Tripadvisor at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Shift to Experiences

Published 08/09/2025, 23:50
Tripadvisor at Goldman Sachs Conference: Strategic Shift to Experiences

On Monday, 08 September 2025, Tripadvisor (NASDAQ:TRIP) presented its strategic vision at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025. The company outlined its focus on expanding its experiences business, driven by Viator and TheFork, which now contribute significantly to revenue and profit. While optimistic about AI-driven growth and international expansion, Tripadvisor acknowledged challenges in the SEO landscape and revenue pressures in its branded hotel segment.

Key Takeaways

  • Viator and TheFork now make up nearly 60% of Tripadvisor’s revenue.
  • The company is leveraging AI for user engagement and operational efficiencies.
  • Tripadvisor aims to double margins in the experiences segment by 2025.
  • TheFork is experiencing strong growth, with a 28% revenue increase.
  • Tripadvisor is expanding its international presence, particularly in Europe.

Financial Results

  • Viator and TheFork account for nearly 60% of Tripadvisor’s revenue over the last 12 months.
  • These businesses contributed nearly a quarter of Tripadvisor’s profit during the same period.
  • TheFork is on track to nearly triple margins this year.
  • Tripadvisor expects margin pressure on the Brand Tripadvisor segment due to revenue pressure.
  • The company is focused on managing the experiences business for long-term sustainable growth with growing profitability.

Operational Updates

  • Tripadvisor is shifting the business mix towards marketplace businesses like Viator and TheFork.
  • AI is being used to improve user engagement and operational efficiencies, including content creation and customer service.
  • Viator offers 400,000 experiences from 65,000 operators.
  • Exponential growth is seen in AI-first traffic and higher conversion rates.
  • Five AI-related partnership deals have been signed in the last six months.
  • Product R&D aims to reduce bounce rates and increase booking initiation and conversion rates in Viator.
  • Tripadvisor is expanding internationally, particularly in Europe, and diversifying its offerings.

Future Outlook

  • Tripadvisor aims for meaningful double-digit growth and EBITDA expansion in the experiences category.
  • The company intends to enhance its membership program and reward user engagement.
  • Tripadvisor is positioning itself as a winner in AI, leveraging partnerships and internal development.
  • The company is focused on stabilizing the core legacy business and driving engagement-led products to achieve growth in 2026.
  • Tripadvisor plans to continue to accrete profitability and accelerate growth, with plans to double profitability again in 2025.

Q&A Highlights

  • Discussion on the dual-brand approach with Viator and Tripadvisor to optimize marketing ROI and R&D efforts.
  • Analysis of the B2B channel for Viator and its incrementality to bookings, contributing to scale and investments.
  • Exploration of international expansion opportunities for Viator and Tripadvisor, including Europe, attractions, and wellness experiences.
  • Assessment of the potential for asset value unlock and capital allocation strategies, including organic growth, M&A, and share repurchases.

For more detailed insights, please refer to the full transcript.

Full transcript - Goldman Sachs Communicopia + Technology Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker: 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, and Mike Noonan, CFO. Thanks for being at the conference again this year.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Thanks for having us.

Unidentified speaker: To level set and lay the foundation for the discussion, 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.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Yeah. 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, you know, I would say Viator and TheFork, which is our experiences and the European dining business, are now nearly 60% of our revenue. Two years ago, they were burning. This year, they’re contributing nearly a quarter of our profit over that 12-month period. We’re really excited about that. When you look across, you know, experiences are the most exciting part of travel. I think we are well positioned to go and win in that category, to drive meaningful double-digit growth and EBITDA expansion. 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, quarters into Europe and intra-Europe. It’s really good to have the market leader for dining in Europe. 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. We intend to enhance our membership and reward that. That’s really exciting. All of that is underpinned by an opportunity to bring our brands together to drive synergistic value, underpinned by AI. We’re really excited. We believe we’re going to be a winner in AI, and we’re setting ourselves up for that.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Let’s touch on that topic in AI. Maybe just from a high level, broadly, how is AI impacting or not your business? Just share any early learnings from, you know, generative search optimization, how you’re showing up in AI search, and any impact from zero-click search on Google.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: 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 number eight in there. It’s similar to what we’re seeing, a really good, strong citation rate, double-digit citation rate. We were the only travel company and brand to come up in the top 20. 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. Our partnerships are driving that.

