TripAdvisor, Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to TripAdvisor's fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference call over to TripAdvisor's Vice President of Investor Relations, Mr. Will Lyons. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Liz. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our call. Joining me today is our CEO, Steve Coffer, and our CFO, Ernst Tonneson. Last night, after market close, we distributed and filed our fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings earnings release and made available our shareholder letter on our investor relations website. In the release, you will find reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures discussed on this call. On our IR site, you will find supplemental financial information, which includes reconciliations of certain non-GAAP financial measures discussed on this call, as well as other metrics. Also, I'll note that comments regarding cost and cost savings levels referenced on this call do not consider depreciation, amortization, restructuring, and other related reorganization costs or stock-based compensation. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this call may contain estimates and other forward-looking statements that represent management's views as of today, February 19th, 2020. What? TripAdvisor disclaims any obligation to update these statements to reflect future events or circumstances. Please refer to our earnings release as well as our filings with the SEC for information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. And with that, I'll pass the call to Steve.

Thank you, Will, and good morning, everyone. 2020 was a challenging year, but I'm fundamentally optimistic. Inflection curves have been declining, vaccines are being distributed, and from what we see on our site and hear in our research, travelers are all eager to get back out and explore the world. As we described in our shareholder letter, we made a bunch of tough decisions last year. We also shored up our liquidity, got to work helping customers make the best of the current situation, you know, with initiatives like TravelSafe. And most importantly, from my perspective, we prepared TripAdvisor to emerge as a stronger, more focused company when travel comes back. And I'm really proud of what we accomplished. We soft launched our new TripAdvisor Plus product in record time. We're focused on making the core experience TripAdvisor more engaging and personal for all travelers. And we've got some great teams in place growing our exciting restaurants and attraction businesses. We enter 2021 excited about the important role that TripAdvisor can play in the recovery, based both upon our historical reputation as a trusted guidance platform, but also because of our new initiatives that are ready to help travelers take amazing trips. Let me also take a minute to thank everyone at Trip for their commitment during this past year. Know that your hard work is what has positioned our company to help hundreds of millions of travelers get back out on that road again. And all that makes 2021 look like a pretty exciting year for us. Ernst, let me turn it over to you for additional thoughts.

Thank you, Steve. And good morning, everyone. Our fourth quarter mirrored most of the financial themes of our previous 2020 earnings calls that we've done. Less in our control, of course, has been how COVID has continued to impact revenue with all of our business lines very much impacted again in Q4. But uneven stories by geography and type of business. For instance, our restaurants revenue performed very strongly in Q3 as most of the European restaurants were open and then took a step back again in Q4 with most of Europe locking down. And restaurants might be among the first revenue lines to actually benefit again when Europe reopens again. Consistent financial themes that have been more in our control are driving significant cost savings, ensuring a solid liquidity position, and laying the groundwork for compelling and profitable growth when the pandemic finally subsides. On the cost savings side, we more than achieved our target of $200 million of fixed and discretionary savings in 2020 versus 2019. We entered 2021 a more efficient and leaner company. Of course, the reduction in variable cost, mostly performance-based marketing, was actually significantly larger even than $200 million, but most of that expense will return. But the $200 million of savings we have achieved, we're very proud to have achieved, and we think the majority of that we will be able to keep as savings going forward. I want to point out one thing in our Q4 financial results, is that the majority of the sequential expense increase in Q4 versus Q3 was due to an increase in our full-year compensation expense. As such, 12 million of that Q4 expense is not indicative of the underlying quarterly run rate that we take with us into 2021. While we anticipate prudently increasing investments as the pandemic eases and revenue and demand comes back, as I said, we expect that the majority of these 2020 fixed cost savings will persist in 2021 and beyond. And our fundamentally leaner cost structure positions us for operating leverage, better margins as revenue returns. We've also strengthened our liquidity position again in Q4. We renegotiated our credit facility to extend maturity to May 2024 and to extend our leverage covenant holiday for part of the facility. And both of these have provided us with increased financial flexibility. With over $400 million of cash at the end of December, as well as $500 million of additional available borrowing capacity under our credit facility, we believe we are very well capitalized. We have been throughout this pandemic and are right now focused on driving customer value across our diverse revenue lines, and we're getting ready to catch the wave when travel inevitably bounces back. So in summary, despite uneven travel recovery trends in Q4 2020 and in early 2021, The current backdrop makes us increasingly optimistic that travel could come roaring back as early as the second half of the year. More importantly, we have positioned the company well in terms of future growth potential and margins. With that, we will open it up for your questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question at this time, please press the star, then the number one key on your touchtone telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. In the interest of time, we ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Our first question comes from the line of Lloyd Walmsley with Deutsche Bank.

