Tongcheng Travel Holdings Ltd

HKEX:780

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q2

[Operator]

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tongcheng Travel's Second Quarter and Interim Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

Now I would like to hand over the conference to your first speaker today, Kylie Yeung. Please go ahead. Thank you.

[Kylie Yeung, executive]

Thank you. Good morning and good evening, everyone. Welcome to Tongcheng Travel's 2022 Second Quarter Conference Call. I'm Kylie Yeung, Investor Relations Director of the company. Joining us today on the conference call are our Executive Director and CEO, Mr. Hep Ma; our CFO, Mr. Julian Fan; and our VP and Head of Capital Markets, Ms. Joyce Li.

For today's call, our management will provide a review of the company's performance in the second quarter. Hep will walk us through the company's business performance for the past quarter, Joyce will discuss our operational highlights, and then Julian will address the details of financial performance accordingly. We'll take your questions during the Q&A session that follows.

As always, our presentation contains forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on management's current expectations and current market operating conditions and relates to events that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the company's actual results, performance or achievements to differ from those in the forward-looking statements.

This presentation also contains some unaudited non-IFRS financial measures. It should be considered in addition to, but not as necessity for measures of the company's financial performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. For a detailed discussion of non-IFRS measures, please refer to our disclosure documents on the IR section of our website.

Now let me introduce our CEO, Hep. Hep, please go ahead.

[Heping Ma, executive]

Thank you, Kylie. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to our earnings call for the second quarter of 2021 -- 2022. As you may know, China's travel industry was under extreme stress in the past quarter with drastic travel restrictions being imposed nationwide to contain the spread of the raging virus. April saw the worst ever situation since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020.

Travel activities will put to a standard tier during the month with [indiscernible] and demand for travel hovering at new lows. Entering mid-May, travel segment began to show an improvement as some regions partners reacted to control measures, leading to a gradual recovery in the travel industry since then. Amidst these wider fluctuations, we are [indiscernible] in the industry, swiftly turning to cost reduction and efficiency enhancement, while proactiveness seeking actual opportunities during the quarter.

Fortunately, we passed the stress test and again demonstrate the resilience of our business as well as the strong execution capability of our team. Over the last quarter, our accommodation business exhibited greater resilience and staged better-than-expected performance against the backdrop of the drastic turbulence. As [indiscernible] moved to capture recovery opportunities driven by the demand for short-haul and local travel, especially in lower-tier cities, while recovered faster.

During the period, we remained focused on lower-tier cities and further optimized our operations there to better serve our users. We continuously explored long-tier scenarios for hotel stays and acted preciseness to seize the niche demand. On the other hand, we continued to push ahead with our offline user acquisition initiatives with enhanced emphasize on efficiency, user value and merchandise recognition. In addition, more efforts were made over the quarter to enrich value-added products and services so as to better serve users' needs, also diversified marketing tools was developed to help merchants to have either access to their targeted consumers on our platform.

Under the deep shadow of the frantic resurgence of COVID, our transportation business was [indiscernible] affected as nationwide mobility was reduced to the lowest level as possible. During this turbulent time, we stayed focused on enhancing our products and services to provide users with more smooth and comfortable travel experience. For our air ticketing business, we have further consolidated our leading market position in some advantageous regions, while continuously tapping into under-penetrated regions to build a stronger presence in this market. Besides, consistent efforts were made to diversify the user base of the business.

Through our profound consumer insights and industry know-how, we have established effective engagement with new users such as college students and ethnic minorities, as for our train ticketing business. We have been consistently optimizing our positions for the sake of user convenience. Over the quarter, we extended the coverage of our intelligent question system by integrating all available travel routes with various means of transportation, which enabled us to provide users with more comprehensive travel solutions thus further enhancing user experience.

Moreover, we continued to dig into users' unmet needs and constantly enriched our user-added products and services to make our users' journey more convenient and easier. Our bus ticketing business though in the dips of COVID flare-up remained solid and continued to deliver decent growth under the stressful quarter, with value up more than 70% year-over-year during the time. We did expanded our geographical footprint across the country term by term. We had more urban and rural bus operators on board to work together and further penetrate under-tapped countries and towns. As for the ticket vending machines, more emphasize was placed on operational efficiency rather than the extensive rollout of the equipment during the quarter. At the same time, efforts were made step-by-step to pursue comprehensive travel products to our bus ticketing users, aiming for higher user value. Besides, initial attempts were made to grow the segment's advertisement business.

