terms of the Maldron, it's more C, it's less ABC1 social grade, and also, Clayton has more children than the Maldron. And then when we look at how they use us, couples getaway is the number one reason why people come to hotels. But if you look at the business trip in Clayton, 18% of people visit our hotels for a business trip versus 9% in Maldron. In Maldron, 17% to attend a concert versus Clayton at 9%. There are different usages, and Maldron is that epic base camp, "It starts here," and Clayton is more about the amenities and the facilities, and we'll continue to build and refine our strategies as we move forward. Before, again, Maldron, which probably feeds into the NPS, it's a little bit value-led visually, and we have changed this more to an international city location. Again, the pre and post, so from April, and we have supported that in 2024. Then, if we look at Clayton, this is before April 2024, and this is after the rebrand. And again, it's much more of an elegant sophistication, tapping into that more affluent customer and giving them more reasons to visit us in our hotels. So I hope you think it's beautiful. Yes? It is. Yes. Yes, I think it's gorgeous. So, no, we're really proud of the marketing transformation. I think it's a fantastic journey. It's. We've used consumer insights, we've unlocked digital, and we've also, you know, made really strong work with, as a team. So I'm going to leave you with the Clayton TV ad. Well, actually, I'm leaving you after, actually. So before I leave you with a video, I'm going to show you the TV ad for Clayton. So this went live in Ireland last week, and it's the first time Clayton's ever been on television, so we're very happy, and we hope you like this ad. Welcome to Clayton Hotels, where every second is yours to enjoy however you like, and every experience is elevated with a little help from us. Clayton Hotels, where it's personal. Lovely. So, that is the Clayton TV ad, and we have lots of outdoor and lots of different communications and social media. So if you see it, please do let us know what you think of it. Before I take some questions, I'm just going to show you a video, just outlining and reinforcing exactly what I just took you through, and I hope you find it informative. I feel so close to you right now. It's a buzz feel. I wear my heart up on my sleeve like a big deal. Your love pours down on me, surround me like a waterfall, and there's no stopping us right now. I feel so close to you right now. I feel so close to you right now. It's a buzz feel. I wear my heart up on my sleeve like a big deal. Your love pours down on me, surround me like a waterfall, and there's no stopping us right now. I feel so close to you right now. I suppose we take any questions on what Roma's presentation was. Obviously, just for me, you can see why I'm so excited. It's a huge transformation from where we were previously, and Roma joined us about two and a half years ago, and has really brought an energy to both the team in terms of what we're doing, marketing, and right throughout the business. We often joke that we hate presenting after Roma because she always finishes with a really good video. So whoever's up next, which is Shane today, it's a hard one to follow, but we've made enormous progress, and I'm really excited about what we've done in this area. So any questions on what Roma presented? Paul? Um, yeah. Thanks for that, Roma. Really interesting. So just kind of two questions again, sorry to jump straight to the financial side of it, but just maybe- Yeah. If you could just discuss the kind of the overall sales and marketing budget for the last couple of years, how you think about it for the next couple of years? And is there anything tangible, say, from, you know, if you look at the Irish state now and the brand resonance of Clayton and Maldron in Ireland versus where they are in the U.K., and how we think maybe about the evolution of direct booking and, you know, maybe what some of the financial outcomes of that might be. I might touch on the budgeting part first, and then I'll let you, Okay. Yeah Yeah ...right. So, like, we have increased a degree of investment into marketing, but if I look at next year, we're only looking like something like a 3% increase. Because in fairness to what Roma has done, she's driven huge efficiencies as well. You saw it in terms of social media, you know, we've saved in terms of full-time equivalents, we've saved in terms of agency fees. So everything that Roma has done at the center is about driving efficiencies. We've taken some of the spend back from the hotels, so it's managed more at the center now, and we're getting better value from that as well. So everything you've seen here today isn't a huge investment. Now, there is one significant investment, which is in signage, which is gonna cost us, we're estimating it, for internal and external signage over the next nine months or so, which will go through our normal maintenance CapEx budget, is going to be about EUR 4 million. That is the biggest single investment. A lot of the rest of the budget has just been repositioned and used more efficiently. Sorry. Yeah. So in terms of the book direct piece, well, it's definitely, from all the numbers that we're looking at at the moment, obviously, doing a conversion directly with a customer is way cheaper than doing it with an OTA. Now, OTAs are very important. They will drive conversions fast for the business and occupancy for the business, but it's about balancing both. You can't hand your whole business over to OTAs. As the years go on, they can increase commissions. There's too much risk to the business, so we need to balance our own book direct relationship, invest in it, cultivate that relationship, make sure we're getting the returns, but also use all our levers and business mix to drive shareholder value and customer conversions. But one of the things we're doing there as well, is that some hotels are doing really well in direct bookings through our websites. Yeah. And we're trying to understand what's actually driving that, because honestly, at the moment, we've one hotel in particular in Newcastle, that's really, really successful. There's no logical reason, like, brand awareness wouldn't be high in Newcastle. Yeah. There's a good Irish connection, but not as big as, let's say, in Manchester, whereas the book direct in Newcastle is much higher than Manchester, and if you think the connections between, even through the football, we don't understand that fully. So now we're being honest, okay? We're now trying to investigate that, understand what is driving, what has been successful in Newcastle that we potentially roll out in someplace like Manchester. Yeah. Jack? Jack Cummings at Berenberg. You obviously went through there, a significant amount of the transformation that's happened in the business already. As we're thinking about the next two to three years, what are the key areas for yourself and the team that you think you can drive for more efficiencies or where you think there's more to do? Yeah. It would be around that book direct piece as our priority, because we're also getting a CXDP customer platform. We've a very old CRM management system, which is all about the life cycle of the customer. We'll be focusing on. We have now our fundamentals and infrastructure in place. It's about maximizing that now and really making sure, how do we drive more book direct? We have our brands. We won't be a scalable brand. We're not going to spend a fortune on branding, but we have really solid brands, great consumer insight, and we have the digital infrastructure to drive those book direct. So I think that would be, like, a bit of an obsession of mine anyway, of us all to drive that. So that would be the priority number one. Thank you. Anything else on the market side? Okay, Roma, thank you very much. Thank you, Dermot. Shane, I'll call Shane up to the stage. Thank you. Morning, guys. No cool videos, I'm afraid. So yeah, look, I'm Shane. I'll hopefully take you through our growth strategy, put a bit more color and substance on it to probably what you're used to in terms of the annual reports or the interim reports. I do have over thirty slides. I've been hearing all morning that, "Shane, you have so many slides, you have to stay on schedule," and so on, so I'll try and move through it reasonably quickly. I'll try and slow down through at regional U.K. and Europe, which will take a bit of work. Obviously, there's a Q&A, as Dermot mentioned, at the end, but I'll be over in Shoreditch after as well. So if anyone wants to catch me there, that's no problem. As you can see, the agenda is pretty self-explanatory. I just wanted to start on this slide, which is pretty consistent to what