Travel management provider Serko saw its income rise by 45 per cent year-on-year for the first half of its financial year, as the company benefited from its ongoing partnership with Booking.com for Business and acquisition of GetThere.
New Zealand-based Serko reported total income of NZ$61.8 million (US$35 million) for the six months up to 30 September, which was an increase from NZ$42.7 million (US$24.2 million) in the same period of 2024.
Darrin Grafton, Serko’s CEO and co-founder, said it was the company’s strongest half-year ever in terms of revenue.
Booking.com for Business was a key driver of this increase, said Grafton, with 2.1 million completed room nights – up from 1.6 million in the first half of the previous fiscal year – and a 40 per cent growth in active customers year-on-year.
Amid the overall customer growth, completed room nights per active customer fell slightly year-on-year.
“This likely reflects small and medium-sized businesses in Europe booking fewer trips due to the macroeconomic headwinds there,” Grafton said during an earnings call. He added that this should stabilise as economic conditions improve.
Serko completed its US$12 million acquisition of corporate booking tool GetThere from Sabre in January. This helped to boost US revenue “above expectations”, as those customers expected to stop using the platform did so more slowly than originally anticipated.
Grafton said GetThere was now “fully integrated” within Serko’s business, and its customer base has stabilised, with “a very low level of new churn”. He added that Serko has not yet achieved its sales targets with GetThere but has a “clear path forward” to do so.
“It’s become apparent as we’ve been establishing our sales pipeline with leading Fortune 500 companies that many of them want to wait for the new capabilities we’re building rather than onboarding to our existing product and going through a second migration later,” said Grafton.
For the first half of the current fiscal year, Serko reported a post-tax net loss of NZ$9.5 million (US$5.4 million), compared with a net loss of NZ$5.1 million (US$2.9 million) in the same period of last year.
Serko’s CFO Shane Sampson said the increased half-year loss was due to a combination of lower interest income, foreign exchange impact and the company’s sale of its InterplX expense management offering to Cerebri AI.