Yatra Online (NASDAQ:YTRA) held its first-quarter earnings conference call on Monday. Below is the complete transcript from the call.

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Summary

Yatra Online Inc reported its most profitable year with revenue from operations growing 27% year over year to INR 10,074 million, and adjusted EBITDA increasing by 64% to INR 564 million.

The company added 163 new corporate customers with an annual billable value of INR 9,568 million, enhancing its corporate travel business despite macroeconomic challenges.

Yatra Online Inc's strategic focus includes expanding online penetration in corporate travel, leveraging AI and automation, and enhancing its hotel supply, positioning for future growth.

Despite geopolitical disruptions impacting Q4, especially in MICE and international travel, the company remains optimistic about recovery in the second half of the next fiscal year.

Management highlighted strong performance in air and hotel segments, with air passenger volumes and hotel room nights exceeding industry growth rates.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Hello everyone and welcome to Yatra's fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2026 financial results call for the period ended March 31, 2026. Today's call is hosted by Yatra's co founder Dhruv Sharan, Yatra's CEO Siddharth Gupta and Yatra's CFO Anuj Sethi. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, reflect the management's views as of today, May 25, 2026. The Company does not take any obligation to update or revise the information before they begin their formal remarks. Please be reminded that certain statements made on this call may constitute forward looking statements which are based on Yatra Management's current expectations and beliefs and are subject to several risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a description of these risks, please refer to Yatra's filings with the SEC and their press release filed earlier this morning on the IR section of the Yatra website. With that, let me turn the call over to Yatra's co founder Dhruv Sharan. Please go ahead.

Dhruv Sharan

Thank you Operator and good morning everyone. Welcome to Yatra's full year 2026 and Q4 2026 earnings call. Fiscal 2026 has been a landmark year for Yatra. Despite some very significant macro headwinds that impacted three out of the 12 months of the year, it is the most profitable year in the company's 20 year history. This strong performance is a testament to the resilience of our business model, our commitment to innovation, the balance in our revenue mix, the quality of our corporate franchise and the dedication of our teams. I'm very proud to announce our FY26 results. Our revenue from operations grew 27% year over year to INR 10,074 million or approximately $107 million, while revenue less service cost, which is our gross margin, increased to INR 4801 million, a growth of 22.6% year over year. Adjusted EBITDA grew to INR 564 million or approximately $6 million, a growth of 64% year over year, reflecting strong operating leverage on the corporate customer acquisition front as well. We added during FY26 163 new corporate customers with annual billable value of approximately INR 9,568 million or about $102 million, up from 148 customers and INR 7,475 million or $80 million in FY25. As Siddharth will delve Further in his remarks you will see that this number has been increasing on a quarterly basis, underscoring the continued traction in our enterprise travel business and the strength of our go to market execution. Online penetration of corporate travel is still less than 25% in India in the managed business travel segment and as the market leader, we are best positioned to capitalize on this as the industry moves up the online penetration curve. We have demonstrated over the years that we are not only have the ability to acquire customers but with a retention rate of almost 97% have the ability to retain them for a very long lifetime value as well. In our assessment, the current macro environment driven by a conflict which has impacted energy prices and disrupted travel in the Middle east and more broadly international travel does not reflect a structural change in the underlying travel demand ecosystem. It is a short term blip which the industry will tide over as soon as normalcy returns. Corporate travel demand in India continues to remain resilient and we expect recovery momentum to strengthen meaningfully in the second half of the year driven by revenge travel just like we witnessed in the years following Covid. That said, the escalating conflict significantly impacted our MICE and international corporate travel business. Weighing on the overall Q4 results, several Q4 MICE and international corporate group travel bookings were either cancelled or deferred into FY27. Barring the impact of this, it was quite likely that we would have reported stronger results ahead of last year's performance. The current conflict and the balance of payments challenge has also heightened the government's focus on domestic tourism as a strategic pillar. The infrastructure buildout in rail, aviation and even the domestic highway network bodes well for domestic tourism. Yatra, given its market leading domestic hotel supply, we believe is extremely well positioned to capitalize on this trend. We have enhanced our API infrastructure framework and a migration onto the Google Cloud platform has significantly improved our ability to distribute our hotel content to a large network of domestic and international travelers. This is a highly margin accretive business for Yatra and one that we expect to scale up further in the coming years. From a quarters perspective, despite the headwinds, we reported resilient performance in Q4, especially in our core air and hotel segments. Gross bookings grew 8% year over year. Air passenger volumes were up 9.6% year over year, roughly 2x the industry growth rate reflecting continued market share gains. Our hotels business continued its strong momentum with room nights growing 36% in the quarter and gross bookings growing 9%. Despite the significant disruption in MICE, total transactions increased 15.2% year over year, a strong indicator of platform activity and engagement. Our corporate business added 55 new clients during the quarter with an annual billable potential of INR 2,709 million or approximately $29 million, which is higher than the 40 closures worth INR 2,234 million or approximately 24 million in Q3, demonstrating the strength of our sales engine even through a challenging environment while there is a macro disruption outside our control. More importantly, the underlying demand from our corporate customers remains intact and we expect a meaningful portion of the deferred business to return as conditions normalize. Structurally, the outlook for India's travel and corporate mobility sector remains compelling. India continues to be the fastest growing major economy with strong investment flows across manufacturing and the outsourcing driven business travel demand. Based on the strength of our corporate customer base, our industry leading hotel supply and our AI enabled corporate travel technology, we remain confident of our medium term growth CAGR of revenue less service cost of 20% and adjusted EBITDA of 30%. With that overview, let me hand you over to Siddharth to walk you through the details of our performance.

