Good Investing Talks - Can HomeToGo win in booking & SaaS, Steffen Schneider?

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

I am pleased to welcome CFO Steffen Schneider for a two-episode discussion of HomeToGo and the business's growth chances.

our smoo software it's very easy to use the software as a service where you pay like a monthly base fee and then per each property another fee if she would buy our software so we would get like a monthly base fee and then for the property it would be around 25 euros per month so it doesn't sound much but there's basically no churn in that business we could for example say okay the price you offering your property during the peak season, you can easily charge 10% more or even 20% more because all your neighbors are charging 20% more. While in the shoulder season, you might want to reduce the prices by 10% that increases your utilization. Dear viewers of Good Investing Talks, it's great to have you back and we are having another home studio video today with Steffen Schneider of Home to Go. Hi, Stefan.

Hi, Tillman. Nice to be here and happy to be on your podcast. Great to have you here and Stefan is running home to go and maybe we switch to the other camera Stefan because now I have a bit of a challenging question like home to go is in the holiday rental market and the housings you rent out like Airbnb and booking.com and verbal are your competition with this competition in mind why do does the world need you? I said it's a challenging question. All good. First of all you know I'm not I'm not I'm not the CFO of Home to Go. I'm not the CEO. But to answer your question. So we are an important part of the overall vacation rental business. And you know, they mentioned booking.com, Expedia. They are

partners of ours and even Airbnb. We are a supplier of Airbnb because they use many of our software customers. And therefore, we are a very integral part of the business. And we can go through it partner by partners or supplier from the starting from the big OTAs to the property managers to the actual host and we have solutions for everyone on the supply side and that helps us to basically get the biggest offering in the market with more than 15 million offers and that of course is something which the travelers really enjoy so my plan was to go more through it from the customer side and look at your customers and then also you can spice them the the partners maybe. I've created three personas as your customers. So let's start with this dude.

He lives in Berlin, does investing and likes to travel using holiday homes. And he comes in touch with you. What can you help him with when he looks for a holiday home in Europe? So, you know, you will refer to holiday homes. We always call it vacation rental. And the reason why we say vacation rental is because we are present in the traditional vacation areas. So at the sea, in the mountains, at the lake, etc. If you want to go to city centers, there are other companies better suited to have like more city center inventory. We always joke about it. You can find properties with us in Berlin, but then you're more or less in Potsdam and not in Berlin Mide. And if you want to go into traditional vacation areas, we have more than 15 million

offers globally with a big part in Europe, in North America, but also in the southern hemisphere, and there's basically not anything you can't find with us. So being it very big, very small, rather expensive, rather cheap, rather special, like a castle, you can find everything with us. How can the customer find you, like aside from meeting you at a capital markets conference? So, you know, most people come to us via paid marketing, so Google, Bing, Facebook. But there's also a big part which comes from organic searches, who go straight to home to go, or one of our subsidiaries, for example, Casamundu, Edomitiel, etc.

And it's sometimes very funny when you have people talking about it and they say, well, you know, if you really want to find good properties, you have to go to Edomiti, They're much better than, for example, what you can find on home to go. But the technology, it's all the same, the inventory, it's all the same. It just looks a little difference, has a different URL. And it reminds me always like when people were saying the Bosch's vacuum cleaner is better than the Zeman's vacuum cleaner, but it comes from the same factory. It's just a different brand.

And how can you earn money with the youth looking for an accommodation when he's traveling and going to home to go. How we make money? Yeah. Okay, so we get a so-called take rate. So with our partners and partners are all the suppliers. So these 50 million offers are not properties we own. They are owned by most of the time private people who are then using

the help of a property manager or the help of an OTA or come directly to us. And we get a so-called take rate and that's the margin we are getting we had in QV. Q3 last year or this year more than 11% take rate. So if the traveler is, for example, paying 1,000 euros for a week of vacation rental in Portugal, we would get on average 110 euros out of it. How do your partners earn money with this customer? So again, out of the 1,000 euros that the end traveler is paying, it depends on what kind of partner is involved. So if you take, for example, a property manager who's doing everything,