Thanks, guys. A couple if I can. First, Steve, could you give us a sense for where you are in terms of establishing key relationships with OTAs, hotels, other kind of companies to directly build up supply of kind of discounts and perks for TripAdvisor Plus and what is the roadmap for adding new benefits for subscribers of TripAdvisor Plus? And then second one would just be, you know, can you give us a sense of how the unit economics work, how you're kind of providing the discounts, you know, who's funding those and, you know, what the puts and takes are for you guys, for a hotel supplier and, or at OTA for participating in that? Thanks.

Certainly. Thanks, Lloyd. Excellent question. So when we talk about TripAdvisor Plus, it really comes to the proverbial win-win-win. For the traveler, they're getting these amazing discounts, the perks. It's something that's turning their trip into something fabulous. When it comes to TripAdvisor, we're making some money on the actual subscription and building up what we hope to be a wonderful recurring revenue stream. For your hotelier, and that's really where your question started, we are changing the model whereby folks like TripAdvisor would ordinarily take a commission on the hotel sale, and we're going direct to the hotel and say, instead of paying us let's offer that discount directly to the consumer. So if you might have been paying X percentage to your other distribution channel, let's instead offer that same percentage, but as a discount, TripAdvisor passes it directly along to the plus subscriber, plus subscriber gets the deal. Now, when you add the value of the perk, and you add the value of the discount, it becomes something pretty compelling for the consumer, back to that original win, and something that's well within the availability of the hotelier to offer that package at the same or better travel distribution cost as they go through for other channels. And so the win for the hoteliers, they get access to this club on TripAdvisor. They get preferred placement on the TripAdvisor site, so more visibility for their property. They get a guest that's perhaps higher end, perhaps likely to stay longer at a distribution cost that's the same or lower as many of their other channels. The unit costs, if you will, for Plus from TripAdvisor's perspective, we have, practically speaking, no cost of goods on us delivering on the service. We have some level of customer support. That's fine. But we make our revenue on the subscription fee for TripAdvisor Plus. And then the next time somebody comes back to TripAdvisor because they're a member, they might be booking an attraction and we'll make a decent margin on there, even after passing a discount back to the consumer. Travelers will also come back to TripCruiser to plan other parts of their trip. And again, making us a preferred place for those subscribers to start their travel planning, all of which building into our repeat story. To answer your other question on roadmap for new benefits for subscribers, we expect to be launching, or when we launch more fully throughout the US, we'll be adding some additional benefits that we'll announce at that time. And we can see a very straightforward plan over the course of this year and next to add additional benefits that helps make people, that helps make travelers, turn travelers into savvy travelers. So, again, we start with hotels and experiences because those are things you book on our site today, quite valuable in the amount of savings. We can differentiate on the perks, but we're also going well beyond that in the travel category. Our goal is nothing less than building an affordable travel subscription product that pretty much everyone would love to be a part of, travelers, because it turns them into better travelers no matter where they're going. And I don't want to repeat myself, but we think it's going to be a great offering.

Thanks. Good luck. It's a very, very interesting product. Excited to see it unfold.

Thank you very much.

Your next question comes from Richard Clark with Bernstein.

Good morning. Thanks very much for taking my questions. Just a question to start with on your guidance into Q1 about revenue flat to 24. Compared to pre-pandemic, that would make the drop into Q1. a little bit more than Q4. Maybe we could break that down between different geographies, different components. What are you seeing? What's getting worse? What's getting better? And the second follow-up question is around your additional $12 billion cost. What is the nature of that? Was that just sort of screwing up the bonus pool for the full year? Where did that one-off cost come from?

Richard, I'll take those questions. Thank you for those questions. Firstly, about the first quarter, there are a number of things that go into Q4 and Q1, different revenue streams. Europe is obviously a big impact on our business today, the lockdowns in Europe, and that has impacted our European business broadly. Our fork business, the restaurant business, of course, is very skewed to Europe, so that's made an impact. and the lockdown progressed throughout Q4 in Europe, and we expect to take that into the first quarter, and that's what's the basis for what we provided as guidance for Q1. Having said that, we also pointed out that February is a marked uptick in the quarter, and so we have seen at least some improving fundamentals in the business coming up again, and that bodes well for us for hopefully the rest of the quarter and for the first half more broadly. But the lockdown in Europe in particular is behind the cautious outlook for the first quarter. The second question, the $12 million of additional cost in Q4 that we said really should be taken out of the run rate if you do your analysis. Yes, that was an additional... expense in compensation that was indeed based off of bonuses. We accrued throughout the year a low bonus percentage, and at the end of the year, we decided with our board to up that. It's still well below 100% for the year, but higher than we originally accrued for. And so as we pointed out, although that all hits our Q4 P&L, really you should take out $12 million of that if you want to take a run rate for the quarter and start to project that into the following year.

That's very clear. Thanks very much.

Your next question comes from Navid Khan with Truist Securities.

