Yatra Online Limited (YATRA) Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Yatra's Fiscal Third Quarter 2026 Financial Results Call, the period ended December 31st, 2025. Today's call is hosted by Yatra's co-founder and executive chairman, Dhruv Shungi, and CEO, Siddhartha Gupta. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, reflects the management's views as of today, February 12th, 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 the score 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. 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 YATRA website. With that, let me turn the call over to Yatra's co-founder and executive chairman, Dhruv Shungi. Dhruv, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. My name is Mr. 391, and I'm going to present to you in 2022 tournaments. Let me start with the interview first on the event that happened during the quarter and how it has impacted the industry. The third quarter, which is typically a strong basis for legislation that I have witnessed We covered in the second half of the month, and we've seen more factors than Thank you. Also, the recent union budget sends a clear message and positive signal about the government's long-term commitment to the traveling tourism sector. By positioning tourism as a strategic growth engine linked to the employment generation, foreign exchange earnings, and regional development, the policy framework shifts from episodic support to building a more structural and sustainable ecosystem for travel and hospitality in the Key areas such as the actualization of tax collection at source on overseas to a uniform footprint rate improve outbound segments. In addition, increased emphasis on domestic connectivity through infrastructure investments including high-speed rail corridors, motorways, and regional access initiatives to enhance hospitality capabilities to a national institute of hospitality and large-scale programs and the tourism sector. There is a growing demand for Indian organizations to help digitize travel procurement while using AI-driven platforms that offer end-to-end automation, self-booking tools, and integrate expense management, prioritizing compliance and cost savings. AI and predictive analytics platforms may determine the forecasting demand, optimizing costs, enforcing policy, and enhancing data in real-time. AI-enabled self-booking tools can perform real-time policy compliance checks, slide risks like disruption or analysis for the idea analysis, Moving on more specifically to our business for Coda, Our B2C business has been selected earlier by us, currently Ghana is now still growing profitably. Additionally, our corporate and mine business was well-entracted to deliver as long as it started to go over yet. So, the consumption of the area is reflected in the information about our official performance in the quarter. We remain actually supported by our continued focus on scaling the corporate travel business. The steady growth in corporate bookings, along with the increasing contribution from higher margins, hotels, and mice segments, positions as well for sustained margin expansion, and improved profitability over the long term. With this, let me now introduce you to Mr. Siddharth Gupta, who recently joined us as our new CEO. Siddharth brings with him a wealth of experience across the B2B SaaS industry, and in his last role was the president of Nolta Consulting in India and was also heading their SaaS-based talent acquisition business globally. Prior to this, Siddharth has also held leadership roles in large tech and SaaS companies like SAP and HP. With that, let me hand you over to Siddharth. Sid, over to you.

