Actually, I will hand over back to Patrick, because Patrick will start today.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining HomeToGo's half year 1 2026 earnings call. As you have seen in our report published this morning, we delivered a strong first half of 2026, characterized by the disciplined and successful execution of our strategic roadmap.

Following a transformative 2025, our half year 1 results clearly demonstrate that our strategic evolution and greatest transformation are in full swing and delivering tangible results across the group. Let's now look at how we structured today's call.

We want to give you a clear and comprehensive picture of our performance and momentum. We will begin with a brief summary of our half year 1 highlights, followed by a detailed update on the progress we've made against our strategic goals for 2026.

Then we will walk you through our financial results for the first half of this year in depth before reviewing our financial guidance for the full year of 2026. To wrap up, we will summarize our key takeaways before opening the floor for your questions.

Let's dive in. To kick things off, let's look at the overarching highlights that defined our performance in the first half of 2026 on a statutory basis.

First and foremost, we achieved a significant improvement in overall group year-over-year profitability. Our adjusted EBITDA grew substantially by 26.6% year-over-year in half year 1 and has even accelerated in quarter 2 with an year-over-year increase of 58.6%.

This development reflects our continuous advancement in expanding the group's profitability. Thus, we massively improved our free cash flow by an exceptional €53.2 million year-over-year, reaching €48.2 million in free cash flow in the first half of 2026 alone.

Second, a key element behind this is HomeToGo_PRO. Our B2B segment more than tripled its IFRS revenues to €105.2 million, representing an impressive growth of 250.5% year-over-year, primarily driven by the consolidation of Interhome.

Third, our disciplined strategy in the marketplace segment continues to boost profitability. Marketplace adjusted EBITDA improved by 16% year-over-year while still delivering a new booking revenues backlog record for the end of half year 1, validating our strategic shift toward high-margin conversion and marketing efficiency.

Fourth, on the strategic front, the launch of HomeToGo Originals strengthens our position as Europe's leading vacation rental group. This new umbrella brand for our group's property management companies highlights HomeToGo as one of Europe's largest direct suppliers of vacation rentals backed by a strong and growing portfolio.

Fifth, our AI leadership is driving measurable operational and marketing efficiency gains. Deep group-wide AI adoption is delivering tangible ROI and significantly faster time to market for new product innovations.

Finally, backed by the solid first half performance, we reaffirm our financial guidance for the full year 2026. With that high-level summary in mind, let's move to the next section of our call and take a closer look at the concrete progress we've made against our strategic goals for 2026.

We introduced our 2026 strategic roadmap earlier this year to provide a clear and transparent framework to track and discuss our progress throughout the year. Now, I'm pleased to share that we are executing successfully across all five pillars.

Let me walk you through the overview of our year-to-date progress. First, on finalizing the Interhome integration, our TSA exit and cost synergy roadmap remains fully on track to achieve our initial €10 million in annualized cost savings until the end of 2026.

We are currently executing several large restructuring projects to capture the remaining cost synergies. Second, in HomeToGo_PRO, we continue to build out our strategic M&A engine.

The bolt-on acquisitions closed in the first quarter of 2026 have now been successfully integrated. We are actively scaling our capabilities, expanding our dedicated M&A and post-merger integration resources as we source additional asset deals for the second half of the year.

Third, regarding group-wide brand harmonization, we officially launched HomeToGo Originals, our new umbrella brand uniting our core property management businesses. This unified market presence builds deeper ecosystem trust, enables seamless cross-company switching, and serves as a powerful catalyst to reduce customer acquisition costs.

Fourth, on driving operational excellence in the marketplace, our strategic decision to prioritize profitability over top-line growth is paying off. Despite cutting advertising spend by 16% year-over-year, we achieved a record end of quarter 2 booking revenues backlog of €71.9 million, which is up 1% year-over-year, while still delivering a strong 16% increase in marketplace adjusted EBITDA for the first half of the year compared to half year 2025.

Finally, on maintaining our AI leadership, AI adoption across the group is driving tangible, measurable efficiency gains. In marketing, latest AI-generated ad tests achieved an impressive 44% lift in ROAS alongside 60% lower video ad production costs.

At the same time, we significantly accelerated operations and are well on track to drastically reduce time to market for product development. Overall, our disciplined execution across all five strategic priorities continues to strengthen our foundation and drive sustainable profitability across the entire group.

Let's now dive deeper into our first strategic pillar, the integration of Interhome and the substantial value creation it unlocks across the group. As a reminder, when we closed the transaction, we set an initial target of €10 million in annual cost synergies to be realized within 12 to 18 months.

I'm pleased to report that our execution remains ahead of schedule. Year to date, we have already captured approximately €6 million of these cost synergies on an annualized basis.

The strong momentum is backed by an accelerated TSA exits, and we have successfully exited eight Transitional Service Agreements to date with two TSAs in the second quarter and at least three additional exits on track for quarter 3. Crucially, we remain fully on schedule to exit all remaining TSAs, including our largest and most critical milestone, the migration of Interhome's SAP.

To capture the remaining cost synergies until year end, we are now executing several large restructuring projects that were prepared during quarter 2. Beyond these initial cost savings, we continue to drive our mid-term value creation roadmap, which adds an additional €20 million in upside and brings our total mid-term synergy and value creation potential to approximately €30 million.

Also there, we made excellent headway on two key drivers. First, tech-driven efficiency in sales growth: we successfully deployed HomeToGo's core CRM platform across Interhome's shared service center, optimizing operational efficiency while significantly enhancing sales capabilities to unlock commercial upside.

