MILAN, Reuters – Italian payment group Nexi (BIT 🙂 stuck to Thursday’s 2022 outlook. It reported a 7.1% jump in its first quarter revenues as recovering tourist flows led to “higher impacts” transactions like hotel bills.

Nexi is Europe’s largest payments company, along with France’s Worldline. In April, its merchants’ transaction business saw a 38% increase in volumes, and a 162% rise in large ticket items, mostly related to travel.

Nexi’s travel business, which includes merchant acquiring and brokerage, rebounded during the quarter. It now accounts for 34 of its pre-pandemic volumes.

In spite of Italy’s earlier relaxation of COVID-19, the first quarter revenues were 712.6million euros.

Year-on-year, earnings before interest tax, deduction and amortization increased 17.4% to 307.5 millions euros. From a year earlier, the EBITDA margin grew by four percentage points to 43%.

Nexi confirmed that revenue growth was expected to be between 7% and 9 % in 2019, with core profit increasing between 13% and 16 %, barring any worsening of the Ukraine crisis or assuming an end from the pandemic by the third quarter 2022.

Nexi has seen rapid growth through acquisitions. It completed a merger last year with SIA, a domestic rival, and Nets in Nordic. On Thursday, it announced that it had purchased 100% of Orderbird. Orderbird is a German software company that provides cloud-based services for hospitality businesses to manage bookings.

The total investment includes stakes Nexi has previously acquired.