Siddharth Gupta

Siddharth thank you Dhruv and good morning everyone. The larger headline is that Yatra delivered its strongest performance in financial year 26 despite a volatile macroeconomic and geopolitical backdrop. In FY26 we delivered RLSE, which is revenue less service cost or gross margin growth of about 22.6% while adjusted EBITDA grew 64.2% year on year reflecting a strong operating leverage as well as disciplined cost control. This is particularly notable given FY26 reflected only nine months of full operations, underscoring both the strength of execution during the period while maintaining financial discipline. Another achievement worth emphasizing is the balanced nature of this growth across segments and lines of businesses. Let me start by taking you through the segment performance across both AIR and hotels. Yatra strengthened its competitive position. The AIR segment delivered a healthy TTV growth of 12% for the year INR 61,874 million from INR 55 to 73 million while maintaining margin discipline with passenger growth outpacing industry levels throughout the quarter and the full year while maintaining margin throughout the year. A point to highlight is our air margins have steadily improved from approximately 2.7% in financial year 24 to nearly 4% in financial year 26, reflecting a structural improvement in the quality of our business mix. We remain one of the very few players in this space to consistently expand air margins despite intense competitive pressure across the sector the hotels and packages business also gained strong momentum led by strong TTV growth of 27% with the government's continued push towards domestic tourism and infrastructure led travel growth. Our extensive hotel supply footprint across India positions us well to capture demand across both major metropolitan markets and emerging tier 2 and tier 3 cities. Moving now to across lines of businesses, during financial year 26, Yatra added 163 new corporate customers with an annual billable value of approximately INR 9568 million which would be approximately $102 million up from 148 customers and INR 7475 million which was close to 80 million in financial year. This underscores the continued traction in our enterprise travel business and the strength of our go to market execution. It is important to note that corporate wins typically take three to six months to go live and ramp up to their full trading potential. This provides strong visibility into incremental revenue contribution over the coming year. Beyond our large enterprise wins, we continue to see significant white spaces in India's mid market corporate travel segment which remains substantially under penetrated online. To capture this opportunity, we invested in building a dedicated mid market sales team during Q3 with early contributions already visible in Q4. Given the scale of the untapped market, we believe this segment can become a meaningful incremental growth driver for our corporate business over the medium term. Coupled with the fact that our corporate business continues to demonstrate exceptional stickiness with customer retentions consistently above 97%, this positions us well for continued strong performance in our corporate segment. Our consumer business performed well through the year as well, demonstrating the inherent resilience of domestic consumer spending. The diversified nature of our operations and multiple revenue levers enabled us to navigate periods of disruption while continuing to deliver resilient full year performance. During financial year 26, Yatra benefited from incremental demand from newly signed affiliates and partnerships helping us gain air and hotel market share while further improving margins. This highlights the strong scalability of our API led distribution model which has emerged as an important growth driver. Combined with our extensive domestic hotel supply network, it positions us to accelerate growth in the periods ahead. We are seeing strong traction in API led distribution with travel agents, affiliates and B2B partners increasingly sourcing hotel inventory through the Yatra platform. This allows us to scale transaction volumes efficiently while preserving margin discipline. We expect this trend to continue and any near term softness in consumer demand during the first half of the year should be mitigated as the year progresses. Yatra delivered a resilient performance in Q4 with gross bookings growing 8% year on year, air passenger volumes increasing 9.6% year on year, approximately double the industry growth rate while total transactions rose 15.2% year on year. The quarter was impacted by the conflict related disruption which slightly depressed air volumes and had a more pronounced impact on several MICE and international corporate group travel bookings, a number of which were either cancelled or deferred into financial year 27. While the MICE category experienced temporary disruption during the quarter, we are seeing instances where customer preference is shifting from to domestic programs, partially offsetting the impact. Importantly, we are already seeing signs of recovery with Q1 run rates currently trending approximately 20% above the Q4 levels. We continue to view MICE as a structurally attractive category given its close linkage to corporate reward, engagement and incentive programs. Over the years we have built strong execution capabilities and a broad partner across domestic and international markets creating a meaningful competitive advantage. Our gross margin, defined as revenue less service cost, increased 1% year on year to INR 1101 million or approximately 12 million. Adjusted EBITDA declined 49% year on year to INR 46 million or approximately $0.5 million. Our corporate business added 55 new clients during the quarter with an annual billable potential of INR 2709 million client wins worth INR22.34 million or approximately 24 million in Q3. This demonstrate the continued strength of our sales engine even in a challenging operating environment. Overall, while the quarter was impacted by geopolitical uncertainty stemming from the West Asia conflict, we remain optimistic about our trajectory supported by our continued focus on scale in the corporate travel business. The steady addition of new enterprise clients, improving online adoption and the growing contribution of our hotel business within the corporate segment positions us well to drive operating leverage and deliver gradual margin expansion over the medium term. Looking ahead, AI and automation remain a core strategic focus area for Yatra. We continue to see encouraging adoption of our AI powered servicing capabilities across both consumer and corporate channels. Our continued investments automation and successful deployment across customer touchpoint reinforce both operational scalability and long term profitability. Our continued collaboration with Google further strengthens our technology ecosystem and supports product innovation across customer acquisition and servicing. If past cycles are any indication, periods of market disruption are often followed by a meaningful release of pent up consumer demand. Accordingly, we expect the second half of financial year 27 to be materially stronger than the first half. While macro changes are likely to persist in the first half of the year, we remain optimistic about financial year 27 backed by structural growth in India's travel and corporate mobility markets and Yatra's continued investment in AI technology, customer acquisition, hotel Supply and its B2B platform. As Dhruv mentioned earlier, we remain confident of our medium term growth CAGR of 20% RLSE growth and 30% adjusted EBITDA growth. With that, let me hand over to our CFO Anuj Sethi to walk you through the detailed financial performance. Thank you Anuj.