Second, distribution margin internalisation: we expanded our own direct booking channel share by more than 5%, allowing us to retain a higher share of the distribution margin directly within the group. All in all, this progress clearly demonstrates that Interhome is not only delivering on its cost reduction commitments ahead of plan, but is rapidly turning into a major high-margin profit driver for HomeToGo.

Now moving on to our second strategic pillar, expanding our M&A engine within HomeToGo_PRO to lead the consolidation of a highly fragmented European market. To put the scale of this opportunity again into perspective, if you look at the left side of the chart, you see that Europe's core vacation rental destinations comprise roughly 17 million properties in total.

When we narrow this down to rural and marketed vacation homes, we arrive at a serviceable addressable market of roughly 2.5 million homes. Our primary focus within HomeToGo_PRO lies in this targeted market, especially for externally managed homes, representing around 900,000 properties operated by more than 100,000 local vacation rental management companies across Europe.

As you can imagine, this landscape is characterized by extreme fragmentation. Most of these hyper-local agencies manage fewer than 100 properties, suffer from low tech adoption, and face clear operational inefficiencies.

On top, the top three players, including us with HomeToGo Originals, combined hold only about 10% of the total market share, presenting us with a tremendous long-tail roll-up opportunity. Following the proven success of our Interhome acquisition, we are actively scaling our vacation rental property management business with our buy-and-build strategy.

I'm pleased to share that the first three bolt-on acquisitions we closed in quarter 1, adding roughly 200 new units across Switzerland, Italy, and Spain to our property management portfolio, have already been successfully integrated and are fully bookable via the Interhome and HomeToGo platform. To build on this transaction, we are expanding our dedicated internal M&A team and ramping up our post-merger integration resources.

This infrastructure allows us to even more systematically process deal flow and swiftly onboard new inventory. Looking ahead to the second half of 2026, we are actively sourcing and expect to close additional value-accretive asset deals to continuously broaden our property management footprint.

Now on to our third strategic pillar that we already touched on before, harmonizing our group-wide brands through the launch of HomeToGo Originals. As we continue to expand our property management footprint, establishing a unified and recognizable identity is essential.

HomeToGo Originals now serves as our new umbrella brand for our property management companies, Interhome and e-domizil. Through this, what we call on-brand initiative, we are connecting key physical and digital customer touchpoints across the entire travel journey.

Whether a guest discovers a home on our digital marketplace or visits one of our local service offices in destination, as illustrated in the storefront mockup on the right on this slide, HomeToGo Originals clearly signals vacation rentals that are mostly managed directly within our group with our trusted end-to-end service. From a strategic perspective, this cohesive presence significantly strengthens brand recognition and builds deeper trust across our entire ecosystem by seamlessly bridging the gap from initial online search and booking to professional property management and all the way to actually the physical stay.

Importantly, this unified identity also unlocks substantial B2B synergies for HomeToGo_PRO. By aligning our market presence under one strong roof, we make it easier for homeowners and property managers to transition across our portfolio.

This cohesive structure acts as a powerful catalyst to strengthen our overall PRO offering and will ultimately drive down customer acquisition costs across the group and/or increase lifetime value, however you want to see it. Now let's dive into our fourth strategic pillar, the HomeToGo B2C marketplace.

Here, our objective remains crystal clear: we strictly prioritize growing profits over pursuing top-line volume. Looking at the left side of this slide, you can see the deliberate strategy is directly reflected in our half year 1 numbers.

While the marketplace IFRS revenues intentionally dipped by 10.2% to €58.8 million, driven by our conscious reduction in ad spend, our booking revenues backlog actually increased 1% year-over-year. At the same time, segment profitability improved substantially, with adjusted EBITDA increasing by 16% year-over-year to a negative €16.8 million, up from negative €20 million in H1 2025.

This earnings progress is powered by a structural transformation in our marketing efficiency, shown on the right. Over the past year, we have fundamentally optimized our cost structure.

Group marketing and sales expenses as a percentage of IFRS revenues decreased to a new record low of just 54% in half year 1 2026, representing a massive 31 percentage point reduction compared to the 85% in half year 1 of last year that you can see on the slide. By maintaining strict discipline in our B2C marketing spend, we continue to proactively reallocate capital into HomeToGo_PRO, where we see superior growth potential and higher risk-adjusted returns.

For the remainder of this year, we will stick firmly to this playbook: lowering marketing investments, maximizing marketing efficiency, and enhancing profitability. While this means an intentional resetting of the marketplace revenue base, it ensures the segment operates as a highly efficient, high-margin cash generator for the entire group, this and especially in the coming years.

Let's take a closer look at one of the clearest proof points of our operational excellence and marketing efficiency in the marketplace segment. On this slide, on the left side, you can see the significant, deliberate reduction in advertising spend.

We intentionally scaled back our marketplace ad spend by 16% year-over-year, bringing it down from €60.5 million in half year 1 2025 to €51 million in half year 2026. This nearly €10 million cost saving is a direct result of our disciplined strategy to prioritize high-margin conversion and bottom-line profitability over sheer transaction volume.

Remarkably, as shown on the right side, despite this €9.5 million reduction in marketing investment, we successfully expanded our marketplace booking revenues backlog to a new end of quarter 2 record of €71.9 million, up 1% year-over-year, showcasing what we can do also with lower marketing spend. Now on to a closer look at the underlying health of our marketplace, specifically our regional booking mix and the evolution of our average basket sizes.

Starting on the left with our regional booking revenues share for quarter 2, the DACH region continues to represent our core foundation, accounting for 52% of total marketplace booking revenues, up 3 percentage points year-over-year. The rest of Europe contributed 26%, up 1 percentage point year-over-year, reflecting healthy and sustained demand across European destinations.

North America contributed 22% to our mix, down 2 percentage points year-over-year. This is a market where we continue to operate selectively under our advertising model.