We’re doing a lot of partnership to learn about AI-first search, multimodal search, agentic AI. 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.

Unidentified speaker: 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.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: 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. 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. 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 traveler reviews, not AI-generated reviews, real traveler reviews.

We are very excited about how that’s performing. What we’re seeing is that AI-first traffic from that search ecosystem, sometimes called generative search optimization, is growing exponentially. It’s a small base, but it’s growing exponentially, and the traffic is higher intent. We’re converting it more effectively. Every single one of our partnerships is around a learning agenda and being very adaptive and eclectic about what the value exchange is. It 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. We’re really excited. 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. We’ve signed five deals in the last six months.

That’s exciting, and we’re going to learn and scale.

Unidentified speaker: Great. 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.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Experiences is the most exciting category in travel. It’s the fastest growing. It’s going to grow faster than the category overall. 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 asset, 400,000 experiences from 65,000 operators. It’s multiples larger than anybody else. Quantity is not everything. Quality is important too. 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-party channels 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. 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. We’re using that.

We’re seeing that 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. It also helps that we have the leading content, leading and review platform in the world because you need ratings and reviews for people to try your products. That really all works together. We think together, that’s an advantage, and we’re going to lean into it. I said in earnings, we see real synergy potential between the two, and we’re going to go after it.

Unidentified speaker: Maybe expand a little bit more on that dual brand approach with Viator and Tripadvisor and leaning into that for experiences. How do you ensure, like, why is that the right approach? How do you ensure that optimizing things like marketing ROI is not diluted for, you know, one brand over another?

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: It’s the right approach because, 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. Having two brands on the shelf allows you to go after audiences in the way that is most effective to acquire those customers. It might be more effective to acquire at Tripadvisor. It might be more effective to acquire at Viator. 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 two brands allows you to go out into those sort of auctions and be far more effective. That’s not all. It’s not just marketing. We also see opportunity around R&D.

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 two 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 those brands. 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. I think we’ll be able to make some real strides there in the quarters and years to come.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Another area within Viator is B2B or third-party point of sale as a channel, and that’s been growing fast 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.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Sure. I’ll take that one. You know, first of all, third-party, or we call it 3P channel, is a pretty diverse channel. It encapsulates travel agents, white labels, affiliates, and our merchant partners in the OTAs. It is the smallest channel, to be fair, but it’s growing faster. 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. It’s been very purposeful to help power all these channels and empower the merchant OTAs. Why do we do this? It is very incremental both from a revenue and profit perspective. You know, from a revenue perspective, we are getting economics on bookings that have been very difficult for us to get, i.e., in Europe, for example. These bookings come without marketing. They’re very profitable for us.

The incrementality is very important for our business model as we scale. It helps support our scale and helps support our investments around the global platform. The incrementality point is important. Secondly, 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. 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 good opportunity to acquire that user the next time they interact with our channel. For those reasons, we’re really pleased with the performance and will continue to invest behind this.

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

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Great. I guess maybe, shifting to the kind of growth versus margin debate. First, what is kind of the worldview and how you’re optimizing or managing the Viator segment for growth versus margins? Maybe just double click on some of the specific initiatives we talked about, the B2B or, you know, 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.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. I’ll take that, Matt. You can chime in where you want to. I think we’ve been pretty consistent saying we are growing as fast as we can with unit economics that support our long-term margin goals. That’s an important statement. I think, when we look at the flywheel, the acquisition flywheel, new user acquisition does tend to be expensive, it’s all measured on that repeat business and coming back to you. 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 comes down to how you think about that marketing spend and fixed cost.

On marketing spend, we continue, as I just mentioned, to focus on the repeat user, the acquisition and then bringing people back. When they tend to come back with us over repeat usage, they tend to come back less and less through paid channels. That’s a very important piece of how we think about the leverageability in the model. When we look out in that fourth, fifth, and sixth booking, those contribution margins are very strong. It gives me confidence in that margin statement. Secondly, this is a big year for our experiences team in product and product work. You can see how we’re investing in that this year in the P&L. That translates and is intended to translate to conversion wins. 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.