Thank you so much, Dhruv. Operator, I hope I'm loud and clear on the line. Thank you so much, Dhruv, for giving a preamble on our quarter performance and industry trends. A very good morning to everyone on the call. Adding to Dhruv's comments, despite an industry-wide disruption in the airline sector during the quarter, Yatra continued to deliver in its air ticketing business, supported by seasonally strong B2C travel demand. Gross bookings in the air ticketing increased 22% year-on-year, supported by 14% growth in air passenger, which far exceeds the industry growth of about 1%. Take rates also improved from 6.2% to 7.1% on account of the quarter being more B2C focused. In the hotels and packages segment, overall performance during the quarter remained healthy. However, we did see some temporary impact in the MICE and the corporate events subsegment, with a few bookings getting deferred due to flight disruptions. Just to remind listeners, it was the disruption in the Indigo Airlines schedule in India. This resulted in a modest one-time impact on the quarter, part of which we expect to roll over in quarter four, supported by the continued strength in underlying corporate travel demand. Gross bookings in the segment grew 20% year-on-year, excluding the impact of deferment of the MICE business. Hotels would have grown over 30% on a standalone basis, supported by strong growth in our corporate business and in our affiliate business. While gross take rates moderated slightly from 12.2% to 11.7% year-on-year on account of change in business mix, gross margins improved further from 9.7% to 10.2% year-on-year, reflecting prudent discounting in B2C and better margin utilization from suppliers for corporate hotels. Our B2B to B2C mix was approximately 60 to 40 for the quarter versus the nine-month average of 65-35 in favor of B2B. Our corporate travel business continues its strong momentum. We onboarded 40 new corporate clients in this quarter, collectively adding an annual billing potential of INR 2.2 billion. As mentioned earlier, the disruption happened during the highly productive first two weeks of December when corporate travel usually peaks before holidays. We saw a deferment of mice travel into Q4 and subsequently few of the groups moved to Q1 of the next financial year as a direct result of uncertainty in the travel during that period. This disruption not only adversely impacted our operating performance, but also led to incremental working capital deployment where advances had already been paid to vendors for mice groups. These impacts were largely limited to the month of December, and the business is back on track. In the corporate business, there's more to share. The early response to our expense management solution has been very, very encouraging, and we have onboarded eight customers now on our expense management platform. Early traction proves that Yatra understands the pulse of what our corporate customers need. This solution has not only become a door opener to get new accounts, but also gives us a huge upsell potential in our existing accounts. Few thoughts on what you can expect from Yatra in quarters ahead. Our consumer-focused line of business has returned to growth path while improving margins. This was a result of sharp execution coupled with successfully tapping into partnerships and affiliates for demand generation. In the near future, you should hear more on organic demand generation projects making impact, helping us further improve margins in this line of business. Our corporate value proposition still has a huge headroom for growth. Online penetration is around 23%, and we have laid a strong foundation for chasing this potential. We've sharpened our go-to market by establishing separate teams to chase large and small and medium enterprises. Demand generation is amplified by a new inside sales team now, which has started augmenting the efforts of the team on ground. Early signals are very promising. Beyond new customer acquisition, our farming team have won multi-year renewals from some of our largest customers this quarter, proving that corporates want trusted partners who can deliver value to them. Needless to say that our success is closely tied to the speed at which we can deliver tech innovation. Our early investments in adding talent to our product and tech team have started showing results. You can expect us to further add gap between us and what's available in the market. Hope that gives you a flavor of where we're headed. At this moment, I would have paused and handed over to Anuj Sethi, who's our CFO, to brief you on the financial performance for the quarter on the review. He is caught up in a medical emergency, hence I'll take you through the financial performance as well, and then me and Ro will take the questions together. On the financial performance, for the third quarter of Financial Air 26, on a consolidated basis, our revenue from operations grew 10% year-on-year to INR $2,577 million, or approximately $29 million, driven by steady demand across our key segments with robust growth from air ticketing business. In terms of segmental performance, our air ticketing passenger volume grew 13% year-on-year to 1491,000. However, gross bookings grew 22% year-on-year to INR 16,931 million or $188 million. And air adjusted margins rose 40% year-on-year to INR 1,195 million or 13 million with adjusted margin percentage improving from 6.2% to 7.1%. Under hotels and packages segment, hotel room nights grew by 22% year-on-year to 508,000. Again, gross bookings increased 20% year-on-year to INR $4,306 million or close to $47 million, with adjusted margin expanded 15% year-on-year to INR $502 million or $6 million. On the liquidity front, cash and cash equivalent and term deposits stood at INR $2042 million or $23 million as of 31st December 2025. Gross debt has marginally increased from INR 546 million as of 31st March 2025 to INR 583 million, or 6 million as of 31st December 2025. With this, I would like to hand back to the moderator and open up for question and answer session. Thank you.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star followed by 2. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your device is unmuted locally. First question comes from Scott Buck with HC Wainwright. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hello, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. First, I'm curious, the revenue growth deceleration in the quarter, is any of that structural or you're viewing that all as, you know, just kind of the ebbs and flow of managing some of the macro challenges that are out there?

Hi, Scott. Good morning to you. This is largely seasonal in nature. Quarter 3, if you recall, is one of the lowest quarters for business travel, given the holidays that we have for Christmas, New Year's, and for Diwali Dasherah, which both happen in this quarter. So effectively, you lose one month out of the three in holidays, and then it got compounded this year with the flight disruptions that happened during the first two weeks of December. So, it's not a structural shift. It's just a one-off given, you know, the disruption that happened in the industry.

