[Operator Instructions] And I will now hand over to Elie Maalouf to introduce the Q&A session.

Thank you, and welcome to this Q&A session. I'm Elie Maalouf, Chief Executive Officer of IHG Hotels & Resorts. Hopefully, you've all had a chance to watch the results presentation, which we made available at 7:00 U.K. time this morning, featuring myself and Michael Glover, our Chief Financial Officer. Michael and I are in different locations today. Michael is at our headquarters in Windsor and I am currently with our business in the U.S. So do bear with us as we coordinate sharing the questions. Before we open the line to take the first questions, I will briefly summarize our excellent performance in 2025. Our RevPAR grew by 1.5%, reflecting the breadth of our geographic footprint, the depth of our brands and the resilience of our operating model. We delivered gross system growth of 6.6% and net system growth of 4.7%, driven by outstanding development activity and record hotel openings. We signed over 102,000 rooms across 694 hotels, a 9% increase with over 2024 when excluding the Ruby acquisition in 2025 and the NOVUM Hospitality agreement in 2024. We expanded our fee margin by 360 basis points, driven by operating leverage and step-ups in ancillary fee streams. EBIT grew 13% and adjusted EPS grew 16%, supported by the completion of 2025's $900 million share buyback. In summary, we made excellent progress on our strategic priorities and we are confident in the strength of our enterprise platform and the attractive long-term growth outlook. Touching briefly on 2026, while very early in the year, we have seen and are pleased with the trading performance to date in all three regions. We have also announced a new -- today, a new $950 million share buyback program and formally launched our latest brand, Noted Collection. And with that, let me turn it over to the operator to take the first question.

Thank you, Elie. And your first question comes from the line of Richard Clarke of Bernstein.

If I'm allowed, I'll do three. I guess, if I look back at 2025, if I was to strip out the cost savings and the boost on card revenues and points revenues, I think your EPS would have grown off algorithm about somewhere in the mid-single digits. I appreciate it wasn't the best RevPAR year. If RevPAR doesn't play role in 2026 or going forward, do you have other levers to pull to kind of make sure you hit your algorithm? I guess second question, you said a couple of times, Michael, that there's some key money that's been deferred into the first quarter of 2026, just the scope of that and whether that should make us quite optimistic about unit growth and sort of luxury unit growth in 2026? And then thirdly, I think there was -- your margins down in China. You talk -- made a comment about improving unit economics or owner returns in China. I guess Holiday Inn Express now a $22 RevPAR brand in China? I don't think you'd open a $22 RevPAR brand in the U.S. So do you need to improve those RevPAR numbers? Do you need to improve owner returns? Does the brand work at that level of RevPAR?

Thank you, Richard. I'll take the key money question first. And then I'll turn over the fee margin triangulation while I'll touch on it briefly, then hand over to Michael for some details and turn over to him the margin question on China. So first on key money, as you saw in Michael's presentation, we have been very prudent and thoughtful deployers of capital across a range of places we -- and manners in which we deploy capital, whether it's key money, recyclable maintenance and, of course, our capital returns to shareholders. If you go back over an extended period of time, our capital has been fundamentally stable, up some years, down some years, because some of it's lumpy, but it's been pretty stable, while our revenues and profits have grown significantly, something we're very pleased with. But some of these investments, whether it's key money, whether recyclable, can be lumpy instead of happening towards the end of 1 year, they may happen in the other. So we're flagging that, some of it may roll over from '25 into '26, but then you never know what rolls over from '26 to '27. Nonetheless, we are confident in the growth track record that we have. Our 4.7% system size growth in 2025 is the 4th year of acceleration. Our 6 -- our best in 6 years. Our signings were strong, as you can see, up 9%. Our pipeline grew 4.4%. Our openings were strong at 10%. And that just shows that we have a lot of firepower. Now, we have more brands with Noted Collection being announced today. We're not putting a ceiling on our growth potential for 2026. The consensus is 4.4%. I would say there's more upside than downside to that number, but we're comfortable with it where it…

