Le Travenues Technology Limited (NSE: IXIGO) Q4 2025 Earnings Call dated May. 14, 2025
Corporate Participants:
Unidentified Speaker
Aloke Bajpai — Chairman, Managing Director, and Group Chief Executive Officer
Mr. Rajnish Kumar — Director and Group Co-Chief Executive Officer
Mr. Saurabh Devendra Singh — Group Chief Financial Officer
Analysts:
Unidentified Participant
Anmol Garg — Analyst
Harikesh — Analyst
Manik Taneja — Analyst
Akhil Gulecha — Analyst
Shrinarayan Mishra — Analyst
Presentation:
operator
Good day and welcome to Late Revenues Technology Ltd. Q4 and FY25 earnings conference call hosted by DAM Capital Advisors Ltd. As a reminder, all participant lines will be in the listen only mode and there will be an opportunity for you to ask questions after the presentation concludes. Should you need assistance during this conference call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero on your touchdown phone. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Anmol Garg from DAM Capital. Thank you. And over to you sir.
Anmol Garg — Analyst
Thank you, Steve. Good evening everyone. On behalf of DAM Capital, I welcome you all to ICSIGO’s Q4FY25 earnings call. We have with us Mr. Alok Bajpai, Chairman Managing Director and the Group CEO of the Company. Mr. Rajneesh Kumar, Director and the Group Co CEO of the Company and Mr. Sourabh Devender Singh, Group CFO of the Company. Before I hand over the call to the Safe harbor statement on the second slide of the earnings presentation and is assumed to be read and understood, over to you Saurabh.
Mr. Saurabh Devendra Singh — Group Chief Financial Officer
Hi. Thanks Anmur. As we sit on this call, I’m reminded of a year ago. That time we were in the last stages of our ipo. Ibzigo was stepping into a new arena, public market, where scrutiny is sharper, timelines are shorter and the stakes are inevitably higher. The question kept on circling in my mind, sometimes quietly during the meeting and sometimes loudly in the solitude of late night. Would we be able to honor the belief that the public market investors are placing enough? As some of you might know, I spent a large part of my career in the public market.
I’ve seen many IPOs and that is why the transition worried me. The IPOs are moment, yes, but being public is a mindset, a discipline, a daily commitment to openness, accountability and performance. Under the bright, unforgiving light. And these lights are glistening. The coverage, the clap, the ringing of the bell. But they cast long shadows. A single misstep travels fast. Win needs context. Mistakes in real time, in full view. That’s the reality we stepped into a year ago. And today, as we close FY25, our first full year as a listed company, I feel something deeper than relief.
I feel gratitude that even in this new paradigm, we stayed faithful to who we are and what got us here. And more importantly, we’ve shown that being public doesn’t mean being something else. It means being more of what matters. With this thought, I’ll pass it on to Alok our Group CEO.
Aloke Bajpai — Chairman, Managing Director, and Group Chief Executive Officer
Thanks Sourabh. Good evening everyone. There are great quarters and there are blockbuster quarters. Q4 FY25 was a blockbuster quarter for us. In fact FY25 was a blockbuster year because we grew quarter on quarter without any impact of seasonality that our industry usually witnesses. When I use the word blockbuster. It’s not just because of our GTV for the full year being close to 15,000 crores which is actually more than Bollywood’s annual box office collection even in its best year, but also because it is a quarter that demonstrated our ability to scale with discipline and generating operating leverage that is both visible and sustainable.
With 122 crores of cash generated from operations in the full year as well as a more than doubling of our profit after tax for Q4. While building a company we have to make conscious decisions that balance our short term interests with our long term ones. We’ve had the good fortune at exigo to never have to compromise our long term interest in optimizing for purely short term objectives. Our investors have also been always supportive of this approach. This allows us to continue betting on areas that could one day disrupt our core business or de risk it to a large extent.
It also allows us to keep taking small size bets time to time which if they work well can end up defining us and if they don’t, will give us learning at hopefully not too big a cost. What matters most here is the foresight and conviction that the team needs to build about how the market will evolve in the future and what would be required to offer superior customer experience and product differentiation. As an outsider at times it is hard to appreciate this approach because some of the things we spend disproportionate time or effort talking about doing may not make much sense today and it is only after two to three years, sometimes more, that those start to impact our growth and P and L in any meaningful way.
When we listed in June last year we had a solid foundation of a large and sticky user base, dominance among OTAs in the train line of business, a young but fast growing flight and bus OTA business, and the product agility and nimbleness that a challenger brand typically needs to have in a competitive space. The promise was that as our large widespread base of aspiring middle class travelers would mature, they would come back to us for a wider array of their travel needs, pay up for value added services that solve their pain area and as their incomes improve, spend the larger share of their wallet on us through premiumization of the spends.
Our FY25 performance is proof that the market is evolving exactly how we expected it to, with flights and buses becoming our fastest growing verticals both in GDP terms and revenue terms. There are visible market share gains we see across the three core lines of business. We have hit pretty meaningful scale with annual active users crossing 544 million for the full year and our monthly active users crossing 83 million across our brands, apps and websites. The bigger achievement though is how we’ve grown our monthly transacting users which have crossed 3.7 million monthly transacting users as of Q4 with a 4% MTU to MAU ratio.
If we look at our GDP scale now, it is nearly 2% of all B2C E commerce being sold in our country today. In the flights and buses business we have seen material acceleration and some gains in market share as well. Buses in fact now has the largest share of contribution margin across our lines of business, so we are a much more diversified business in that sense. We are no more just a tier 23 brand either. If we look at our growth coming from Tier 1 to Tier 1 flight, it was at 68% in passenger segment terms in Q4, which is multifold faster than the overall market growth of flown passengers between the top metros, indicating our increase in market share even in those axis.
ICIGO’s uniqueness lies in its ability to tap into a growth factor that is rare, which is not just that of people making their first online travel booking, but of people booking the first ticket of their life on that mode of travel itself. This new to market segment essentially allows us to create a blue ocean for ourselves rather than compete in existing red oceans. An interesting statistic to share with you all is that the NBU users that we have, the ones that come and book new flights with us, the ones that came in Q4, our surveys indicate that half of those users that was the first flight booking of their life.
So essentially half of those new users who came to book on the NBU apps had never booked a flight in their life. So we are basically creating a new market. One contributor to that is also Travel Guarantee, which is now fully rolled out across Exigo Trains and Confirmed Ticket, a value added service that leverages our unique advantage of a strong presence across the travel segments that we operate in trains, buses and flights. Travel Guarantee helps travelers gain greater visibility into seat availability for their trips and allows them to get steeper discounts on alternate modes of transportation in case their waitlisted train ticket does not confirm on the date of travel.
In many cases, this introduces the next billion users to new modes of travel such as flights and buses. This product has received strong initial uptake and is helping a lot of travellers to be able to benefit from up to 3x discount on a bus or a flight booking or up to 2x discount and an alternate train booking when their train ticket doesn’t conform. All three lines of businesses are seeing a positive impact of travel Guarantee on the revenue and GDP growth at this stage of our journey. We are not optimizing travel guarantee for margins but instead prioritizing trials and adoptions by our customers and measuring customer satisfaction while observing their propensity to book an alternate transport.
