Gross bookings for the quarter for the hotels and packages segment came in at $559 million, witnessing a strong growth of 27% year-on-year on a constant currency basis. Linked to seasonality and improved pricing, the adjusted margin growth came in much stronger at 38.8% year-on-year on constant currency terms and stood at $98.8 million during the quarter. Take rates for the quarter were in line at about 17.7% in this segment. We witnessed strong growth across both domestic and international destinations with our international hotel business surpassing the pre-pandemic peak. We continue to work on sharper targeting of various demand segments via a multi-platform approach, while also increasing the breadth of our offering through directly contracted hotels, both in the domestic as well as the international markets.
This two-pronged approach is helping us drive strong growth in this business segment. In our bus ticketing business, gross bookings for the quarter stood at $269.8 million, growing at 20.3% year-on-year in constant currency terms. Adjusted margin stood at $26.9 million, registering a strong year-on-year growth of over 33.8% in constant currency. Take rates for the bus business again came in line at about 10% for the quarter. During this high season quarter, we invested behind our brand campaigns to drive top of mind recall for our brands, further thus helping us increase the mix of organic traffic. As a result, the marketing and sales promotion costs for the quarter came in slightly higher at 4.9% compared to the 4.6% in the previous low season quarter, but were lower than the 5.2% in the comparable quarter of last year.
While the return on these brand campaigns tends to build over a longer duration, the initial response has been positive and should help us continue to target around 70% of our orders coming in from our existing customers or via repeat orders. All other costs were largely in line and we continue to drive year-on-year efficiencies in our fixed cost base. Another highlight of the quarter was our strong working capital management during peak seasonality. While the previous quarter had seen a deployment of about $12 million in working capital as we were getting into peak seasonality, we saw a much higher working capital release of about $35 million during this quarter. Accordingly, compared to the $37 million in cash operating profits for the quarter, the cash position has improved by almost $70 million over the previous quarter, taking our total cash position to about $608 million at the end of the quarter.
During the last quarter, we announced the signing of the agreement to take a majority position in Savaari Car Rentals and I am happy to report that the transaction was concluded by early December. The teams are working on consolidating all the supply with Savaari and thereby driving efficiencies in supply acquisition and management. With this, we expect to drive much better efficiencies in our supply acquisition, facilitating the scaling up of our intercity cab business. We recently filed an intimation for our 2028 note holders on their right to tender the notes for repurchase at par by the company at the end of the third year of the notes as the terms and conditions of the indenture on 15 February 2024. We shall update the progress of the tender process in due course.
With that, I’d like to turn the call back to Vipul for Q&A.
Vipul Garg: Thanks Mohit. [Operator Instructions] The first question is from the line of Vijit Jain of Citi. Vijit, you may please ask your question now.
Vijit Jain: Thanks Vipul and congratulations on a terrific set of numbers yet again. My first question is, just looking at the hotels and packages business obviously has done really very well in the current quarter. I was wondering on two things. One, can you call out any specific benefits in terms of, either the average realizations per room night or in terms of your profitability that you had during this quarter because of both Cricket World Cup as well as other in general travel appetite. Is there anything, any special or any extraordinary gains that you had in this quarter from that side? And how should one think about pricing margins in this segment going forward? That’s my first question.
Rajesh Magow: Yes, maybe I can take that Vijit and thank you. You’re right. Hotel and packages growth. Given that this is also a season quarter and we had the demand momentum, especially after World Cup, it sort of picked up significantly because till the World Cup, it was sort of — the focus was lot more while there were some gains for specific cities where India was featuring in terms of their World Cup games, but largely people were sort of focused on watching World Cup matches over the weekend. And therefore the first half of that quarter of this quarter, till the World Cup was relatively speaking, the seasonality momentum hadn’t really picked up, but the moment World Cup was over, it sort of took off, and I guess sort of more than made up overall on a quarter basis.