Thanks a lot. Maybe a quick follow-up on TripPlus. And then I'll start with a clarification. So if a participating hotel that's giving perks to the members is booked through an OTA, would the traveler still receive the perks or is it only on direct bookings? And then can you just maybe give us a sense of the size of the beta, what percentage of the traffic that's eligible is getting exposed to this and how should we expect that to grow as the year progresses?

Certainly, thanks Navid. Steve, I'll take that. So to your first question, no, all of the perks and discounts are available to travelers when they subscribe to TripAdvisor Plus first. And then, of course, they have to complete the booking on TripAdvisor. We have a very solid booking flow. We'll store your credit cards. We'll make it easy. And we're building that repeat behavior where you come in what we call that no-brainer moment where this hotel for your five-night stay has a $250 discount, which is close to our average at this point. You then take a $99 subscription fee. Travelers are still saving meaningful dollars right now, and they book that through the TripAdvisor booking flow. Traveler comes back, they get a similar discount the next trip they're going to take perhaps, and of course they've already paid that fee. So it's all dropped into savings. Whether that traveler then chooses to spend that savings on amazing new experiences that they found on our site or anything else that they're looking for, that's up to them. So the question of data rollout, yes, we're still in pretty early days. we're excited by the fact that it's out, we're testing, we're learning, it's out in kind of US audience only at this point, and we've shared that we will be rolling it out to the rest of our US traffic in the first half of the year. And, you know, then we go beyond in other English markets. At some point after that, we are very excited about the opportunity that TRIP represents. I talked about having 160 million times when we looked at our 2019 numbers where travelers were expressing enough interest in looking at a specific property such that they were using our meta auction and clicking off to an OTA or supplier direct. That's 160 million times we think of it as shots on goal 160 million opportunities for TripAdvisor with TripAdvisor Plus to say, hey, on a lot of these properties, we have an amazing discount and a perk that's going to make you the customer a savvy traveler. It's part of the TripAdvisor Plus subscription, please come subscribe. Make your money back or close to it in the very first purchase and get the benefits for an entire year. that savings can go into making a better trip, that savings can go into your bank, and the audience is folks who are not only taking this one trip but are likely to come back to TripAdvisor over and over again over the course of the year. So it doesn't take a high conversion percentage when your denominator is 160 million opportunities to be able to find the set of audience that's quite excited about this product.

Got it. A quick follow-up, if I may. As you kind of plan for recovery, it takes hold as the year goes on. Any plans of increasing your ad spending as we sort of ahead of that as you look at the bookings that happen in advance and things like that? How should we be thinking about your ad spending?

So I would say we have so much traffic on our site today that we don't feel a need to reach out to market space on non-owned or paid channels. Of course, our paid marketing, our regular performance marketing will grow as traffic returns. That's really just a function of traffic. of our kind of standard operating procedure. When it relates to PLUS specifically, again, I talked about that 100 plus million number of people who are already potentially PLUS clients, and we don't need to reach outside of TripAdvisor to talk to those folks.

Ernst, did you want to add anything? No, I think that's correct, Steve. Outside of the business, as we've said before, the marketing expense is mostly going to be variable with revenue.

Thank you both.

Your next question comes from Tom White with DA Davidson.

Great. Thanks for taking my question, too, if I may. Thanks for the color on TripPlus there, Steve. You know, it sounds like, you know, the platform is kind of heading down a road of becoming more kind of transactional, I guess. I might be just curious to hear your thoughts on maybe how your initial push into making TripAdvisor more of a transactional site back from the instant booking days, maybe what the big learnings from that were and how that's going to inform the rollout here. And then maybe also just an update on where you guys stand in terms of leveraging customer data. Some of you guys have talked about prior calls. Just would love to get an update on how those initiatives are coming.

Sure. Thanks, Tom. Excellent question. Learnings from InstantBook and past transaction on TripAdvisor. I would say InstantBook, taught us a lot about how to be an effective transaction platform. We did a ton of bookings when instant book was was rolled out throughout the site. We did it on a global scale. We had a lot of partners involved. And, and we succeeded in delivering a lot of bookings for a lot of customers would where it didn't work as well as we had hoped with instant book was simply we did not offer a compelling additional value proposition to the user as to why they should book on TripAdvisor versus their other choices out in the marketplace. And so when we take it forward and look at TripAdvisor Plus, it looks like Instant Book a little bit because the transaction is still on TripAdvisor, but the whole message is completely different. Here we're talking about a subscription service to make the traveler a savvy traveler. getting compelling immediate instant value for going down the transaction path with subscribing to TripAdvisor Plus and getting that immediate savings or that immediate room upgrade, that immediate set of benefits that compel someone to say, this makes it a straightforward choice. TripAdvisor Plus, may not have the frequency of something like an amazon prime but we do have that immediate logical benefit of we're going to help you have a better trip right now you'll save 200 bucks you can take the private tour instead of the group tour fairly straightforward we're adding as i mentioned before more of the non-transactional components to turn you into a smarter traveler when you're actually in destination, to help you when things go wrong. And, again, we'll be adding more of that over the years. So the learnings from Instant Book, we know how to do. We know how to work in a transaction environment in hotels because we've done it before. That's great. Clearly one of the reasons we were able to launch the product in such a short time period. And I want to make sure to mention that we are also adept at being a transaction site as we've been selling experiences on TripAdvisor for many, many years now. So again, people may think of TripAdvisor or some people may think of TripAdvisor as a review site, but we've been selling travel for quite some time. To the second question on more that we're doing with our customer data, it certainly plays an important role internally as we launch TRIP and have offers going out to existing members, existing contributors, folks who already have a relationship with TRIP Advisor that we can identify. And then as we've shared in prior calls, our targeting capabilities in our media business is getting better and better. So we're just able to more effectively create campaigns that serve our advertisers in a better way with the additional capabilities that we've been building in the system, some of which have launched, other pieces of which are still in development.