The bus ticketing business remains an effective instrument for the company to grow our user base bigger. For the following quarters, we will continuously tap into under-penetrated regions to further enhance our market share. While efforts will be stepped up to enhance the monetization capability for the -- of the business. In addition to bus ticketing, we have also been ramping up efforts in car-hailing business to further penetrate the short-haul travel market. We strive to provide users with convenient access to one-stop shop services, and they extend the traditional airport pickup service to car-hailing services. Continuous efforts have been made to increase the coverage of car-hailing scenarios so as to enhance user experience.

During the last quarter, the business witnessed a remarkable growth despite disruptions caused by COVID resurgence. Its volume registered nearly 120% increase year-over-year. In the foreseeable future, we will continue to explore travel scenarios and seek new growth engines for the transportation business. Before closing, I'd like to reiterate our deeper faith in the upward trend of China's travel industry as well as our company's capability to grow a greater business. Those uncertainties caused by COVID resurgence will continue for the short run, and to some extent, where temporarily the travel industry, the demand for travel has been resilient and can quickly bounce back once restrictions are relaxed as it has demonstrated in the past quarter. What does [indiscernible] makes as stronger.

With that, I will turn the call over to Joyce. She will walk you through our operational highlights for the second quarter. Joyce, please go ahead.

[Joyce Li, executive]

Thank you, Hep. The past quarter was very challenging, which [indiscernible] us to the fundamentally shaken by the contagious virus and has inevitably impacted to a great extent.

Facing the depressed travel demand and willingness, we moved quickly to cut our investments and stayed focused on cost optimization, while proactively capturing recovery opportunities, when restrictions were relaxed later during the quarter. As such, we continue to pull through difficulties and delivered better-than-expected results for the quarter. For the past period under review, the disruption caused by Omicron outbreak was so close to that our average MAUs recorded a year-over-year decrease of 28.9% at around RMB 197.6 million.

The efforts were made to maintain user activity on our platform. Our average MPUs for the quarter was no exception from disruption, but rejected a lesser decrease set to our cost-effective offline user acquisition initiatives. It decreased by 21.9% year-over-year to RMB 26.1 million in the quarter. Our 12-month paying users displayed a year-over-year growth of 8% in the past quarter and reached RMB 196.5 million. More significantly, the cumulative number of visitors on our Weixin mini program exceeded RMB 1 billion in mid-August, demonstrating the effectiveness of our user acquisition strategy.

Throughout the second quarter, we maintained a close cooperation with Tencent to engage with the younger users at [indiscernible]. We continue to utilize popular IP rights to launch eSports events, aiming to build effective interaction with younger generations and enhance our brand awareness among them. The impact has been not only well received by young people but also well recognized by local tourist bureau and tourist attraction operators.

In July, we cooperated with several local governments to launch eSports events in tourist attraction in these regions. Meanwhile, we joined hands with Tencent Music to participate into December conference held in a tourist attraction targeting Generation Z. Both efforts were designed to build as unique travel platform that understands and connects with the younger users. Besides, we continued to work with Weixin's search and Weixin's Video Accounts to further penetrate Tencent ecosystem.

On the other side, our cooperation with handset vendors remained solid and centered on user experience enhancement, membership benefits sharing and [indiscernible]. Moreover, our offline user acquisition initiatives continue to play a key role in acquiring new users for [indiscernible] facilitating our strategy to further penetrate to low-tier cities. Since our brand upgrade in early 2020, we have been steadily ramping up efforts to enhance our brand influence among younger generations through varied marketing campaigns.

In the last quarter, we launched a brand campaign aiming to build closer bonds with Generation Z. With this campaign, we approached a younger cohort by using their languages and [indiscernible] in our creative short videos tailor-made for them. Meanwhile, we joined hands with Jiangsu Province Tourist Bureau in May to co-launch marketing activities, targeting college students through which students can get free access to dozens of tourist attractions in Jiangsu Province. Besides, we continue to roll out advertisement, both online and offline such as ad inserting popular online TV dramas and ads on buses in low-tier cities.