Thanks, Elie. Yes, let me -- Richard, let me first go to your first question on kind of 2025 in earnings per share without the ancillaries and cost savings. I guess the first thing I would say there is the ancillaries are not going to stop growing. And so, if you look at what we've said kind of moving forward, while we don't have the step-ups next year, we do see strong growth there and at a rate in the double digits, above 10%. So we do still see that moving forward. The second thing around cost, obviously, we've talked about this a bit at the half year. When Elie and I came in, we really started to focus and look at how we could look at this cost base and how we could change the curve and really be able to take more dollars of revenue to the bottom line. And obviously, you've seen us do that in 2025 with costs being down about 3%. Now next year, we're -- in 2026, what we're looking at, is that being coming back and being around an increase of 1%, but still having some of that savings come through that we've been doing with our programs. And so we still feel like we'll have strong cost control as we move into 2026. And then, I think the other thing that we also mentioned at the half year was really around the fee triangulation where I think we talk about and many of you will know where you look at RevPAR and system size and look at the fee revenue growth. And we mentioned kind of a few things that were really impacting us in 2025. First and foremost, which is a really -- is a good thing, is that we've had…

No, Michael, that was great. Just on those factors affecting the fee triangulation for 2025, just note that most of those are positive things, right? Strong openings way above the prior year's renovations, then all those other factors, whether it was a leap year or whatever, all those -- we start to comp against in a better way. So they were good factors in one end and then they become tailwinds as we go forward.

And your next question comes from the line of Jaafar Mestari of BNP Paribas.

I have two, if that's okay. The first one is just on the fee business overheads. Those $23 million of cost efficiencies in '25, should we assume they were broad-based across the three regions, across central costs? Or was the restructuring this year particularly targeted in one region, thinking specifically Americas, were you able to flex the costs more in response to what's been a turbulent here? And then on credit card fees and ancillary fees in general, when you announced your two big renegotiations 18 months ago, loyalty point sales and the credit card fees, you are the only major global company to have something of that materiality going on really. It looks like you were closing the gap with U.S. peers who had historically more material contribution from those, and it's great that you're able to have a bit of a mark-to-market with issuers as you're much stronger today, et cetera. But since then, we've now seen Hyatt last November and then Marriott just last week, also announced their own major renegotiations, big explicit millions of dollars targets for increase in fee contributions over the next few years. My question is, once everyone is fully ramped up, so you've had your step up, it will continue to grow. They will have their step-up in the next 12, 18 months. When everyone's fully ramped up, where do you think that gap will be? Because historically, you were saying, well, we're a bit behind. We can convince insurers and increase that and catch-up. Where do you think that will be? Will the gap have closed over 36 months as everyone gets the renegotiations? Or will it have just translated your level of ancillaries and their level of ancillaries, please?

Thank you Jaafar, let me take those questions, and Michael, of course, jump in and build on that. So on the fee business cost, I think we just have to pull back and touch on what Michael said in his presentation earlier, what he mentioned when speaking to Richard's questions. We've always maintained a highly disciplined approach to cost management. If you look at the presentation, our cost growth over a long period of time has been well below revenue and profit growth. But since Michael and I came in, we've taken a more philosophical view of how do we just shape the whole cost structure for the future, make it future-ready, scalable, using technology, new processes, shared services, locations and now artificial intelligence. So we can continue in the future to grow revenues and profits at a much higher gradient than cost. This was not a reaction to last year because actually, we started our work, our strategic work when he and I assumed our positions in 2023. And it took some time to really design it strategically. We had outside help. We have inside teams. We had a long runway of work that we started deploying in 2024. We saw our cost growth in 2024, be only 1%. Then you saw cost reduction of up to minus 3% in 2025. So there's been a trajectory of us bringing in these initiatives in a thoughtful strategic way, not a reaction to a market that was up, for a market that was down. It's just really reshaping our cost base and our processes and our technology and taking advantage of new technologies like AI. So that is generally how we achieved the benefits of 2024 plus 1%, 2025, minus 3%. And we're saying that going forward, low or very low…

