HOSTELWORLD GROUP PLC (HSW) — Preliminary Results

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good afternoon, and welcome to the HOSTELWORLD GROUP PLC Preliminary Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q and A tab situated in the right hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Gary Morrison, CEO. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, and welcome back, everybody. It's a absolute delight and privilege to be back on the IMC platform to talk about our preliminary results in 2022. We are gonna spend a little bit of time today talking about the actual results in 2022, where I'll hand over more to Caroline. And then I'm gonna spend a little bit of time sort of seeing what sort of trading we've been seeing over the first three months of the year and our growth aspirations for the rest of the year. So really in two halves. And with that, let's get going. So the usual disclaimers, I am going to check these as red, and now we'll go straight to highlights. So 2022 was really a transformational year for HOSTELWORLD. It was transformational in terms of the travel recovery, but it was also transformational in terms of that really exciting pivot we made to a social network powered OTA. And I think I would characterize the, you know, the key highlights as as follows. So first off, we made our EBITDA targets that we communicated in the Capital Markets Day in November last year. In fact, we were slightly ah...