Based on the NCLT order in May ’23 for the appointment of a resolution professional to operate Go First on a going concern basis, we had been optimistic of restoration of its operations. However, considering that now over 5.5 months have elapsed and there are ongoing legal challenges to the resumption, we have made a onetime provision of all the recoverable amounts towards deposits for ticket issuances, accrued incentives, taxes deducted or collected at source and recoverable from Go First during this quarter. As a result of this exceptional provision to the tune of about $10 million, the year-on-year increasing in the operating profit as per GAAP is about $2.8 million compared to about $13 million increase in adjusted operating profit, which is not impacted by this exceptional provision.
We expect small capacity increases in the second half of the year, followed by normalized growth in the domestic civil aviation industry from the beginning of the next fiscal year. Gross bookings for the quarter for hotels and packages segment stood at about $432 million, witnessing a strong growth of 34.5% on a year-on-year basis in constant currency terms. Adjusted margin for our hotels and packages business stood at about $75.7 million during the quarter, witnessing a year-on-year growth of about 36% in constant currency terms. Margins for this segment also came in line at about 17.5%. In our bus ticketing business, gross bookings for the quarter came in at $219.7 million, growing at a year-on-year basis of 21.2% in constant currency terms.
Adjusted margin stood at $21.8 million, registering a strong year-on-year growth of about 34% in constant currency terms. Margins for the bus business also came in at line at about 9.9% for the quarter. We continue to drive efficiency in our expenses and particularly so in our customer acquisition costs. Excellent top of mind recall of our brands has been driving a high mix of organic traffic for us. On top of that, almost 70% of the orders coming from our existing customers, helping us drive further cost efficiencies. Overall, marketing and sales promotion costs for the quarter came in at about 4.6% of gross bookings as compared to about 5.4% in the same quarter last year. With the COVID-19 pandemic behind us and almost every line of business having recovered to pre-pandemic levels or above, our focus is now on continuing to drive profitable growth.
Our strong balance sheet with over $0.5 billion in cash and cash equivalents gives us the flexibility to pursue both organic and inorganic opportunities of driving supply or distribution side expansion. Across our portfolio of brands, we have built significant businesses in travel services, such as air ticketing, hotels and packages and bus ticketing. We have organically scaled up a variety of other travel service offerings such as airport transfers and rail ticketing for our customers. As part of our inorganic innovative, we had invested in BookMyForex, which is a well-known ForEx service provider in India. This investment helped us in strengthening the ForEx offerings for our customers, who book overseas travel services with us and opened up another growth opportunity for us.
Along these lines, we are pleased to announce the signing up of a majority investment in Savaari Car Rentals Private Limited, which is a well-run intercity cab services company. We believe that while intracity cabs and local city buses fall under the day-to-day commute services, intercity cab services are akin to intercity bus services and, therefore, are a segment of opportunity for travel service providers like us. This is a segment with low online penetration, fragmented supply and lack of standardization in experience. We believe that there is an opportunity to transform this space with technology and offer a better value proposition, both for our suppliers as well as the customers in the years to come. The significant focus of the government of India in terms of improving the quality of highways, apart from adding to the highway infrastructure across the length and breadth of the country, can add further impetus to this segment.
This investment, which is likely to be closed in the next 2 months, is intended to accelerate our plans of building a meaningful presence in the intercity cabs business or market in India. During the quarter, we also acquired the last tranche of equity from the founders of Quest2Travel, a company engaged in providing corporate travel services to large-sized corporates. We had acquired an initial majority stake in 2019 and have been increasing our holding over the years. And this final tranche marks the completion of the process with the acquisition of 100% ownership in Quest2Travel. We will continue to look for such inorganic investments to support our future growth initiatives as well. With that, I’d like to turn the call back to Vipul for Q&A.
A – Vipul Garg: Thanks, Mohit. [Operator Instructions] The first question is from the line of Sachin Salgaonkar from Bank of America.