Great. Thanks for the details, Steve. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Mario Lu with Barclays.

Great. Thanks for taking the question. I have another one on plus and one on alternative accommodations. So the one on plus, just wanted to take a step back and talk more broadly about the genesis of the product. Just wanted to share your thoughts on why you think TripAdvisor is uniquely positioned to succeed with a subscription product versus, say, the traditional OTAs. And then secondly, on alternative accommodations, they're continuing to gain share versus hotels within the travel industry. So I'm just curious to see if anything has changed in terms of your strategy in this category to either ramp up supply or add more partnerships to show more listings in this category.

Thanks. Sure. Thank you, Mario. Two excellent questions. So on the plus side, that was your first question, I we've studied the behavior of travelers on TripAdvisor for so many years now. And obviously people are coming, they're looking, they're getting great guidance. And then, you know, our monetization model was advertising on the site and then getting those travelers to leave us and book on supplier or OTA sites. At work, built a billion six business, All good. But we've always known that there was this notion of a leaky bucket. We're sending folks, travelers away to book elsewhere. And many of them do take the trip, but they don't book right away. And kind of we lose credit for that. There's also the notion of while our meta engine finds a good price for people, it doesn't by definition find a better price or offer a better traveler experience than what is out there, than what that user could find themselves. We help them find it easier, but it's not unique, it's not exclusive. And obviously there's many other meta players. So we sat and we thought, What do travelers want? They want to have a better experience. They want their dollars to go further. What do we have? We have a ton of travelers on our site taking all types of trips. So if we start with that consumer value proposition, how could we provide real discounts, amazing perks, in a way that the customer isn't able to find that value proposition through their other channels, through the traditional places that they book or through other meta sites. We came up with this notion of, well, if we put it behind a subscription wall, there's an established model of being able to offer discounts and perks to folks that are behind industry problems, behind this pay gate. and could that be a model that works? So we asked first, hey, would the customer be interested in this? And with our surveys and with discounts and perks, the answer is clearly yes. Then how could we market this product to an audience. Would we be able to find, would people on TripAdvisor be interested in this product? And as I shared 160 million times in 2019 that people were building or interested in an expensive trip, interested enough to be clicking off of our site in our meta auction. And we pick $750 because if you take a 15% discount on a $750 purchase, you're equating it to that membership price of $99. So can we find the audience to be able to educate about this product? The answer is clearly yes, because they're already on our site. And then we ask, will the hoteliers give us these discounts and perks? And I was explaining the earlier question like, yes, because it still has the opportunity to be a lower cost of distribution for the hotelier than the other channels that they use. So again, Getting the extra visibility on TripAdvisor at a distribution cost equal or better than what they're otherwise paying, that seems very straightforward from a hotelier perspective. And we've been signing up hotels in addition to our aggregators. We've been signing up direct hotels that say, this sounds great. Let me give it a whirl. And we continue to do that with our direct sales force. And then, you know, will travelers be willing to transact on TripAdvisor? As I shared in the earlier question with Instant Book, clearly people were willing to do so. We sell a ton of experiences on TripAdvisor. So that's really not a, do we need permission from our travelers? TripAdvisor is already a trusted site and they've already proven that they will go down that transaction flow. And again, it's, We have this as an additional product on top of our auction. The auction is not going away. If you don't find the ideal property in our set of plus opportunities, there's a beautiful meta auction. You're already on our site, and you click off and get the exact property that you're looking for. So TripAdvisor.com. You know, we serve for, in pre-COVID days, we were north of 400 million UUs a month. You could think of it as we serve a billion travelers a year. And if, you know, I have to say this carefully, but, you know, if it's only 10 million that sign up for TripAdvisor Plus, that's still less than 1% of our annual traffic. But 10 million sign-ups times 100 bucks, and obviously the math works pretty nicely here. in a recurring subscription revenue. So I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, this is not going to happen overnight, we have a lot of supply, we want to go sign up. But it is a huge market, we have our own TripAdvisor channel to reach users when they are shopping, we're trusted as a brand. And, you know, post COVID, we think the the The regular traveler is ready to embrace a subscription product. Subscription products in general have been doing quite well, and it's not us, but many others have educated consumers on the notion of signing up for something on an annual basis. So versus the OTAs or supplier directs, they're going to win, we're going to win. It's not a one or the other by any stretch. As I say, our auction will continue to be quite healthy, but our ability to hand the commission that the hotel is ready to to pay their distribution channel back to the customer, I think enables us to offer discounts in a way that is very hard to match from other, you know, more traditional channels. Great. All right. A shorter answer to the second question, alternative accommodations. Absolutely, we see alternative accommodations continue to grow. We had a pretty good last summer on our site for our rental inventory. It's just a smaller piece of our overall pie. And so we do look to grow choice. We do look at some point to be able to integrate in the rental experience into TripAdvisor Plus because a bunch of those travelers are also planning rental stays. We don't have anything kind of new to report at the moment, but please understand we are keenly aware of consumers' interest in this type of inventory and the fact that, you know, we have a hotel auction that gets inventory from lots of different places. Obviously, we have a rental sale not really an auction, but we have a rental display that also gets inventory from multiple sources. And we do look to expand that over time. Got it.