Yes, let me jump in on both of those actually. And Jaafar, great question on the overheads. And Elie mentioned it is broad-based, but he also mainly covered the P&L. And I'd say we've also done this within the system fund as well. Because that gives us more firepower as well. And so actually in terms of total dollars, we've saved more as a part of this program in the system fund than we have in the P&L, which is actually great, because it allows us to reinvest and go after things that drive revenue. And then if you look at kind of by region and being broad-based, it was across every region and every function within IHG, but we also had investment. And I think that's important to note as well. Certainly, we had the investment about integrating Ruby coming in EMEAA. That's why you might see some of the costs a little -- not as much down in EMEAA actually, I think it was slightly up. But we're also investing in places like India. And I think that's really important that it's not just about cost reduction, it's about investing our dollars where we can get the most growth in the future and repurposing those dollars. And that's what we want to do. Because we've said many, many times, our biggest risk is not capturing our share of that growth in the future because this is a growth industry, it's an industry that's going to achieve higher highs and higher lows. And we want to be a part of that, we want to participate. We want to compete in that. On the credit card fees, the only thing I'd add there is we announced a new credit card, Revolut, a deal here in the U.K. with Revolut, we have more countries we can go to, and it doesn't bring the quantum for sure that the U.S. does, and it's much smaller. But that just shows the power of the loyalty program as it grows. We have more opportunity in different countries around the world to continue to launch that. It's great to launch one here in the U.K., and we're in the process of launching others around the world and as we get those agreements done, we'll let you know about them. I'll pass it back to you, Elie.

Thank you, Michael. Thanks for Jaafar. I'll just add that in addition to credit cards and our ancillaries, let's not forget our point sales business, which grows very nicely and also has no ceiling to it and our emerging and rapidly growing branded residencies, all of which are high margin accretive to our bottom line. Next question.

Your next question comes from the line of Jamie Rollo of Morgan Stanley.

Three questions too, please. First, just on that Branded Residence income. I don't think you've quantified it yet. I know you've got 30 projects, both open and in the pipeline. But what did those generate for you last year? And when you say substantial increase in '27 and beyond, could you sort of give us some numbers behind that, please? Secondly, on the removals rate, I think it was 1.9% ex the Venetian. Should we expect that to fall back towards sort of 1.5% this year? Is that what's giving you confidence to the upside to the consensus 4.4% net unit growth? And then just coming back, if I may, on the sort of gap between the comparable and the total RevPAR and then looking at the fees, you've got a helpful slide on Slide 56. So there's about a 2-point gap between comparable and total RevPAR. And there's also another couple of points in the three regions between underlying fee income and the sum of total RevPAR and available rooms. Are you saying that those timing issues mean that those negative figures turn positive this year or at some point in the future? Just to, sort of, clarify the algorithm.