you would have seen in terms of the annual reports. We've obviously updated it in terms of the information or announcement this morning. So targeting to have 21,000 rooms by 2030, which Dermot mentioned on. You can see the ambition there, where we're looking to be the largest hotel operator in the four-star segment of all major cities, and then growing presence in London and Europe, which Dermot touched on as well. What I'm hoping is to give you more of why we're going where we're going, and why we're not going where we're not going as well. So moving on. Hopefully, you can all recognize the sketch map of the Republic of Ireland there, and you can see the highlighted dots, let's say, on the west coast of Ireland, which are starting from the top, Galway, Cork, and Li- or Galway, Limerick, Cork. We got the order slightly wrong there. But there are three very important markets for us in the Republic, and very stable. You can see there in terms of market share, we're somewhere between 13% and 17%. So we don't see huge growth opportunities in those cities. We know those markets very well. We're obviously the strongest player in the Irish market. So if something came up that was very, very attractive, very central, we would obviously look at it. But in terms of strategic growth, we don't see a huge opportunity for us there. In terms of Dublin, we've always, you know, we've always been pretty upfront that we're very comfortable with a 20% share of the Dublin market, and not because we've reduced our share or reduced our count in Dublin, but because the way Dublin market has grown, we've actually slipped off that circa 20% to down around 16.4%, and that delta represents a 1,000-bedroom opportunity. So we would be, we are interested in Dublin, but again, because we've such a strong profile, a strong knowledge of that market, it is only those best and strongest locations, and we are in the enviable position that we, you know, the risk factor, let's say, in terms of a Dublin opportunity is very low, 'cause we can understand the market so well. We would have announced last month what the Wexford disposals. We announced that we had exchanged contracts on Maldron Wexford, and there's a process in Clayton Whites of Wexford. The Maldron is due to complete first week in November, and it's on schedule, and Clayton Whites is due to exchange, we'd expect in the first half of November and complete this side of Christmas. So they're all progressing well. Look, we are constantly reviewing the portfolio. The reality is, the company is a very different company from when we IPO'd in 2014. The key questions we'd be asking ourselves when we're looking at the portfolio, are the locations strategic? Are the properties themselves consistent with the brand? You would have heard what Roma. You know, what we, where our brands are a lot more distinct now than they would have been in the past. Is there the potential to grow business within the property? The CapEx requirements, you know, is a very substantial question, both in the short term and the medium term, because hotels continue, continuous investment, and some of these properties need substantial investment. And then, you know, you can have your strategy, but then there's the practical reality of what's the market value versus what the hotel is delivering today. And we look at it through all those aspects before we make any decision. I can say to you today, there's no current plans for any further disposals, but what I would, as I would have touched on, we are constantly reviewing the portfolio. So then in terms of regional U.K., and you're going to have to bear with me a little bit here, because how do we assess the market opportunities in regional U.K.? We place a lot, or we work a lot with the AM:PM hotel database, which is part of the CoStar network, in terms of supply, basically broad data across the hotels, for the U.K., in this case. We select. We draw down our own database. We only select the STR city center, so if you, it's not the Greater Manchester area, it's Manchester Central. So it's those areas that we're very much interested in. That's, in short, a database of nearly 90,000 bedrooms, and all the analysis you see from here on in terms of U.K. is per bedroom, not per hotel. So that, this just gives you, I suppose, a snapshot of that. Everything I'm talking about are those cities in the U.K. that we're targeted on. This is not a U.K. analysis in a generic sense. You can see the share there, taking from the top, five star, 4%, apartments, 9%, budget, 22%, and then three star, 19%, and the four star is at 36,000 rooms, the largest grade in that market. And it, we often, and we do, when you see further analysis, we often combine the four and three stars. You can see it actually dwarfs, you know, for a generation now, the budget sector has been the growing grade in the U.K., but it's still dwarfed by that three and four star segment. We like to look at it in terms of the ownership structure. On the left-hand side there, you've got the budget analysis, and then on the right-hand side, the three- and four-star analysis. And you can see it's split between chain management, franchise, and independent operators. You can see the budget sector is completely dominated by large brands. Premier Inn, Travelodge, and Ibis represent 72% share of that market. Little or no independent sector. While in contrast, the three- or four-star has a huge number of independent operators. One in five bedrooms are owned by independent owners, and I've gone, honestly, through the data. They all only have one property. I think when you average it out, it's 1.16 per independent owner. These are standalone mom-and-pop shops, and they own a fifth, or they have a 1/5 of the three, four-star market in these cities. Largest brands, Hilton, 10%, and then you can see it works down through IHG, Marriott, Leonardo, and ourselves. Between the Clayton and the Maldron, we have just over 5%. That fragmented three-star segment with a very large number of small independent owner operators, for us, highlights the opportunity for us coming in with a cohesive model where we can bring all the benefits of scale and synergies that we have. Another analysis we look at is on the age profile of hotels. Again, you have budget on the left, three star on the right. You can see that going from the top is over 40 year old, 40 years old, then over 20 years old, then over 10, and then under 10 years old. So you can see the budget sector is basically a 1/3, a 1/3, 1/3, and which is the nature of that sector. It's all largely new builds. There's little or none over forty years old, but 27% of the three and four star are over 40 years old, and over 1/2 of the independent rooms that I referred to in the previous slide are over 40 years old. In contrast, 75% of the Dalata bedrooms in this market now, before someone picks me up on it. In Ireland, they are less than ten years old and none are over forty. Think of the modern offering that you have in the hotels. You know, you're going to Shoreditch in the afternoon, which is brand excellence, in terms of has all the best plant, that cost a fortune. To invest in that and properties of that age is a substantial obstacle for these independent owners in terms of trying to stay in the game, so to speak, in the mid-market. Next, what we have is cost growth outpacing RevPAR growth. What you see here is you can see the table on the right, we've taken a number of large cities, all of which are target cities for us in the U.K., and we've tracked RevPAR growth, 2015 versus 2024 and 2019 versus 2024. You can see at the bottom of the table then we have the comparatives for the U.K. CPI movement and the living wage movements. As it tends to do in terms of the hotel market, RevPAR has kept pace with CPI, but is way behind living wage. To give you an idea of the impact that has in terms of for our, ourselves, payroll is over 40% of the total cost base of the hotels, and circa 40% of the payroll is linked to movements in living wage. Now, I'm not saying 40% are at living wage. That's where people's, if living wage goes up, the increments will have to go up for other people. So 40% is, is substantial. So again, very challenging environment for those independent or small operators, and we definitely believe an opportunity for Dalata when you think of how we approach things from an entrepreneurial perspective and an innovative perspective. At present, smaller cities don't work for us. Again, U.K. regional. So now, in terms of the table, I'll work through quickly. This is one area if you want to explore with me after, that's no problem. So we took Exeter, we took a hypothetical Maldron of 200 bedrooms. The market in Exeter is 2,057 rooms, so that's 