Very helpful. Thank you. I would add to that is underlying what Steve is saying here about the fact that we have a broad platform, including rentals. But I also want to point out that in this pandemic, the rental business has benefited because of the travel trends that were specific to the pandemic, of course. So people making More local trips, not traveling by car, not flying. And so although this has been an important development this year, there will be some degree of reversion to the mean when the pandemic is gone and people start to feel comfortable flying again, feel comfortable staying in hotels. So I would caution to overestimating the trend for the long term.

Great. Thank you both.

Your next question comes from Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer.

Hey, great. Thanks for taking my question. One on plus and then just one on current trends. So just on TripAdvisor plus, Steve, Ernst, how are you thinking about having enough supply or what execution you need to do to prevent, like, a natural churn issue? And then, like, will you actually tart, like, when you're about to book a hotel, well, that's when, like, the plus option might come up if you pay $99 you can save on plus. And then just real quick on current half trends, you know, as we've seen cases have a decent decline here in the U.S. I mean, have you seen an improvement over the last couple weeks in traveler interest?

Great. Thanks, Jed. Perhaps I'll take the plus one and turn to Ernst for the recent trends. All right. Your question is, how are we thinking about supply, avoiding a natural churn? Was the natural churn, were you thinking on the hotel side or on the customer side? Customer side, right? It's like, all right, yeah. So I... Yeah, we're using to answer the supply side first, we're using kind of traditional discount aggregators to bring, you know, 100,000 plus properties online quickly offering discounts, other perk aggregators where they've already negotiated with the hotel to get a wonderful set of perks and make these properties really kind of stand out from the rest. And that's been our launch. We have been signing individual hotels with our direct sales force. Fortunately for us, though we have, you know, call it a million plus pieces of lodging on our site, there's a popular head to that, if you will. When you look at where people are planning expensive trips, that list narrows down quite a bit. And we're using our direct sales force to call into those properties and tell them about PLUS, share the easy decision that we think it is for them to give it a try. We don't look for long-term contracts. We don't look for guaranteed, every room is discounted. They can tune the channel to meet their needs of being able to get more reservations. So when we think about the question of churn, If you're in the beta mix, you'll see that there are lots of hotels that are available for plus. It's not a majority or anything like that, but in most cities you'll find several choices. We look to expand that tremendously, of course, with more partners and more direct sales. There's no challenging availability right now, so plenty of opportunity to meet the consumer demand. when we think about churn, we think, uh, uh, yes. When, uh, purchase and then churn, we think the traveler looking at a city, I'm going to, uh, uh, I'm going to Miami. I'm looking at hotels. Oh, this is a plus property cause I see it's being merchandised with a discount and a perk that log in to see what the actual discount is. Uh, and I can't transact on that discount unless, unless I buy the trip subscription along the way. Of course, at any point, I can click off to a traditional OTA and pay that rate, but the TripAdvisor Plus rate is better. That's the discount we're offering, and that's the reason the hotel got to be at the top of our sort list. So it's a compelling inflow opportunity for us to market TripAdvisor Plus. And then, assuming the customer buys, they're good for a whole year. And so they come back and they see a lot more opportunities to save money with any hotel purchase that they're making based upon the discounts and the perks that we have. They get their 10% off attractions and the rest of the benefits. Even though I keep talking about how most plus subscriptions are paying for themselves in the very first purchase, we fully expect the people that are buying plus to take multiple trips over the course of the year. And every time they're taking that additional trip, it's a pure savings moment for them. Perhaps at the end of the year, we remind them Hey, it looks like you booked six hotels with us. Here's the grand total you saved, $872. Time for the $99 renewal. Trying to make that very much a no-brainer moment when it comes to renewing TripAdvisor Plus for next year. So obviously it's a subscription business. There will always be some level of churn. but the target audience here is taking more than one trip a year. They're already saving the cost of the subscription in general in that first purchase, so it doesn't take much to ask that traveler, do you think you're going to take at least one more trip over the coming year? Answer yes, and they've had a great experience the first year. Away we go.

