Travelsupermarket in the black, cuts back on TV ads

TravelSupermarket.com “has moved into profit” according to its parent company’s financials for the first six months of 2008, with current trading ahead of last year. While the vertical’s standalone profitability is not broken out, the results show that it has kept revenues per visitor and revenues per transaction in line with last year. It lifted…

TravelSupermarket.com “has moved into profit” according to its parent company’s financials for the first six months of 2008, with current trading ahead of last year.

While the vertical’s standalone profitability is not broken out, the results show that it has kept revenues per visitor and revenues per transaction in line with last year.

It lifted visitor numbers by 54% to 27.3 million visitors in the first half of the year (H1 07: 17.8 million) with revenue per visitor of £0.41 (H1 07: £0.42).

Transactions during the half were 48% up at 22.7million (H1 07: 15.3 million), with a revenue per transaction of £0.43 (H1 07: £0.43).

Revenues also showed a big hike, jumping 48% to £11.1 million (H1 07: £7.5 million). Click-based revenues accounted for £9.8 million (H1 07: £6.5million).

“Growth has been delivered with a relatively flat spend on TV advertising and the vertical has moved into profit against a loss in the comparable period last year,” the statement said.

It is thought that the “relatively flat spend on TV advertising” equates to around £3 million mark – in its presentation to analysts, one slide showed the group’s total TV ad spend in the half of £10.4 million, with a separate slide showing that moneysupermarket.com spent £7.1 million on the small screen.

While the first-half spend was flat, Q3 will be “scaled back”.

This will have a negative impact on revenues, but should improve the bottom line.

Current trading is satisfactory, with revenues ahead of last year, although growth has slowed compared with the strong first half.