Expedia Group, Inc.

Thank you for your patience. The Expedia Group Q1 2024 Financial Results Teleconference will begin shortly. Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Expedia Group Q1 2024 Financial Results Teleconference. My name is Lauren, and I will be the operator for today's call. If you wish to ask a question at the end of the presentation, please press Start Loadable 1 on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press Start Loadable 2 to cancel your request. For opening remarks, I will turn the call over to SVP Corporate Development Strategy and Investor Relations, Harship Bash. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Expedia Group's first quarter 2024 earnings call. I'm pleased to be joined on today's call by our CEO, Peter Kern, our CFO, Julie Whalen, and our incoming CEO, Arianne Gorin. As a reminder, our commentary today will include references to certain non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings release. And unless otherwise stated, any reference to expenses excludes stock-based compensation. We will also be making forward-looking statements during the call, which are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Actual results could materially differ due to factors discussed during this call and in our most recent forms 10-K, 10-Q, and other filings with the SEC. Except as required by law, we do not undertake any of the responsibility to update these forward-looking statements. Our earnings release, SEC filings, and a replay of today's call can be found on our investor relations website at ir.expediagroup.com. And with that, let me turn the call over to Peter.

Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us today. As you will know by now, this will be my last earnings call. I'm excited to be handing the reins over to Ariane, and we have reserved time for her to share some thoughts after Julie's so you can get a sense of her ambition for the company going forward. Arianna and I have been working closely these last few months to make sure she can take over without a hitch. And I just want to say I'm truly excited to see how she and our team bring this company forward and accelerate on top of everything we have built over these last several years. As for the quarter, we saw a healthy but more normalized market environment for travel globally. North America remains the slowest growing geography relative to major international markets, but the gap is closing now that we are largely past the pandemic driven recovery. Adjusting for geo and product mix, prices held up in general for lodging, but were under continued pressure in the air and car business. Against this backdrop, our results for the first quarter of 24 met our guidance with a revenue and EBITDA beat, but less robust gross bookings. Julie will get into the details, but revenue and EBITDA performance benefited from our mix of business, a strong performance in our advertising business, and our decision to invest more in pricing actions as opposed to direct marketing. As for gross bookings, our B2B business continued its strong performance and our B2C business, excluding Vrbo, was in line with our expectations. Unfortunately, that only partly made up for a slower than expected ramp up for Vrbo post its technical migration. As we discussed last quarter, we had pulled back on Vrbo marketing in the second half of last year while we went through our migration. And while we have been ramping that spend and the product has been improving, we have seen a slower than expected recovery. Based on this and the overall trends in our B2C business so far in Q2, we expect growth to be lower than what we had initially anticipated for 24. We are therefore lowering our full year guidance to a range of mid to high single digit top line growth with margins relatively in line with last year. We still expect to see broad improvement across 24 in our B2C business with the best early indicator being the conversion gains we have seen driven by higher test velocity and feature rollouts. Behind that, we will continue to invest in Vrbo and our international growth markets to reignite those flywheels to set us up for continued growth in the years to come. All in all, I'm pleased to say that while momentum is not yet back consistently in all the business lines, we are improving every day, learning to optimize all of our new capabilities, and I have tremendous faith in our team's ability to extract the full potential of what we have built. With that, I will just close by expressing my profound appreciation to all our teams at Expedia for their dedication throughout our multi-year often painful transformation journey. When the returns from this work are fully realized, we will owe this determined bunch of people a great debt of gratitude. I also want to thank all of you, our existing shareholders, the analysts covering us, and the broader investor community who have been with us along this sometimes bumpy journey. There is a reason most companies don't undertake transformation on this scale, and it takes patience and a commitment to understanding to come along for this journey. I'm very appreciative of all the constructive engagement over the years, And it has been a pleasure working with all of you. So with that, over to Julie.