Our AI based optimization algorithm for pricing this product as well as deciding for which waitlisted ticket this product even gets offered for allows us to run this product in a profitable manner. But in the initial phase travel guarantee will be a lower margin offering than the overall margins in our business. Given this is a there’s a slightly higher variable cost to operate this product. As you can see in our financials, it has strengthened our overall portfolio and despite the marginal dilution in unit economics that it brings for the trains business 31% trains contribution margin in Q4FY25 versus 34% in Q4FY24, it has still contributed to a healthy GDP and revenue growth for the trains business and the other lines of businesses in FY25.
We’ve also doubled down on brand and performance marketing across our portfolio. Building upon the organic growth foundation that we had, we partnered with Rohit Sharma for our Exigo Trains brand campaign which had visibility across railway stations, TV channels, Mahakumb and more. We also doubled down on our confirmed ticket partnership with RCB in IPL and executed a new campaign for Travel Guarantee featuring Virat Kohli and other cricketers. We also renewed our Mahesh Padu association for Abhibas brand as well as signed up with the CSK team in ipl. Apart from these, we did several tactical campaigns, sponsorships, brand partnerships and offline activations which has been enhancing our brand recall across our brand portfolio.
Let me speak a bit on the macro development since we last spoke. The Mahakumbh Mela in the months of January and February 2025 saw a surge in searches and bookings for us across our three lines of businesses and not just for Prayagras but also for nearby towns such as Varanasi, Lucknow, Kanpur, Ayodhya. These act as feeders feed routes into Prayagraj. Our bookings to Prayagraj surged 20x yoy for buses 5.4x yoy for flights and 4x y o y for trains during this period, reflecting that for categories such as bus where supply was not constrained like the others, there was a decent spike noticed during the Mela.
What came as an eye opening insight for us was how Gen Z and solo travelers found a dominant demographic for Mahatum, shattering stereotypes about what demographic drives spiritual travel demand in our country. On trains, solo travelers made up over half the train bookings to Prayagraj and a staggering 50% of all visitors to Mahakum across all modes of travel that we saw were under 30 years of age. Having witnessed it myself, I believe that this event was a testament to the true power of spiritual tourism in our country, marking the beginning of a structural multi year theme.
Though some bit of Our performance in Q4 might appear to be influenced by what was happening at the Mahatum, let me also clarify that only a mid single digit percentage of our GDP for that quarter is directly attributable to the Mahatma. The event was an eye opener to many on the power of spiritual travel in India and there’s an opportunity in the long term to serve this market in minutes. In more recent development, the Pehalgam terror attack happened at a time when Jammu and Kashmir was seeing 70% growth YoY in bookings for us in the month of April.
The attack marked a significant blow to the state’s tourism momentum and the region’s security environment and led to a military conflict that impacted flight operations in North India. At icsigo, our first priority was to ensure the safety and well being of our travelers by ensuring we were disseminating information about disruptions and closures in a timely manner and to help them find alternate means of transportation to return to their home safely. We were also supporting our users by offering full refunds including convenience fees, free reschedules to all passengers flying from or to the affected airports. We also saw some increase in customer reach outs to our customer support channels and our CX teams work proactively day and night in coordination with our airline and hotel partners to resolve customer queries efficiently with the help of some AI as well.
On May 10, 2025, driven by feedback from our users, we took a decision to suspend flight and hotel bookings for certain countries whose actions and stance during the conflict sparked significant public outrage in India. As a company deeply rooted in Bharat, we believe it is our responsibility to take a stand in solidarity with our nation during this critical situation. This action reflects our unwavering commitment towards aligning our business practices with the sentiments of the people in our country. We remain dedicated to reviewing this position. As the situation evolves, should geopolitical equations change, we’ll reassess the stance and we’ll do what is right for the broader travel ecosystem.
This decision aligns with our core value of empathy and is reflective of our responsible corporate citizenship. Lastly, I want to end by quoting Swami Vivekananda, whose life and principles have been inspiring for me. Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life. Think of it, dream of it, Live on that idea. Let the brain, muscle, nerves, every part of your body be full of that idea and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success for us. That idea has been to serve the underserved travelers. When I say underserved, I mean travelers not just from the next billion user segment, but also the ones from the existing market who haven’t been fully served in terms of depth of customer experience.
As of now, on June 3rd we will complete 18 years from launch and our journey is a testament to the true power of compounding. We remain thankful to the immense faith of our customers, employees, airline partners, irctc, bus operators, hotel partners, all our stakeholders that have reposed their faith in us throughout and we remain conscious of the great burden of trust we carry on our shoulders. With that, I will now hand over the call to my friend and co CEO Rajneesh.
Mr. Rajnish Kumar — Director and Group Co-Chief Executive Officer
Thanks Anouk. Bets we took ahead of time Even when it seemed common intuitive on why we were taking those bets, we took these bets because we felt they would help improve customer experience and pain points in the travel industry over the long term. What we are seeing now is therefore a result of some resource allocation decisions we took several years ago. If you see a growth trajectory over the last three quarters, the acceleration coming quarter on quarter is a result of multiple factors improvement of products especially for more evolved users. Firstly with utility features such as tracker tool, automated trip management, secondly, enrichment of supply in buses and flights now starting to happen on hotels as well.
Thirdly, deeper cross integration and synergies across our products and services in our app ecosystem across Exigo confirmed ticket aribust. Fourthly, better cross sell through integration of food, hotels, advertising etc. And lastly enhanced monetization from new value added services such as travel guarantee and price mark. We already have a large user base so our focus is on enhancing our monetization and expanding our share of wallet among our users. Our approach to expanding the share of wallet is centered around solving customer problems through innovative products that build trust and loyalty through better customer experience this loyalty and trust then translates to better cross sell and upsell leading to enhanced monetization per user over the long term.
Over the years we have focused on utility first community driven use cases to organically acquire customers. Since travel is an infrequent use case, the best way to measure share of wallet growth for our business is by tracking annual spend per transacting user, calculated as GTV divided by annual transacting users. This metric reflects how much each transacting user is spending on our platform annually and serves as a proxy for our share wallet share expansion. We have grown from 6,537 rupees per user per annum in FY23 to 9,705 rupees per user per annum In FY25, compounding at 22% CAGR, signifying our deepening relationship with our customers.
This increase in share of wallet is also correlated with the rising trend of what we call premiumization in our country. We are witnessing a clear and accelerating growth trend of premiumization in Indian travel, a shift driven by rising purchasing power and innovation that are delivering better value at lower cost to the customers. Destinations once considered aspirational such as Goa are being substituted at times by international travel places such as Vietnam, Thailand, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Singapore. Domestically too, there’s a strong surge in spiritual travel destinations like Troyagraj and Ayurveda, reflecting both evolving aspirations and deeper cultural excavation is also seeing upgradations.