And just your second question. Yeah, we did see a January, January sort of starts softly, but February, uh, improved seeing, um, uh, revenue, uh, take up more than we usually see, uh, from January to February. Uh, so that's positive. Uh, we've seen, uh, uh, a market increase of the searches for 90 days plus out, uh, versus what we had seen in the three months before. So that was something that gives some positivity there. And so February is definitely starting off so far better than we expected or than we have seen in January. But it's very mixed across the businesses, as you can imagine. The U.S. has been actually doing reasonably well. We called out in January. We had in our hotel auction, North America was roughly 50%. of the year before where Europe was just much, much lower. And so we've seen the difference play out between the U.S. with relatively few travel restrictions in place versus Europe. We just see that in our numbers. And so we're looking forward to travel restrictions, hopefully with the rollout of the vaccine and hopefully with the subsiding number of cases that we are seeing right now, also have to start to apply in Europe over time and see some of these trends improve both in North America and in Europe. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Eric Sheridan with UBS.

Thanks so much for taking the question. I won't ask any more plus. I think we've talked about that. But generally pivoting back to sort of the scope and your working view on the recovery, any sense you can give us about how you think where you sit in the broader marketing funnel will play out as demand starts to pick up again and whether you'll be a leading or lagging indicator or how conversations continue or merge with your advertisers and in terms of how they might utilize the platform on the other side of COVID versus the world we were in, you know, 2019 and earlier. And then going to the local and experiences side, do you think you need to do a lot there on either growing the inventory scale or letting, you know, travelers and consumers know that you have those offerings out in the marketplace? Or do you think it's just a function of end demand opening back up to see recovery in those businesses coming out over the next couple of years? Thanks, guys.

Great. Thanks, Eric. Two excellent questions in there. So scope of the recovery, a very good question, a very tough question to answer. We certainly have seen traffic on TripAdvisor, people planning or thinking about trips. not go down nearly as much as travel actually went down. So in that sense, we're a leading indicator that people still want to travel, they're still searching, they're still coming back or are you you drop unique user drop, again, a lot less than our revenue drop, because they're not yet booking, but they're thinking that they're dreaming. So as we predict as we hope in the second quarter, as people certainly in the U.S. may have their vaccination dates scheduled, they would get more excited about planning that trip, knowing that they will be vaccinated on X and Y dates. Uh, so I think would be a good kind of leading indicator from a marketing perspective and businesses that want to get in front of those customers when they are thinking about that, that summer trip, uh, I would argue would do wise to leverage the eyeballs that are on our platform today in the, in the planning moments. I, uh, Ernst, do you want to add something to that?

Yeah, I would add maybe if you look at our business line by business line, what we've seen last year is that restaurants actually has adjusted much more quickly than the rest of the business to improvement. So in Q3, when restaurants were open in Europe, our business was straight back to the 2019 levels and in some countries actually above. So I expect that line of business to do better. Experiences has been lagging and is likely to lag in the recovery. And then if you look, for instance, at our hotel auction, because of our revenue recognition being different than an OTA model, we may see revenue earlier than OTAs may see revenue. We recognize revenue on the actual click, and OTAs recognize revenue broadly on stake. So that may be an early indicator for us or a leader rather than a laggard in our business.

And then on the, thanks so much, experiences, a question, is it a supplier, an awareness, or just a demand? You know, at the moment, it's certainly just a demand question. There aren't enough people taking those leisure trips looking to do that exciting activity. But when those leisure trips do rebound, we feel for our core audience in Western Europe, in the U.S., we think we have most of the supply that we need. It's constantly adding more, but we don't think of it as a supply throttled. We're looking to build up the demand and build up the – inspirational quality of what we are presenting as things to do in these tourist destinations. Because between Viator and TripAdvisor, we certainly have, we feel we have enough eyeballs, we have enough travelers taking the types of trips where they should be booking experiences, but we need to help them make that commitment to book it online as opposed to wait and book it in destination. It's a different answer if you reach all the way out to Asia in terms of the supply question. But for our core markets, I think it's mostly traveler getting back to taking the trips that include experiences, i.e. nobody in the U.S. is headed to the Vatican right now to get the amazing tours of the museums there. When that comes back, we will be more than ready to go. Thanks so much for the color, guys.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from Kevin Koppelman with Cowan.

Great. Thanks a lot. Just a quick follow-up. Could you talk a little bit more about the initial learnings from the beta test on plus and what kind of conversion rates, initial conversion rates you're seeing and what's a realistic goal all the time? Thanks.

