Tripadvisor, Inc. (TRIP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. I think in the interest of time, we'll get started with the next session. It's my pleasure to welcome to the stage the team from Tripadvisor, Matt Goldberg, CEO; Mike Noonan, CFO. Thanks for being at the conference again this year.

Good to be having us.

So maybe just to level set and lay the foundation for the discussion. I would love to just kind of hear some of the key themes coming out of Q2 earnings across the segments of the business and what you're seeing in the broader current demand picture.

Yes. So in Q2, I think the biggest thing coming out of Q2 is really the progress we are making to shift the mix in the business. We're really seeing our marketplace businesses come on. Over the last 12 months, I would say Viator and TheFork, which is our Experiences and European dining business, are now nearly 60% of our revenue. 2 years ago, they were burning. This year, they're contributing nearly 1/4 of our profit over that 12-month period. So really excited about that. And when you look across, experiences is the most exciting part of travel, and I think we are well positioned to go and win in that category to drive meaningful double-digit growth and EBITDA expansion. And there's a lot of reasons for that. I know we'll get into it. We are excited about how TheFork is progressing. We think dining in Europe is a great position to have, given the traveler perspective on dining as an experience and a category that they care about, but also corridors into Europe and intra-Europe. It's really good to have the market leader for dining in Europe. And then, of course, we're making progress on our transformation of TripAdvisor and really focusing on what matters most, which is the highest value audience, which is largely increasingly going to come to us direct, is going to log in increasingly book and be a member, and we intend to enhance our membership and reward that. So that's really exciting. All of that is underpinned by an opportunity to bring our brands together to drive synergistic value, underpinned by AI, and we're really excited. We believe we're going to be a winner in AI, and we're setting ourselves up for that.

Great. Well, let's touch on that topic in AI. Maybe just from a high level, broadly, how is AI impacting or not your business? And just share any early learnings from generative search optimization, how you're showing up in AI search and any impact from zero-click search on Google?

Well, look, the way we're showing up, I don't need to say what I think is happening. There's third-party research out there. We just saw Semrush, which showed the citation rates, and we came up #8 in there, similar to what we're seeing, a really good strong citation rate, double-digit citation rate. And we were the only travel company and brand to come up in the top 20. And that's because our brand is highly valued. We have content that is high quality, and we're focused on positioning ourselves well. Now while SEO has its challenges, and you talk about zero-click search, we're positioning ourselves to adjust to that. First, for our strategy to get more travelers to come direct to think about how we want to leverage our content and data. But similarly, how we use our SEO capability to appear highly in AI-first search. And our partnerships are driving that. We're doing a lot of partnership to learn, learn about AI-first search, multimodal search, agentic AI. And our view is that we're going to position ourselves leveraging all of these assets to really shape how AI changes the travel future, and we're excited about it.

And you have obviously a history and a muscle that you've built out around SEO and SEM optimization. Maybe just talk about how that can help you in a world of AI search in ensuring that you're showing up and optimizing inside of generative search.

Well, absolutely. I mean the same skills that allow you to be crawled and cited are the same skills for SEO that they are for AI. That's what Google has indicated they're seeing. That's what we're seeing with our capability. Clearly, brands that are trusted, and we are still the most trusted brand of all the travel verticals. Content that is from real travelers. So user-generated content is very helpful. We're focused on that content asset and ensuring that not only is that a stable and durable content asset that continues to renew itself, but it's something we're going to focus on for the future. So we're going to make it easier for travelers to rate and review and leave their points of view on our platform. We can leverage AI to make it easier, to make it more effective, but they're real travel reviews, not AI-generated reviews, real traveler reviews. So we are very excited about how that's performing. And what we're seeing is that AI-first traffic from that search ecosystem, sometimes called generative engine optimization is growing exponentially. It's a small base, but it's growing exponentially, and the traffic is higher intent. So we're converting it more effectively. And every single one of our partnerships is around a learning agenda and being very adaptive and eclectic about what the value exchange is could be that we're going to license, could be that we're going to see traffic that we're going to convert. It could be that we're going to build entirely new experiences in our partnerships that we're going to share revenue for. So we're really excited. And I think the proof is that we get called from all of the major LLM companies saying, let's figure out how to do something together. And we've signed 5 deals in the last 6 months. So that's exciting, and we're going to learn and scale.