We are seeing people are transitioning from trains and buses to flights. These behavioral shifts are being fueled by two core underlying drivers. First, one is rising disposable income enabling more Indians to spend on travel and experiences and secondly massive infrastructure investments including the expansion of aircraft and tier 2 tier 3 cities and the development of major tourist sites like temples and monuments. The recently introduced travel Guarantee Value Added Services is another step in this direction, created to ensure that users without a confirmed train ticket can conveniently and affordably switch to alternate modes of transport. As previously highlighted, this feature is also enabling many users to experience new modes of travel to their flights for the very first time in their life.
ALED has already talked about the growth in our flights and buses vertical which continues to surpass our own expectations. OPEX is still nation but we are very satisfied with what we have achieved in the fiscal year where we have worked upon it. Quite a few learnings we have in that vertical. When it comes to product market fit both on the supply side and the customer side, there’s also lots of work to be done there in the coming quarters to get to a point where we feel we have solved some customer pain points that still exist in that space in terms of customer experience on the ground and the expectation versus reality of it.
As a trusted customer for Zan, it is important for us to continue investing in technology, AI and new initiatives that will enhance our customer experience as well as into brand marketing. Some new related products that we launch, such as cloud source products on trains, Flight Tracker Pro or Bus Insights, may at times lead to disproportionate growth in tech talks without a proportionate increase in revenue. However, in the long term these products help increase engagement and stickiness and improve our repeat bookings leading to reduction in our consumer acquisition costs. Over the past year a number of investors had asked us about this, so let me share an interesting metric for you.
In FY25, 85.8% of our transactions were done by retreat bookers who have booked with us before, which shows the loyalty and faith our user support upon us. Given the accelerated progress in the field of AI, the adoption of AI tools have accelerated across all our teams as well as in customer facing products. This incremental investment also shows up in our technology cost, but it ends up creating operating leverage in other areas such as employee costs and customer support costs. To give you an example, recently we rolled out YCI agents for our flight and train customer support and we are already seeing 45% of our flight customer support on board being done end to end by these AI agents, allowing us to scale the flight business without adding incremental human support agents.
If you look back and see where they’re coming from, it looks like an impossible feat to have growing nearly 23 times of our revenue from operation from 40 crores pre Covid in FY19 to 914 crores in FY25. However, we remain extremely paranoid about the future and we’ll continue to place our bets on areas that can potentially disrupt them because that is the only way we know we will remain relevant and continue growing. I want to end by thanking Our team, now 509 people strong in the XVCO business. The contribution to this journey is commendable and I think they are the true creators of this impact.
As we approach our 18th anniversary as a company, I can’t help but reflect on the early days marked by series of venture capital pitches and the still of repeated rejections that we face. Back then we believed that securing that funding could have significantly accelerated our growth trajectory. What we didn’t realize then was that those very rejections were helping shape the DNA that would allow us to build a stronger foundation for future growth. With capital always in short supply, we were left with no choice but to rely on technology, creativity, product led growth, organic growth, marketing and we built a culture deeply rooted in capital, efficiency and customer centricity.
What began as a necessity soon became second nature and that discipline has served us remarkably well to this day. With that, I’m handing over to my friend group CFO Sourab Devendra Singh over to you.
Mr. Saurabh Devendra Singh — Group Chief Financial Officer
Thanks Rajesh. Let’s walk through some highlights. As always, all figures shared are in rupees crore. In case I forget to mention it, unless mentioned otherwise, year over year comparisons refer to the same period in FY24 for annual and Q4 FY24 for quarterly. Now let’s start at the top. Our gross transaction value of GTV rose by 65% in Q4 to 4,418.4 crore for a full year. FY25 we recorded 14,971.6 crores in GTV, a 46% increase year over year. Revenue from operations stood at 284.1 for the quarter, a 72% increase. YoY. For FY25 the number was 914.2 crore, a 39% increase.
YoY on contribution margin we delivered 120.9 crore in Q4 up 69% for full year, our contribution margin total crore growing 37%. Y O Y while the quarterly margin percentage dipped slightly from 43.5% to 42.5% in Q4. That was in line with our decision to lean into growth opportunities and along the lines of what we’ve been talking about in every call that we have. Adjusted EBITDA excluding other income and epoch Costs improved to 29.1 crore for the quarter up from 17.1 crore in Q4FY24. On a full year basis we closed FY25 at 94.8 crore in adjusted EBITDA compared to 55.3 crore last year.
Profit after tax stood at 16.8 crore for the quarter compared to 7.3 crore in Q4 last year, an increase of 128% for the full year PAT was 60.3 crore versus 73.1 crore in FY24. This year over year difference is explained by one off which we have already discussed in the previous quarter and I will also summarize again. Close to the end I should highlight that our operating cash flow has nearly quadrupled over three years from 30.8 crore in FY23 to 122 crore in FY25. Now let’s take a quick look at how our major business lines are performing this quarter.
Our bus segment is now cruising like a well maintained Volvo 9600 smooth category defining and ahead of schedule. Whoever hasn’t traveled, please travel in Abibas and you’ll realize how good it is. In Q4 we recorded 0.55 crore passenger segment booking making a 78% year over year growth and generating a GPV of 552.5 crore. Contribution margin rose to 40.1 crore with a healthy contribution margin percentage of 60.9. Thanks to this strong profitable growth, the bus segment now contributes 33.2% of our overall contribution margin. Now much like the Boeing 787 Dreamliner which was bold rethinking of what log haul travel should be, our approach to flight business has been intentional, ambitious and built for long term.
We didn’t rush to scale. Instead we invested in the underlying systems and customer experiences needed to build something enduring and now the strategy is taking off. In Q4 we booked 0.25 crore price segment a 73% year over year increase with a GTV of 1,709.2 crore which is a 92% growth. YY contribution margin reached 39.6 crore with a margin percentage of 45.2%. Slice now contribute 38.7% to overall GTV and 32.7% to group’s total contribution margin. When it was first launched in 1969, the Hazaraj Ghani taught India to expect more from train travel not just in terms of speed but in consistency, comfort and trust.
Our trail line of business carries forward the same spirit. In Q4 we booked 2.62 crore segment marking a 30% growth over Q4 FY24 and contributing to 2107.1 crore up 41% year over year. Operational revenue came in at 126.3 crore with a contribution margin of 39.2 crore at a 31% contribution margin. Percentage claims accounted for approximately 32.4% of group total contribution margin. Now as promised, I would like to highlight a few one off or call out items that influence the comparison between FY25 and FY24. Re evaluation gains for our associate Freshbus was 29.7 crore in FY24 and 5.8 crore in FY25.
Share of loss of Fresh bus increased from 5.9 crore in FY24 to 9.1 crore in FY25. FY24 also had a Freshbird loss of 5.2 crore. Consolidated with US at that point of time it was a subsidiary. There was a 1.2 crore related to share issue expense in FY25. Related to further, we had a tax expense of 21.5 crore in FY25 as compared to a one off tax credit of 12 crore in FY24. Thus, due to the above item, on a like to like basis, we had a net charge of 26 crore in FY25 against the net gain of 30.6 crores in FY24.