The rest of the world remained stable at under 1%. Moving to the right side of the chart and our basket size evolution, we saw resilient customer demand across all geographies.

Our basket size in quarter 2 grew by 5% year-over-year to reach €1,056. Looking for that into the individual regions, in the DACH region, average basket size increased by 10% year-over-year to €891, and when excluding the short-trip business, it climbed by 8% to €1,263.

The rest of Europe followed a similar positive trend, with basket sizes rising 4% year-over-year to €1,183. Finally, North America continues to generate our highest absolute order values, with average basket sizes reaching €1,603, up 2% year-over-year.

Overall, and this is important, this broad-based expansion in basket sizes underscores our success in targeting high-value, longer-stay travelers, further supporting our high-margin strategy across all key markets. Turning to our fifth pillar and the final one, maintaining AI leadership, given the broader market debate around how generative AI might impact digital search and discovery, we want to clearly address why AI represents a structural net positive for HomeToGo.

Generally, vacation rentals are unique and no commodities like hotels. On one hand, it's harder for people to let AI choose the right one; on the other hand, it's about vacation, and thus the selection process is for many the first part of the actual vacation.

You can imagine the total opposite of a stay in a hotel for a business trip. Even in a scenario that AI takes fully over the selection process, we are likely the best prepared in the industry.

First, the HomeToGo Group generates more than 80% of its adjusted EBITDA with HomeToGo_PRO, effectively insulating the vast majority of our group profits from potential B2C search traffic shifts. Looking at HomeToGo_PRO on the left, our core profitability is protected by a physical moat and unreplicable on-ground services.

The property management business relies fundamentally on local physical services that are simply not easy to replicate. This protects our business model overall, in particular from big tech players that deliberately avoid capital-intensive local operations, especially when you need to build them up from scratch.

Even more, a potential B2C search traffic shift will likely increase the direct traffic to our properties, outside of OTAs, and would actually help us further internalize margin. Second, turning to the HomeToGo marketplace side on the right, we've always solved problems of aggregating the largest selection of vacation rentals with the latest machine learning before AI was talked about by everyone.

We were also among the first leveraging the new capabilities of AI that arose at the end of 2022. Our early AI adoption brought us integrated personalized AI-powered travel planning on our platform since 2023, launching nice tools and features like AI summaries of reviews and descriptions even before the biggest tech players, and so much more we did first in the vacation rental space.

Today, we have also deployed our own native HomeToGo Model Context Protocol, MCP, to allow autonomous AI agents and third-party LLMs direct access to our inventory, turning AI platforms into highly efficient, low-cost acquisition channels. Beyond these known customer-facing innovations, internal AI adoption is radically accelerating our daily operational efficiency and delivering measurable margin expansion across the group.

That's something we haven't spoken so much about yet. Let's take a look.

Today, 100% of our workforce has access to AI tooling, with 15 active tools leveraging all leading frontier models across every department. This is supported by a successful training proof of concept with over 100 employees, enabling non-technical teams to use AI frontier models natively, via command line interface or CLI if that's something that you are familiar with, and securely in a secure sandbox environment.

Let me highlight three areas of the many parts where internal use is already delivering tangible ROI. First, in marketing, AI-generated responsive search ads are now outperforming human-written ad copy at near-zero generation cost, driving a 44% lift in return on advertisement spent in many of our tests.

In video production, AI tools have enabled us to cut costs by more than 60%. Second, we take a look into product development.

Time to market has been drastically shortened. A standout example is our new partner center featuring natural language interface, which our engineering teams built and deployed in just 4 weeks, a process that previously would have taken us 6 months.

Third, in operations, process automations have enabled three times faster customer email response times, reduced human chat escalations by 85% as we discussed prior, and cut turnaround times for standard legal contract drafts by up to 95% for specific parts of the business. In summary, AI is not just a future vision for HomeToGo; it's an operational reality actively widening our competitive moat, driving marketing efficiency, and accelerating our profitability already today.

This concludes the first part of our presentation on the strategic and operational highlights for the first half of this year. As you have seen, our strategic evolution into a B2B-led powerhouse, complemented by strict marketplace efficiency and AI leadership, is actively delivering tangible, high-margin results across the group.

To now give you a more granular look at how this strategic process and progress translates into our detailed half year 1 financial performance and the actual segment dynamics, I will now hand over to our CFO, Sebastian. Thank you very much, Sebastian.

The floor is yours.

Thank you, Patrick, and a warm welcome to everyone from my side as well. I am pleased to walk you through our financial results for the first half of 2026.

It was characterized by strong top-line expansion, accelerating profitability momentum driven by a very strong second quarter, and a remarkable surge in our free cash flow performance. Let's dive straight into the financial highlights for the first half of this year.

Let's take a closer look at our statutory P&L comparison for the first half of the year. To be clear, this comparison looks at our H1 2026 performance against the figures as reported in the first half of 2025, which at that time did not yet include Interhome.

Let's start with the IFRS revenues. We delivered significant statutory revenue growth of 71.8% year-over-year, reaching €160.1 million.

This strong jump is driven by the full consolidation of Interhome, which was not part of the group's reported figures for the first half of last year. Next, we look at the cost of revenues.

Cost of revenues increased to €41.4 million, reflecting a structural shift in our business model due to the inclusion of Interhome's managed service operations, which incur substantial direct expenses such as cleaning and laundry services. Next, we look at product development and operations.

Here, expenses increased to €25.7 million. This was driven by a larger workforce following the Interhome consolidation alongside increased software license fees.

Next, we look at G&A expenses. These expenses reached €21.8 million.