Anuj Sethi (Chief Financial Officer)

Thank you Siddharth. Good morning everyone. For the fourth quarter of the financial year 2026 on a consolidated basis, our revenue from operations decreased 14% year on year to INR18.90 million or approximately US$20 million. Our gross margin, defined as revenue less service cost, rose 1% year on year to INR1101 million or approximately $12 million. EBITDA loss increased year on year to INR102 million or approximately $1 million for the full year ended financial year 2026. On a consolidated basis, our revenue from Operations grew 27% year on year to INR10.74 million or approximately $107 million. Our gross margins rose 22.6% year on year to INR4801 million, adjusted EBITDA of INR564 million or approximately 6 million representing a year and a growth of 64%, while our beta improved to INR266 million or approximately $3 million a year on year growth of 31%. In terms of segmental performance, our air ticketing passenger volume increased 2% year on year to 539-5000 and our gross year booking grew 12% year on year to INR6187.4 million or approximately $659 million. Here, gross margin rose 30% from year on year to INR24.49 million or approximately $26 million, with margins improving from 3.42% to 3.96%. Under hotels and packages segment hotel room nights grew 16% year on year to 1936,000. Gross bookings increased 27% year on year to INR16578 million or approximately $177 million, while gross margin expanded 34% year on year to INR1502 million or approximately $16 million, with margin improving from 8.60% to 9.25%. On the liquidity front, cash and cash equivalent and term Deposit stood at INR 2512 million or approximately $26.7 million as of 31 March 2026. With this, I would like to hand it back to the moderator and open up for question and answer session. Thank you.

OPERATOR

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, please press Star one. Again we ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality if you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q and A roster. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. At this time, it appears that we don't have any questions. I will now turn the call back to Siddharth Gupta for closing remarks.

Siddharth Gupta

Reiterating Structurally, the outlook for India's travel and corporate mobility market remains compelling. India continues to be the fastest growing major economy with strong investment flows across manufacturing and GCCs driving business travel demand based on the strengths of our corporate customer base, our industry leading hotel supply and our AI enhanced corporate travel technology. We remain confident of our midterm growth in CAGR of RLSE 20% and adjusted a beta of nearly 30%. On that note. On that positive note, I would like to thank you all for joining the call. I hope we were able to address all the queries that you might have. If you have any further questions, you can reach out to our IR partners at ICR. And thank you once again for participating in this call. Thank you.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.