Sure. So that, of course, is why we do a beta. We look to learn. And it's out to a decent portion of our US traffic so that we're getting daily subscriptions. We're watching where we are in the funnel. It's too early to really talk about the conversion rates of where we're at. and we don't honestly know what the right target is we certainly would hope that the discount and the perk would generate a pretty compelling reason to go into the funnel hey i can save 300 here that's pretty exciting and then again we have the content from the hotels we're making the transaction uh fairly straightforward we're happy to store your credit cards make it easy to come back uh and then knocking down all the reasons why people either get stock or there's extra friction in the flow. But the core value proposition, I get a early check in, a late check out, I get a fruit plate in the room, I'm saving $200. This sounds like a really simple reason to book on TripAdvisor to subscribe to TripAdvisor Plus. And that's sort of, if you will, replacing a user who was going to click off to the hotel site or an OTA for just that particular trip. And we feel like it's a better value for the traveler to book that TripAdvisor Plus offering. It makes economic sense for us and the hotel is happy because it's a less expensive distribution channel. So again, Win, win, win all around. And we'll be out of beta relatively soon as we look to expand the opportunity to both learn faster and just help more people start to realize the benefits of Trip Plus in advance of the peak summer travel season.

Excellent. And as you think about the 160 million shots on goal, Can you give us a sense of how much is that of your overall hotel traffic or hotel ad revenue, just to give us a sense on that?

I don't offhand know, but in a sense, you could take all of our revenue auction revenue, take a guess at our CPC and do some backwards math in terms of how many total clicks over the course of the year we might be generating. I, of course, most of our travelers that are on our site for all the sets of reasons are looking for what I might call the ordinary trip. It's I'm staying a couple of nights here. It's a, Half Leisure has a business trip. It's a visiting grandma. There's lots of different reasons why people will be taking a trip. And the TripAdvisor Plus offering is really, you know, it can be effective for those small trips if you want to upgrade, but then there's that kind of $99 cost. We're clearly targeting, at least initially... on the bigger trips, the longer stays, and that's why we shared this 160 million number to help folks give give you all the confidence that we have that says we have a lot of travelers on the site already planning trips of this scale. And so obviously we would look for it to be incremental revenue to us and recurring revenue being the fabulous part of the overall offering. Hope that helps. Thank you, Stu.

Your next question comes from Lee Horowitz with Evercore ISI.

Great. Thanks for the question. Two, if I could. Maybe sticking with Plus, appreciating that this is not necessarily a product that can only win if the OTAs lose, by extracting the hotel discount via the hotelier's distribution cost, this would seem to put you in more direct competition with the OTA suppliers. How are you thinking about this potential management of this tension point with important advertisers on your platform? And then maybe one on experiences and building on Eric's question a little bit, thinking through experiences in the recovery, would the experiences industry likely acutely impacted by COVID or Do you expect that you will need to spend more aggressively on sales and marketing during the recovery to bring on more experienced supply to offset what I would imagine would be a lot of experienced suppliers who have gone out of business during the crisis? And in your experience, what is the lead time between investing in that sales and marketing channel and onboarding an experienced supplier and getting them up to meaningful bookings on the platform? Thanks for that.

Sure, I'll take that. Plus question. And thankfully, again, two good questions there. It's fair at the highest level to think, hey, well, if somebody is booking on TripAdvisor and that ends up kind of being a supplier direct booking, then that's a booking that the OTA wouldn't get. Technically true, but the volume of these bookings compared to the volume that our big client OTAs would see, it's a little hard to believe that it's even noticeable. Unlike Instant Book, which did have OTA participation, TripAdvisor Plus is not for the vast majority of our audience, whereas the Instant Book plan, it was for the vast majority of the audience. Instant Book, we were looking at one-night hotel stays, convenient booking on the phone. So In a sense, that was a potentially more competitive move. Again, part of why it took a little while for the OTAs to join on. But as we evaluate client reaction from the OTAs with this, they just put it in a different ballpark. This is a very gated product and discounts behind paid gates are extremely well established in in the travel industry and what could be a very big opportunity for TripAdvisor still isn't necessarily more than a rounding error for the big online travel agencies. So we don't foresee that being an issue at all, frankly. Two experiences questions. Ernst, do you want to? and comments on the supply side?

Yeah. Lee, we don't see this as an investment in big investment push into supply different than we would normally have as the market recovers. We have a lot of supply and overlapping supply in many markets, multiple providers of a certain service in many markets. And even if some of them will go out of business, we don't think that will be will be particularly harmful to our overall offering to the consumer. Moreover, there are a number of historically high revenue venues like Steve was mentioning the Vatican before or the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona or the Louvre, a special Louvre tour in Paris that are not likely to be not returning, that are likely to return when the travel to the cities happens again. So we are not that concerned about that overall. We're thinking more about how do we catch the wave from a marketing to consumer's perspective when the market comes back more than what we need to do for our supply base.