cleaning, changing the linen, changing the keys, doing repairs, but also making sure that there is sufficient utilization, they can take up to 40%. They even stories where they take more than 40%. So out of the 1000 euros, maybe 600 euros end up with the owner of the house, 400 euros end up with the property manager. And then the property manager, again could for example give us 1110 euros and keep the rest for themselves and maybe walk us through what is your smallest partner in this area and what is your largest partner and how like how many units do this partners have an average yeah so we have around 60 000 partners and that goes from the booking.com's expedia groups both of them have around 6 million to

to the actual host who has like one. Is this ability to have collected so many client fee, as we Germans might say, like small units also part of your mode and you have this already done? As always, it comes each with the pros and cons. So if you have the very big partners, of course you get like connecting one partner, connecting one API, you have a huge amount. And again, for us catering to the traveler to have the claim that they find the biggest selection of vacation rental in one go is an important claim. So it's good to have the very big partners, but the more attractive inventory for us in terms of how does the inventory look, what is the take rate, what is the conversion, etc. It's more like the middle groups.

So the property managers who have like between 1,000 and 10,000, maybe 100,000 units. And if you're directly connected to the host, again, you have like more, let's say more control over the calendars. Usually the business comes to you first. So each group has their certain pros and cons. Let's move to my persona number two that I made. So this dude has a mother. She lives somewhere in the rural space and she has a house that's too big for her alone. wants to rent it out for certain periods of time like to people who work in a factory nearby or even like holiday travelers how can you help this person well i mean the easiest way for this person would be to use our our smoo software it's very easy to use the software as a service

where you pay like a monthly base fee and then per each property another fee and it's very easy to build their own web page and own online calendar and it has a built-in API connection which then enables the mother of the person you just mentioned to connect it to Airbnb, connected to booking to Expedia or to home to go and the good thing about this if she gets one booking let's say from Airbnb it automatically blocks the calendars in the other ones so there's no overlap and that's something which sounds easy but is a big fear for many of the hosts. So she is a bit of a boomer and she's not that tech savvy. Is it easy to use? Yes, Mumu for her. Yeah, very easy. And how can she find your

offer? Like, so how are you marketing Smu? So there are certain, let's say certain areas where you have like online groups, but also certain areas where people who own, vacation rental are present and therefore it's important for us to be present. So when you cater to these kind of groups, it's not the traditional online marketing like you have for our marketplace business, where you spend money on Google, Bing, etc. When people are looking for vacation rental in Greece. So that is a little bit different, but ultimately, as always, you need to find the respective interested parties and then cater to them. How can you get paid for your service or how like, yeah, can you earn money with this mother?

Yeah. So, I mean, in this case, if she would buy our software, so we would get like a monthly base fee and then for the property, it would be around 25 euros per month. So it doesn't sound much, but there's basically no churn in that business. So once someone has keyed in all the details, when someone is using the software, they basically have. stay. So it's a very good business model because the customers are very happy about it. And therefore, it's a nice recurring stream of revenues. And we have, if we have more than one customer, it adds up and the smoooo business is a business which is developing really nicely. How does it make the life easier and saves the customer's time? So you key in the information once. So again, staying with your example.

So that's the house, that's the property, these are the how many rooms, what is present, is the TV, a dishwasher, etc. Once that is in, she can do everything on her own, but she can also connect it directly to the big platforms. And for example, if during peak season, she can increase prices very easy and then it increases the prices over all platforms. in the off-season she can decrease the prices very easy and it's once the data is in it just comes automatically the bookings flow in automatically and then she just have to make sure that you know there's someone present who is handing over the keys and helping whatever kind of services she's willing to offer so how does onboarding work is there some person at smoo sitting and having a call with her or is she asked to fill it in