With extensive brand exposure, we tend to create a distinct place in the mind of our target users and [indiscernible] over such population. In addition, our Black Whale membership program maintained a growth momentum in the second quarter against the backdrop of the huge [indiscernible]. During the quarter, we, for the first time, market membership program by leveraging an IP of a big hit TV drama. As of the end of June 2022, the cumulative amount of Black Whale members approached 15 million, signifying a big leap from 2019.

As always, we stand firm on transforming apps from an OTA to an ITA. On one hand, we are fully committed to empowering the travel industry with our profound Internet expertise and advanced technology [indiscernible] a high efficient travel ecosystem. During the quarter, we steadily pushed forward our cooperation with airports. We joined hands with [indiscernible] airport and developed a mini program for the airport to facilitate transit and that best service transit passengers, which enable passengers to get access to services such as catering, accommodation and transportation during transit.

We also have [indiscernible] Airport to increase the digitalization by transferring traffic offline to online by rollout of small equipment at the site. Besides, we provide a fast solution to more individual, small- and medium-sized hotels to help grow their daily operations more efficiently. On the other hand, we have always put customers first and have been consistently endeavoring to enhance users' travel experience. Our intelligent Huixing system, which is the brand of transportation architecture continue to play a key role in satisfying users' travel needs.

Over the quarter, we had certainly covered more travel scenarios and provided users with more comprehensive travel choices. Besides, our self-developed AI-driven customer service has been further integrated into all business lines, which has helped standardize customer service that's enhancing customer service efficiency. As a leading player in the travel industry, we fully understand the importance of social and corporate sustainability. We're determined to contribute to the development of China's travel industry. In the past quarter, we've launched an empowerment program to help our partners coping with uncertainties caused by COVID and [indiscernible] safely through difficulties. By leveraging our resources in the travel industry, we aim to help tourism professionals to improve their occupational skills and the rate emerge from disruptions caused by COVID. At the same time, we initiated a long-term relief plan to provide support to small and medium-sized hotels that are under business distress so as to facilitate the recovery of the travel industry.

Entering July, many parts of the country have been exposed to extreme weather with historical high temperatures. We've noticed outdoor workers are at the highest risk under such circumstances. To help reduce the harm of extreme heat, we joined hands with hotels and business partners to provide water and shade for them in several cities. We hope, through this program, other workers such as sanitation workers and food delivery men can have a place to rest and get refreshed.

With that, I will hand over the call to our CFO, Julian. He will elaborate on our financial results for the second quarter. Julian, please go ahead.

[Lei Fan, executive]

Thank you, Joyce. Good evening, everyone. As mentioned earlier, we had a worst ever situation in the past quarter since the first outbreak of COVID, after [indiscernible] and travel restrictions were imposed nationwide with lockdowns in Shanghai and Beijing. However, we saw a remarkable rebound since mid-June with a great recovery momentum week by week from lower-tier cities to higher-tier cities from students to business travelers.

Thus, our business performance was better than our previous expectations. For the second quarter of 2022, we reported a net revenue of RMB 1.32 billion representing a 38% year-over-year decrease from the same period of 2021 or a 17% year-over-year decrease from the same period of 2019. In view of the disruptions caused by the resurgence of COVID-19 cases, we temporarily adopted cost control measures to respond to market challenges. Benefiting from our prompt control on sales and marketing spending and a sharp reduction of operation costs, we managed to achieve RMB 112 million adjusted net profit and 8.5% net margin in the second quarter of 2022.

Though facing the most challenging environment, our accommodation reservation revenue achieved RMB 544 million for the second quarter of 2022, representing a 26.8% decrease from the same period of 2021 or a slight decrease of 2% compared with the same period of 2019. Room nights dropped by 30%, but the year-over-year decrease remained better than the home market performance, mainly thanks to the demand for short-haul trips and for local travel in lower-tier cities. ADR also endured a negative impact year-over-year and the industry headwinds, but the impact was fully offset by the improvement of our blended take rate, which recorded a new high in the past quarter.