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. We feel real good about where we are in our growth and profitability algorithm. We would expect in the current flying formation to continue to progress the margin. We have, 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. We’ll continue to do so. With respect to your dual branded question, and as Matt alluded to, 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 give us the best possible chance to have that user to stay with us? That’s it. That may be through Tripadvisor. It may be through Viator. 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. You heard me say a little bit in our guide this quarter around, you know, there can be some variability shifting between Tripadvisor and Viator. We’re not so focused on that segment piece per se, but how we make smart acquisitions. We may have more acquisition opportunities at TA. That would drive more expense in the TA segment, drive some more profitability in the Viator segment. All the while, we’re going to manage this experiences business to be a long-term sustainable growth business with growing profitability.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: I do want to go back to the supply comment for Viator and experiences more broadly. I think, you know, historically, it’s been more of a North America focus supply type of business, not supply.

Unidentified speaker: Demand.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Demand. Yeah, demand.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Is there a growth engine in expanding internationally, you know, other regions of the world that you’re focused on, or are you still focused on the core kind of North America customer?

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: 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. 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 opportunity there. I think Europe is really interesting. We certainly 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 in attractions, in ticketed attractions, whether that’s live or museums. There’s a lot more that we can be doing there.

Of course, there are 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. Finally, we’ve been pretty focused on the top experiences around the world. There are 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. 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 we are literally just getting started.

There is a lot of headroom ahead.

Unidentified speaker: Got it. Let’s turn to the Brand Tripadvisor segment here. You’ve talked about historically getting back to growth in 2026. 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?

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Yeah. You know, we started this year with that ambition for sure. I think underpinning that is stabilization in the core and the core legacy business, the core meta business. There was 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, particularly the free side, has been a little bit more headwinds to it. We’ve done a really good job, I think, on the pricing side with a lot of product innovation and helped rebuff a lot of that. I think as we sit here today and we think about 2026, we’re in early plannings, as you would expect us to be, of 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, continual alignment of our cost structure, reflective of that. 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.

Unidentified speaker: 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’re now further into that strategic initiative?

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: You’re 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 are looking to book, they’re planning, they’re contributing, and we’re focused on that. When you look at our KPIs, we’re more interested in a member and a logged-in app user than any other user, and that is the highest growth segment of our traffic. We’ll lean into that. We’ve launched new elements to our membership. We’re going to enhance the value exchange when someone comes in and logs in with us. 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. That’s real credits in your wallet, and that’s unique in the sector. We’re excited about how membership can bring that together. 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.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Maybe if we drill down specifically to the branded hotel segment, you know, a return 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.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Yeah. Some of it just echoed what I just said. You know, we’ve seen really strong pricing this year. Again, just 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 the product innovation. The product innovation is simply meaning how do we deliver to our advertising partners, the OTAs, and hotels a very high-value click that converts. 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. As we look forward to that piece and trajectory on that, we’re going to continue to try to innovate around pricing and always want to deliver value to our customers in that regard. A lot of it comes down to traffic, right, and where we see.

I think we, to be fair, an easier comp this quarter, right? As we move forward, we’ll continue to evaluate that. Again, we’re going to be focusing on managing the asset prudently and focus on how we deliver value to our customers.

Unidentified speaker: On margins for Brand Tripadvisor, the dual brand approach on experiences probably factors into this. 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?

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Yeah. We started this year talking about outlook for the Brand Tripadvisor in a margin perspective. We did say we expected margin pressure really as a result of the revenue pressure, and 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 that I just talked about, but also thinking very prudently about delivering margin and cash flow, protecting that as best we can. We’ve been very thoughtful about how we spend in the paid markets. We’ve said our paid ROAS assets have been pretty consistent year over year, so we’re very thoughtful about how we, again, think about margin in this business.

We’ve been pretty prudent in thinking about our operating costs and operating structure, and you should expect we’ll continue to do so as we think through top line and revenue implications as we move through this year.

Unidentified speaker: 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? Anything there that you can share?

