Serko ships its AI-led travel future: Serko.ai enters closed beta as FY26 EBITDAFI +137%
GetThere's U.S. foundation and a restructured Booking.com for Business underpin a pivot from search-led to AI-led travel — with positive free cash flow in sight at the FY27 midpoint.
SKO.NZ · Earnings Call · 2026-05-20
Serko ships its AI-led travel future
The pivot finally ships
Serko spent its last two earnings cycles describing a world in which travelers hand their trips to AI agents. At FY26 results on 20 May, that future stopped being a slide deck and became a product. The New Zealand travel-tech group (market cap ~$198M) released Serko.ai — a multi-agentic travel execution engine — in closed beta to U.S. users last week, with the first customers onboarded and 'highly encouraging' initial feedback. In a category where the global conversation has turned toward the agentic economy, Serko is positioning itself as a data and policy layer rather than another search box.
The industry is shifting from search-led travel management to AI-led travel execution.
CEO Darrin Grafton stresses the moat: millions of real travel transactions, years of policy and compliance intelligence, and a connected supply ecosystem. The AI solution coordinates 'numerous AI agents that carry out tasks in parallel' against third-party suppliers behind a simple conversational interface — the kind of company-unique claim that separates a genuine pivot from sector boilerplate.
The pivot was funded by a stronger core
None of this would matter without the numbers. Total income grew 34% to $120.9M, at the top end of narrowed guidance; EBITDAFI more than doubled to $6.5M (up 137%); and the full year of GetThere added $16.1M of revenue while giving Serko direct U.S. customer relationships and transaction data at scale — the foundation for both Serko.ai and the targeted U.S. corporate push.
“We delivered total income at the top end of our narrowed guidance range and materially grew our EBITDAFI.” — Darrin Grafton, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-05-20
The recurring question on the call was how the company gets from here to the $250M FY30 aspiration when FY27 guides to just $128M–$134M of income. CFO Shane Sampson anchors the answer in operating leverage — income grew 5.4x over five years while spend rose less than 1x — while acknowledging a deliberate reinvestment of that leverage into the platform.
One subtle but genuinely informative detail is the commission mix shift inside Booking.com for Business. The partnership renewal holds the 50% commission only until Serko earns strong returns; incremental volume then steps into lower tiers. That is now happening — the blended commission rate fell from 50% to 48.7% — and management argues it remains accretive per transaction given very low incremental cost.
FY27: cash flow turns, and the U.S. segment becomes the swing factor
The other quiet change is currency. After a $3.8M loss on non-hedged euro and Australian dollar forwards in FY26, Serko has designated a significant portion of its FY27 euro contracts as accounting hedges, selling EUR 32M at an average NZD 1.977 per euro — removing a recurring P&L volatility item.
Guidance of $128M–$134M total income and $132M–$140M total spend still implies accounting cash burn, but the CFO is explicit that at the midpoint free cash flow would be positive once non-cash share-based compensation is stripped out.
“in terms of cash flow for FY 27, there are some noncash items within total spend, particularly the share-based compensation. So if you like, at the midpoint, we would probably have positive free cash flow.” — Shane Sampson, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-05-20
The swing factor is the defined U.S. corporate segment — a targeted push into U.S. organizations that move large volumes of people but don't need big-enterprise tooling, staffed with new sales leaders from travel brands like Airbnb. The revenue contribution depends on how fast customers onboard and complete bookings, which feeds the wide guidance range.
From promises to product
The contrast with the November half-year call is the shift from talk to execution. Six months ago, the CFO was describing a plan to reallocate resources toward AI-focused product builds; today the product is in customers' hands.
“we are effectively looking to reallocate some of our resources... reinvest that next year again, back into that more AI-focused build of the future products.” — Shane Sampson, CFO · 2025-11-17
Likewise, the weakness in booking frequency per active customer that dominated the November call has, per the CFO, recovered through the second half of FY26 and into early FY27.
“we've seen the activity levels recover a bit in the second half of FY 26, and we're seeing that into the beginning of FY 27 back towards where they were in FY 25.” — Shane Sampson, CFO · 2025-11-17
Serko enters FY27 with a freshened story: the AI-led travel thesis is now a shipped product, the commission tier proves the economic model, and the currency hedge removes a nagging earnings item. For a company of this size, that is a meaningful set of changes — the open question is whether the market backs the U.S. segment's ramp.