On one hand, hotel opening to users was greatly reduced. On the other hand, more importantly, the one-stop shop strategy in accommodation segment has been successfully executed in the past several years, leading to a more than 15% revenue contribution from VAS products in the second quarter. Transportation ticketing revenue for the second quarter of 2022 was the RMB 619 million, representing a 49.8% decrease from the same quarter of 2021. The severe-than-ever mobility control of nationwide greatly harmed the long-haul traveling demand, which caused a year-over-year shrink for air ticket and train ticket volume during the whole quarter. But we observed an impressive recovery in June right after the lockdown realization in Shanghai. On the opposite, demand from short-haul travel was quite encouraging. We accomplished more than 70% year-over-year growth for bus ticketing volume and a 120% year-over-year growth for car-hailing volume.

We believe the short-haul transportation business will become additional revenue drivers for the company in post-COVID periods. On the other hand, the results of short-haul transportation will enrich our Huixing system's use selection to provide our users with abundant options and different travel scenarios.

Other business revenue was RMB 156 million in this quarter, representing a 3% decrease and 55% increase compared with the same period of 2021 and 2019, respectively, mainly driven by the big success in our Black Whale membership program, PMS and advertisement business development. We are very confident that the diversified revenue streams will make further contribution to the growth of the company in the following quarters.

Gross margin was 70.9% for the second quarter of 2022, decreased from 76.4% for the same period in 2021 and 72.5% for the previous quarter. The temporary drop in gross margin was mainly due to revenue shrink in the second quarter as some of the expenditure in our COGS were relatively fixed. As we mentioned, we immediately adopted the cost control measures for sales marketing, spending and operational expenditure and the industry headwinds. As a result, our adjusted EBITDA achieved RMB 292.2 million with 22.2% adjusted EBITDA margin. Adjusted net profit achieved RMB 112 million with 8.5% margin.

Service development and administrative expenses in the second quarter of 2022 slightly increased by 0.7% from the same period of 2021. But excluding share-based compensation charges, service development and administrative expenses in total accounted for 28.4% of revenue in the second quarter of 2022 compared with 19.4% of revenue in the same period of 2021 and 26.8% in the previous quarter. The temporary percentage increase was mainly because revenue scale dropped, but our head count and related expenditures were relatively fixed. By the end of June, our total headcount was 5,284, which dropped by 2% quarter-over-quarter, but increased by 15% year-over-year. That is because in the second half of 2021, we hired more employees in product and R&D for new product and service development and further optimize the staff composition.

Selling and marketing expenses in the second quarter of 2022 decreased by 35% from the same period of 2021 as we promptly reduced the investments in marketing campaigns to deal with drastic challenges and the headwinds of the industry. Excluding share-based compensation charges, selling and marketing expenses accounted for 42.7% of revenue in the second quarter of 2022 compared with 41.1% of revenue in the same period of 2021 and 36.5% of revenue in previous quarter.

As of June 30, 2020, the balance of cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash and short-term investments was RMB 7.0 billion.

Now let's turn to our quarter 3 forecast. Since mid-June, the nationwide travel restrictions, especially in first-tier cities were largely relaxed, and the sequential release of pent-up demand was quite encouraging in early summer holidays with demand from student groups to business groups, from local and short-haul travel to long-haul family tours, which significantly benefited our accommodation, bus ticketing and car-hailing business. However, recent COVID resurgence in some regions again weighed on industry recovery.

Based on the latest rebound and the business progress, we are now expecting our net revenue in quarter 3 to increase by 5% to 10% year-over-year compared with the same quarter of 2021 or increase by 0% to 5% from the same period in 2019. Our adjusted net profit is expected to be in the range of RMB 300 million to RMB 350 million. This forecast reflects our current and preliminary view, which is subject to changes. After years of cultivation and preparation, we have now entered the golden time to capture the travel opportunities in every scenario by expanding product and service offerings and acquiring new users in low-tier cities, thus further gaining market shares.

The remarkable rebound since mid-June have again demonstrated that the travel is an important and essential activity in our daily life, no matter for business, leisure or family friends gathering. We are very confident that by persisting in our strategic priorities and initiatives, we will continue to lead the industry growth with decent profitability. With an aim to make travel smart and joyful, we are also devoted to generating more value to the society and our stakeholders, including our users, suppliers, employees and shareholders.

Operator, we are ready to take questions now. Thank you.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Brian Gong from Citigroup.