Okay, that's fair. Second, I just want to ask about the mice business. Are you seeing some of the macro challenges out there, whether it's tariffs or anything else, having an impact on that business? I know there were some headwinds in the quarter.

No, we haven't really seen any impact of that, especially things like tariff and all. We do in fact expect that given that there is a new trade deal which is in place between India and the EU and India and the US, we will see business travel scale up even further when it comes to travel between both Europe and the US. But we're not really seeing any headwinds per se on account of these. Sid, if you want to add something extra on that.

Yeah, so, you know, this mice as a segment has grown and has tremendous potential for us to grow into. This was a very fragmented market about three to four years back. And now, over the last two years, Yatra has become one of the top three players operating in this space in India. And Indian economy is one of the fastest growing economies. So there are multiple industries where corporates are traveling, not only outside India, but within India as well. And hence, there is a huge headroom for growth. What we have seen is that this entire segment is getting more formalized. So instead of very small players operating these events for corporates, now the corporates prefer doing business with large vendors like ourselves. So I think there's a huge potential, and we don't see any disruption in this space at all.

Great. That's helpful, Collar. And then last one from me, guys. You continue to do a really nice job adding new corporate partners on the travel side. I'm curious, how many of those kind of obvious or low-hanging fruit opportunities are still out there, and at some point, do you need to change or pivot the way you're pitching some of these customers to continue to bring on that corporate travel business?

I think at this time, we have started a lot of bedroom in this. Our initial mapping had suggested close to about 13,000 organizations that we could target as part of this. We are still just in excess of about 1,000. So I think there is a lot of bedroom for growth for us in this sector. I think Siddharth coming on board will also sharpen our focus on how we go to market, and maybe Siddharth can elaborate a bit more around how he's gone ahead and

So, to add, I concur with Dhruv completely. We have barely scratched the surface. There is a huge headroom for growth because the offline corporate travel still is the majority market and the value proposition of Yatra from, you know, providing an online A corporate travel platform which caters for all uniqueness of every corporate customer has a huge headroom for growth. To give you a parallel, in my days at SAP or Hewlett-Packard, corporate India itself has more than 30,000 companies which are potential customers to Yatra. We just about crossed 1,300 right now, so there's a huge headroom for growth for us. From a go-to market standpoint, we have commenced a very ambitious and aggressive go-to market sharpening exercise at Yatra. We have divided our go-to market into three pillars. One is, so we've separated these teams out. One is the elite sales team, which looks at only large enterprises and tries to get us more inroads into large corporates where travel spends are very high. Then we've got a separate team, which is looking at small and medium enterprises, which operates through digitally creating demand and then through an inside sales, landing it into our kitty. And the third bit is we are already one of the larger players in India from a large enterprise automation. So we have a very large existing account base. So we have a team called Key Account Managers and headed by a very senior leader here in India. And the mandate there is to upsell and grow our existing relationships where we are introducing newer solutions like expense management and other solutions and especially international hotels and travel so that we are able to upsell into our existing customer set as well. So overall, we are sharpening the go-to-market, running a very strong cadence on a weekly basis to ensure that pipes remain healthy and conversions remain healthy as well. So, you should see momentum pick up from here, and we expect our strategy of leaning more towards B2E to grow Yatra, you know, very successfully executed over the next three to four quarters.

Great. That's very helpful color, guys. Well, I appreciate the time. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

As another reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad now. We have no further questions, so I'll hand back to the management team for any final remarks.

Thank you, operator. Who would you like to thank everyone who joined the call today? And as always, we remain committed to driving shareholder value and being able to address any questions that you might have. Siddharth and I are always available. Please feel free to reach out to us through our IR firm, ICR, and they can direct you to us. We look forward to engaging with you And continuing to deliver on the strong results that we have done for the last few quarters. Thank you for your time today.

Thank you so much, everyone.

Ladies and gentlemen, today's call has now concluded. We'd like to thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.