Great. Well, maybe let's move to Viator and experiences. From a demand perspective, just talk about the trends you're seeing in experiences more broadly. And any updated views on the competitive landscape and market structure, which is evolving with various players entering the space?

Well, experiences is the most exciting category in travel. It's the fastest growing. It's going to grow faster than the category overall. And I believe that we are better positioned than anyone to go after it because we have these unique advantages. We have brands that are trusted. We've got a vertical experiences marketplace in Viator with the largest supply of asset, 400,000 experiences from 65,000 operators. It's multiples larger than anybody else. Quantity is not everything. Quality is important, too, and we're constantly thinking about the quality, but that quantity allows us to get not only our flywheel spinning and serve the demand, but also to go and serve others, the third parties that we're serving very profitably. It's incremental bookings for us. We are getting far more efficient in our marketing. We're investing in product R&D and seeing that we can make really meaningful improvements in our -- reducing our bounce rates, increasing our booking initiation rates and our conversion rates, all of which are growing double digits. We think that the combination of Viator as a deep vertical and TripAdvisor as a demand generation platform, there are so many assets at TripAdvisor that we can use to drive both growth and together get efficiency, which we think means operating leverage and strategic advantage. And if you think about TripAdvisor and that brand and how well known it is globally and how much of our traffic is coming from the U.S., Europe and Asia, we can use that brand to drive demand, to match supply and demand to take the data to target not only the most high-intent audience, but also the best supply. And we're using that. And we're seeing that demand-driven supply targeting is actually paying off because we're able to get more supply around new geos, more supply around new categories and get it matched to that demand so that when we do bring new suppliers onto the platform, we're getting their first booking much faster. And that also helps that we have the leading content rating and review platform in the world because you need ratings and reviews for people to try your product. And that really all works together. So we think together, that's an advantage, and we're going to lean into it. And I said at earnings, we see real synergy potential between the 2, and we're going to go after it.

Maybe expand a little bit more on that dual brand approach with Viator and Brand Trip and leaning into that for experiences. How do you ensure -- like why is that the right approach? And how do you ensure that optimizing things like marketing ROI and it's not dilutive for one brand over another?

Well, it's the right approach because we -- first of all, it's not new. We've been testing quite a bit over the last couple of years, and we've had some real success. So having 2 brands on the shelf allows you to go after audiences in the way that it is most effective to acquire those customers. It might be more effective to acquire TripAdvisor. It might be more effective to acquire at Viator. And if we do that well together, we can drive growth while keeping EBITDA stable or we can drive more EBITDA while keeping growth stable because having 2 brands allows you to go out into those sort of auctions and be far more effective. But that's not all -- it's not just marketing. We also see opportunity around R&D. So when we're investing in optimizing our funnel, when we're thinking about the way we merchandise, the way that we do our sort, take friction out and make these far more sticky experiences, it doesn't make sense to do it in 2 separate places. We can do it once and export the learnings from one brand to the other. We can go after supply and have supply go across both of those brands. And increasingly, we think leveraging the data asset and going after an international opportunity because we've been largely U.S.-sourced for our traffic. We have opportunities to go after Europe, you think about TripAdvisor in Europe. And I think we'll be able to make some real strides there in the quarters and years to come.

Great. Another area within Viator is B2B, your third-party point of sale as a channel, and that's been growing best for you. Maybe just share why you think that's incremental to bookings as opposed to cannibalizing the Viator point of sale? And how sustainable is that as a driver of growth for Viator?

Sure. I'll take that one. First of all, third party or we call 3P channel is a pretty diverse channel. It encapsulates travel agents, white labels, affiliates and our merchant partners and the OTAs. It is the smallest channel, to be fair, but it's growing fastest. And to be really clear, it's a channel we have invested behind, right, to make it easier to connect folks -- connect these partners into experiences. So has been very purposeful to help power all these channels and empower the merchant OTAs. So why? Why do we do this? It is very incremental both from a revenue and profit perspective. From a revenue perspective, we are getting economics on bookings that are very difficult for us to get, i.e., in Europe, for example. These bookings come without marketing. So they're very profitable for us. So the incrementality is very important for our business model as we scale, it helps support our scale, helps support our investments around the global platform. So the incremental point is important. Secondly, we -- this is enabling the experiences category to come online. It's one of the biggest unlocks of growth for the entire category, and we will benefit greatly from that. So if we are empowering partners around the world to bring more people, bring awareness to, hey, I didn't know you could do this online and book through a channel. You know what, we have a really good chance and a good opportunity to acquire to that user the next time they interact with our channel. So for those reasons, we're really pleased with the performance, and we'll continue to invest behind this.