[Brian Gong, analyst]

Congratulations on the solid results even during the difficult time. So I have 2 questions. First question is how do we think about year-on-year growth for the fourth quarter this year, especially considering a low base a year ago, but continuously resurgence COVID situation? And my second question is regarding our expectations for the margin for the second half -- for the fourth quarter?

[Joyce Li, executive]

Thank you so much for your questions. I will take the first question then Julian will address the second. And first, just let me give you some more colors about our recent observations of the latest market situation and business performance. The first thing is that we all know that the resurgence of the COVID cases since March has severely impacted the whole travel industry. However, a step into the middle of June, we observed a significant improvement in travel demand as the government was easing the COVID control policies step-by-step. The travel restrictions in different regions start to be lifted, and we saw a remarkable rebound since middle June and a great recovery momentum week-by-week, with demand from low-tier cities and high-tier cities and different group of travelers, as Julian has mentioned, including students, business travelers and short-haul leisure travelers. In June, our accommodation room nights has been back to 95% comparing to the same period of last year and the ticketing volume of air and train has already been back to more than 80% of the last year's level.

When entering July, there were resurgence of COVID in several regions, which also impacted recovery trend of the overall market, especially the long-haul travel. However, during the recovery in June, we saw the resilient travel demand from different groups of consumers, as mentioned above. Therefore, we have seized niche opportunities and continued to invest in our target markets, which allowed us to achieve faster recovery than overall industry. As we mentioned previously, the travel demand in the post-COVID period are more mixed and diverse when compared to a situation before COVID. So the business travel and the long-haul travel, to some extent, impacted by the virus resurgence in some regions, especially in some tourism destinations, but the other kinds of business travel, short-haul travel and vacations are very stable and encouraging.

In July, all of our business segments greatly recovered with some business even recorded year-on-year increase in terms of volume. When getting into August, the pent-up demand was further [indiscernible] and the growth momentum has been stronger, considering the low base of last year. However, we recognize that there are also COVID resurgence cases in some regions recently, which have definitely slowed down the recovery of industry gain. But in all, we still are very confident for the performance in the coming September and August.

[Lei Fan, executive]

Yes. In terms of the expectation margins for the second half, actually, I cannot give you -- provide the exact number of the margin expectation because it's difficult to visible for the whole second half. But actually, I can provide some color for the short-term margin outlook and also for the long-term outlook for the margin. In the quarter 3, actually, as the revenue improves, our gross margin, I think, will recover to the similar level of the last year. But in terms of the net margin, it will be largely improved from previous quarter, but may slightly lower than the same quarter last year due to several reasons as follow.

Firstly, last year, we reduced a lot of the sales and marketing investments since late July last year to face the industry volatility. And we turned to a cost-saving mode in the whole August last year. But this year, as we mentioned, the market, especially our targeted markets are very active. So without any hesitation, we invested more on the marketing campaigns and promotions in the summer to capture the market rebound opportunities, acquire users and penetrate market as much as we can. And the second reason is that we invested more on brand advertisement such as TV shows and offline branding advertise in the airport, train station, bus station to strengthen our brand influence for our long-term sustainable growth. And the last reason we invest on the new products and services for additional revenue growth drivers in the mid to long run.

In the past 2 years, actually, we have streamlined and optimized our operations, which allowed us to reduce the operational costs. But at the same time, we increased a lot on our selling and marketing expenses to achieve rapid growth in user base and business volume. So as I mentioned, in the short run, we will continue with this strategy to further invest in the market so as to achieve hypergrowth in user base and business volume. But in the long run, we are very confident that our adjusted net margin will be improved to a pre-COVID level in the medium or long run or even higher than our pre-COVID level in the long run for several reasons.

First, we -- in the second half of the year and next year, we will cultivate and focus on improving user value and monetization instead of user volume itself. And the second reason is that we will also improve the ROI of our offline user acquisition and reduce some of our investments in some offline channels or other distribution channels, which have lower ROI. And also, the scaling effect will be continued and benefit the cost structure in the following years as we have higher revenue scale, our cost service development and the G&A expense rate as of revenue will be further optimized, further increase because more than 50% of the spending -- of those spendings are relatively fixed. But -- last but not least, we believe we will be able to achieve a higher margin because our operation efficiency will be further optimized and improve the benefiting from automation and digitalization, which have improved in the past several years. So that is my comments on the short run and long run margin outlook.