So most of the people do it themselves. It's very easy and user-friendly, but if there's a need for someone to help, there's someone to call this. What kind of return does this person get over time? So maybe get out some examples of your success stories, which you have enabled for Smu-Boo. Do we have any idea, what is the return on the 25 euros? The person pays a month and what the highest, the most successful people can get from this investment? Well, it's difficult to quantify that because what is the alternative? So taking your example, again, if the mother is getting like, is able to book out the property each week all by her own because she has a local network of people or there's a factory next by with people who want to rent it out, then, you know, the The additional utilization might be very low, but if it's rather empty and suddenly she gets all these bookings from Home to Go or other platforms, it's a big difference for her. But to put like a percentage next to it would be difficult because if just one week, taking

my example from early on, if she's renting it out for 1,000 euros per week, put it to comparison to the 25 euros it costs and again even if she would take a property manager but if she only needs the property manager for cleaning and changing the keys etc but is doing all the booking there herself she can pay much less to the to the to the property manager so it's a it's a very attractive opportunity talking about the property managers are you also getting paid by the property managers for qualified leads so So the qualified leads business, they're still, it's like a really tiny. So we call it like the CPC and the CPL.

But the CPL, it's really minor. It's an old business. So usually there's still some CPC business left where we get paid for the click and the cost per lead is a similar business model, but it's really minor. Okay. Let's move to persona number three and maybe look out of the window here in Berlin because there are more professional like home rental or people who have maybe 10 flats, they rent out and they also have issues with managing their business.

So how could you help them? So I mean, the software, you know, don't want to talk about only the software, but the software itself, the majority of people are using it for up to 10 properties. There are some who even use it for up to 100, although I would say, For if you have a hundred, there are better opportunities. So then you come already in the semi-professional areas, but you can easily scale it. So you have all the basic information in and you just need to add the additional properties and off you go. So it's very easy to manage all the things in parallel.

How is your sales approach or your marketing approach for SMUDU for this kind of customer different than maybe the single or two unit person? It's pretty much the same. Okay. And they also can earn the same, like you also earn the same way money with this. Yeah, it's exactly the same thing. It's, it's, you know, effectively you make more because the base fee is still the base fee and then the, the five euros you pay per property. So it actually have a better utilization of the base fee over the amount of properties. So the more properties you manage, the higher the profitability is. So one person with 10 properties means,

25 Euro base fee and 50 euros on top. Exactly. And is there any other lever you can earn money with this person? Well, there are many opportunities. So for example, we again, using the older knowledge from our marketplace, we know what is the current price. So let's assume the property of your persona is in the German Baltic Sea, where we have a lot of information.

We could, for example, say, okay, the price you're offering your property during the peak season, you can easily charge 10% more or even 20% more because all your neighbors are charging 20% more. While in the shoulder season, you might want to reduce the prices by 10% that increases your utilization. And that's information we have. We are currently not charging for it, but we could easily do that. and it would still be a very valid proposition to the owner. Hey, Timon here. It's great that you've made it that far into the video,

and I think it shows a certain passion for investing you're having. If you want to dive deeper and go further down the rapid hole, you're invited to apply to my community Good Investing Plus. It's a place that's very helpful to people who are ambitious about investing. It's helpful to investment talent, and as well as Experian fund managers. So if you are interested, please click on the link below. And now, without further ado, enjoy the conversation.

Is there also a case where investor can get a certain fantasy about like you also taking a share of the total payment, the person gets like a share of, for the payment, the person gets 400 euro for the rental or the thousand euros and you take 0.5% or 1% because you manage the payment for this person as well? We could, so again, that would be something that you would go from the, you know, more subscription or software as a service model, more to like a volume-based model. And we have certain parts of our business, they are already volume-based, where we get a certain share if there's a booking. So that's also something we could do.

In that particular case, we don't do it yet, but it's technically feasible and it might also be economic sense. So we had the three personas I've created as customers. Is there any fourth or fifth persona you want to add as a customer for you? I mean, there are so many people that, let's say the majority of our customer, so the traveler is like more than 35 years old. It's usually a family with children and these are the standard users of a vacation rental. And it's one of the things why, again, I know, you don't want to talk about the supply side yet but it's one of the reasons why the supply

side really likes to work with us because these families usually mean less issues so you have a group of young men a typical bachelor party etc it gets loud maybe things get broken et cetera if you have a family usually it's very easy going and the suppliers love that is it maybe that you that customer might not be the perfect thing to name it's also like you have a partnership approach also more in thinking about like this positioning you are or yeah so the partner or the word partner we are using for our suppliers because with many of the suppliers we are in a let's say frenemy combination because on the one hand we are competing directly for the traveler So the big OTA wants to get the traveler directly.