Great. I was just going to say you asked about the competitive intensity in this category. And I think this is a real competitive advantage for us to be positioned to serve B2B as well as B2C. And we're focused on it, and we're -- I think the supply that we have means that people really want to work with us. So it's a very diverse channel, and we think there's opportunity there in the future. But we also know that having Viator be the leading point of sale is the key, and we want to make it more direct, more in the app, more sticky and get people to repeat. And that's why we're seeing shifting cohort unit economics, which is really exciting.

Great. I guess maybe shifting to the kind of growth versus margin debate. First, what is kind of the world view and how you're optimizing or managing the Viator segment for growth versus margins? And maybe just double-click on some of the specific initiatives we talked about, the B2B or 3P point of sale, the dual-brand approach and how that does or doesn't impact your view of being able to achieve OTA-like margins over a long enough time horizon?

Yes, I'll take that. Matt, you can chime in where you want to. So I think we've been pretty consistent in saying we are growing as fast as we can with unit economics that support long-term -- our long-term margin goals. And that's an important, important statement. I think when we look at the flywheel, acquisition flywheel, newer acquisition does tend to be expensive. It's all measured on that repeat business and coming back to you. And so we do believe, as you mentioned, that we can achieve OTA-like margins over the longer term. Why do we believe that? We continue to look at very healthy take rates. So our unit economics are favorable there. We have very high gross margins. So our ability to leverage EBITDA margins relative to gross margins really come down to how you think about that marketing spend and fixed costs. On marketing spend, we continue, as I just mentioned, to focus on the repeat user. the acquisition and then bringing people back. And when they tend to come back with us for repeat usage, they tend to come back less and less through paid channels. So a very important piece of how we think about the leverageability in the model. And when we look out in that fourth, fifth and sixth booking, those contribution margins are very strong, and it gives me confidence in that margin statement. Secondly, this is a big year for our experiences team in product and product work. And you can see how we're investing in that this year in the P&L. That translates and intend to translate to conversion wins. So all the conversion wins on the product side that we can actually acquire or convert fewer clicks into bookings is leverageability in the marketing spend. And then leverage on fixed costs, we certainly, over the longer term, would expect those fixed costs to grow slower than revenue growth, which further supports that. So we feel really good about where we are in our growth and growth and profitability algorithm. We would expect in the current flying formation to continue to progress the margin. We're on a track to do what we said we're going to do, double margins this year, which we're really excited about, and we'll continue to do so. With respect to your dual-branded question, and as Matt alluded to, so we are -- we want to go out and make the smartest decision possible about acquiring a user period, not really worried about where segment and where it's going to come and where it's going to flow. How do we acquire that user the best possible way and gives us the best possible chance to have that user to stay with us. That's it. And so that may be through -- and that may be through TripAdvisor, it may be through Viator. And certainly, that's going to depend on different markets, different keywords, different auctions. That's where the excitement and the nimbleness comes from in terms of our marketing teams. And so you heard me say a little bit even in our guide this quarter, around there can be some variability shifting between TripAdvisor and Viator. And we're not so focused on that segment piece per se, but how we make smart acquisitions. And so we may have more acquisition opportunities at TA, and that would drive more expense in the TA segment and drive some more profitability in the Viator segment. All the while, we're going to manage this experience business to be a long-term sustainable growth business with growing profitability.

I do want to go back to the supply comment for Viator experiences more broadly. I think historically, it's been more of a North America-focused supply type of business.

Not supply. Demand.

Demand, demand. Yes. Yes.

Is there a growth engine in expanding internationally, other regions of the world that you're focused on? Or are you still focused on the core kind of North America customer?

