Whitbread plc (WTB) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the Whitbread full year 2025 preliminary results live Q&A conference call. My name is Sammy, and I'll be coordinating your call today. During the presentation, you can register a question by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two on your telephone keypad. I will now hand over to your host, Dominic Poole, Chief Executive to begin. Please go ahead, Dominic. Thank you, Sammy. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining myself and Hemant Patel, our Group CFO for our full year results call. Hopefully you've been able to go through our release and have a chance to listen to our results presentation this morning. Before we open up the call for Q&A, I thought I'd pull out just a few key points. Starting with our full year 2025 results, as you all know from the published data, market demand has been slightly softer in the UK. However, with the benefit of new room growth and our strong commercial program, our accommodation sales were flat year on year and we outperformed the mid-scale and economy market. Food and beverage revenues declined in line with our previous guidance due to our accelerating growth plan as we optimize our offer and exit a number of branded restaurant sites, unlocking 3,500 high-returning extension rooms. Having delivered £75 million of efficiency savings during the year, which was ahead of our previous guidance, together with the removal of lower returning restaurants, we were able to reduce our UK cost base by 1% despite the presence of ongoing inflation. And in Germany, we're making excellent progress. Our estate and brand are continuing to mature, and we delivered a strong trading performance that was well ahead of the market, and...