Thank you, Jamie. I'll take Branded Residences, removals, I'll turn over the fee income to Michael, and anything else he wants to build on. So look, Branded Residences, we're very excited about that business. It builds on the power of our Luxury & Lifestyle portfolio, that just keeps growing with the six brands we have now, mainly the ultra-luxury brands: Six Senses and Regent. I mean, just let me just give you an anecdote. I was -- I've already been to six countries, it's not even mid-February yet and -- or it is just mid-February. And I was in Bangkok early this month, late last month, and we have an InterContinental Residence project that had just started sales in the heart of the city, in December, of speaking to the owner, they were 40% sold by mid-January that raised prices 4x. I told them they have to raise prices again to slow these sales down. So -- and that's InterContinental, not even Regent and Six Senses, where we have most of our projects. So there's more coming across more brands. Yes, we have 30 projects today. We have many more that are going into the sales space. They are in London, when Six Senses is London is opening this coming month. The Branded Residences are all sold out or maybe there's one left I understand. Up to now, I'd say the fees range have not been that material. It's been $5 million to $10 million. However, we see substantial increase in that starting in 2027 and beyond. So again, we're not putting a ceiling on that. We think it's totally accretive, and we're very excited about where it's going. On the removals rate, yes, we're confident it will go back towards the 1.5% over the next few years. There was just a lot of lumpiness going on right now, especially in China as things normalize post-pandemic, but we see a path to clearly back to the 1.5%. I don't think that's the only thing that can give us -- it is lumpy, but I don't think it's the only thing that can give us more upside in 2026. The strength of our signings, the strength of our brand portfolio, the proven enterprise to get more openings going, whether it's conversion or even new build, all of that put together gives us more confidence in our system growth over the medium to long term. Yes, there's opportunity also in lower removals, but that's not the primary thing. It's a combination of everything. Michael, if you want to build on those and answer the question on fee income.

Yes, sure. I mean, I was going to say the similar on the net system size. I mean, we've been saying consensus is at 4.4% for next year. We certainly feel like there's more opportunity on the upside of that. Then there is risk to the downside as we move into the year based on the visibility we have. And really, Jamie, it's not just about removals coming down, which we do believe they will. It's really about those openings and how things are proving out and what we look at, we see really strong growth across EMEAA and China. You saw that in our results this year. We see -- if you exclude the Venetian, the U.S. at 1.5%, we're on the right track record or the Americas at 1.5%. We're on the right track there. So I think, we feel confident in that, and that's why we're willing to say that there's more opportunity to the upside to that 4.4%. And then when you look back -- and on your third question regarding the table in the chart -- in the presentation, thank you. We thought that would be helpful. It is. It is helpful, but it also goes back to what we talked about earlier and the reason for that total RevPAR being less than the comparable RevPAR, particularly the ramp-up of hotels. So it takes sometime for hotels once they open to build that base business and then begin to yield as you open more hotels, and we have that acceleration in openings, you've got more hotels in that as a percentage of your system than you used to have. And so that's affecting that. You also have the renovation effect. There's also, of course, the leap year effect, but then also the mix effect of when -- as hotels are opening around the world. So I think over time, yes, that gets back and that normalizes. We're going to still open as many hotels as we can. So we want to continue that as you see that acceleration. And really, you go back to Elie's point, of us growing our system size over the last 4 years. It just puts more openings in there and more hotels ramping up as a percent of the system size versus what we used to have. And so I do think that normalizes over time, and we get to a better position. And I'll pass back to Elie, if there's anything else.

Thank you, Jamie. Next caller.

And your next question comes from the line of Ricardo Benevides Freitas of Santander.

Two questions from my end. Firstly, on the brand portfolio, we've seen these two recent additions to your collections brand portfolio, right? What I wanted to ask is what other thematics, let's say, are you willing to approach on further brand acquisitions or entering? Is it more collections or any other specific team? And I wanted to ask you regarding -- I mean, you've had a very strong cash flow generation this year. Your net debt seems to be very under control. Why not a bit more allocated towards your share buyback program?