The property manager wants to get the traveler directly. And even your personas, if they can get someone to do it directly, they would certainly take that. So, you know, always cut out the middleman. But on the other hand, they need us. For many of the property managers, we are the number one or number two booking channel. And even for the big OTAs, we are an important part of, of, of, their booking. So they need us. We need them. And therefore we call it a partnership with the traveler. You know, we want to have happy customers, happy travelers because the best marketing we can

have is that someone goes out and says, oh, it wasn't that great vacation rental. I found it via home to go. And then he tells all his friends about it. We even calculate already if someone likes the property so much and is renting it out next year again, they usually do it directly with the owner. So when they come for the second or third time to the same property, they usually go directly to the owner. And the owner says, you know, I'm happy to leave out any middle person and the traveler is happy. So, but that's fine for us. We basically assume that to happen because it's still, if someone is so satisfied with a property, they will also talk with friends about it and say oh i found that great property with home to go and i'm so smart next year i i i book it

directly with with the owner that's perfectly fine because at some point they will book again and they will most likely come back to us and find a new property but so you don't take away some of the pain points as the platform in the middle like i tend to book holiday rentals as well but like do it with a bnb because i have someone who i could call if something comes up as an issue Yeah, yeah. I was just talking about if you book exactly the same property a second time, then usually you know the owner, and then usually there are always exceptions to the rule, then there's a direct business between the owner and the traveler. If someone is booking something new, it's a different story.

So you must be very good at marketing then to help the ecosystem. I'm personally not, but the colleagues are, yes. How like maybe happy are you with your efficiency general in marketing also compared to other players? Yeah, the good thing is that coming from, you know, when we started the business almost 10 years ago, it was like a meta search engine and by now we still the meta business or advertising business as we call it now is still a part of it but no longer the biggest part of the business. but when you like the whole dna was to work very efficient with very thin margins so we always knew that how to get as close as possible to sounds like a very german business but to really make sure

that okay with the last euro of marketing spend we make exactly one euro of of of of revenue so you know that you basically have like a zero contribution margin But to know how to do that enables you to also basically meet any other kind of margin you want to have and we are very efficient in it. And we always make fun of our paid marketing team that we say, okay, whatever kind of efficiency gains we are making, for example, with more repeat customers, they immediately spend it because they are going for that whatever our goal is. And having that skill is actually, it's actually quite, quite helpful because that enables us to make sure we want to reach a certain limit and then we're going to reach it. So last year we reached our adjusted Ibeda target. This year we will reach our adjusted Ibeda target and then we will increase it from there. My second question on marketing was if there's anything especially good you're doing in marketing and I think this could be the thing or are there other things where you say, okay, when I love it. at other players in the market.

We are good here. I think when it comes to paid marketing, we are really good. And it comes down to very little things. For example, in this year during Q1 we had very good success with people looking for vacation rental with a dog. So as always, the broader you are in your search, the more traffic you get and the more narrower you are, narrow you are, the less traffic. But for example, that worked really well. There were other

success stories where I'm not allowed to talk about it publicly. Yeah. But, you know, truth is also, when I look at some of our competitors, they have a great brand. I, you know, as the colleagues from Airbnb are saying Airbnb is a verb and a noun. So that is something I look at with big envy, because that is really an impressive thing they have done. So, you know, our brand can still grow, but we just recently, there was a survey by Handelsblatt, and out of the top six, there were four brands from home to go. So not too bad, but still room for improvement.