This increase mainly reflects the full consolidation of Interhome, bringing its personnel-related software license and third-party service expenses directly into the group's expanded cost space. Last, we look at the adjusted EBITDA and the margin expansion.

Adjusted EBITDA improved by 26.6% year-over-year to negative €15.1 million. This drove a large margin expansion of plus 12.6 percentage points, improving our adjusted EBITDA margin from negative 22.1% in H1 of last year to negative 9.4% in this year.

This clearly demonstrates how we are delivering on our 2026 targets by driving group profitability through strong marketing efficiency and a significantly widened revenue base. Now let's take a closer look at the composition of our IFRS revenues and adjusted EBITDA by segment for the first half of the year, again on a statutory basis, comparing our current scale to the prior-year period when Interhome was not yet part of all reported figures.

I will start with discussing IFRS revenues. At the group level, we realized a big step change with 72% year-over-year growth to €160.1 million of IFRS revenue.

For HomeToGo_PRO, the standout driver is our volume-based revenue, which grew by 412% to €91.1 million, reflecting the full impact of the Interhome consolidation. In addition, subscription revenue expanded by a strong 16% to €14.1 million, mainly driven by very good performance at Smoobu.

For the marketplace, overall IFRS revenue declined by circa 10%. This decline was expected and reflects the strategic shift away from a focus on top-line growth to a focus of growing earnings and came on the back of a 16% reduction in marketing spending.

Within IFRS revenue for the marketplace, the shift between advertising revenue and on-site revenue continues, with advertising revenue declining by 26% while on-site revenue actually grew by 4%. For HomeToGo, on-site revenue carries a much higher strategic value as it provides a superior customer experience throughout the entire booking journey.

Furthermore, it enables us to achieve customer ownership, fostering long-term relationships and driving repeat business. Consequently, we continue to work actively with our partners to transition them from the advertising model to the on-site booking model.

I will now discuss adjusted EBITDA. At the group level, we improved our statutory adjusted EBITDA by 27% to negative €15.1 million, demonstrating significantly enhanced operating leverage.

HomeToGo_PRO turned profitable, delivering a positive adjusted EBITDA of €1.7 million. For the marketplace, further proving our operational discipline, segment adjusted EBITDA improved by 16% year-over-year to negative €16.8 million.

Overall, I would like to remind you of the seasonal pattern of our business. In Q1, we invest into customer acquisition to capture the bookings.

In Q2, we start to see revenue coming in and profitability increases. Our by far strongest quarter in every year is Q3, where we generate the majority of revenue and earnings.

We are seeing the exact same pattern also in this year, our strongest quarter for revenue and earnings is yet to come in Q3 of this year. I would now like to provide more transparency and clarity on the more significant items below adjusted EBITDA in our statutory P&L for the first half of this year.

First, share-based payments stood at €7.9 million compared to €7.1 million last year. These remain non-cash expenses related to our long-term incentive program.

We have discussed the setup of our long-term incentive program and the accounting treatment of share-based payments in much detail in our last full-year call, and I would like to point you there in case you have any questions on this matter. The appendix of this presentation also contains a slide with some additional detail.

Second, one-off costs totaled €3.4 million for the first half of this year, essentially flat year-over-year. These were primarily driven by integration costs of €1.7 million as we continue to execute on synergy realization from the Interhome acquisition.

We also have a slide with some more detail on one-off items in the appendix of this presentation. Third, amortization and depreciation: amortization of fair value step-ups from M&A increased to €10.4 million, which was up from €5.3 million in the first half of last year.

This reflects non-cash charges recognized as part of the purchase price allocation for Interhome. Regular amortization of intangible assets stood at €3.6 million.

I would again point you to the appendix of this presentation in case you're looking for more detail. Fourth, net financial income came in at a negative €14.6 million, comprising €400,000 in interest income and €14.1 million in interest expenses.

There were a lot of items driving this post, I will go into more details. Within the €14.1 million of interest expenses, there were €3.2 million for the full amortization of transaction costs related to the old loan, which we repaid in March 2026.

There was €3.1 million in actual interest on the new Nordic bonds. There was €2.6 million relating to the deferred consideration for Interhome and €1.4 million in interest on the old loan, which we repaid in March of this year.

Further non-cash items included a €1.9 million revaluation of the call option that we have for the remaining 49% of Getaway Group, along with smaller accounting adjustments for the Nordic bond prepayment option, interest hedges, and lease interest. In summary, while our statutory net income is impacted by these non-cash accounting effects and integration-related items, our underlying operational momentum and profit expansion are clearly visible in our significantly improved adjusted EBITDA and also our really positive free cash flow trajectory.

Let's now take a closer look at our like-for-like P&L comparison for the first half of this year. As a reminder, the like-for-like basis compares our statutory financial results for the first half of this year against pro forma financial results for the first half of last year, which include Interhome and eliminate any distortions created by the timing of the acquisition of Interhome, which only closed on the 28th August of 2025.

Again, we'll start with IFRS revenues. IFRS revenues came in virtually flat at €160.1 million, down slightly by 0.2% year-over-year.

This reflects a stable overall top-line development despite our deliberate strategic decision to deprioritize revenue growth in the marketplace segment. The managed decline in the marketplace segment was offset by very good revenue growth in our B2B business.

Next, we look at cost of revenues. Cost of revenues increased by 6.3% to €41.4 million.

This includes a €1 million increase in payment costs due to the higher adoption of HomeToGo Payments by our partners, which also led to a material improvement in our net working capital, as well as €600,000 increase for additional cleaning staff and €400,000 in higher costs for domains and hosting. Next, we look at marketing and sales.

We achieved a significant cost reduction of 11.1%, with expenses decreasing to €86.2 million. This positive shift was driven by €9.5 million lower performance marketing expenditures year-over-year as we rigorously focused on operational efficiency and margin protection, particularly within the marketplace segment.