Helpful. Thank you both.

And our last question comes from James Lee with Mizzou Health.

Great, thanks for taking my questions too here. Steve, given your focus on subscription, maybe can you talk about any changes to your view on the hotel meta-search product over the longer term? Should we think about the overall strategy from a consumer point of view? Is it more of the segmentation strategy? For example, for a high ASP traveler, it goes to subscription, and maybe for mass market, do you want to still focus on meta-search? And also, secondly, on Trip Plus again, sorry about additional questions there. Doing your testing here, just curious what you're learning is on that specifically. Do you think the demand that you're seeing for people signing up, is that incremental? Or do you think there's some sort of substitution effect coming from other travel subscriptions?

Thanks. Sure. Thanks much for the question, James. You can take a look at kind of what we're doing right now with Plus with respect to Meta in that we're really trying to market Plus where we're making it the easiest possible decision for the traveler. So, for instance, even where we might have a discount on a property, if that discount is only call it $25 and the subscription is $99, we're choosing not to push the consumer towards TripAdvisor Plus at that point because it may be what the consumer wants, but we don't want to push too hard where the value proposition isn't as compelling. Where the consumer is going to save $150, sure, it makes a lot more sense for that consumer to buy TripAdvisor Plus than, you know, clicking off on some of our meta auctions. So in our merchandising on the site, yes, we are segmenting our audience in terms of how hard we are pushing Plus or how much we're choosing to market Plus to those different segments. That's likely to change over time over years as plus becomes more well known as people come to TripAdvisor. Hey, TripAdvisor Plus, how can I see more availability as we otherwise segment travelers into very frequent travelers? Well, maybe that traveler perfectly happy with a $40 savings because they're going to take five trips over the year, and they know that, and we know that, and so we have a marketing message that says, think of all your trips you're taking. It clearly pays for itself. To the degree that we also learn and can use the data we have in-house for folks who are less price sensitive and more interested in the upgraded experience, we have a different opportunity to push the perks as opposed to the discount to that audience. We think our meta-search is gonna be around for a long, long, long, long time, and Plus complements that. When we think of perhaps a typical plus user, found a great deal for this wonderful vacation, they're excited about the upgrade, or the fruit plate, they take that trip, and now the next time they think about traveling, well, I'm going to start on TripAdvisor because I'm looking for that similar thing. Maybe not with the same amount of discount, but maybe the particular hotel they are interested in for whatever reason, location or reputation or referral, doesn't have a plus offering at that moment in time. Well, great. They came to TripAdvisor, and their next step is to go click on a meta auction link. which also helps us monetize the consumer and get that traveler to the hotel that they want to book. And that hotel happens to be on Expedia or booking.com or supplier direct. So I don't view it as particularly cannibalistic. We view plus as a wonderful engagement vehicle when we get to a meaningful enough number of subscribers. And then final point, when I look at the rest of what the TripAdvisor core team is working on, it is about building more engagement on our platform. Getting more visitors to become members, members to become engaged members, and eventually some of those engaged members will certainly become paid members, plus members. But all along that funnel, we're building more reasons to come back to TripAdvisor. And one of the key ways we monetize that traffic is through that traditional hotel auction. A hotel auction is working beautifully. Our clients continue to pay what we think of as fair prices for the traffic that we're sending them. There's nothing wrong with the auction, except it was pressured at the top of the funnel. how much traffic starts looking for their hotel on TripAdvisor. And to the degree that our visitor to member, member to engaged member programs are effective, we're able to get more traffic back to TripAdvisor, which we know how to serve quite well. Second question on the testing learnings. they're, to the best of our knowledge, there aren't other travel subscription products we could be kind of pulling from. So we feel our current testing and the product rollout is pulling people that hadn't really thought of doing a travel subscription product, a relatively new concept, and saying, hey, this is worth signing up for because I'm getting the benefits, I'm getting the perks, I'm getting all this for a whole year. It may be a first of what is first of a kind subscription product because of all the different categories we cover. But to the consumer, I don't think they're looking for a travel subscription product. I think they're looking to have a better trip. And by signing up for our subscription product, that's the way that that they're going to achieve that objective. And they might take that savings from the hotel and apply it to spend an extra day on vacation. That's great with us. They enjoyed the benefits of the subscription immediately.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you.

There are no other questions at this time. We'll now turn the call back over to Steve Coffer.

Well, thank you all. Thank you all very much for joining our call. Time and time again, travel has rebounded. Travelers have come back to TripAdvisor. We'll continue executing our strategy and ensure that TripAdvisor plays its rightful role as an influential advisor to travelers and to businesses throughout this upcoming recovery. I want to again thank our employees, our TripAdvisor customers worldwide, and our shareholders for their support and partnership in 2020 and for the years ahead. So thanks, everyone, and please stay safe.

Ladies and gentlemen this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.