So marketing is the one thing, and conversion is the other thing that makes a business happy or business owners happy. How have you come and let's factor a bit of history? to read here better in converting customers over time? It's like a constant process and it's the the kind of when I know our product team they are doing like constant AB tests every day there like 100 tests going in parallel it comes down to really tiny things for example is the checkout button here or is it here is it green or is it blue is it red or is it yellow

And it's really interesting to see the results out of these AB tests. Sometimes there's no difference. Sometimes it's a huge difference. And then to test it, to apply it, and then to see how the conversion rate is picking up. There are certain things when you scroll down the page, like what is happening, how much you see at the top. Is it faster? Is it slower? For example, to have, you know, with more than 15 million offers, initially we showed a lot of offers until we realized during a B test that the travelers actually were not too happy about seeing 30,000 search results in certain areas.

So now we show like 300 and then they can load another 300 and in order to not have that feeling of, oh, I saw these great properties, but maybe on search page 300, there's an even better one and then they keep on searching and not booking. So most of these steps there's very rarely that you do like that one thing which then makes a complete difference. It's a slow improvement of the site year over year and it's very important when we very often talk to the property managers. The property managers always talk about the inventory as their property. When we talk about the product, it's always the marketplace, always the technology and that distinguish us from them. How many people work on this task? So how big are your teams? So in total we have systems you've implemented over time that take away work from the people.

Yeah. So overall we have more than 600 people in the group and out of that one third are like real engineers software engineers etc and then there are another hundred who you know work around the product many things like with the ranking for example important thing is what are the properties we show you and again it's helpful the more information we know about traveler the better it is to show a certain amount of of properties and like last year my family and i we went to Denmark and my wife was looking at home to go with our family laptop i was looking at home to go from my work laptop and we put in exactly the same keywords got completely different properties because i had much longer search history because i constantly look something up and and therefore the algorithm

was seeing me as a different person than seeing my wife and therefore we we saw different properties so So sometimes it's really interesting. So it's also getting more and more tailor, the more data you put in. So it's not a static search. No, no, no. And the ideal customer of ours is the customer who has booked already before. We know who the customer is. And if they booked last year for a family with two kids and one dog,

the likelihood that they will look again for properties which suits a family which suits a dog is relatively high, so much easier to show them properties which meet their needs. Yeah, you might be even better than Airbnb because I have some pain points that they remember me. Bad Airbnb, they have to change it. Let's talk a bit about conversion mistakes. What kind of costly conversion mistakes will you avoid in the future? You don't have to disclose all out of competition reasons, but maybe you have some. examples so I would I would rather it's it's I would less see it as a as a

conversion mistake it's just that we you know when sometimes we would get certain traffic which doesn't convert and then it's not so easy to see why is this traffic not converting so didn't it convert because we showed the wrong results. So maybe someone was looking for a big villa and we showed them rather budget objects or the other way around. Was it that maybe someone just was looking for certain kind of ideas and didn't never really had an intent to book so we were thinking that this was a high intent customer but actually it was a rather low intent customer so there are many many things and unfortunately we don't always have like the

perfect information there so sometimes it would be really nice to have like afterwards the opportunity to ask to do like a survey with the customer who booked or who didn't book to know what went well what didn't went well what is the payback period of a newly acquired customer across the different business lines and offers you have so when we We have like the typical marketplace customer. These are the customers. We make sure that already with the first booking, we have a positive net contribution. While if you have more the software as a service, there the custom acquisition cost are initially

higher than what we get with the first month. But usually after one year, we also are back in the profitable territory. switch to the topic of retention like investors call it so how happy are your customers with you and how do you measure this happiness so maybe also breaking it down to the product lines yeah so when you look at the software or subscription customers you can see it's very easy how happy they are because if they just keep their subscription going let's assume they are happy and We have very little churned, so that's a good sign. When we look more at the marketplace, there again, we have to distinguish between the on-site

customers where we have the full information and there we can see if they are coming back. And these are, I would say, the most attractive customer group of hours because if they come and book with us for the second or third time, they cost us significantly less. we just calculated it again. It's about 88%. And the reason why they cost us so much less is because we can save the Google text. It doesn't matter if it's Google or Bing, etc. It's just we save a lot of paid marketing. In addition, we have the information about the customer. So most of these repeat customers have downloaded the app. By the time, they're very easy to retarget. So we can send them an email and whatever they looked up in the app, we can say,