Lastly, let me quickly touch upon the impact on our business due to the recent geopolitical issues, the temporary shutdown of 32 airports resulted in some disruption to flight services with cancellation affecting 5 to 8% of total scheduled flights between May 7 and May 12. While there wasn’t much impact on train business, our bus business actually saw some increase in demand during this time and hence at a company level, we didn’t see much impact. With the announcement of reopening of affected air force from 12th May, we are glad to report that as of 13th May and onwards we have returned to normal flight booking level prevalent in early May.
Now, where does the end of FY25 leave us? It leaves us with a strong start on a long and ambitious journey. While we have strengthened our platform, invested and reinforced our value proposition, we know that next few years because defining factors are rarely the comfortable ones. I’ll end up with a quote which means more or less what Alok said, but he’s a spiritual guy while I’m a dark brooding type. So Kafka once wrote, don’t bend, don’t water it down, don’t try and make it logical. Don’t edit your own soul according to the passion, rather follow your most intense obsession.
We are following our mission to democratize access to travel with integrity, empathy and innovation at the heart of everything we do. It’s that obsession that has brought us here and it’s the same focus that will carry us through good quarters like this one and also through others which may not be as smooth though in which things don’t go as planned. Regardless of the challenges, we will remain steadfast to our core values and mission. Thanks. And with that I’ll hand it back to the moderator for Q and A.
Questions and Answers:
operator
Thank you very much. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their Touchstone Telephone. If you wish to withdraw yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two participants are requested to use handset while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. The first question is from the line of Anmol Kar from VAM Capital. Please go ahead.
Anmol Garg
Yeah, hi and congratulations guys for a very strong performance. I have a few questions that I wanted to understand. Firstly, in both our flight and bus business, our take rates have gone up significantly versus the last quarter. So just wanted to understand that what has led to this? Has there been increase in the overall international booking in our flight segment?
Mr. Rajnish Kumar
So I’ll take the first one on Mole. Look, part of it is what we have as value added offerings. So one of the things that say in the case of Buzz, what we’ve been doing is we’ve been increasing and expanding the footprint of Abhishod across and in general, as we discussed in the presentation, we’ve introduced a number of value added servicing and a part of the take rate of why our take rate would always be slightly different is our underlying roots might end up being our underlying might end up being different to the market. And we don’t know what the market is right now.
But partially it’s more of math in that sense. The second question, sorry, you had was international.
Aloke Bajpai
So I’ll take that look here. I think the growth we saw in international this time around was pretty much in line with the kind of growth that we saw for the overall flights business. You could look at it that way.
Anmol Garg
Understood, understood. Secondly, wanted to understand that you have launched Travel Guarantee this quarter also we have other value added products. So currently what would be the percentage of revenue that is currently coming out of this product and how has it changed over the last year?
Mr. Saurabh Devendra Singh
We are not declaring the revenue on this. Firstly and again it was launched last quarter, so whatever it is over last year. But let me give you a more qualitative idea and probably Alok and Rajneesh can talk a bit more about the product. Remember the product came from the need of the user a lot of times. So it’s a product which was which came with the need of users and secondly, with the kind of base that we had in train, we felt we could make it really work in this sense. So what I can tell you is that the product is doing extremely well for us and what we are trying to do is and part of what you see in the decrease in the margin of the train business is what is happening with Travel Guarantee because We are not optimizing the product right now for margins.
We are keeping it profitable. But we are prioritizing adoption by customers, trying to see the customer satisfaction really works where it works. But yes, it is a very popular product for us. So as if you see the in general growth, what has happened in that segment has been driven by this. And we are getting a lot of people in the segment.
Aloke Bajpai
I’ll let you add more. Yeah, so I’ll just add that. Look, if you look at the utility value of this product, right. As an end customer, because if you were planning to go somewhere and you had a waitlisted ticket, now you have the chance to be assured about the fact that if the ticket doesn’t conform, you will have enough discount to buy a bus or a flight at a steep sort of discount from where the fares typically are at the last minute. Or you could take a train the next day and still you could afford a more premium Pascal train.
Right. With 2x refund. So in that sense, the folks who actually do opt in for this product and who do not get actually a ticket at the end of the day, confirmed seat, you can assume that a large part of them will actually start using this to book an alternate trip. So in that sense, it also kind of expands the market because that person would have not traveled at all or would have not found any, anything on our app worthy of their spend. But now get that option and largely priced with data, science and AI.
So we keep it profitable that way. But like Saurabh said, you know, it’s very early days. I mean, I think I would love to talk more about it in a few quarters from now. Rajneesh, you want to add something?
Mr. Rajnish Kumar
No, I mean, I just wanted to say that as the name suggests, the goal of this product was, like I said, everything. It’s not about making money right in the beginning. Are you able to hear me?
Anmol Garg
Yes.
Mr. Rajnish Kumar
Yeah. So as the name suggests, travel guarantee, the goal of the product was to make people travel. Are you able to hear me now? Sorry,
Aloke Bajpai
yes, you’re on the data search.
Mr. Rajnish Kumar
I think this might be a connection issue.
operator
Yes, the current participant got disconnected. We will move on to the next question.
Anmol Garg
Am I audible?
operator
Yes, sir, you’re audible.
Anmol Garg
Yeah, I can hear you. Rakesh.
operator
Yes, sir. Shall we move on to the next question? Yeah, it’s on the line of Swapnil from GM Financial. Please go ahead.
Unidentified Participant
Hi, thanks for the opportunity and congratulations on a good set of numbers all through. Just starting with the your flights business. See, if I were to look at from the silver perspective q1 q4k to 1q typically I believe there is a decent growth that you see because of holiday season in now. But there were a few events like you called out, right. There was some disruption in Kashmir, there was Kumb in the days of 4Q and then there are certain markets areas stop taking some bookings. Now my question here is like will we see the usual seasonality despite this events or should we build in you know, slightly unusual quarter for 1Q this year particularly because.
Aloke Bajpai
Yeah, thank you Alok here. I just wanted to call out first of all that Mahakum itself like we said in our narrative was just contributing single digit percentage of additional GTV as of Q4. Right. So it’s. Even though it did help us grow a tad bit faster. But I would say that you know the secular growth trajectory itself was pretty exciting even without it. And this I’m saying for especially for flights where the inventory addition which was purely mahakum related was not as big as let’s say on a vertical like buses where the impact could be felt more materially.
Right. In that sense. So I think at an overall business level we would have stayed grown very fast even if there was no Mahatma in Q4, let’s put it that way. As far as the disruptions that you mentioned are concerned, those disruptions which happened just for a period of five days during the conflict, I think as I speak today we have already recovered levels that existed pre conflict. So let me put that to rest.
Mr. Saurabh Devendra Singh
Swapnil, you have to realize one thing that because we are multimodal as I called out in the last question, there are different businesses which react differently to this kind of event. So it’s kind of in that sense it’s kind of balanced out for us. And so the other thing going back, I would not say that this is a quarter which is where the one offs and then we kind of have called everything out. If you go through an FAQ you’ll find most of these things also put on paper where we highlighted these points.