We are definitely focused on expanding growth, going after new TAM. And there's a lot of different ways to get there. There's offline to online. There is, as you say, going after new geographies. And really, we think we have lots of assets to leverage to go after it. The TripAdvisor brand where it is strong, where we are currently not leaning in as much as we possibly could. There's opportunities there. I think Europe is really interesting. But certainly, we think it can be a global platform. So there's geographic expansion. There's new categories that we haven't been highly penetrated in. So we're relatively low penetration and attractions and ticket attractions, whether that's live or museums or there's a lot more that we can be doing there. And then, of course, there's other categories that are coming on strong, whether it be people who are focused on sports or music or wellness, and we can really create experiences and bring on inventory. And then finally, we're -- we've been pretty focused on the top experiences around the world. There's second and third-tier destinations that we can go after, including in the United States that we think there will be a lot of growth. So we see many different ways to grow. And we think that by really being aligned and coordinated, we're going to go after this, and we're going to accelerate growth. We're going to continue to accrete profitability. And we feel really good about the growth and profit progression. Remember, we got profitable in 2023, and we added on in 2024. We said we're going to double again in 2025. And we think that, that -- we are literally just getting started. There is a lot of headroom ahead.

Got it. Let's turn to the Brand Tripadvisor segment here. And you've talked about historically getting back to growth in 2026. So I'm curious if you could just expand on what's embedded in that assumption? What do we have to believe to get back to growth in 2026 within Brand Tripadvisor specifically?

Yes. And we started this year with that ambition for sure. And I think underpinning that is stabilization in the core legacy business, the core meta business. And that was -- there was an assumption around stabilization, particularly in traffic. Now I think as we sit here today, it's probably a little harder, right? We've seen the ecosystem continue to evolve for sure. And traffic has -- particularly on the free side, has been a little bit more headwinds to it. Now we've done a really good job, I think, on the pricing side, a lot of product innovation help rebust a lot of that. So I think as we sit here today and we think about 2026, we're in early plannings, as you would expect us to be thinking about that. It's about how we narrow our focus, really think about the engagement-led products we've been working on to drive that truly people staying and doing things with us in a product-led way. It's thinking about alignment -- continued alignment of our cost structure reflective of that. And so listen, we're not taking this off the table. But I think we are thinking about how we continue to double down and focus our resources to deliver.

And Matt, can you just expand on some of the strategic initiatives? You've given some KPIs around app-based usage and monetization of more of a direct app-based user, logged-in user. What are you seeing now as you -- we're now further into that strategic...

Right. All of our traffic is not created equal. In fact, the traffic that gets impacted by the SEO evolution is the lower-value traffic. We're focused on the high-value traffic that is increasingly coming to us more direct. They are logging in. They are downloading our app. They're looking to book. They're planning, they're contributing, and we're focused on that. So when you look at our KPIs, we're more interested in a member and logged-in app user than any other user. And that is the highest growth segment of our traffic. So we'll lean into that. And we've launched new elements to our membership. So we're going to enhance the value exchange when someone comes in and logs in with us, and we're rewarding not only your activity in booking, but we're going to reward engagement. The more time you spend with us, the more you contribute, the more that you look and build an itinerary, we're going to reward that. And that's real credits in your wallet. And so that's unique in the sector, and we're excited about how membership can bring that together. But in the end, what's most exciting is the way that TripAdvisor and the assets that we have, that quality content, the data, the brand of trust in a world of AI, we think we can assemble that to really drive the experiences future and get real value as an AI innovator in travel.

Great. Maybe if we drill down specifically to the Branded Hotel segment, returned to growth for the first time in a couple of years. Maybe just talk about the moving pieces of getting that to growth this past quarter and how sustainable or not that is as we look forward?

Yes. Some of it just echoed what I just said. We've seen really strong pricing this year. And again, just as a reminder, pricing is, I think, as much driven by a healthy travel market for sure. We have to have that. But it's also by a lot of product innovation. And product innovation is simply meaning how do we deliver to our advertising partners, the OTAs and hotels a very high-value click that converts. And so we've done a lot of things, if you just looked at our surfaces over the past several quarters even a lot to innovate around that. So as we look forward to that piece and trajectory around that, we're going to continue to try to innovate around pricing and always want to deliver value to our customers in that regard. So a lot of it comes down to traffic, right, and where we see it. Now I think we -- to be fair, an easier comp this quarter, right? As we move forward, we'll continue to evaluate that. But again, we're going to be focusing on managing the asset prudently and focus on how we deliver value to our customers.