oh, you looked up Croatia, look at these offers which are currently in, there might be of interest to you. So that's the most attractive customer group. We actually think that our repeat customer group is bigger than we can identify because there are also people who still then go on the advertising business. So who do go offside, who still book with us, we just don't know it, except unless they use the same IP address. how is the app share grown over time for your business of traffic it's it's growing so the absolute amount of of app downloads is growing the monthly average users are growing the actual share i think is also growing but i don't have that number already at the moment okay and how easy is like like if there's someone looking through the app how likely will this person then convert maybe i don't know

if you can just close something on there it's important to see that the majority of our travelers are booking in in the first quarter for traveling in the third quarter so it's the traditional main or in the northern hemisphere summer holiday so therefore we see a lot of traction in the app so when travelers are looking at something and to look at these information is helpful for us because when they then come into the stage where they want to make a booking we have a pretty good idea what they are looking for but it's usually for example after the summer people rarely book for the next season there are some people there are some early bookers who come home from the last holidays

they book already for next year but the majority of bookers are really in the in the next summer this could be maybe me not that bad yeah and generally thinking do you have some observation how much is really app traffic over time or is it more like the people also browse so like is it in some categories you just shop via the app or in your category it's it's more complex transaction you have to find pictures in a higher resolution it's all over the place so some people it's interesting some people are looking up something on the app and then booking over the web it's i would have difficulties they're product colleagues who might be able to answer that that question better than than me but it's very hard to say that you have more now in the

app than on on the web and ultimately again me has to see you I don't care as long as they make a booking so back to the numbers questions so how do you measure the happiness of the customers I think it's NPS yeah so we we do like a constant check of these NPS and the results are very good again comparing it to to other OTAs we fare very good if we compare it to the overall travel sector it's it's it's very good although sometimes it's easy because I think the the airlines have really low, low scores. We also, Roger Barn when we don't talk about it, but it's something where our guest relations team is looking at it very, very carefully.

And if there's any kind of deviation, in particular to the negative, they are looking into it. We just, or the team got a newsweek award in the US market as one of the best guest relations team, and NPS was a significant you can factor in it. So guest relation teams means like customer could call them in case something is like there was a TV. There was a bed in this picture. There's no bed. It already starts earlier at the booking. So everyone from the management board, but also everyone of the second level management team has to do at least one day per year in guest relations. And it starts from working when someone has a question on the booking. So very often it's like they were using the pet filter, but they have two pets. And then they ask, can I bring two pets? And most of the time,

you could read it yourself in the description of the properties. But that's something where we have seen very good success of it by helping the respective traveler or potential traveler. And then they're very happy to book or if something is and that was a learning for me when this property was not allowing two pets the respective colleague was then immediately looking for a property which was closed by which allowed two pets and the conversion rate out of it and the kind of happiness of the customer out of it is is really impressive and so i always learn learn a lot there and that's like just for the part before people are booking and then you have people who have already booked and then asking questions, okay, where is the next supermarket? Or when they

have arrived and there was an issue, how to deal with that. And then of course, we can help the traveler if we go back to the respective partner and say, look, the traveler was expecting a TV. There was no TV. Then what to do about it? But usually complaints are really a minor issue and we are able to to solve them immediately and sometimes we even you know solve the issue for the traveler and then go back to the partner to get our money back so lesson for building a business always try to answer customer questions even if they stand in your descriptions and you might think they are a bit like interesting um so this makes customers happy and how do you use the power of customers that are happy to grow your business so do we have any special strategy

to even like custom use customer referrals and stuff like this as a growth engine we do some some tests with a kind of vouchers where we have for example customers who have booked with us we enable them to you know also take an additional voucher and give it to some friends and had some good results on that, but it's still in the testing phase. So there are many things you can do with various kinds of loyalty programs for existing customers, but also for potential new customers, but we're still in the testing phase there. And maybe also transferred it's to SMUBO because here becomes interesting. Is there a lot of referral happening from

existing happier homeowners? Yeah. Yeah, it's usually that's what I try to, you have these online groups, for example, and once you, you have you know some people in that group who are happy customers then it's usually very easy to convince the other ones because as always when you know someone who has had a good personal experience and tells you use this software it's working well look at what it did to me it's the best kind of argument you can have do you expect if this continues to go on a certain network effect where it even can drive your growth because more people have experience with you, the network get denser, the travel network gets denser.