Thank you, Ricardo. I'll take the two questions and Michael, if you can build on the cash generation and leverage, if you wish. Look, obviously, we don't comment on what else we're going to launch until we launch and tell you, like today. And so actually, we indicated this collection in Q3, and we just named it today and formally launched, and we're very excited about it, reaching 150 hotels. We're starting in EMEAA with Noted Collections really because EMEAA has the largest percentage of unbranded hotels and we've typically launched our collection and conversion brands in EMEAA before going to east and west from there. So that's the future of the brand. It won't be just in EMEAA, but we'll go east and west, but establishes itself in EMEAA first. We do look at M&A from time-to-time, as you know, and we did Ruby acquisition last year. We don't need M&A to grow. It's helpful if we find the right opportunity in the portfolio. It's most likely -- although I won't say exclusively, it's most likely to be in premium and above premium, upper upscale luxury lifestyle, and we tend to launch our own brands, when it's a soft brand like Noted Collection or whether it's a mainstream brand like Garner, those we tend to launch on our own, although there could be exceptions to that. But we don't need M&A to grow. We have 21 very strong brands now. 11 of which launched in the last 11 years with a lot of runway. So those are still new. Those are basically still new and new to new countries. I think in 2025, there were 32 or 33 instances when we took one of our existing brands to a new country. As far as that country is concerned, that's…

Yes. I mean, you said that really well. What I would also just say, if you go back and look at kind of where we were in -- when we first started the buybacks again, back in 2023, we were well below the leverage range. And so a lot of what you had going on in our buybacks was a step-up to get back into the range. And we finally have arrived in that. And I think what's exciting about this buyback is that we're able to actually grow the buyback again this year and be in the range. So we're no longer getting that -- delivering the buyback and having any of the step-up come in as part of that buyback, which is really a good indication of the kind of cash generation that this business can do. I'm very happy with that. And I'm also -- there's just a couple of other things, kind of nuanced in there that are really, really helpful. One, we've eliminated that we've greatly eliminated the currency translation on our debt. That's a huge benefit for us. And by the end of this year in the first quarter of next year, we will have completely eliminated that many of you who have followed us for many years have known about that. The other thing was we refinanced our RCF this year and have taken out and no longer have debt covenants on that. That gives us a lot of flexibility. And as we've said many times, with our shareholders, and the expectation is that we will continue to do buybacks. And so whether it's delivering cash this year or at the next one, we will do that and we're committed to do that. You've seen our track record on that from the $500 million we did in 2023 to the $750 million we did in '24 and -- excuse me, the $750 million we did in '23, the $800 million we did in '24 and then $900 million we did in '25. We've built that track record, and we'll continue to do that.

Your next question comes from the line of Jaina Mistry of Barclays.

I have three questions as well, two follow-ups. So the first follow-up is around Branded Resi. When we're thinking about your growth algos of 100 to 150 bps on the margin or roughly 10% EBIT growth, should we think about Branded Resi next year is contributing to growth over and above that algo? And then second question is around net unit growth. I mean, your commentary sounded really quite confident and bullish around it. If we're thinking about net unit growth being around the 4.5% mark in 2026. Is this the run rate going forward for the medium term as well, somewhere between 4.5% and 5%? And then very lastly, just on RevPAR, I wondered if you could set the stage for '26. Why are you confident in an inflection? Or indeed, are you confident in an inflection? And could you give some color by region about what you're expecting?

Thank you, Jaina. Let me start with your last question and then work our way back. Michael, please build on my responses, if you wish. So let me start with RevPAR outlook. Understanding we don't give guidance either by quarter or by year, but just give you some context also by region. Let's start where I'm sitting today in the United States, although by tomorrow morning, I'll be back in London. And if you look at 2025, we're very pleased with our performance in 2025 in the United States. We believe it was competitive, but we also know there was some burden on the industry 2025, which started very well in January and February. And then we had a series of things that became sort of headwinds. You have the tariff anxiety and uncertainty. You had reductions in government spending. The Dodge project, which affected government travel down, say, 20% on average. Then you had reductions in inbound, mostly from Canada, but a little bit also from Mexico and from Europe. Inbound for the U.S. ends up being down 4%. And then you had a record government blend shutdown in the fourth quarter. You take all those things, and yet, I think we performed competitively in 2025. Those things either don't reappear in 2026 in the U.S. or they don't get worse. We don't think government travel gets worse, it may not get better. We don't think there's going to be a government shutdown at that length or maybe not even one or whatsoever. Instead of reduced international travel, we got the World Cup. We've got [ USD 250 ]. In many cases, we've got a weaker dollar, which is not unhelpful. And so the comps get better going into 2026. But on top of that -- on top of…

Elie, no, I mean I think you covered it in detail. Nothing more for me to add.