9.7% share. We did comp sets calculate what we believe we could achieve in a Maldron in that market, which delivered an EBITDA on our P&L model, which delivered a rent. We then put in the math in terms of what we believe we could secure in the institutional market, which left us with the NDVs, net development value of 21 million, excuse me. That only gets about 2/3 of the way to the actual build cost. You can see the EUR 12 million gap there. Clearly, increased property yields and construction costs are making building four-star hotels in smaller cities not feasible. That analysis excludes site costs, design and planning fees, funding costs, and a developer profit. So you can see, you know, it is very, very challenged in terms of delivering into that market, the build cost is a Maldron. A Clayton would be even worse again. For us, smaller cities are also intrinsically riskier. You can see it there in terms of Exeter, 2,000 rooms, roughly. We bring one hotel in and increase the room stock by 10%. Also, when you have a smaller market like that, if you have a large corporate leave the market, the impact is oversized in terms of what, say, a London or a Manchester can take when you have movements of corporates. We've completed similar exercises for other cities, including Southampton, Reading, Milton Keynes, and Bournemouth, and it's a similar story for all of them. Enough of where we're not going. Where are we going? Hopefully, you can see that now. So you can see that I won't call it. There should be no surprises there. I won't call the cities out on the left-hand side. Hopefully, you can read them. You're working across the top. We have the supply, September 2024. We've our target percentages, so you can see we're taking more, I suppose, ambitious positions on the likes of Edinburgh and Manchester than, say, in Oxford, at 5%. That gives us our target rooms. We take off what we have in operations or in the development pipeline, and that leaves us with a net target. So we're looking at a potential growth in this market of 5,000 rooms. Regional U.K. still provides a lot of potential for us in terms of growth. And very clearly, we're already seeing it in Manchester, where we have, you know, we have three hotels in the city and one in Manchester Airport. Large regional cities such as Edinburgh, Manchester, and Birmingham offer very attractive scale opportunities for us. Moving to London then. One slide in this, so we'll be very quick. So that, the table, you can see, outlines our current position with the five properties. You can see in the sketch how we've already managed to develop a cluster in the City of London. The two orange Claytons are Clayton London Wall and Clayton City of London. Just north of that is the Maldron Shoreditch, where you'll visit, and just north of that again is the Maldron Finsbury Park, and out west, then, we have Clayton Chiswick. So London has always been a very attractive market. I suppose in some ways, we maybe were a little bit respectful of it in the early days, where we saw high hurdles to getting in here, but we've doubled Dalata's bedroom count in London from 2022, which, to be honest, I didn't realize until we started putting this together, and I think it's a fantastic statement of success, and it certainly fed the confidence in terms of us being able to do more in London. We're already seeing the benefits of having the ability to cluster hotel functions. London has approximately 135,000 bedrooms. I just showed you a database in terms of Regional U.K., which is 90,000 bedrooms. So that gives you just in terms of simple math there, this London market is 50% bigger than all of those cities I showed you in combined in terms of Regional U.K.. So that, you know, for us to take a 2.5% share, which is very conservative, would equate to an additional circa 2,500 bedrooms over what we have in London today. Europe. Why Europe? Which is a question I get asked pretty regularly. I suppose when you know, when we were looking at it strategically, and you try to pull it back, we're pretty simple people, we try to pull it back to some basic questions. The basic question we eventually finish with is: What are we best at in? And for us, it's those large, busy cities or airports with strong international and domestic demand drivers. It's, and Roma's touched on in terms of location, Dermot's touched on it, but we're very experienced and successful at identifying and securing strong central locations. As I said, Roma had already touched on it, but our Booking.com location scores are pretty consistently greater than nine, certainly for the new properties we deliver. And then within those cities... Sorry, cities that in themselves generate strong ADR and high occupancy. So there are large cities in Europe that, you know, tick the boxes in terms of population, but they're not destination cities, they're not hubs, and they don't, you know, they're, that's reflected then in what we would call the city RevPAR. So we're looking for those cities that in themselves generate strong ADR and high occupancy. But then when we get in there, with our operational expertise, we're able to outperform in occupancy. We've that focus on efficiencies, which delivers very high EBITDA margins. Hopefully, in terms of regional U.K., you can see that it's still very attractive. However, the opportunity is finite, so it's very much incumbent on us to find fresh pastures into the future. And, you know, we opened Düsseldorf in February 2022, Clayton Düsseldorf and Clayton Amsterdam in just last year, exactly 12 months. And all experience to date confirms that, you know, Europe and those large cities in Europe are a very, very attractive market for the Dalata model. So where in Europe? So hopefully, you can see that, you can read across, you don't need me to call them out, but there's 11, let's call them, non-German cities, and then the six German cities on the lower half of the box, and then we, you know, put in, I suppose, shares at 1% of those markets and 2% of those markets. We're focused on those cities with large markets and strong RevPAR. To give you an idea. You know, you thought of Exeter there with 2,000 rooms. I have a table in a second that'll actually maybe give you a better contrast, but the smallest market up there is Düsseldorf at 21,000, just over 21,000 bedrooms. All are large destination or host cities. There's a balance of leisure and corporate demand, visitors, which allows us the opportunity to secure strong EBITDA returns, and also because they're large. If you think of what I said about Manchester and Dublin before, it gives us the opportunity in terms of scale and clustering, and efficiencies. I must say, I like this table in terms of just picturing or giving a brief, distinct picture of the opportunity. You can see where we've taken the European or the non-German cities above, and you can see the average market size, the average RevPAR, KPIs, similar for Germany. Then you look at those, what we call those U.K. challenged markets, and they're dwarfed, you know, in terms of opportunity. Another question we regularly get asked is: Is the lack of a global brand a difficulty? Sorry. So that's our distribution channel share for 2024 up to the end of September. So you can see huge consistency there. You're looking at tour business at the top, corporate is the pink, followed then by OTAs, and then you have our brand and direct business. So we are obviously substantially stronger in Ireland, which is, as you would expect. The tour business, lack of in Europe, is more a reflection of the individual properties themselves, and Düsseldorf, in terms of the city, than not being able to pull tour business in there. We'd actually, looking at it, would look to grow the brand. You know, we see across all three geographies, opportunities to grow the brand and direct in terms of what Dermot and Roma have touched on. But we're very happy that the Clayton branding has enhanced the business of both our Amsterdam and Düsseldorf hotels. We already have strong relationships with a number of large airlines and international corporates. If you think of Dublin as a tech hub, we have all those strong relationships with the Googles, the Microsofts, and so on, and similarly with the airlines that we're able to leverage off when we go into new international cities. Does the room know what GDS is? Okay, take it that GDS is Global Distribution Systems. So think of Booking.com, except for corporates, and it doesn't have the sexy website and pictures and so on. So it's more about codings and so on. So agencies like American Express use it in terms of booking for their corporate clientele. So the one GDS code we would have would apply in Germany, applies in Amsterdam, and so on. And we'll