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Yeah. I don’t say two ways. Just on the cost, well, three ways. On the cost, things that are in our control. One is that growth, the growth algorithm. We could go out and try to drive more growth by paying more and more in the options, right? I think those are things we always evaluate. We are trying to strike how to deliver as much consistent profitability in this business as possible. We’re pretty prudent in that regard. Secondly, it’s a fixed cost. 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? Then, there are things operationally in that fixed cost piece, which you mentioned, that we’re always doing when we think about AI, AI technologies. You see that across our businesses where it’s customer service related.

We’re seeing more in the content, that content piece. A lot of just repetitive things within the organization certainly are on the front line of things that we’re looking at to replace. We see that in the finance organization as well. I think there continues to be ample opportunities for us to get at that fixed cost piece, which we are always doing.

Unidentified speaker: 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 so they can serve the consumer, so they can do their jobs better. This is the first, and we’ve already seen some efficiency gains. This is the first year where we’re going to, you know, make AI efficiency and advantage as part of our annual planning. We’re going to measure it. You know, it’s table stakes. It’s what everybody’s 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.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Great.

Unidentified speaker: Let’s move to TheFork segment, and just frame what you’re seeing from a demand perspective there. You’ve done a lot on the partnership side at TheFork. Talk about some of the partnerships and potential runway for more partnerships there to unlock demand.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Do you want to kick off with demand and all of your partners?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I’ll kick off the demand. You know, I think for the growth algorithm at TheFork, was pretty exciting. We see it in kind of three pieces. I’ll let Matt touch on the last piece, the partnership piece. You know, 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 deeply penetrated countries. 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, the restaurant operators, and how do we help them, right?

Our operators look for two things from us: demand and helping them manage a restaurant. I think we’ve been investing against the products for some time now that we really feel good about that product we’re delivering to our restaurant operators. That B2B, we will continue to push B2B as it solves customer problems, our restaurant operator problems. 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. The third piece, which is the partnerships, which is exciting, which Matt, I’ll let you start.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: I think, you know, 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. 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. 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. Of course, they’re going to partner with us on the events that we do, and be the preferred payment providers. That’s exciting. We have partnerships with the folks at Michelin. That’s a suggestion that we’re not just a commodity offer, but rather, Michelin wants to partner with us.

We’re going deep there. That’s just a suggestion we can do. There is a lot more that we can do in partnership. We’re excited about that as well.

Unidentified speaker: On the margin front at TheFork, how do you think about the structural margin profile of that business? As you do more B2B and partnership stuff, how does that factor in versus the historical, you know, B2C mix?

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Yeah, that is an important piece of our push the last couple of years. I think, you know, when Matt and I joined, this business was, you know, it 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. 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 in a more efficient manner. We’re pretty pleased about, you know, they’re going to deliver, you know, they delivered 28% revenue growth, 22% constant currency, and on target to nearly triple margins this year, which we set out at the beginning of the year. I think that B2B business helps support that margin attainment.

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 costs.

Unidentified speaker: 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. In the last year, you cleaned up a lot of the share class structure, one class share structure. How does that impact at all the priorities and where you’re thinking about allocating capital investments in the business, returning capital to shareholders? 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?

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: You want to kick off?

Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I’ll kick off, and I’ll close out.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: You close out. Yeah. Better. Just like our capital offshoot framework, you know, obviously, it is a priority of growing organically, first and foremost. We have a very low-intensity CapEx model, right? Most of our investment comes through our P&L, as you would imagine. Coming out of the L Trip 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 now have a capital structure that is very strong from a net cash position and a debt position. We are looking at continuing 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.

We’ve announced our program, which is how we think about that, a bit more programmatic way of looking at our future cash flow to buy that back in our shares. 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. Our priorities clearly remain in the organic one.

Unidentified speaker: I would just say we’re increasingly positioned as an experiences 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.

Where we see opportunities, we’re going to look at that. Of course, we’re always looking at our portfolio. 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. That’s what we plan on continuing to do, I think, quarter by quarter, year by year.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Agreed.

Unidentified speaker: Do that?

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Yes, let’s do it.

Unidentified speaker: Let’s do that.

Matt Goldberg, CEO, Tripadvisor: Please join me in thanking the team from Tripadvisor for being here. The field.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

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