Last week’s first-half update saw the share price rise to £2.09 but it has since given up most of its gains.

Group trading profit grew by 1% to £117.5m with revenue up 8.7% to £478.3m. The travel division is split into two sections: holidays and cruising.

The holidays unit reported a 25.3% a rise in revenue to £166.9m. Most of the increase was down to Destinology, which was bought in 2014, with the rest made up of growth in Saga Holidays and Titan Travel.

Holiday revenues booked for 2015-16 departures are 2.5% ahead of a comparable point in 2014.

Saga Cruises generated revenue of £42.8m – 1.2% down on the prior period.

The company said this was due to “the result of a changing mix of itineraries during the period”. For 2015-16 cruising departures load factors are down 1.1 percentage points to 84.3%.

Saga’s other businesses include financial services and insurance. Lance Batchelor, group chief executive said: “Continued strong cash generation has allowed us to further reduce our debt ratio, and the solid performance in our core businesses of financial services and travel has meant positive growth in underlying profitability.

“This growth was partially offset by the impact of a full six months of costs associated with becoming a listed company, a situation that will not repeat to the same extent in the second half of the year.”

The company said that it had made “good progress” in its travel division. Reservation levels for both the current and next financial year were described as “very encouraging”. Analysts at Langton Capital said that the performance added to the late summer optimism for tour operators.