And then just on margins for Brand Tripadvisor, the dual brand approach on experiences probably factors into this. But what are -- how should we think about the growth versus margin dynamic for Brand Tripadvisor from here as we look into the back half of the year and next year?

Yes. Well, we started this year talking outlook for Brand Tripadvisor on a margin perspective. And we did say we expected margin pressure really as a result of the revenue pressure. And so we still expect that. I think what you've seen from us in managing this brand is one of thinking about the investments on the revenue side, which is on the price piece I just talked about, but also thinking very prudently about delivering margin and cash flow, protecting that as best we can. And so we've been very thoughtful about how we spend in the paid markets. We've said our paid ROASs have been pretty consistent year-over-year. So we're very thoughtful about how we, again, think about margin in this business. And we've been pretty prudent in thinking about our operating costs and operating structure. And so you would -- you should expect we'll continue to do so as we think through top line and revenue implications as we move through this year.

Can you just talk about that opportunity on the fixed cost side in various scenarios for growth, how much is inside of your control to pull levers on costs? What are you seeing on cost savings from AI or other process improvements? Just anything there that you could share?

Yes. So I'll say it 2 ways. Just on the cost -- 3 ways. On the cost things that are in our control, one is like that growth algorithm. So we could go out and try to drive more growth by paying more and more in the auctions, right? And again, I think those are things we always evaluate. And again, but we're trying to strike how to deliver as much consistent profitability in this business as possible. So we're pretty prudent in that regard. Secondly, it's a fixed cost and how do we think about continuing to look at our top line revenue and think about our fixed cost and make sure there's alignment there. And then three, there are things operationally in that fixed cost piece, which you mentioned, that we're always doing when we think about AI, AI technologies. And you see that across our businesses where it's customer service related. We're seeing more on the content piece. A lot of just repetitive things without the organization certainly are in the front line of things that we're looking at to replace and I see that in the finance organization as well. So I think there continues to be ample opportunities for us to kind of get at that fixed cost piece, which we are always doing.

We put AI tools into the hands of every single employee in our company everywhere around the world and encourage them to be experimenting with it, not only that they can serve the consumer so they can do their jobs better. This is the -- and we've already seen some efficiency gains. This is the first year where we'll go into make AI efficiency and advantage as part of our annual planning, and we're going to measure it. And it's table stakes. It's what everybody is doing. I'm far more excited about what we're doing in our product and through our partnerships, but we are putting it at the core of how we run the business.

Great. Let's move to TheFork segment and just frame what you're seeing from a demand perspective there. And you've done a lot on the partnership side at TheFork. So talk about some of the partnerships and potential runway for more partnerships there to unlock demand.

Do you want to kick off with demand, and I'll do partners.

Yes. Thank you. Yes, I'll kick off demand. I think the growth algorithm at TheFork was pretty exciting. And we see it in kind of 3 pieces, and I'll let Matt touch on the last piece of the partnership piece. But -- we have a really exciting, growing diversification in that revenue stream. It started very much as a B2C-only business in 11 countries in Europe. We still think there's a lot of runway for us in the B2C product. We're in 11 countries in Europe, but the preponderance of revenue is clustered in more deeper penetrated countries. So how we further penetrate some of those 11 is exciting for B2C. We have a very fast but smaller, growing B2B business, and that's responding to our customers on the other side -- one side of the marketplace, our operators, restaurant operators and how do we help them, right? So our operators look for 2 things from us, demand and helping them manage the restaurant. And I think we've been investing against the product for some time now that we really feel good about that product we're delivering to our restaurant operators. So that B2B, we will continue to push B2B as it solves customer problems, our restaurant operator problems. And we do see a further diversification of that B2B, B2C mix over time, which we think is a really healthy one and drives a very much stickier revenue growth as it is a recurring revenue software type of product. And the third piece, which is the partnerships, which is exciting, which Matt, I'll let you talk...