Yeah. Yeah. And also what you always have to see when you look at the global market for vacation rental, we would say by now a bit more than 50% is online. A large amount is still offline. So the, you know, the holiday on a farm, which always went through the automobile club magazine and the one generation passes on the property to the next generation and then they say okay that's all nice with the automobile club magazine but there must be something more online by now and then it goes online and with every new generation we we get like new customers let's jump to the questions how good you have become over time with keeping customers like with moodoo you said there's nearly

no turn? Like what are churn reasons there? I don't know the exact reason now, but I think the main reason is that people are just selling the property. So they don't longer have the property and then there's no longer a need for the software. And sometimes if the new owner is keeping the software, so then we lose one customer, we gain another one. Sometimes the owner already has like an existing software and just putting it there so many different different reasons what's what's happening but that's the number one reason so the churn in the like holiday rental marketing business let's say it's like this you correct me or the core business um is then higher so and in the core in the

core business it's the repeat cycle for our customers is one point one time times per year. So there's basically just one big travel date they do per year. So on the one hand, of course, it's good because if people stay like for two or three weeks, it's again one of the reasons why our supply partners love us, because if you have a traveler who stays for two weeks, it means only changing the keys for two weeks, changing the linens for two weeks. So a lot of money saving for them. On the other side, in terms of repeat customers, I would love to have more of short-term traveler so that we have like maybe two bookings per year and therefore have a higher repeat share.

Therefore, it's not that we like lose the customer. It's just that it takes another year until they book again. But for example, from 22 until 23, we have increased the amount of booking revenues from repeat customers by 50%. So it's still a relatively small double digit amount of over. all revenues which come from repeat customers. And I always say compared to the big OTAs who have like 70, 80, 90%, it's a long way to go and it will take us a few years to get there. But to get from a low double digit to maybe 30 or 40%. We have a pretty good idea where what we have to do and

where to get. And again, remembering the 88% less cost we have with a repeat customer gives you an idea on what kind of effect it has on our on our P&M so how should we think about the persona's thinking in cohorts so they could be like the home to go lover that comes back every year and just buys with you then there's the the jeep german that try to compare us everything and you have the best deal and that's why he books for you with you every three years and then there's the the person that's only booking every five years is like this and you can i i always I always have this picture from the pet food industry. I think it was Zoo Plus who could show like the customer who booked for the first time.

Then there was a churn of like 10, 15%, but whoever booked for the second time basically stayed a loyal customer. So unfortunately we are not pet food because they book every, what is it, second month because they need new pet food. I wish it would be like that. So in our case, but holiday content is also not that bad. The internet can accept too. I don't want to complain about it. It's just when you have that repeat cycle of 1.1 times, it is difficult to have that kind of a layer shown to investors as the pet food example could do it. Because it could have many reasons why in what?

year you maybe don't want to go to vacation rental you might return in the next year but it's not so so easy to show but as I said we have increased it by 50% this year we want to continue to increase it over the next years and it will become a bigger and bigger part of our overall business again this enables us to to spend more money for new customers which again will help us to grow the overall business so how do you co-hold what's behave over time like the oldest compared maybe to the newest and have you made it that the newer cohorts have more quality than the older hmm i don't have that data really at the top

of my head now so in general we can see that like basically every new cohort is is usually starting higher than the old one but i couldn't tell you now the exact reason why that is but it's usually going up and then continues to to grow afterwards so maybe that's a good invite for my guest that they will ask these questions to you in future talks when they see you at the capital market conference and i will close the first part of our conversation for now and we'll be back with a second part where we talk about complexity competition and capital location CCC in the next video. Thank you very much for your attention.

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