Whitbread plc (WTB) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's Whitbread Full Year 26 Interim Results Call. My name is Seb, and I'll be the operator for your call today. If you'd like to ask a question during the Q&A session, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press star 2. I'll now hand the floor to Dominic Poole, Chief Executive, to begin the call. Please go ahead. Thank you, Seb. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining myself and Hemant Patel, our group CFO for our half-year results call. Hopefully, you've all been through our release and you've had a chance to listen to our results presentation this morning. Before we open up the call for Q&A, I thought I'd just pull out a few key points. Let's start with our first half results. As you probably all know from the published data, the UK market returned to growth in the second quarter. As a result, UK accommodation sales were in line with last year for the first half, And with the benefit of our commercial program, we continue to outperform the mid-scale and economy market on both accommodation sales and REFPA. Now, food and beverage performed in line with our guidance, and we continue to make great progress on our accelerating growth plan to transform our offer at around 200 of our lower-returning branded restaurants and unlock 3,500 higher-returning extension rooms. We've done really well with our cost savings, delivering £43 million and a half, helping to partially mitigate cost inflation that ran slightly ahead of our previous expectations. As a result, UK EBITDA was down just 3% and we're increasing our full year guidance to £65 to £70 million cost efficiencies for this year. In Germany, we delivered a positive revenue performance that was ahead of the market, de...