Let's take the next caller.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Brignall of Rothschild & Co Redburn.

I'm just going to stick to one, if that's okay. It's a similar vein to Richard and Jamie earlier. If I take your fee revenues less your non-RevPAR fee revenues than your sort of take rate as a percentage of gross revenues was down 8 basis points this year, and it was down 6 basis points the year before and is down sort of 25, 30 basis points from pre-COVID levels. There was some noise in the COVID years. I can't imagine that this is from existing contracts. So how do we solve for that in terms of the contribution of new properties? The same trend is exactly as seen at Marriott and actually also Hilton this year. So how do we -- how does that not mean that new rooms are coming with a slightly lower sort of effective royalty rate?

Alex, thank you for your question. I'll take it, then Michael build on it. Our take rate is not reducing. I can tell you that. So there may be -- there are a few factors working into it. As we moved into more luxury lifestyle premium, and we've been very open about it, our key money has moved up too, because we're now participating by strategic choice in a sector that has more key money to plan it, but also has higher fees. So that key money amortization is starting to come through and affect a little bit of the fee revenue, and we've quantified that actually for you. And so I think that there is that factor and the -- but our fee rates that we get, whether it's mainstream, whether it's some premium, with a Luxury & Lifestyle have not been diminishing. And so you might be seeing some year-over-year fluctuations due to normalization of key money or other factors, but it's not a headline fee rate change. Michael?

Yes. I mean, I just would go back to the same factors I said when -- on Jamie's question, and Richard's question as well. I mean, it's just a bit of noise, Alex, right now. It goes back to these record level of openings being incrementally more than what we've had in the past. And just to give you an idea, it takes time for a hotel to ramp up. And because we've had such strong openings, you've got a greater percentage of that in your system. Over time, if those are normal -- openings are normalized, and it equals, it equals. But you've got more hotels earning less fees as they come in. And so that's affecting your fee triangulation and some of that fee growth. Now that normalizes over time. So that's why I say it's a bit of noise. Elie discussed the key money, which we talked about as well. We've talked about leap year, we've talked about renovations. There's a number of things like that, that are -- that's kind of in there that's affecting this. As we look out and we look forward and we model this business, there is nothing to suggest that we will not still be able to hit that high single-digit fee revenue growth over time. I go back to the algorithm. There's no reason to believe we can't generate the 100 to 150 basis points of margin improvement. We've been demonstrating that over the past several years and including that EBIT growth of around 10%. And that earnings per share growth in the 12% to 15% range. Everything we do, everything we look at how we model the business, nothing of that has changed with this noise that we're kind of seeing right now.

I mean, if you look at the pace of openings, Alex, not only was it a record in a number of hotels last year, but a lot of our openings tend to be skewed to the second half. Our fourth quarter tends to be our biggest opening. So from an arithmetic point of view, you're not really even getting 6 months of fees in that given year for those openings while the unit now accounts for the full year. Now that's okay if you have the same percentage increase in openings year-over-year because you start to lap all the same amount. But when you have a surge of openings like we've had, then you get a bit of dislocation, which normalizes. We're happy with that. We'd rather have more openings happening sooner. And as the hotels ramp up, the fees will come through. That doesn't concern us.

I just -- that's why I didn't ask the question like Richard and Jamie, I asked it as a percentage of the gross revenues, which would be, I guess, -- is there a reason for the fee revenues, just the net fee revenues and the gross revenues to have different timing? I wouldn't have thought that, that would affect in a year.

No, I mean, I think gross -- I mean, you get the fee -- Michael, maybe you can help with that, but the -- you get to the net fee from the gross fees and you're not earning the gross fees if the hotel opens in October. You're not earning the same amount of gross fees from a hotel that has a partial year of revenue but has a full year of denominators and net unit growth. So I think that it's -- you're not earning the full fees yet. So it's the same thing.