Unidentified Participant
Got it Sauravanand. The second question is with respect to your bus segment, your take rates have increased materially this quarter. I mean I, I think this is one of the highest take rate quarter for a long period of time. Now my question here is like first, is this a sustainable number to look at it. And secondly we was there any element of better commission that you’re able to get from the you know, the suppliers or uh, or is it purely the validated services uh, that you might be Offering.
Aloke Bajpai
Could you just. I missed the last part of the question. Could you repeat that part again please?
Unidentified Participant
My second part of the question was like is the take rate increase because of you getting better commissions from the suppliers, bus operators or is it. Is it because of the validated services, you know, customers taking more number of valuable services or the the percentage contribution from this service is increasing?
Mr. Saurabh Devendra Singh
Yeah, it’s a mix of a number of things. So one of the as in probably you summarized all the things there as in what you’ve got is one is the share shift which is private versus government that is working out. The second, as I mentioned earlier on the WAC and which includes things like reassured gets us into things like the first time users that we are getting or the returning users after years that we are getting to the bus segment, from the train segment to the travel guarantee move. It is also a combination of us providing, going deeper into our relationships with the bus operators.
And remember for bas, the interesting thing is bus is a fixed capex business. So in case we are able to get better capex utilization, better utilization for a bus operator, he’s willing to share much more. So this is a very different business than the other two businesses.
Aloke Bajpai
Yeah, just wanted to add that there is also the value added services that we sell specifically abhish showed etc. You have to understand that these value added services are not priced manually by people. There is an AI algorithm that prices them and as time progresses these algorithms start optimizing for pnl. I think what we are seeing also is that this optimization is resulting in significantly better attached rate, better better revenue and margins that we are starting to see now. And this is one of the reasons why we might be seeing these things. This is one of the areas that could potentially impact like you rightly mentioned.
Unidentified Participant
So will it be fair to say that 12% plus may be the new normal for your bus stippling business?
Mr. Rajnish Kumar
I don’t think we would like to kind of comment anything on that front about whether this is the new normal or not. All we can say is that we are seeing these optimizations building results. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but hopefully with all the efforts we are making on the side and data science and personalization related to these products, we might see further optimization in the future.
Unidentified Participant
Got it. So one question on your cost side. So you did call out in your earnings note that there was some operating leverage that you were able to drive in FR25 when it came to technology and branding cost. But my what my sense is that both these cost items increased materially in 2H25, which means the full impact of this investments, the technology banking investments will be should be visible in FY26. Does that mean widely natural terms we might be able to deliver very strong EBITDA growth in a particular case, but on a percentage margin perspective, things may not move in the same manner.
Mr. Saurabh Devendra Singh
Yeah, sure. I mean you have to look at technology expenses in a slightly different way. You know, technology expenses generally are proportional to the number of queries or hits or searches as you say that we get in our tech infrastructure and this includes all kinds of searches hosted in our platform. Sometimes, you know, we keep building these utility products as we talk about, right? Whether it is the flight Tracker Pro or the crowd sourced running status on trains or bus insights. And many a times these kind of products, since they don’t have a direct revenue impact, they will lead to disproportionate growth in tech costs without any proportionate increase in revenue.
However, in the long term, if you look at these products, they help increase engagement, right? And this leads to eventually to lead to a reduction in our customer acquisition cost and we are able to acquire more customers for free. I think what we measure in terms of our technology reduction, technology efficiency is whether our cost per million queries, which is defined as, you know, the infrastructure cost that is needed to support bottom and inquiry by dividing the numbers, is constant or declining over time or not. And I can share that that number has been only reducing year over year since we started measuring it.
So the current interesting insight number, I can share with you that at the current spend we are roughly seeing about 8 billion hits every week on our infrastructure. This is the cost at which we’re doing it. The other reason why this cost is an investment right now is that there is a very accelerated progress happening in the field of AI. And the adoption of AI tools has accelerated across all our internal teams. People are using a lot of AI across teams, whether it is engineering, customer support, etc. And also this adoption of AI or implementation of AI in customer facing products that we build, like everything that we do, every product feature that you see, there’s some amount of AI inside it, right? This incremental investment that we are doing AI is also showing up in our technology growth.
And I think there’s something that we had already said as user funds at the time of we went public that we’ll be using these funds for investment in AI. So this is, this cost may end up creating more operating leverage in the future in areas such as employee cost reducing or customer support costs reducing. Just to give you an example, I think I talked about it in the call as well. We have our voice to voice agents, AI agents now operating at full scale and we have already seen that almost 45% of our flight customer support voice queries are being completely handled end to end by AI allowing us to scale this business significantly.
So I mean, there is a rationale behind this, Ben. So, but having said that, even if you look at, you know, at a, at an overall level, even as a percentage of gdp, that number is not growing, it’s, it’s only constant.
Unidentified Participant
Got it. And just the last one, if I can squeeze in, it’s more on a long term perspective. So while you guys are doing fantastic across all these three key segments that you are operating at some point of time, my sense is like you will have to build the hotels segment also in a meaningful manner and a direct manner for. So, so any thoughts around that? How do you intend to do that and what kind of efforts will be needed or any, any, any, you know, any, any thoughts around that will be very helpful.
Aloke Bajpai
So you’re talking about hotels in the. Yes, I mean like I said, hotels. Is still in build out phase. Obviously we are seeing very good growth in hotels, but we’re not, as of now, we’re not disclosing those numbers. The reason is that we are still in early phase of build out. We are focusing a lot on customer experience on hotel side. There’s still a lot of unsolved pain areas that we see on the hotel side which we are trying to solve. Whether it is on the inventory side, whether it is solving areas related to trust or whether it is areas related to how people, you know, why do people don’t transact online enough because of this lack of trust or the availability of, you know, you know, digital content, etc.
That allows people to take those decisions to go online, etc. So we’re focusing on a lot of these areas in order to kind of optimize the customer experience on hotel side. And I think that we will be able to build something which will have a differentiated customer experience and I think that is what will create that product market fit that we are looking for. And I would just reiterate the same thing. Our playbook will continue to be the same, which is we go very deep on customer experience side and we’ll explore most of the customer pain areas that are there in this, in the OT side as well.
And we’ll try to solve them from first principles. And the thesis is that if we are able to solve the right problems at the right time, we should be able to kind of create a product that should attract create that customer stickiness. And the other thing we are confident about is that as of now we are not spending a single amount of dollar a penny to acquire customers to transact on hotels in our platform. And the reason is very simple because we have an extremely large captive audience in our platform, like 83 million people coming monthly on our platform.
So our focus and goal would also be to kind of optimize that large base of customers that we have and start cross selling and upselling in order to improve adoption of hotels in the future.
Unidentified Participant
Thanks a lot for the opportunity and all the best.
Aloke Bajpai
Thank you.
operator
The next question is from the line of Harikesh from Avendis Parks. Please go ahead.
Harikesh
Thanks. Thanks for the opportunity. Firstly, I think congrats for the great results and I think it obviously is an island of opportunity in what other ways looks like a fairly sad consumption sentiment in India? So I had a couple of philosophical question. I’ll just leave it with some of the numerical ones as well. So I think you had alluded in your opening remarks about user usage and premiumization and essentially in a consumer category which is structurally growing, the people who execute this well, multi years out essentially both hold margin power and cash flows. Now I wanted to just address all the three in one question.