[Kylie Yeung, executive]

Operator, we should go to the question, please. Operator, can we go for the next question, please?

[Operator]

Okay. The next question comes from Xiong Wei from UBS.

[Wei Xiong, analyst]

Congratulations on the resilient results in the tough quarter. My question is around your user metrics. I noticed that the MAU and MPU decline this quarter was smaller than the decline in GMV and revenue. So just want to better understand this gap? Is it correct to assume this is mainly driven by the relatively stronger performance in the short-haul travel and also the users in the lower-tier cities? I don't know if you mind sharing the revenue contribution from short-haul and lower-tier users, respectively for now? And how do you think about the trends in the second half and maybe longer term?

[Joyce Li, executive]

Yes, we have mentioned before because of the travel restrictions, the local and short-haul travel with major source of demand during the second quarter. And against the backdrop of COVID impact, we have swiftly moved to capture the recovery opportunities driven by the demand for the local and short-haul business and leisure travel and especially in the low-tier cities, which was recovered faster. We'll continue to explore the long tail scenarios for the hotel stays such as [indiscernible] rooms and acted precisely to seize the niche demand, which also you can see that have contributed to the growth of our accommodation revenue in the second quarter. .

And we believe that COVID has changed the fundamental behavior of travelers, especially for the younger users as they have experience to enjoy the short-haul travels and vacations, which can be more frequent with less planning and instead of only making relatively long-haul trip once in a while. So we think this kind of new demand will be a long-term change that benefits domestic OTA like us. And we believe that the contribution of the local and short-haul travel will continue in our later performance.

[Lei Fan, executive]

Yes. Actually, in terms of the space of our MPU and MAU growth, I would like to put more color. Actually, we believe that the pandemic is driving the acceleration of online penetration of travel industry, creating ample opportunities for large platforms like us to gain market share, from small scale platforms and from offline. For example, for Tencent ecosystem, we believe there still a lot of potential for us to further develop. In the past quarters, we further deepened the cooperation with Tencent to engage new users at different scenarios, which allowed us to gain more users continuously. We also increased our advertising investment in Weixin to reach out to the enormous potential user group. Meanwhile, at the same time, we put extra effort in developing other channels, including quick APPs and offline user acquisition and have achieved outstanding results for off-line user acquisition. We joined hands with hotels, bus operators and tourist attraction operators to transform offline booking habits to online patterns.

These offline initiatives served as effective channels to acquire new users. And also, that is an additional driver for our MPU growth. Meanwhile, our addressable market is still very huge. Online penetration rate for low-tier cities, hotels is only 25%, and the online penetration rate for bus ticketing is still at very low single digits. And for those users that we acquired from small -- bus ticketing equipment more than, I think, 6% was completely new to our platform. So it is the golden time for us to dig into the offline market and accelerate the digitalization and online penetration. Meanwhile, for existing online users, our main target is to enhance the frequency and also the stickiness to pursue a higher ARPU in the future. I hope that is helpful.

[Operator]

The next question comes from Alex Poon from Morgan Stanley.

[Chun Poon, analyst]

Congrats on a very strong third quarter guidance. My question is related to your hotel room nights growth outlook in second half. Can management share the growth in our third quarter assumption room nights growth assumption in Q3 and how the recent performance being in the last 2 weeks as the percentage of 2019 level between higher-tier cities and lower-tier cities?

[Lei Fan, executive]

Alex, before I give you some color on the room nights growth, first, I would like to provide some color on our revenue growth by segment for accommodation and also for transportation. So as we mentioned in our prepared remarks, we expected a 5% to 10% growth year-over-year in the third quarter of 2022 -- 2021 and 0% to 5% growth if we compare with the third quarter of 2019, which may break our revenue -- historical revenue record. But segment, actually, accommodation reservation revenue may grow 20% to 25% compared with the same quarter last year. Transportation revenue may decrease by 0 to 5% when compared with the same period last year and other revenue may also grow 20% to 25%. The segment forecast also shows the strong demand of short-haul and vacation in this summer, which benefits our accommodation business.