actually, you'll see it in a second in terms of what we've done in Düsseldorf. Our decentralized model allows us to activate the OTA channels when appropriate, so that's where we're being proactive and not reactive. And then in terms of some tangible examples, RGI rank is just your score in terms of your RevPAR within the comp set. So having transitioned from the Nikko, we still held a two of six within the comp set in Düsseldorf, and we're forecasting GDS corporate increase of 96% in 2024 versus 2019. So I can remember traveling over to our landlord in Düsseldorf with Des, looking to persuade him to change the brand. Sorry, Des, Des McCann, Chief Operations Officer, and thinking Des had a very hard gig that day. He was able to sit down and explain to the landlord how Nikko, while it was a global brand, very high profile in Japan, and they're very protective, that it actually had no GDS business in Europe, and that our GDS coding and profile was actually far stronger and would allow us to open up those opportunities in Düsseldorf. It went from where I thought he was, not impossible, but a very difficult job to sell, where the landlord just said, "Get on with it." That makes complete sense. I think that's the most tangible example I can give to you in terms of not having a brand difficulty. Then within our Amsterdam, we've actually improved, having transitioned from a Hard Rock Hotel branding to a Clayton. We've gone up one place to three of six within the comp set there in Amsterdam, and we've already reduced our reliance on transient leisure. Our own business is up 8.9%. So then, in terms of European summary, if there's one message I'd like you to take away with, from me anyway today, is that it's far more sensible for us to focus on growth opportunities in the Amsterdams of this world than the Exeters. It's both less risky and more rewarding. So, because I know there's a lot of questions as to, were we just pivoting for pivot reasons, but I hope you're comfortable that we've done the analysis, we've done the research, and so on. We're already satisfied that the Dalata decentralized model can work successfully in these markets. The larger cities will allow further opportunities for cluster efficiencies. There's no disadvantage from utilizing a global brand, and at what I regard, again, similar to London, a very conservative 2% share of those identified cities would deliver circa 14,000 new rooms. I'm not committing to any timeline on those, by the way. Just to conclude, you know, virtually all of my PowerPoints or presentation has been about forward-looking. I think it would be negligent on my part not to flag to you that since 2021, we've actually added 15 hotels to the portfolio, and you can see a collage of them all there, and we're very, very proud of them all. But, I mean, in terms of some headlines, that's three and a, circa three and a half thousand bedrooms in total. We've had success across all three geographies. Twelve of those fifteen hotels were, you know, would have been started pre-COVID or during COVID, and we would have had to negotiate through COVID challenges, which were quite substantial. This year alone, we've delivered four new models in the U.K., which is, Dermot touched on in terms of property count, but even on a bedroom count, I think it's either 92 or 96, but it's nearly doubled the bedroom count in the U.K. since 2021. So huge success and kudos to our acquisitions team and our development team. Niall Macklin, our head of acquisitions, is here today as well, if you want to have a chat with him. In terms of market opportunities, then, you know, we are in very deep. We've been very busy. We are conscious that I suppose we've been a little bit light on announcements in terms of new acquisitions or new opportunities in 2024. That is not a reflection of how busy or how quiet we are. That's just a reflection of the nature of the beast, where you can have fallow months and then you have very, very busy months. I can assure you, as Niall's team or Niall reports to me, I'm more concerned about how busy they are and trying to watch them than actually not having enough projects. We are in detailed negotiations and opportunities in Madrid, Berlin, London, Edinburgh and Dublin. The vast majority are leasehold. There, there's also freehold opportunities that we're looking on, and I'd be very disappointed if we don't have some news for you between now and Christmas on some of those. So I started with that slide. I hope you have a bit more color and substance on it. All I've added there in terms of is a new row at the bottom, which I talked you through. But just to remind you, so a 1000 in Ireland, 5000 bedrooms in regional U.K., 2500+ bedrooms in London, and then 14,000 bedrooms to start with in continental Europe. So Sinead, Sinead means that, means that's it in Irish, just in case he lost the crowd. I thank you, Shane. I will just say one thing there. You will have seen a corporate split on the distribution mix, right? And we always use a higher percentage for corporate. The reality within OTA, there's a strong mix of corporate and leisure. We can no longer tell really if people are coming in for corporate or for leisure reasons. We always estimated by our business and day of the week that it's roughly fifty/fifty. It probably was a bit higher corporate pre-COVID, because the tourism ICE has definitely reduced in terms of corporate. That's actually stuff that's coming through directly our corporate channels and excludes corporate business coming through our OTAs and our own direct website. So any questions on... I mean, there's quite a lot there today. As Shane said, one of the main messages to get across is we did an investor perception study at the end of last year, and there's a lot of queries as to why we're moving into Europe. And I suppose what Shane's, hopefully, presentation has shown today is that it is far more sensible, once we go beyond those bigger cities in the region of the U.K., that Europe is a safer option for us than, let's say, the Exeters or the Southamptons, for the reasons that Shane has outlined. So any questions on that? Yep. Thanks. Can I just ask, if I look at the European strategy, why is, have you picked Germany for a cluster of cities and all of the others, you're just looking at one city? How do we- Why are you clustering in Germany? As opposed to? As opposed to anywhere else, just how come Germany was the market you picked? Like, the attraction of Germany was the number of large cities that it had. So now, if and I don't want to offend anyone, but if you look at Germany, it doesn't have any London. It doesn't have actually any one dominant city like that. So when we looked at it, it felt there was a lot of Manchesters there, and that felt like a natural place for us to go in terms of that opportunity. And that's why I suppose, yes, it would be, you know, I suppose if you say we have a country strategy for Germany, while there's a European strategy for a lot of the other cities. So if I talk to what we know, we're in Düsseldorf, we know, you know, we can successfully land in Berlin and Frankfurt and so on. We're in Amsterdam. We've actually looked at, you know, the likes of Eindhoven, The Hague and so on, and they're not, they're just not big enough. They're, they're like those channel cities in the U.K.. So Germany was more attractive for us because of simply the volume of large cities that it had. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Yeah. It's a follow-up question, actually, on Germany. We do understand that there is no central city or a major city, but we've seen a little bit, it's geographically scattered between west to the east, even to Berlin. So would it be a challenge to create efficiencies that are derived from clusters, on that sense? And even, like, if we look at Bavaria versus, I would understand Cologne and Düsseldorf are close to each other, but how would you see the operational efficiency on that vast- Yeah, I might just take that there. I mean, like, we do operate on the basis that a hotel can be standalone and give us the return we require, right? We do like clusters, so for now, we'd love to get more hotels in Amsterdam, but if we never get one more hotel in Amsterdam, when we make that investment decision, it's on the basis that one hotel will give us a return, because we can't assume it's so hard to get locations in these cities. We can't assume that we're going to get a cluster. So it is great if we do get a cluster, so we're looking at a couple of opportunities in Berlin at the moment. Two hotels will give us a higher return, but when we commit to one of those hotels, if we do, right, it'll be on the basis that the single hotel will give us a return. ... Can Can