In terms of usage, you obviously opened up with your original business model and opportunity which no one else saw. But multiple players or large competitions seen it and started entering it and hence you are being flanked there. So how are you thinking about it and where do you defend that? That’s on users in terms of usage, your ATU to aau, the number which we have been tracking, there is some improvement. How are you thinking about it? Do you have a target in mind and where it goes? And in terms of premiumization, would love to hear how do you think of it? Or are there cohorts which you can break up? You obviously alluded to average value which has gone up substantially.
But if you break it by cohorts, are you seeing something different in terms of where you tried premiumization offerings and how they have been doing? So if you can just address these three, that would be great.
Aloke Bajpai
Sure. Hi, this is Alok here on just the first part of your question. I just want to make sure I understood it. Which part were you referring to when you said it’s flattening?
Harikesh
No, I didn’t say Flattening, I said in terms of users, you opened up an opportunity for the market, focusing on tier 2, 3, and then everybody else is seeing an opportunity there. So obviously they will flank you. They try to enter it, they be more aggressive. So how do you defend that core mode? And between the prioritization, you said you’re focusing on growth now, user usage, premiumization, how does your focus in prioritization stand today? That was that part of the question.
Aloke Bajpai
Got it. So we have to start by understanding how we got here, which is a decade long journey, which was built largely on understanding deeply the pain areas of these users that have very different needs at times when it comes to travel. And most of the usage that came initially was for utility and not transactions. So if you think of why Exigo has the largest user base in the market today, the answer probably will have very little to do with our transactional funnels and more to do with our utility funnels. Because we cared about use cases that did not make any money for us or made very little money for us in the first decade, but we went very deep in them and solved those problems to such an extent that we built a very sticky, repeat and closed ecosystem of these users.
And when I talk about that, of course train is the forefront of it, but even today when I talk about flights and when we see the growth coming there, a large part of that growth is being driven by product led growth because we’ve launched these new things like Flight Tracker Pro or helping people get their boarding pass directly at the time web check in opens. All those kind of things are essentially helping build more word of mouth and get more new users on the platform. Now one could ask why nobody else did it, because everybody has been in the same market for the same time as us.
But I think really a question of where you place your focus and bets. And for us, we spend disproportionate time worrying about the smallest of things that. Our users struggle with. And I think that’s really our boat. Right? And of course one can argue that of course we have network effects now. We have, there’s a lot of data that we have which is proprietary, which is hard for anybody to copy. And all those things are there. But if you go back even one more step before that, how did we get there? By understanding customer problems more deeply than anybody else. And I think that’s a harder playbook to copy because it takes a while to build some of those things or scale some of those things, approve them.
Now, when you talk about how will this usage grow, etc. See, on an annual active user basis, if you look at the numbers, and there’s a reason why you will see that the growth is slower than in the last couple of years. I mean, we’ve reached a point where like one out of two people on the Internet has used us at least once across at least one of our brand, app or services in the last one year. Now, if you reach that point of growth, the focus needs to shift on how do you build enough services that bring these people back for a diverse set of use cases, as well as how do you monetize that better through transactions and deepen the relationship with that customer through transactions in other categories.
To give you a small example, let’s say when we launched food delivery on trains, we are deepening that relationship. We are bringing the customer back to the app for one more use case, we are monetizing even further from that customer when we talk about value added services that Rajneesh talked about, all of those deepen our relationship and give the user a reason to come and spend more on us. So, in a way, TAM expansion, once you have hit this sort of scale, TAM expansion makes a lot of sense. And we’ve been working on TAM expansion as well as tapping into these new areas, which is resulting in this kind of growth.
Now, if you look at the ancillary attached rate of 29% or if you look at our repeat transaction rate, which again, has always been in the 80s, even if you look at our DRHP today, it’s 85.8%. Close to 86% of our transactions in FY25 were done by repeat bookers. That’s a testament to the kind of stickiness that we’ve built. Was it built by spending money on brand or by discounting? No. Right. So am I worried about if anybody decides to do that in this market? No, because that’s not my moat and that will never be my moat, if you ask me. Yes, those things will accelerate my growth as well if I do that. And brand is something we are already talking about how we are doubling down on in proportion to revenue growth. But to understand our business, one has to understand why we do the things that we do. And that’s the answer. Rajneesh, you want to add something?
Mr. Rajnish Kumar
Yeah, I just wanted to. Since it’s a philosophical question, I wanted to give a philosophical answer to this question as well. So the short answer to your question was whether somebody can copy us is yes, of course people can copy us. And there’s nothing. There’s no surprise in that. But you know, the reason why we feel that we’ll keep innovating and we’ll keep being ahead of the curve is because with extreme sense of customer obsession that we have built the DNA around, it allows us to be extremely close to customers and their problems. And we always have our ears to the ground listening to what customers want, what their problems are, so we don’t have to go looking out for what to solve for.
We already know what we need to solve for next because of this obsession. The only issue now is that what is the right problem to solve? And I think it’s not really about solving a problem. Given a problem, everybody can solve it. But this is more about solving the right problem at the right time and additionally having the courage to say that you’re going to spend disproportionate amount of time, resources in solving a problem which might not give you immediate ROI in terms of revenues, profits, etc. And for the company, it takes courage to do that.
But you might have seen that some of those investments you have made in the past, they have yielded results like after years or months or quarters. Right. And this is the reason why we do what we do. Right. And that’s the reason why we don’t have to look outside for what we need to do next. Most of the time what happens is that we do something and yes, people would copy us. That’s something that it’s unavoidable. Right?
Harikesh
Yeah. Okay, I think that’s the last part. On premiumization, in case you have some inside some cohorts which you’re looking at, which are higher than the average in. Terms of what I was looking for. As a multiple service. And premiumization. Is that something?
Mr. Rajnish Kumar
Yeah, I mean. See, the whole point of premiumization in our country is that. So one thing that people fail to understand is that generally people don’t have enough purchasing power. It doesn’t mean that they can’t spend enough. It just means that people are not, they are not price conscious really in the real sense of the word. They are more value conscious. They value what they’re purchasing more than they value their money more. And hence they are people who are willing to spend, let’s say 100 bucks to kind of protect their ticket and travel, or people who really want to travel are willing to spend some amount of money and say that they would want to purchase travel guarantee.
And we as a company would create a product and say that, yes, we will ensure that we would be able to take you from point A to Point B, come what may, if you won’t be able to go and train, we’ll put you in a flight or in a bus and we’ll make you travel. So the purpose of travel guarantee was to help people get to their destination irrespective of the mode of transport. And then people are willing to pay an additional price for that or for free cancellation or for price lock or for abhishorth any of these products.
And this is the trend of premiumization because when you create value and customers are willing to pay for it and they have the loyalty and trust built into you and the purchasing power as we see is increasing, we see more and more people keep on buying these value added services and products that they’re building. And that trend is secular like we talked about. I think we are seeing this happen across the board. We are seeing people move from flights, from process on flights and upgrading to flights. We are seeing like a lot of first side flyers in our ecosystem as well because of the same trend.