For the forecast of September, we currently assume the COVID situation in late August and September would be no worse than the current situation in August. Actually, if you look at the room nights to recover, in July, actually, the room nights has already recovered to the same level as last year. Because if you remind -- if you remember that last year, July was very hot season because in June and July last year, there was no that severe COVID situation. So that is historical high in the July last year. But this year July, we have already recovered the room nights to the same level of last year. And for August, the room nights also realized a hyper growth compared with last year, both for high-tier city and low-tier cities. In terms of the room nights growth for the whole year of 2022, actually, as always, the aggressive growth and market penetration for our accommodation segment are the strategic priorities of the company because that is the most profitable segment in the whole travel industry.

We will use all [indiscernible] projects to penetrate this market from traffic advantages of our portal and mini program in Weixin from cross-selling, from the huge user base of our transportation and also from offline user acquisition to connect with users directly. New -- and also the new traffic exploration, such as [indiscernible] and Baidu Map. Although the COVID situation this year is more severe than last year, especially for the quarter 2, we are still targeting to achieve a positive room nights growth for the full year -- for the whole year of 2022. Nowadays, we are right on the track to this target, and we believe we are successfully taking that market share from both offline and online.

[Operator]

We will take the final question from Thomas Chong from Jefferies.

[Thomas Chong, analyst]

In Q2, we have seen a very good revenue trend coming from our take rate. So I just want to get some color, first, about take rate trend for accommodation in coming quarters. And on the other hand, I also want to ask about how we think about competition. As we are seeing [ short-form video ] is also penetrating into the local services, in particular, for the hotel side? And lastly, may I get on the qualitative color, if there's no outbreak of pandemic in July recently, how should we think about our guidance can be the impact to our Q3 guidance? Can you comment on that?

[Lei Fan, executive]

I will, first, put some colors on the take rate and for the competition landscape, I think Joyce will give you some comments. Actually, we are very happy that in the past quarter or 2, our blended take rate for accommodation segment sees the new historical high in past quarter for the blended take rate. There's 2 reasons. One is we largely reduced [indiscernible]. And the second is a contribution from our VAS. As we mentioned, we have more than 15% of revenue contribution from VAS products in accommodation segment nowadays in the second quarter because we have successfully executed the one-stop shop strategy in this segment. For the long run -- for next quarter and the long run, we believe the accommodation VAS will continue to contribute and its positive impact on the take rate will be a long-term trend. So we are very confident our accommodation blended take rate will still have some space for improvement in next quarter and next year.

[Joyce Li, executive]

And in terms of the competition landscape, we actually think the competition in the market has been quite stable over the past 2 years. And most players, I think, now are more conservative in giving our subsidies when there are lots of uncertainties in the market, especially under the hit of the COVID. So in fact, there are only a few major OTAs in the market, and we have a very clear differentiation in terms of market positioning and user nature. With our strategy to further penetrate low-tier cities and our efforts made in the past few years, we have established a strong presence and a solid competitive advantage in the low-tier cities.

Even under the challenging environment, these 2 years, we are still able to recover rapidly and continuously outpace the market. I think the pandemic allowed us to reaffirm our strategic focus in the low-tier cities. And the performance we have achieved also gives us the confidence that we will be more aggressively developed and gain market share with an aim to be the leading travel brand in the low-tier cities. And now we are well positioned to capture the opportunities in low-tier cities with our cost-effective traffic sources like the operating model and strong execution capability.

[Lei Fan, executive]

And also lastly, actually nowadays, the management team of the company treats the COVID situation actually as a daily operation. Whatever the COVID situation is severe or alleviated, actually, the management team nowadays can quickly adjust our strategy and the marketing strategy to face the challenges. So for the quarter 3, actually, as we mentioned, the revenue and also the volume has already get back recovered to the same level for pre-COVID level of 2019. So in the following quarters and in next year, actually, we don't focus on the COVID situation. We're just focused on our strategy. We're just focused on how we can successfully execute for each initiative of our strategy. So COVID actually is just a normal practice for the company right now.

[Operator]

At this time, I would now like to hand the call back to Kylie for any closing remarks.

[Kylie Yeung, executive]

Thank you. In view of the time for time constraint today, we are closing the call now. If you wish to check out our presentation and other financial information, please visit the IR section of our website. Thank you, and see you next quarter.

[Operator]

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now all disconnect.