we get color, like, on what would be the difference in EBITDA margins between clustered hotels and non-clustered hotels, for example? Like, you know, it's not necessarily as big as you think, right, okay? Because, again, it depends on the city. So if you're in a RevPAR city, there's a higher RevPAR, you're going to get a higher margin. So even in regional U.K., the EBITDA margins vary from city to city. What we see in Manchester, well, the benefit we're getting actually is market knowledge as opposed to ideas. So for instance, in Dublin, if there's going to be a concert announced or there's going to be a match announced, right, we'll know about it. We'll know about it immediately, right? So we've got because all the hotels are talking to each other. We're getting to that stage in Manchester, apart from what happened a few weeks back, right? So we are getting to that stage in Manchester because we're a big player. So for instance, last year in Manchester, we did really well on flight cancellations because airlines, there was a lot of the airlines struggling with staff cancellations of flights. So when they knew that we had a big volume of rooms at the airport and city center, we benefited from that cluster. Then, where we get the benefit here in Shoreditch and in London at the moment, is we can share, we're sharing a chef, for instance, between Shoreditch and London Wall. James, who you'll meet later on, is the general manager of both properties, because they're two reasonably small properties. The reality is, if we got a second hotel in Amsterdam, we'd still need two general managers because they're two big, complex hotels. So it varies hugely from hotel to hotel, and we're learning, to be honest with you, because even what we're doing in marketing now, because we're taking more out of the properties, that gives us more ability to grow the margins, because we definitely get a benefit from there, from that kind of clustering of a few hotels in the same location. So there's lots of different reasons why a margin in one city is going to be higher than in another city. There is one thing I will say to you about regional U.K. before I forget it, because Shane made a very good point about how living wage just has been way outstripped the growth in RevPAR. And then you combine that with the independent hotels, and our theory is that they just... Like, people won't be able to survive eventually, unless average room rates go up, right? And it is extraordinary to think that this year, our Clayton Hotel in Cork, its average room rate is 40% higher than Manchester. Now, I'm from Cork, but I still admit it's a small city, okay? Manchester is a big metropolitan city, and the average room rates in those cities is very small compared to what you would expect. And that's what drives into margins as well. So that helps our margins be higher in some of our other cities. You do, because you like being geographically diverse, which I think is very, and there is, let's say, more risk on some of the A&G side. You know, when you look at, like, different, like, employment structures and so on. But the fundamental is we're far better off in those pools where the RevPAR is higher, trying to make rather than make smaller markets work in the same geography that we're in, where we don't have. So we've looked at it in terms of that aspect and where we can drive returns. It is all about the achievable RevPAR, and that's what we're looking at. Achievable RevPAR and scale. Check two. Oh, sorry. I believe transaction activity has been picking up a little bit in the U.K. in 2024. But as we think about market conditions for potential acquisitions, do you think right now the market is more suited for you guys as an acquirer, or do you still think that there is a little bit of a spread at the moment between what people are willing to sell the assets for and what you guys are willing to buy it for? I'm conscious there's a few agents in the room, so, oh, look, it's still funding is the challenge. I mean, we're, you know, I would have touched on it. The vast majority we're looking at are leasehold positions. And look, there's developers we're talking to who we're negotiating with, right, who don't actually have a funding gateway, let's say, at the moment. Their expectation is that the landlord or institutional landlord market will come back in terms of whether it's forward commits or forward funding. We are seeing, you know, we are aware where, say, some of the properties where we're the tenant in, where there's actually has been transactions or close to transactions, so it is improving. You know, it is at yields where I would have been very disappointed with three years ago, but I'm very happy with contrasting where it would have been 12 months ago. So that's, you know, the market is coming back, but it is slow. It is challenging, whether you're talking with institutional European institutions or U.K. institutions, you know, that they're wary. So that's where we're seeing more most evidence. In terms of spread, like, certainly, we've been waiting since 2019 for, say, maybe bank foreclosure type sales. Just haven't seen it. I've given up on it, to be honest. It's just, banks seem to have had infinite patience through this crisis, let's say. Hi, both of you. You've shown in your, in your slides more than enough to get you to your 21,000 room target. So I'm just wondering how you prioritize those markets over time, and capital's scarce, clearly. Do you have the same return on capital hurdle in all of those markets? Do you want to address the capital? In terms of return on capital, we do, right? So, like, if we're going to buy a property, we use an IRR model, and we're looking for a pre-tax IRR of 15%. In terms of rental, we're looking at rental cover. It can vary slightly in the markets there. If it's a smaller market, the rental cover goes up a bit. So that rental cover varies between 1.75 and 1.85, regardless of the markets that we're going into. What I would add to Dermot, some of the European ones will also be, if you want to call it double net or Dach und Fach type structures, which will impact the rent cover, because we'll have less risk within the building, if you think of the physical investment that needs to be in it. If it's, if I'm answering your question, yeah, the like, it's far bigger than nine thousand because you know, that will speak to we can't just, I suppose, it's not like Tesco, where you can drive up and pick something off the shelf, and so on. If you think of Glasgow, we've six hundred rooms. We've big ambitions to go there, but we're not looking in Glasgow at this moment. You know, it'd be far better to just focus on those properties settling in, establishing themselves, and so on, and then in X number of years, we can return to Glasgow. We're delighted with Edinburgh, that we've one hundred and seventy-two rooms, right? But actually, if you measured it over the last eight years, that's quite disappointing in terms of the returns. So we'd be very, you know, we're very, I suppose, very focused on Edinburgh as an opportunity. So I would do two properties in Edinburgh, as we sit here today, because our room count in there is so low. But again, that's a big number. I think, I'm going from memory, it's up around 1,500. So, you know, we won't have all of those by 2020-2031. 2030. 2030, sorry. Won't have them by 2031, I know. Trying to give himself an extra year there. That's always that tension between myself and Carol, because she wants me to nail the colors to the mast, and so on. But it is the nature. I genuinely, you know, when you look at London, if you'd said to me in 2021 that we'd double our room count, I would've said, "Not at all." So it, you know, it's a reflection, I suppose. Good deals lead to more good deals, so it's a reflection of the success we had, that people want to talk to us about more opportunities. One of the things that slows us down is location, right? You'll see in Roma's presentation, we score really highly in location in terms of Booking.com, and you'll see in Roma's research, location's really important for our customer. What we won't do is just get the flags on the map and compromise on the location. We could go much faster if we did do that. You're better off having a wider array of cities you're trying to focus on, because getting the right location in a really good city is probably the hardest thing of the lot in terms of acquisitions and development. That's a very good point, actually. 