Next, we look at G&A. G&A expenses decreased by 5.2% to €21.8 million.

This reduction was primarily driven by the materialization of operational synergies and the successful exit of Transitional Services Agreements for Interhome. Next, other income: other income decreased to €1.4 million, which was driven by lower other income at Interhome, which actually had an unusually high value for the baseline of last year.

Lastly, overall our adjusted EBITDA improved significantly by €7.3 million on a like-for-like basis, or 32.6% year-over-year, to negative €15.1 million, expanding our adjusted EBITDA margin by 4.7 percentage points to negative 9.4%. This strong like-for-like progress, especially on EBITDA, clearly confirms the power of our group strategy, which is to combine the scaling of our high-growth B2B segment with strict marketing and cost discipline in our B2C business.

Now let's dive into our IFRS revenues and adjusted EBITDA by segment for the first half of 2026, again comparing these on a like-for-like basis. That means including Interhome for the comparison period for last year.

Let's start again with IFRS revenues. On a group level, as I already said, overall revenues remained stable at €160.1 million.

For HomeToGo_PRO, we saw solid progress across both revenue streams. Volume-based revenues expanded by 5% year-over-year to €91.1 million, while subscription revenues grew even stronger by 16% year-over-year to €14.1 million, which again was driven by very good performance at Smoobu.

For the marketplace, overall IFRS revenues declined by circa 10%. This decline was expected and reflects the strategic shift away from a focus on top-line growth to a focus of growing earnings and came on the back of a 16% reduction in marketing spending.

Within the IFRS revenues for the marketplace, the shift between advertising revenue and on-site revenue continues, with advertising revenue declining by 26% while on-site revenue grew by 4%. For HomeToGo, on-site revenue carries a much higher strategic value as it provides a superior customer experience throughout the entire booking journey.

Furthermore, it enables us to achieve customer ownership, fostering long-term relationships and driving repeat business. Consequently, we continue to work actively with our partners to transition them from the advertising model to the on-site booking model.

Now looking at the adjusted EBITDA, at the group level, we significantly improved adjusted EBITDA by €7.3 million, or 33% year-over-year, to negative €15.1 million. HomeToGo_PRO was a standout performer, delivering a swing of profitability to reach positive €1.7 million, up from negative €2.4 million in the same period of last year.

This clearly demonstrates the strong underlying earnings power and synergy potential of our B2B operations, especially Interhome. In the marketplace segment, the segment adjusted EBITDA improved by 16% year-over-year to negative €16.8 million, a direct result of our profitability-first strategy and disciplined marketing and cost execution.

Let's now move to our liquidity development and cash generation profile. On the left-hand side of this chart, you can see our cash bridge for the period starting with the 31st December of last year until the 30th of June of this year.

In the first half of 2026, HomeToGo generated a remarkable €55.3 million in positive net operating cash flow, powered by a surging €52.7 million in Q2 alone. Driven by this strong operational cash performance, our cash and cash equivalents advanced from €91.6 million at year end to €134.7 million as of June 30th of this year.

Moving to the right side, in order to provide more transparency, let's walk through the bridge from our operational earnings to our underlying unlevered free cash flow for the first half. We start with adjusted EBITDA, which improved by €5.5 million year-over-year to negative €15.1 million.

From there, we deduct CapEx payments for intangible assets of €5.8 million, which mainly relate to capitalized internal software development expenses, and CapEx for PP&E of €1.2 million. We then account for interest and principal payments for leasing of €3.3 million and income tax paid of €3.5 million.

Finally, we factor in the primary engine of our cash performance in the first half of this year: a very strong €77.2 million cash inflow from the change in net working capital, a significant €48.6 million improvement over the first half of last year. The key contributors were a €56.4 million increase in other liabilities, mainly driven by seasonal advance payments from travelers, as well as a €23.2 million increase in trade and other payables.

The result: our underlying unlevered free cash flow surged to positive €48.2 million in the first half of this year, a massive €50.7 million swing compared to negative €2.5 million in the first half of last year. Achieving this impressive cash generation clearly underscores our enhanced cash conversion power, which, to be honest, is very much driven by the further implementation and ongoing very good take-up by partners of the HomeToGo payment product and also the successful optimization of our operational cash cycles.

Let's now turn to our balance sheet strength, especially looking at our net debt position and covenant headroom as of June 30th of this year. Our total gross debt stands at €209 million.

This comprises €101 million face value of our Nordic bond, €81.3 million deferred payments related to the Interhome acquisition that we still need to pay over the next 3 years, and €26.6 million in lease liabilities. Offsetting this gross debt, we hold €134.7 million in cash on our balance sheet and also €9.8 million in cash held in escrow.

This brings our total net debt to €64.5 million. Moving to the right, under the documentation for the Nordic bond, HomeToGo has to adhere to two maintenance covenants.

The first covenant is the leverage ratio, defined as net debt to last 12 months adjusted EBITDA. This covenant requires us to remain below 4.5 times as of June 30th of this year.

Based on our net debt of €64.5 million and an LTM adjusted EBITDA of €49.8 million, our leverage ratio stood at a very healthy 1.3 times, well below the required threshold. The other covenant is the minimum cash position.

The requirement is a minimum of €20 million. As of June 30th, our total cash position, including cash held in escrow, stood at €144.4 million, providing a substantial liquidity buffer.

In summary, all maintenance covenants for the Nordic bond are met with very comfortable headroom, fully underpinning the group's financial stability and strong balance sheet. With our strong first-half financial performance and operational execution laying a solid foundation, let's now turn to our outlook and financial guidance for the full year 2026.