But the gross revenues would be -- and the gross fees are counted in the same way. That's why I'm not looking at it versus NUG. I'm just looking at it versus gross revenues, which you've disclosed in the release and the net revenues that you've disclosed in the release, and that's where the royalty rates has come down a bit. But we can take it offline.

Yes. Just I want to conclude that there is nothing that we see where our royalty rate is decreasing across any of our brands or our management fees neither. Thank you, Alex.

Your next question comes from the line of Andre Juillard of Deutsche Bank.

Just two follow-up questions for me. First is on segmentation. Could you give us some more color about the trend you're seeing segment-by-segment? And do you see a pickup in the MI segment especially? Second question about AI. I really appreciate the Slide 40, 41. Could you give us some more granularity about the disruption you're expecting from AI? Is it mainly a top line driver, a mix of top line and cost optimization? Is it a real change in the yield management? So I would appreciate any information you could give us.

Okay. Well, thank you, Andre. I'll start with your second question on AI. I'll turn over the question on segmentation to Michael, okay? So just bear with me because when we talk about artificial intelligence, we shouldn't just focus on one small thing, because our strategy around artificial intelligence and what we're seeing is broad and enterprise-wide. Yes, there is disruption, but I want to start by saying that there are two things that we fundamentally believe are not changing. The first one is that there will always be a guest that will want to travel for business or for leisure. We absolutely see no change in that. In fact, we see more interest in that. And on the other hand, they want to go to a destination that has a live real experience. The more people experience the virtual, the artificial, the digital, the more they favor live experiences. Sports events, theater, restaurant, bar and hotel, people want live experience, everything in between, the distribution, how you get there, how you book, how you view it, how you share it, how you search it, that is changing. We don't think it's a disruption for us. We think it's an opportunity for us. And we feel like we're in a strong position to capitalize on these opportunities and to actually deepen our competitive moat because of the huge strides we've made in recent years to modernize our tech stack. We're in a fortunate position because of the work we've been doing over 5, 6 years. You've heard me talk about our guest reservation system on the call. We're the first to roll out this industry-leading guest reservation system. Then we migrated our core enterprise data to the cloud and that allows to quickly plug AI powered systems into our tech…

Yes, sure. Happy to do that. Well, first, I'll just start with where we ended up the year. As we discussed in my presentation, that business was up 2%, Leisure was flat for the group and groups were up 1%. And that's been very pleasing to see in as Elie described a turbulent year across, particularly the U.S. And so as we look forward in what we're seeing right now, as we started 2026, we actually saw really solid business demand coming in. Obviously, in the U.S., that then began to get affected by the storms in the cold weather that hit the U.S., but overall, still positive and moving forward. And so, then if you then look at groups and what we see right now, what we see on the books is still almost double digits up year-over-year. So it looks like groups are going to be strong. And remember, particularly in the U.S., 2025 was lapping against the election year, which had the big events like the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention and then all the other events that happen as part of the election. So you're now out of that, and so you should have better comparables there as well as you get in it. So we look groups continue to be strong. We have less visibility in leisure as, of course, the booking windows on that are shorter. However there's nothing right now to indicate things would be slowing down there. If you go back to Elie's comments on the different markets and how we're seeing things shake up, it seems to be more positive than the previous year. Now we're obviously very early in the year, so we'll need to see how that progresses. But that's how we're seeing it shape up as we sit today.

Maybe one additional question, which is a follow-up. If you consider that you have 2/3 of your clients, which are a part of the loyalty program, what is a reasonable target for you? And what is proportion of new clients you're welcoming every year?