So yeah, premiumization is real, it’s happening and I think there’s an accelerated trend around that.
Aloke Bajpai
I’ve given you incinerary attachment rate at 29.23%. The reason which you asked on the comparison, I can’t give it because nobody else has this as in you’re a great broken house. I would want you to ask other companies have disclosure so that we can compare better. But I’ll my point rest there.
operator
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Manik Taneja from Access Capital. Please go ahead.
Manik Taneja
Hi. Thank you for the opportunity and congratulations for continuing to accelerate in terms of growth through the recent quarters. I don’t know if my question has already been asked because I got cut off in between but. And you already answered about what drove the improvement in take rates on the bus side. But it will be great to essentially understand the improvement in take rates on the AS side and how that’s translating into the contribution margins for the segment given they are possibly the highest in over five or six quarters. And how should we be thinking about this trending going forward? And the second question is basically with regards to ESOP expenses on a go forward basis given the new approval that you have taken.
Those would be my two questions.
Aloke Bajpai
Hi, I’m Anik. Thanks a lot. There are two points to your question. One part is where you’ve talked about the contribution margins for the flight segment being highest over many segments. I don’t think that’s the case.
Manik Taneja
Many quarters. Many quarters. Remember look, part of it I’m not.
Aloke Bajpai
Sure. Which as in it is not out of any range which is there. In fact, if anything, I’ve been investing on growth. There a couple of things on the take rate part. One of the take rate part is if you see my flight take rate is mathematical like it’s for many people, where a large part of my take rate is fixed and the underlying flight price decides what my take rate would be. So if you go back a couple of years and see the range of rates that we’ve given, hence the variance in the take rate is there because it’s the underlying price and it’s how my mix moves.
Because as the core of our business still lies outside the top four metros we are, my underlying price would be as an existence spread across different places. The other part with slide 2 is what Rajneesh mentioned with the bus answer. And if it’s the products that we have, it’s the optimization coming of age of the value added products where they’ve been starting to improve and which are giving you an improvement. And also. The cross functional advantage that we are getting with products like PG adding on to this. Rajneesh, would you want to add on the product side on this? No, I think I would.
Mr. Rajnish Kumar
No, I think I would. On the flight side, the contribution margin. If you talk about why it has improved, obviously there are new barriers. Services that we have built like Price Cloud is also contributing in some way. But there are existing value added services as well which are getting optimized further as our algorithms start seeing more and more data and keep optimizing and improving the algorithms. So I think a combination of all of those things is what is causing this. I think overall the ancillary attached rates are optimal. I think the pricing algorithm attached it. I mean it’s something that needs to be optimized at an algorithm level to make sure that it kind of derives the best value for us.
And I think that is a work that AI does beautifully. So we don’t need to do much work here in that sense. And we see some of those benefits kind of coming in over time as these algorithms keep maturing.
Manik Taneja
So I’ll prod you on this one just to clarify. There may not be any element of one off in terms of any one time GDS incentives in terms of Q up for the full year or similarly from a WAF standpoint in terms of.
Aloke Bajpai
Look here, there are no one offs in there. Just to clarify that. And typically, you know, these kind of incentives, you know, you even if they come, you know, they are prorated across the Period on which they are applicable, etc. So we don’t recognize it as a one off typically even if they come. But more importantly, I think as a percentage the contribution margin hasn’t really grown. If you See and last 3/4 are stated strategy has been that we are chasing market share growth on flights. We are doing it by allowing the percentage contribution margin to dip a bit, which it has.
We used to be in the 50s at one point and now if you see it’s come down from there. And as a result of also the things that Rajneesh described, obviously it hasn’t dipped as much as what it would have if the AI hadn’t kicked in and sort of improve the tax rates and the value per ancillary sold etc. So I think in that sense we are striking a balance. We want to grow as fast as we can without our unit economics deteriorating. And I think we are happy with what we are able to produce now.
Manik Taneja
Sure. And the last one was for Swarab in terms of the use of cost going forward.
Aloke Bajpai
Yes, ESOP was cross going forward. Some time back I told you that we would be within the range of roughly within the range of around 20 maximum. It might go slightly above 20 because we’ve got, as we’ve already declared, we’ve got a target based incentive plan with the shareholders have voted on. But it will be clear about the same PIN code which is there and remember in the new ESOP which we’ve got, it doesn’t and you can read through the filing now that it’s public, it doesn’t get kicked in until the market cap limits are reached.
And what we’ve also done, and it’s an important thing that we talk about this ESOP plan too. So I thank you for asking this question. So in our case what we have tried to do is to to make this fair in terms of we’ve got a VWAP over a month, over 30 days as a criteria, we’ve got a market cap criteria, we’ve got a time based criteria on this to just ensure that it’s not unfair to anybody on this plan. But you can get much more details in the filing that we’ve done on this, but it will be around that going forward.
Manik Taneja
Sure. Thank you and all the best for the future.
Aloke Bajpai
Thank you.
operator
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Akil from Hornville Capital. Please go ahead.
Akhil Gulecha
Hello, good evening and congratulations on a great set of numbers. So you grow nearly 40% in revenues this year and clearly the industry is not doing so well and we’ve had two years of post Covid boom and now we’ve had a great quarter for the Mahatom. How do you see this going ahead in the next few years? Because these are very high numbers. You’re clearly gaining market share. Your competitors are not growing as fast. So what gives you confidence that you can sustain such numbers?
Aloke Bajpai
So first of all, I don’t know if you’ve seen our growth trajectory over the last six years. If you go back to pre Covid and look at where Ixil is Today, we’re at 23 times of the revenue that we had in FY19 and our CAGR is like 58%. Even during COVID we were continuing to grow. We’ve not had a single down year and and I think some of the things we’ve described earlier today are factors that have been driving that growth, which is our ability to grow user base through product led growth as well as monetize evaluated services and cross sell upsell better.
Now if I speak about the industry, right, I think you have to break it in two parts. We are not just in the ticketing business. If you think about icsigo, right, we didn’t start out as being an ota. Even today we are not your typical ota, let’s put it that way. We have a large utility based reason for people to come to us. We monetize through avenues which are built on top and which create a new tam. The value added services I believe create a new TAM which didn’t exist earlier and allow us to sort of grow disproportionately faster by tapping into that new.
And I think if you look at the industry, I will actually not agree with what you said. Like if I look at how the incumbent is growing and if I look at, you know, how the overall market is growing, it’s pretty healthy. Like if you look at categories like buses, you know, it’s actually growing all around, right? It’s not just us. If you look at flights, I’ve been barring the supply constraints that exist, the demand is there, it’s very strong. I mean people are paying a premium on sales year on year and still flying. 85, 90% load factor.
So it’s not a one off. There’s no major impact of Mahakun. Like I said, it’s a single digit percentage GTV contributor. And I think even without that we would have grown decently well as we were growing even then last year, 68% CAGR is what we are doing on, on revenue. I Look at the six year view.