18 months before we secure what is now Clayton Amsterdam, we had another opportunity in Amsterdam. Great property, I think it was over 250 bedrooms, less than 10 years old. Physically, a fantastic fit for a Clayton, but its location didn't work, you know, and we had to, we had to walk away from it, which is always hard to do, but it was the right thing to do. Any more questions before Shane leaves? Thank you, Shane. Okay, thank you, Shane. Thanks. So Carol is gonna give us a financial review. It would be wrong of me, as she walks on stage, not to recognize that on top of doing an interim results announcement a few weeks back, we also did our first share buyback, which is a lot of work in getting prepared for, and we announced last week our EUR 600 million r efinancing, where we extended the ability of that financing group, which private bondholders, first time. So I'm gonna hand you over to Carol, and we'll take questions at the end. Hi, everyone. I am conscious, I am standing between you and lunch, so I'm gonna be pretty quick. I know our colleagues at Maldron Shoreditch have laid on a very nice lunch. First off, I want to walk through a quick reminder of how we approach running the business. We look to drive value, I suppose, through our operational expertise and through clever hotel design, both of which deliver excellent trading performance and margins, which drive our earnings. We also convert those earnings very strongly to free cash flow, and we are fortunate to be in a business that actually has negative working capital requirements. We've a very strong financial position, and that is underpinned by freehold assets in prime locations and by long leasehold assets, which ultimately allows us to maintain financial discipline in what is an operationally leveraged business, and to execute our growth strategy, and that Shane has just spent a bit of time talking about, while delivering returns for our shareholders, and what shouldn't be forgotten, just because it doesn't go through our earnings or our annual cash flows, is the significant value creation through expert property acquisition and development, which has been generated into our balance sheet and has been proven through the completion of disposals, and we've touched on Wexford there, or through sale and leasebacks, so now to something that we're very, very proud of in Dalata, and that's our strong margins. We've worked very hard to protect these in a period of exceptionally high cost inflation. We consistently see that we drive industry-leading margins, and strong conversions to the bottom line are a key focus for all our people. We do not work as hard as we do to bring revenue in, to lose it down through our cost lines. You can see here the makeup of costs in our hotels, which demonstrates the considerable portion that labor costs represent, unsurprisingly, in a people-led business. Inflation of entry-level wages in both Ireland and the U.K. has run at 30% and 40% respectively from 2019 to now. Holding those margins close or at those levels has been a credit to the business and everyone working in it. How do we achieve those margins? What is the secret sauce? I believe it's in no small part due to our decentralized model. Our talented general managers and their teams drive their businesses, their strategy, and their decision-making, and they are very, very competitive, led by a very, very competitive chief operations officer. Support and oversight is provided by central office, in addition to efficiencies through our group shared services and specialized expertise from areas such as digital marketing and facilities management, to name just a couple. Not only does this support allow us to add extra value to our trading profits, but it also allows us to open new hotels and hit the ground running. Our U.K. teams opened four new hotels in the space of two months this year. The combination of the U.K. leadership and support from central office colleagues across all disciplines, and the systems we have in place, made this possible. There is an expression that success breeds success, and the teams and platforms we have built together are certainly testament to that. Dermot also mentioned earlier the culture of innovation that is now embedded, we believe, into our business. This has been critical to protecting those margins. We've set out previously in our reporting, how innovation in the areas of accommodation, our Dalata dishes, et cetera, have really limited the impact of wage inflation, and we have driven efficiency, sorry, reductions of over 10% in the relevant areas, without damaging our customers or our employee experience, and we look forward to the ongoing impact of new initiatives that they will have on the business, such as check-in pods, our QR codes, and the rollout of a new revenue system, Duetto, which we're very, very excited about. This focus allows us to continue to improve performance in our existing hotels. Shane just set out the challenge, particularly in regional U.K., where RevPAR growth has been behind living wage inflation. If we manage to limit the impact of cost increases through innovation and efficiency, while not negatively impacting customers or employees, we will outcompete, and we will benefit either from rate increases at the wider market, especially weaker competition at three-stars, or else they will close. Just as importantly, it allows operational efficiencies to be designed into our new hotels, which gives us greater ability to continue to see more deals in a time of rising building cost inflation and rising yields, and I hope you're going to all get a chance to see that in Maldron Shoreditch, because I can think of no better example to demonstrate that. So I'd now like to touch on our financial position and speak to the refinancing that we completed last week. In line with our growth ambitions, which Shane has taken you through, we've grown the facilities by 20%. Just as importantly, we have diversified our funding sources with the addition of private placement, which also allowed us to extend the tenor of our debt. This is important as we consider the size of the banking club with our ancillary revenue requirements and our continuing ambitions to grow. We have increased the flexibility, including through reducing the security associated with financing and removing many of the consent requirements, with agreements that are now more reflective of a company of our scale and our standing. The PP is split 50/50 GBP to EUR, and the tenor is 40/60, 5-year to 7-year, and the average weighted rate of the drawn term loan on PP is about 5%. We are particularly pleased with the strong sustainability credentials, given the green term loan and green PP, and it reflects the strategic focus that we've had as a business in this area. To the next slide. This gives a little bit more color than we've typically given around the quality of our freehold assets. In Dalata, we've always adopted a policy of revaluation, where our assets are valued twice a year by independent third-party valuers. We believe this is important for transparency for our shareholders. It also allows us to demonstrate the value we drive into the assets by both trading strongly and by buying or developing well. The weighted average cap rate is a healthy 7.6%. Valuations are based upon 10 years of discounted cash flows, with the terminal value linked to the cap rate, and the valuers also look at transaction multiples. So as you can see here, the strong freehold backing provides us with the opportunity to recycle capital, and we have previously sold assets at or above the latest value in their accounts. Our Clayton Hotel Charlemont sale and leaseback in Dublin was a prime example of this, where it was developed for an all-in cost of EUR 42 million, sold two years later for EUR 65 million, while closed during COVID, and we've leased it back, and we still generate EUR 3 million after rent- per- annum. Clayton Hotel Crown also sold over for book value, and we expect our Wexford disposals to do the same. I want to talk now about our leased properties. Leases can have a very poor name, not least in our industry, through a history of very poor financial discipline. In Dalata, our leases are of an exceptional quality. We are as financially disciplined in undertaking these as we are in undertaking our acquisitions or in structuring our debt. We have current rent covers on all assets that were open at the end of June of 1.7 times. That means our RevPARs can take a significant hit of over 25%, and we can still pay all our rent. Our average lease term remaining is 29 years, so we have good, strong access to ongoing profitability from these. Our leases are not subject to open market reviews and move typically with CPI or RPI, but are subject to caps and collars, which limit the increases to 3%-4% per annum, and this has been exceptionally beneficial through recent high inflation. They are, by and large, with excellent institutional landlords, which are shown on this