Look, I think we get excited about the diversification of this business and the sustainability of it. The partnerships are a good testament to the brand in Europe. It is the leading dining brand. And so when you have players who want to come to us and do affiliate gift card anniversary celebration programs like we did with Vodafone, those can be replicated and meaningful. Then we did a really interesting partnership long term with Mastercard, which is all about dining as an experience and going and identifying exclusive and hard-to-access restaurants for the users, doing experiences behind-the-scenes tours with top chefs and then, of course, they're going to partner with us on the events that we do and be the preferred payment provider. So that's exciting. And we have partnerships with the folks at Michelin. And that's a suggestion that we're not just a commodity offer, but rather Michelin wants to partner with us. And so we're going deep there. That's just a suggestion we can do, and there is a lot more that we can do in partnerships. So we're excited about that as well.

And then just on the margin front at TheFork, how do you think about the structural margin profile of that business? And as you do more B2B and partnership stuff, how does that factor in versus the historical B2C mix?

Yes. So that is an important piece of our push in the last couple of years. I think when Matt and I joined, this business was losing about $30 million a year in EBITDA. Big focus of ours to come in, number one and really look deeply at unit economics. on our supply side, which really affects the B2C and the B2B side. So we did, I think, a lot of hard work in terms of thinking about operational efficiencies and reorganizing that business to really address the marketplace needs on a more efficient manner. So we're pretty pleased about they're going to deliver -- they delivered 20% revenue growth, 22% constant currency and on target to nearly triple margins this year, which we set out at the beginning of the year. So I think that B2B business helps support that margin attainment, and we're going to continue to focus on making sure we are bringing the right supply in, supply that utilizes the marketplace, supply that utilizes our B2B tooling, which helps in that and at the same time, being very focused on efficiency of cost.

Got it. Maybe in the last couple of minutes here, I wanted to touch on capital allocation, how you think about the potential for asset value unlock. You've in the last year, cleaned up a lot of the share class structure. You're now one-class share structure. How does that impact at all kind of the priorities and where you're thinking about allocating capital investments in the business, returning capital to shareholders? And as you talk to the Board, how do you think about managing various assets inside of your portfolio versus the potential to unlock asset value?

Do you want to kick off? I'll kick off or I'll close out.

You close out, yes, better. So just our capital framework, obviously, it is a priority of growing organically, first and foremost. And we have a very low-intensity CapEx model, right? So most of our investment comes through our P&L, as you would imagine. And so coming out of the LTRIP transaction, where we repurchased a healthy amount of our stock, 17% retired there. We feel very good about that transaction, simplified our capital structure and I think greatly simplified our story, which is important. I think we have then now have a capital structure that is very strong from a net cash position and a debt position. We are looking at -- continue to look at opportunities to think about if we're happy with our cash right now, future excess cash, we look to redeploy into buying back stock, and we've announced our program, which how we think about that, a bit more programmatic way of looking at our future cash flow to buy that back in our shares, and we'll continue to do that. We always have -- we'll keep some ambition or thought around M&A as a way to enhance or speed up our organic activity, but our priority clearly remains in the organic one.

I would just say we're increasingly positioned as an experience company, and that is the most exciting part of travel. We're going after it. We think we're really well-positioned for it. Mike and I want to create value. We want to create value quickly, but we also know that it's not an overnight thing. It's something that happens quarter-by-quarter, year-by-year. You can see the progress in our mix. You can see how we are driving a growth and profitability algorithm for the experiences category. We believe that there are big organic opportunities. We're going to go after them by aligning our assets, by driving synergy. We think there's growth and efficiency. We think there's operating leverage and strategic advantage there. We are also cognizant that there may be opportunities to go and acquire some assets to go after that category. And where we see opportunities, we're going to look at that. And of course, we're always looking at our portfolio. And we're open-minded. If we thought there was a way to accrete value for our shareholders quickly by doing something different in our portfolio, we will absolutely look at that. We're open-minded and flexible. But we're really excited about the way we're operating these assets, and that's what we plan on continuing to do quarter-by-quarter, year by year.

Great.

We do that.

Yes. Do that. Well, with that, please join me in thanking the team from TripAdvisor for being here this year again.