We're very pleased with the progress of our IHG One Rewards program hitting 160 million members. We believe that on a member per room, we're right up there and the leadership across the industry. The important thing is that they're very engaged too. You go back 5 years, we're below 50% room nights contribution from our loyalty plan now. We're over 66% globally, over 72% in the U.S. That's a remarkable move up. So they're engaged, they're staying more. They're spending more. They're joining our co-brand products. They're spending on those core brand products. So it's a whole flywheel of virtuous behavior that we're fostering. So we're not putting a ceiling on what our membership could be. We're not putting a ceiling of what our contribution could be. We're a growing business. Look, we -- with all of this, we still have only 4% of the rooms in the world with 10% of the pipeline. So as we grow our openings to grow our brands, to grow our system around the world, the opportunities for greater membership and greater penetration just continue to expand. We're ambitious, but we're not putting a ceiling on it.

And we have one more question in the queue, and this comes from the line of Kate Xiao of Bank of America.

Just a quick follow-up question from me. I wanted to ask about your pipeline, obviously, 33% relative pipeline size. And you mentioned over 50% of that is under construction. Is it possible to give some color around which bit of the pipeline is new build versus conversion? I'm asking that because in the context of conversion accounting for over 50% of the new openings last year and obviously, the 4.7% underlying, excluding the [ nation ] impact was helped by a bit of conversion and some conversion deals. I'm just thinking your visibility into kind of conversion this year. Are you looking at new conversion deals that could help kind of maybe give you a bit more confidence to really hit that 4.7% kind of run rate and maybe accelerate after that?

I'll just touch on conversions in general and Michael can take you through the proportions and what that's been. I just want to address, sort of, conversion opportunity and tell you that what we firmly believe is that the conversion opportunity is not as limited as some in the industry might have mentioned, the analyst industry might have mentioned. It is not for us strictly converting from independents. The addressable market is much larger. Most of our conversions actually come from branded operators, whether large or small or regional, it's owners who see the strength of our enterprise, the strength of our brand portfolio, the strength of our -- support of our people and want to join a stronger system. So we don't think it's limited just independence and therefore, we think that the addressable market is very large. And we have now more conversion brands and products with the addition today of Noted Collection. The success of voco, Vignette, of Garner, all of which are way ahead of our initial projections and are many more markets than we thought they would be early on. So -- and many of our conversions actually come from our non-specific conversion brand. So we can convert across most of our brand portfolio already, and we have more dedicated conversion brands and the addressable market is broad, and it's not just the U.S. It's actually EMEAA, where there's a large -- the largest unbranded proportion of hotels. And in China, conversions are picking up. So we think there's a lot of runway in conversions. And we're not looking at it as a percentage of signings and openings. Actually, I don't really care about the percentage. What I cares is that both grow. I care that new build signings grow, and they grew globally and that conversions grow, and they grow in absolute figures and the proportions can fall wherever they may. Michael, let me turn it over to you for the detail.

Sure. Thanks, Elie. Just to give you the numbers here, I think it may be a little surprising to say and to hear that only 20% of our pipeline is typically conversion around that. But there's logic behind that. It's because they come in and out of the pipeline much quicker as obviously, it takes not as much time to get those open as it does a new build. And so -- but if you look at 2025, just to give you a feel of that, if you look at our openings, roughly 40% of those openings around the world were conversions with 50 -- roughly 54% being new build, and then there were some other items in there as well. And then, of course, our signings were 52% conversion and 43% new build. So the reason you see those higher numbers in the signings and openings is that they come out quicker. And so that's why we would see overall the pipeline having a smaller percentage over time than what you see opening and signing.

And this does conclude our Q&A session. I would like to hand the call back over to Elie for closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone. It's been great to connect with you today. We are very proud of what our teams have accomplished in 2025, and we remain confident in our ability to continue delivering on our strategy and driving shareholder value creation going forward. Our next market communication will be our first quarter trading update on Thursday, the 7th of May. Thank you for your time and your interest in IHG, and I look forward to catching up with you soon.