slide. The yields we tracked on these leases reflect the quality of our balance sheet, which underpin the group guarantee that we give. Our partners are attracted to us by the quality of our covenant, but also by our ability to support them in design and project management, if they are building a new hotel, and the ability of our operational teams to drive excellent trading, which ultimately drives value in the underlying assets for them, and leases are a very capital-efficient way of creating value for our shareholders. However, the change in accounting standards for leases has really distorted how leases are portrayed in our accounts, which is incredibly frustrating. This slide shows the impact of how leases are treated on the balance sheet of leverage. On transition to the new standard, our leases came onto the balance sheet at about 12 times rent. We include a disclosure where we bring them on at eight times, and you can see the differential up here behind me, and we refer to that as our lease-modified net debt. This is the level which is more typically used by banks and rating agencies, but even that is very blunt when you look at the quality of our assets or in our leases. In addition, there is a distorting impact on our earnings. As the age profile of our leases is very young, the expense-front loading impact of the lease accounting standard, IFRS 16, means that earnings and EPS are materially impacted. On this slide, you can see the total disconnect between earnings per share and free cash flow per share. There is now a EUR 20 million difference versus cash rent in our earnings. That's 1/3, which equates to almost EUR 0.09 a share on an EPS of EUR 0.42 in 2023. The reality is now that free cash flow per share is a far more appropriate way to measure how we are performing and how we create and grow shareholder value. We have now grown free cash flow from EUR 14 million in 2014 by almost 10 x to EUR 133 million in 2023. We have generated strong returns on invested capitals, on invested capital with 12.6% for the year to June 2024. These returns don't include the value uplifts created in buying and developing hotel assets, which is over EUR 500 million since IPO 10 years ago. Given the scale and lumpy nature of our hotel investments or developments, we maintain financial flexibility, which is critical to our growth strategy. As you can see from the table on the slide with growth CapEx spent, just down the bottom left-hand corner, this can fluctuate depending on when the opportunities arise and what form they take. Acquisitions of existing hotels, developments, et cetera. The most important thing is that these are an appropriate strategic fit, they provide us with the opportunity for either trading uplift or development potential, and they meet our return hurdles, not some arbitrary timeline, and we do say, for Shane, it's a little bit like the buses. You don't get one for ages, and then they all come along together, which takes me to our capital allocation philosophy. Like how we approach most things in Dalata, we take a disciplined and measured approach to our capital allocation decisions. We protect and grow our hotels through ongoing refurbishment and enhancement. This ensures ongoing strength of trading performance and protection of asset values. We maintain our financial strength through a level of debt and leases that is appropriate for a listed, operationally geared business, and yet provide us with the ability to continue to invest and grow for the benefit of our shareholders. As I mentioned a moment ago, our acquisitions and developments can be lumpy in nature, so we take a multi-year view when planning. We currently have pipeline CapEx of about EUR 125 million over the next few years. We also have a progressive dividend policy, which our shareholders tell us they value. We have just completed our first share buyback of EUR 30 million yesterday, and today announced a new EUR 25 million buyback from the expected proceeds from disposal of those two non-core hotels. We continue to approach our capital allocation and our financial planning decisions with the same level of clear-headed analysis and a long-term lens, and we consider all forms of capital allocation. We remain strategically and financially ready to grow further and are well-placed to deliver on our ambitions to grow to 21,000 rooms, or by over 70% by 2030. So I think, Dermot's gonna come up, and if anyone has any questions? Thanks, Carol. Jesus, they're all up together. Hello, just two quick questions on the finances. Are you able to give us the profit or the revenue and profit contribution from Wexford, from those two properties, just for modeling purposes? No, I'm not, and we haven't yet completed the sale, so, we won't be speaking about that at the moment. But there will be a little bit more color once we get to our year-end, when we'll have completed both deals. Okay. Was it positive, the profit? Yes. We don't operate hotels that lose money in Dalata. Brilliant. That's good to hear. Can you talk about the margin at the group level rather than at the hotel level? You're a couple of points behind where you peaked, obviously, because of central overhead inflation. Just wondering when you'll get back to peak. Thank you. There's a couple of things. All our hotels will deliver different margin levels. It depends on what cities they're in. It depends on their mix of business. So, for example, you'll have always seen historically our regional Ireland hotels have a lower margin. It doesn't mean they're poorer hotels. It just means there's a greater element of food and beverage revenues within their business. And then you'll have the mix. As we grow and as Shane moves through the rooms in the cities that we want to go into, you'll have cities that have higher margin percentages than lower margins. I suppose what we say in each of our hotels is that we don't give up or we don't go backwards on margins, and we set ourselves that ambition through innovation and through efficiency. 'Cause it's not about working our teams harder, because to be honest, they work very hard, and they're very talented at what they do. What it is, is about finding different ways to do things, and then it's about ensuring that when the market is performing strongly, we are performing more strongly than the market, so even in a year like this, and you'll have seen, in Dublin, that we outperformed the market, and that's what we say when we're speaking with our teams. You can't always come deal with what's... or control what's going on in the markets around you. You can't control it, what events are in one month versus a different month last year. You can't control what the government is going to do on minimum wage inflation. So it's just incumbent upon us to outcompete those that we're competing against, and for us all to work together to make sure that we're working as smart as we can. Because if we can outcompete those that are around us, it's a very open market, and it's driven by supply and demand, we will do better, and we will outcompete those that are competing alongside us. And when they have to drive rate, we'll be able to benefit from that as well, in addition to having control of their cost. ... Thanks. Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I was talking about central overhead, how you'd expect that to, We look at our central office as a platform, so we don't in any way intend growing the central office at the same rate that we're going to grow the scale of the business. You've heard from Roma this morning in terms of what we've done from a marketing perspective. We look for better ways to do things to add value from center without necessarily incurring more cost. That's what we've done in marketing. That's what we've done in finance. We have a shared service center in Cork that allows us to open new hotels effectively, but it also allows us to manage the cost base that we have at center. We certainly won't be looking to grow our central overheads as a percentage as we go forward. We have a very strong platform. Obviously, that may move as we go forward, but it certainly won't move relative to getting to our 21,000 rooms. I think maybe as well, sometimes people get confused when they see us go into Europe, and they're saying, you know, how are we making money straight away? We're not trying to create a consumer brand, so we don't need to create a big central office function, and we don't have one. In Germany or Netherlands, it's all managed back out of a combination of people here in the U.K., or in Ireland. Thanks very much. Hi. Just the leverage target, the 2 to 2.5 times. Just thinking, it looks like at year-end, you're trending a good bit below that. Could you maybe talk to, like, what