Based on our solid performance in the first half of this year, we are confirming our financial guidance for the full year 2026. We reiterate our target of IFRS revenues of between €400 and €410 million and adjusted EBITDA between €45 and €47 million.

Looking closer at how we expect to deliver within these target ranges, first, regarding IFRS revenues, we currently expect full-year results to come in towards the lower end of our guidance range. The driver for this softer revenue outlook are lower-than-expected demand in our ancillary short-trips business, which is being impacted by softer consumer sentiment and also forest fires throughout holiday destinations in Southern Europe.

Crucially, overall demand in our core vacation rental business remains as expected. Second, looking at adjusted EBITDA, we expect bottom-line performance to come in towards the upper end of our guidance range.

Our strong focus on profitability in the HomeToGo marketplace, combined with very good progress on synergy realization, is providing us with increased confidence in our bottom-line execution. To wrap up our presentation, let's summarize the four key takeaways from our performance in the first half of this year.

First, exceptional top-line growth and significant profitability improvement: group IFRS revenues increased by 72% year-over-year to €160 million. Group adjusted EBITDA improved substantially by almost 27% year-on-year to negative €15.1 million, driven by accelerating growth in the second quarter of plus 59% year-over-year.

Second, HomeToGo_PRO scales rapidly as the group's main revenue and profit driver. Our B2B segment delivered extraordinary growth, with IFRS revenues more than doubling by 250% year-over-year to €105.2 million, now accounting for approximately 66% of total group revenues, while segment adjusted EBITDA turned distinctively positive.

Third, we saw a surge in free cash flow, driven by the successful Interhome integration, seasonal cash conversion, and optimized working capital, also driven by the further adoption of the HomeToGo payment product. Free cash flow surged to €48.2 million in the first half, up from negative €5 million in the first half of last year, advancing our cash position to €134.7 million.

Lastly, we are reaffirming our guidance for this year. Backed by a strong H1, we iterate our full-year guidance of €400 to €410 million for IFRS revenues and €45 to €47 million in adjusted EBITDA, now tracking towards the lower end of the range for IFRS revenues and towards the upper end of the range for adjusted EBITDA.

With that, we thank you very much for your attention today. We will now open the floor for your questions.

Good morning. Thanks for the presentation and solid set of numbers.

First question for Patrick on encouraging to see your average basket size actually going up. I think that's on the industry probably at best a stable development.

Maybe you can shed some comments on overall sort of booking behaviors and how you see that you're fairing against the competition on that respect.

Yes, happy to. Part of it is obviously our marketing efficiency topics that we said we strategically put on our radar for this year, where we said we will try to cover higher conversion and higher basket sizes, people that may have an interest in book also bigger vacation or spend more.

This is basically also reflected if you compare it in regards to the overall market that we have been able to not only lower our ad spend and nonetheless get a higher booking revenues backlog, but also part of it is targeting specific consumer segments that are actually letting us profit from that in the basket size development.

Thanks. Then, Sebastian, a few questions for you.

Thanks for providing the pro forma P&L, that's very helpful, the transparency there. If I look at the Q2 isolated, adjusted EBITDA improvement is only marginal.

Can you remind us how we should look at those cost synergies? Seems like they all came sort of in Q1.

Anything we should have in mind there? On that, also could you remind us for the pro forma EBITDA for Q3 last year?

I think I had €69 million in mind. Could you confirm that?

Thank you.

On the EBITDA for Q2 in isolation, two effects that I want to point out that are important to know, and that's why I think actually looking at half year is probably the much better metric, it is timing of Easter. Easter was in Q2 last year, and it was actually in Q1 of this year.

Because of the way we recognize revenue, that means that a lot of revenue has actually shifted between quarters. Q2 this year is kind of negatively impacted by that because some of the revenue and then also EBITDA actually shifted towards the first quarter.

Again, I would invite you to look at H2, because that is the much better comparison. Then for Q3, I would point you to our Q3 presentation that we gave last year.

In the appendix, you will find the full pro forma P&L, including Interhome, on a quarterly basis, you can actually look it up there, Tim.

Thanks. Then finally on the free cash flow, yeah, great performance there.

I know you don't give guidance on that number, but maybe sort of more on a qualitative level, how we should expect that figure to pan out in the next quarters, that would be very helpful. Thank you.

Yeah. The seasonality pattern that we see in revenue and EBITDA we obviously also see in cash, right?

We get cash prepayments from our travelers, especially in the first half. When then the traveler is actually taking the holiday, we also have to pay out money to the host, especially at Interhome.

We have a very seasonal pattern. For those of you who were part of the Nordic bond fundraising last year, there were a couple of slides in the presentation materials back then where we showed the seasonal cash pattern, especially for Interhome.

Tim, I'm happy, if you don't have those materials, to shoot them over after this call. The cash pattern will follow the same patterns as last year also this year, right.

That would be helpful. Thank you.

All the best.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you. Hope you can hear me.

I just had a couple of questions. Could you share how much traffic you're currently getting from third-party LLMs and AI agents?

That's the first question. The second question, with regards to your PRO business, the 3% growth on a pro forma basis, is that in line with your expectations for this year?

What kind of growth are you looking to get to in the medium term for this business and the steps you're taking to get there? Thanks.

On the LLMs, look, I think the answer to that is I think the most importantly is we don't get many bookings through them, right? That is all very, very early.

I think probably the bookings I do personally with HomeToGo every year probably outpace the combined volume of all bookings we ever received through an LLM. This is really early adoption of technology.

We do believe that much more bookings will migrate to this channel in the future, we want to be positioned very early on in there. We want to learn, but economically it doesn't have any material impact at all for us at the moment.