Akhil Gulecha
But that is the past. Now your base is much bigger. You’re already probably the second largest ota. So do you feel confident that you can sustain the growth numbers on this base as well?
Mr. Saurabh Devendra Singh
Look, the first thing I would. This is Saurabh. The first thing I would say is we don’t give forward looking guidance. So I would not comment on any specific number. Having said that, yes, as I said at the end of my speech, as of right now we believe that there are problems to solve and which we’ll continue to solve. And from what we see, we remain confident in our ability to solve problems. As a company, we’ve always believed that if we solve the right problems and if we do the right thing for the customer, monetization will follow.
The logic remains the same. Nothing has changed for us in that sense.
Aloke Bajpai
I would just like to add that we are still nascent in many categories that define how OTAs are built. Right? So those categories, I think we still have a lot of upside in the years to come waiting for us. So it’s not like we are maxing out on growth. So on trains at we disclosed this last quarter 58% share of the OTA market. We continue to grow at the speed that we do. Right? So by that logic we should have been tapering out. I think innovation is the reason why you can find new growth factors and I think this is a company that has always managed to find new growth factors every year or two.
Akhil Gulecha
Got it, got it. Thanks. That was very helpful. Lastly, on the contribution margin, so I have seen a slight dip this year as opposed to last year. So is it because the value added service component has increased? Is that the reason or is it because your performance marketing has increased? Of course we find out in the annual report. But if we just throw some light on why the contribution margin has dipped and how are you seeing performance marketing as a cost?
Aloke Bajpai
What we said in a regular quarterly basis is that I look at performance marketing, discount and branding as a combined customer inducement cost and it will be between 3 to 3.5% where I’ll remain comfortable on that. And in that sense I kind of remain there. Yes, the combined number is at a higher end, but you should look at it in that range going forward and probably in some sense if you look at that in other contexts, what we earlier mentioned. So if you go back to our first quarter or say first quarter call at that point of time, as I said, buses were giving you great contribution margin and we had said that we will be Investing in growth.
The underlying business is growing. As in, if I look at industry numbers, Everybody talks about OT as being 18% figure world, take whoever you’re using. And we believe that if that is the case, the underlying business is growing this fast, it is time to invest and that’s what we do Indian investing. But I think the answer that you’re looking for is if you go back to my faq, one or two quarter back, you’ll find.
Akhil Gulecha
Okay, understood. So thank you so much. And the result has been incredible. So congratulations.
Aloke Bajpai
Thanks.
operator
Thank you. The next question is from the line of Sri Nairanan Mishra from Baroda BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Shrinarayan Mishra
Thank you for the opportunity. My first question was on the headroom that we have in terms of cross selling. So if you can highlight what percentage of users are using either of the two services and what percentage are using all the three services, that would be great.
Aloke Bajpai
Yeah. So look here, I think at this point we don’t disclose this particular metric, but it’s a great input. Perhaps at some point, you know, we should look at talking about it. What I can tell you is that there are two things you can track which give you some sense on this. One is how fast we are able to grow on the flight and bus line of business. I think a very significant part of the answer lies in our ability to cross sell upsell better. And now with hotels also, we are seeing the ability to, because like Rajneesh said, we are not speaking spending any money outside our ecosystem to acquire users.
So there is no brand or performance marketing, etc. We’re doing for hotels at this point, largely whatever growth we are driving internally is through cross sell upsell. And similar is the case with Zoop. So most of the food orders that we are doing there are now largely coming from within our ecosystem. And I think there is still huge headrooms. I mean just two, give you one sense of this. Right? I mean there’s, there is still a significant number of people who use our apps just for utility and do not book yet with us. Right. I think the biggest headroom still for us is lies in that bucket.
Shrinarayan Mishra
Okay, okay. So, so, so, so how much would be that user base which is just, you know, for utility purpose.
Aloke Bajpai
And yeah, you can look at the MTU MEU ratio right. In our presentation, if you go and see that. But we crossed 4% there. It used to be early 3. So we managed to sort of increase that, which is a sign of again how well we are able to sell to our own users. Right. So the top of the funnel is if you see on a monthly basis it’s our mausoleum, 82 million. We’ve got monthly access which is the top of the fun line. That is the potential which you are talking about.
Shrinarayan Mishra
Okay, and, and second question was on the bus segment. So will it be possible for you to give market share geographically? And so I was trying to read how, how the bus segment, where this growth will be coming from.
Aloke Bajpai
The bus segment. The good news is that there are three things happening there. One is supply expansion which is that existing operators are adding new buses, new operators are coming in. So we had the likes of Flixbus, New Go Fresh Bus, etc entering the market the last couple of years. We have existing operators, you know, like even intercity Zingbas and all who have added supply in the last couple of years. The second thing is a premiumization which we were talking about which is, you know, moving from non AC to AC buses, moving from, you know, just government to private as well.
You know those two things are also happening. The third part which is penetration which is only under 20% of bus tickets get booked online today. And that sort of penetration number will move over time because in other verticals that’s much higher. But on buses there is still a lot of scope to move this metric as the market expands. So experience will matter a lot because it’s a very last minute product. The last people typically realize that they need to book a bus in the last two, three days. So I think a lot of it is being able to target the right user at the right time and also get the experience right so that people come and book with you.
And on the experience we’ve launched a few things maybe Rajneesh can talk about which are also helping this expansion.
Mr. Rajnish Kumar
Sorry. Yeah, yeah. So on the experience, you know, I mean as you would have noticed that, you know, our ratings on the app store, at least for Alibaba has been constantly increasing. You know, we are at almost 4.8 now. This is something that is the proof of the fact that the product experience has significantly improved. I know some of the examples of the things that we have done are things like Bunsell size that we talked about in the call which has significantly improved the confidence of customers trying to book a ticket. Abhishod was once this product we built in the past which helped us build up confidence in customers to book with confidence whether you get cancelled or not or whether for service level reasons that shut down you will never be let down in all that series, refund most of it or Even more than that, in certain situations at service level, promises were not delivered.
So this has always been our effort and I think we’ve been using now AI tech and data science all the more to kind of create these kind of experiences where we are able to predict exactly what bus gets assigned to you, what gauge the bus has, et cetera. And people are able to kind of make that decision. You know, the problem with buses as a category is always because the inventory is so fragmented and unpredictable that generally don’t know what kind of bus you get. You know how the experience of travel would be giving people that kind of insights.
Using bus Insights product is helping people make that decision and it’s letting them to fit confidence. So we are seeing those kind of products and features also result in revenue and margins. Although the intent was just to solve customer problems. Right. But the side effect is that it led to better stickiness, it led to better conversion rate, and then eventually we were able to kind of drive higher revenues and margins.
operator
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question for today’s conference call. I now hand the conference over to the management for closing comments.
Aloke Bajpai
Thank you. I would like to thank everybody who has joined the call today and we’ll speak to you again very soon. Have a great day. Good night. Depending on where you are. Take care.
operator
Thank you. On behalf of DAM Capital, that concludes this conference. Thank you for joining us and you may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.