your thought process is on that 2 to 2.5 times whether, you know, you might run the business on an ongoing basis, at that level? And maybe then just to press you a little bit further on, you know, how you think about cash returns within that. You've obviously done the two buybacks or announced the two buybacks this year. Should we expect a higher level of cash return, or is that leverage target there to kind of allow you to deliver the fairly ambitious room growth, target that Shane has set out? Yeah, I mean, like, if we're going to achieve the growth target we're setting ourselves, we're going to have to spend money, obviously, right? Okay, and I think in one of the slides Carol had, she clearly demonstrated just how lumpy the investments in hotels can be. So last year, I think it was over a hundred and fifty. I think it was EUR 155 million we spent on acquisitions, whereas so far this year, we've spent nothing actually on acquisitions. We've just spent some on growth development CapEx. So we always want to give ourselves ability to go in and do the good deals, right? So therefore, we're not. Like, when you look at in terms of what we've done to date, the share buyback we did in September reflected that our gearing was very low, right? We just felt it was a good opportunity to buy back a percentage of the company, and clearly, the share buyback we're announcing today is linked to the disposal of two hotels in Wexford. So going forward, we could have disposals, which gives us the opportunity to do share buyback. We could do a sale and leaseback, which gives us an opportunity to do a share buyback or just gives us an opportunity to buy another hotel elsewhere, right? So we will always be flexible, right? We'll look at our gearing at the time. We will look at the opportunities that are open to us at the time, and we will look at the share price as well in terms of the value we can get in buying our own shares. Is that? Yes. Could I ask just one follow-up? Just on the room growth target, just as you see the market at the moment, like, you know, should we expect that to be fairly evenly delivered? I understand hotel acquisitions are very lumpy by nature, but, like, if we're thinking about modeling out to 2030, those targets, you know, is it practical to say, you know, to divide it by the number of years, or is there anything fundamental in the market that would suggest you should back end loads? I'd love to tell you we could divide it by the number of years, right? The reality, it doesn't happen like that. Okay, so, so, like, this year, the guys have been busier than ever working on deals, right? Okay. But in order to get the right deal in the right location, we're very choosy, right? But last year, you know, Finsbury Park, London Wall, Amsterdam, and Edinburgh all happened, I think, within three months of each other. Okay, so like, it isn't unfortunately an even line, and let's make the model even more difficult. It is a mixture of existing hotels and new hotels. Most of the hotels, I think, in Europe will be existing, but not all. Whereas I think in provincial U.K., most hotels will be new developments, and London will be a mixture. A bit of a modeling nightmare to be honest, as some models in the past. With regards to cost inflation, how much cost inflation are you kind of banking at the moment as to what you're expecting to be in the business over, say, the next two-to-three years? And then secondly, as you're thinking about the expansion into continental Europe, is there anything that would structurally mean margins are different in some of the cities that you've looked at, compared to, say, Ireland or regional U.K.? Yeah, so in terms of cost, cost inflation, we touched on it there, and we set out the mix on that slide. Like, labor costs are the biggest element, and the element that is, I suppose, most impacted at the moment is moves in minimum wage in Ireland or living wage in the U.K.. In Ireland, it's going to be just under 6% this year. It's very hard to get a read on the U.K.. It seems to vary anywhere between 6% to 12%. We probably think it's going to be the lower end of that, but would I put my house on it? No, I wouldn't. So I suppose that's the element that probably impacts most our cost lines, and that's why we spend so much time in the business trying to find more efficient ways of doing things. In terms of other areas, commissions obviously will grow with our hopefully growing revenues. A lot of the other elements are relatively fixed. I know we did a lot of good work to negotiate a deal in Ireland last year, which actually got a savings on our food and beverage purchases, and we're looking to do something similar in the U.K., because obviously, we've touched on it earlier, we've doubled the size of our hotels, it gives a little bit more footprint. We're doing a lot to hold back inflation even where it's coming to us, and that certainly helps. But that's, you know, your view is probably as good as mine in terms of the pressure that will or won't come on governments. Now, the reality is, inflation is abating, interest rates are coming down, mortgage rates are coming down, energy costs are coming down. So that hopefully should take a little bit of the pressure. We certainly saw that in Ireland, 'cause six months ago, we would've been predicting a far higher increase in Ireland this year. In terms of Europe, and make sure you get a hold of Katrina, she's over there. She'll be at the hotel later on, she can give you a chapter and verse. First of all, I suppose every hotel will have a different margin structure, depending on the mix of business, and where it is. The couple of things that are slightly different is, as we would've expected and our research would've guided us going in, that's a little bit around the labor side. It's things like, you know, maybe some sickness and some of the leave provisions. Nothing we hadn't forecast or expected, but I suppose it's different in structure. It's not evolving as such, that's just a different feature of the market. You know, we have seen a little bit in terms of room taxes in Amsterdam, so that's one we watch out for and keep an eye on. That's the other, the only other thing that you'd sort of see. But no, what we're doing consistently is ensuring that we run the best or the business the best that we can do and manage the costs that are going in, and that we look to the future all the time to try and find better ways of doing things. And I think we've proven we've been able to do that over the last couple of years, and we certainly have no intention of giving up. Like, Duetto will be the first sort of big thing we're doing on the revenue side to try and squeeze that extra little bit, and that will certainly be helpful. But I would expect, if you think, and if you look at the slide I showed earlier on in terms of the labor component, like, you would expect RevPAR to move given some of the pressures that have come on the cost base. And if you are one of the best competitively in your market, that should move more quickly than you even need it to move. Any more questions? Okay, well, thank you. I suppose at the end of today, I hope you've got a better understanding of what our vision for the company is, what our ambition is over the next five years. I hope also that you've got a real clear understanding of what we're trying to do in the marketing and the transformational journey that we're on. We were asked to address the question as to why we're moving into Europe as opposed to just staying in the U.K. and Ireland, and again, I think Shane has demonstrated why that's a very logical step for us. And finally, I think Carol has demonstrated that we're in a very strong financial position. We're very focused on converting EBITDA margins, despite the headwinds of increases in minimum wage in Ireland and living wage in the U.K.. I just wanna thank one person, Niamh Carr, who's the head of investor relations, has done a huge amount of work in putting this together, and she's had huge support from the teams right across the organization, and the Shoreditch Hotel team have also been a big help to us in that, but I think it would be wrong of me not to recognize Niamh's contribution, 'cause it was her day. Now, I really would encourage you, if you have the time, to try and visit Shoreditch. I think you'd get so much out of getting the operational tours. We've got teams of people set up to bring you around the ground floor and up to see the rooms and really understand our approach to developing that new hotel, so that'll be very informative, and there'll be a nice lunch afterwards as an incentive to stay on. Okay, so thank you very much, and the various people will show you up to Shoreditch now. Okay, thank you.