Then on your second questions for B2B, yes, it is in line with our expectations. We're actually quite happy with the B2B performance that we're seeing, and our medium-term expectations remain the same, so as we have also discussed in prior calls with you.

Okay. All right.

May I just ask one more question then? With regards to Smoobu subscriptions, any color on the seasonality with regards to new subscriber ads and the growth in Smoobu?

Is that being currently driven by the new subscriber ads or price increases or anything else to talk about? Thank you.

The growth in Smoobu is driven by new subscribers actually, it's not driven by price increases mainly this year. There's not much seasonality profile necessarily when it comes to subscriber growth.

It's more driven by campaigns that we run at Smoobu, where we try to push for subscriber growth, there's not that much seasonality profile in there.

Understood. Thank you.

Hello, can you hear me?

Fantastic. Thank you very much for having me.

I have three questions, if I may. On the wildfires we are currently seeing, I guess that makes Southern Europe in in in summer increasingly more or less attractive a destination, maybe also some DACH regions.

Can you say something, what how do you see the impact of that on on your business model? Probably summer months are very important for for HomeToGo.

Maybe you can can share your thoughts on that one if if that's possible. Secondly, it seems I would like to understand that short-term trips seems to be much more important in the DACH region than elsewhere.

Is that because most of your customers are in the DACH region and they're more tend to to be more attracted by short-term trips or what's what's the reason behind that? Lastly, on HomeToGo Payments, you said that they are you incurred additional costs of €1 million for HomeToGo Payments, but overall my understanding was always that that this is a very positive feature for HomeToGo because you are able to to to manage more effectively your networking capital when it comes to payments, customer prepayments, etc.

Can you confirm that? That would be my three questions.

Thank you very much.

On the first one, on the wildfires, I think the wildfires per se, we do see cancellations in the areas which are specifically impacted by the wildfires, right? We do see cancellations.

Overall, they're not exceptionally meaningful for us right now, right? It is a rapidly developing situation, and it's very, very hard to forecast wildfires.

We just need to see, and hopefully it's all going well and there is rain coming. I think the broader question, to be honest, is more what the impact of climate change in Europe will do to holidays.

Because when you live in Germany and you are already suffering from heat, you probably are not really looking to take a holiday in Southern Europe where it's even hotter. What we do see is an increasing interest in holidays in northern destinations.

For example, the Baltic Sea, where we are also very strong, has had a very, very good year this year, people are looking towards taking holidays there. From industry, we also know that Scandinavia had a very, very good year this year, which is an area where we're currently underrepresented, it's definitely an area we're looking at to grow in the future.

We do see that some southern destinations, for example Croatia, are actually suffering this year, right? Climate change and the expectation that the heat patterns will continue in Europe, and hot summers like we had this year will probably be the norm in the next couple of years, will definitely have an impact on where people want to take holidays, and we as a travel provider need to adjust to that, and we need to make sure that our destination portfolio is also well equipped to cater for that.

Then the second one on DACH, yeah, our short-term business is really a very German business, right? It's Kurzurlaub and Kurzreisen.

That is a business that is catering towards German customers taking short trips in Germany. Think about taking a short trip with your wife to, I don't know, go to Munich and see the opera or something like that.

This is definitely a part of our business where we do see negative consumer sentiment coming through, there is less interest in this kind of booking. It's seen as an item of spending that people can do without, in contrast to the big summer holiday, which is the driver for our core vacation rental business.

This is definitely one part of our business where we see negative sentiment unfortunately playing against us. Then on HomeToGo Payments, yes, you're absolutely right.

We obviously have higher payment fees as more and more of our partners are using the payment product, but the benefit far outweighs the costs. It's number one, a much better customer experience, overall conversions are positively impacted by that.

Number two, the cash flow is also positively impacted because we get the money in earlier if people use our payment infrastructure. It's a very, very good thing if more and more people use that.

Thank you very much.

Hello, this is Baader Bank. Can you hear me?

Yeah. Perfect.

Thank you very much. Thanks for all the details already provided.

A couple of questions from my side. In the future, it's about AI, and in the future, if I got it right, HomeToGo could be more an inventory provider then for the AI models.

You said that is of course not the immediate impact, but looking ahead, what does it mean on your business model and how could that impact take rates, for example, for first question? Second question is on M&A, worth a word on that.

You touched not on that in the past. It was always a topic.

Are you working on a short list here, and how is your priority in regards to M&A versus debt reduction, for example? How do you look at that?

Last one, perhaps some words on the negative EPS trend in H1 versus H1 last year. How do you think about the quality of your net income given that, yeah, higher PPA, higher financing costs, and higher SBC effects?

Thank you.

Thank you, Volker. I take the first question and Sebastian will take the second and the third.

In regards to AI, yeah, so as mentioned by us, we see the LLMs as a potential additional or somehow replacing direct traffic channel, yeah? Because people might turn not only that they go directly to OpenAI ChatGPT or use Claude of Anthropic, but also within the integrated AI mode of Google when they search, you obviously have this kind of LLM interaction there, right?

What HomeToGo has always been doing is not only going after our own website, but we had from some time ago the HomeToGo Doppelgänger product, which is allowing third parties to access HomeToGo inventory, yeah? This is something we further went after with building this MCP, yeah, so that LLMs can theoretically directly access our inventory via the MCP protocol.

Really trying to build a standard if people want to connect to the largest selection of vacation rentals. You can imagine, as we have good relations with Google, but also OpenAI and others are eager to connect to our large amount of inventory, we believe that this is an interesting kind of traffic channel in general.

In regards to take rates, that shouldn't change something. We actually expect that customer acquisition costs, in terms of ad spend, would rather be lower on that side.

Especially for our HomeToGo_PRO part of the business, as you said, right, there what we take as take rates for managing the house, maintaining it, cleaning it, and so on, that is not affected by AI. Furthermore, we also believe there that the acquisition costs will get lower as more people might get directly to, for instance, the Interhome inventory instead of needing to pay another OTA a margin in between.

Take rates stay the same, but margin likely goes up because we don't have to share parts of our take rate with third parties.

Just for clarification, in the end it would be that the customer could book via an LLM at an HomeToGo property without having seen the website of HomeToGo in this booking process, right?

No, at the moment this is not how these things are happening, right? Because also OpenAI...

As a vision for

the future, not in the moment, that is right.

Yeah. But...

In the future, if you're thinking about the way I described.

As said, right, all of these things take longer usually than you expect. We prepare for such a future, yeah, because Google, for instance, is currently testing, you might have seen that in the US, that you can directly within their AI mode basically book hotels, yeah.

Not only search them, but book them. It could also be that this is something that will come, usually a little bit later due to European regulations to the EU, but at some point it might definitely come.

As we have also on the inventory side with Google Vacation Rental Finder and Google Hotel Finder a good kind of relation to Google, we expect also this at some point being part of this because, as said, right, for us it's about that our properties get the bookings and not necessarily that they always have to have happened via the HomeToGo marketplace,

yeah. Yeah.

Thanks for the clarification.

I will take over for the second and third question now. The second question was on M&A, if we have a short list and whether we prioritize debt reduction or M&A.

Yes, we absolutely have a short list that we're working on. As Patrick has also explained during his presentation, we are also increasing overall our M&A deal capacity, we're both increasing the number of people on the sourcing and execution of M&A deals, as well as on the integration side.

We want to be able to do many more deals, especially the smaller deals. We're very focused on deals in the property management sector, which is in line with what we had said before.

We generally want to do M&A deals only on the B2B side and especially on the property management side. As I explained, we are thinking about our portfolio as well strategically, right, which regions we're buying at.

At the moment we're probably not that interested in doing deals in Croatia, but we would be really interested to do deals in Scandinavia, for example. With debt reduction, we can only repay all at once for the loan.

We cannot repay it partially under the terms of the loan, we probably wouldn't do that anyways at the moment. We have a good M&A pipeline.

We're pretty excited about that. We can do deals at very good multiples, we see a much better return on deploying capital there rather than repaying the debt.

Then lastly, your question on net income, what I want to reiterate is when you look at where the deterioration comes from, it is coming from the net financial result, right, which is at negative €14.8 million, and then also the much higher depreciation and amortization. Within the almost €15 million of net financial result, the actual interest cost in there is about five.

There is €10 million of non-cash accounting stuff in there. Is this really a good indicator towards underlying earnings power?

In my personal opinion, no, but everybody has to form their own opinion. Then the higher amortization charge comes from the M&A-related amortization for Interhome.

All of that is non-cash. Again, it is also accounting-driven.

In my personal view, the reported loss says very little about underlying performance or underlying earnings power, and the story really is about EBITDA and free cash flow generation. That's my personal opinion on that.

Understood. Thank you very much for that.

Thanks.

They're obviously two different metrics, right? LTM adjusted EBITDA is 100% certain, so that relates to history, I know it with certainty.

Then guidance relates to the future, and as much as I still are wishing for a crystal ball to be given to me for Christmas, my wish hasn't come true yet. By definition, we always are a little bit more cautious about the future.

The guidance we have actually increased in this call, right, to the upper end of the guidance, and I think that stands on itself.

We do not give a guidance for end of '26 leverage. As I explained before when I was talking to Tim, the seasonal cash patterns will be the same ones as or very similar as last year.

I know that you know the presentation materials because you were involved in the fundraising, I would just point you to there.

Yeah. As Patrick has said, we're working on it.

There's also been some news reporting about that in the Badische Zeitung, for example. They will be realized in the second half.

As I've just said when talking to Mr. Volker, we have an M&A pipeline.

We're working on that. We are picky in the deals that we're doing, there is no deal that we must do.

We're looking for a deal which or deals, generally speaking, which fit our strategic criteria, which is it needs to be on the B2B side, especially in property management; it needs to fit the geographic search focus that we have; and it needs to be priced well. We're in multiple discussions at the moment, and we expect to do deals in the coming weeks and months.

As Patrick has also explained during his presentation, the restructuring is part of the synergy realization, it's getting those last €4 million until the end of the year. There's a couple of larger projects that we're working on, and that is the restructuring that is mentioned.

One of them entails discussion with the workers' council, which we have started recently. As those discussions are ongoing, we cannot give specific guidance on the restructuring costs involved.

Yes, I would point you to note six in the half-year report. There's actually a lot of detail on your question in there already.

This relates to a tax matter at Interhome. It all relates to the period well before our ownership.

There's about a €26 million in risk there, tax risk, of which €18 million relates to back taxes and €8 million to interest and penalties. We have taken a liability as part of the purchase price allocation for that, but most importantly, we've also created an asset, which is exactly the same amount.

Why have we created that asset? Because we have an ironclad indemnification from the seller towards that.

The net risk for us is zero because any back tax and interest and penalties are to the account of the seller, and we're working through that at the moment also together with the seller.

We do not give free cash flow guidance. We also do not want to start with that right now, especially with bond investors.

I've gone through how the cash flow works and what kind of the constituent parts of cash flow are in detail many, many times, I would point to that. I think there is a lot of knowledge within investors about that.

Yes, I can reconfirm our mid-term aspiration for the EBITDA margins.

Look, I would probably point you to the number that is the second maintenance covenant test, which is the €20 million, right? We had about €144 million.

I think the €20 million, which is the maintenance level, is a good proxy for that.