TripAdvisor, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to TripAdvisor's first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to TripAdvisor's Vice President of Investor Relations, Mr. Reliance. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Ludi. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our call. Joining me today are TripAdvisor's CEO, Steve Koffer, and our CFO, Ernst Tonneson. Last night, after market closed, we distributed and filed our first quarter 2021 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. I also note that comments we may make regarding cost savings levels referenced on this call do not consider depreciation, amortization, restructuring, and other related organization 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, May 7th, 2021. 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 or information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Steve.

Thank you, Will, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. As covered in our shareholder letter last night, I'm pleased to say that consumer demand and revenue performance as a percentage of 2019 levels improved sequentially on our platform in both February and March. This was led by the U.S. market, where vaccination trends accelerated during the period. Traffic to our U.S. hotel pages approached 80% of our 2019 levels in March. Two of our key offerings that lagged last year, our hotel meta-search auction and experiences, are showing nice improvements so far this year, again, due to increased U.S. activity. Europe lagged due to lockdowns, but demand picked up in April, and we're optimistic for a broadened international recovery as vaccination rates improve. Positive Q1 trends in the U.S. and some other countries contrast greatly with challenges in many other parts of the world, like in India. And I just want to say that our thoughts are with all of our colleagues in India, as well as their families, and of course, everyone who is struggling so hard with this terrible situation. These contrasting trends that we are seeing support our overall view that the road to recovery is in fact uneven. So travel is certainly not out of the woods, but we have a positive start to the year. We remain quite optimistic about the second half of 2021 as the number of people vaccinated increases, countries reopen, and the leisure travel recovery broadens. People want to travel, and we are certain that when they feel safe to do so, they will travel. But the TripAdvisor story is more than just the recovery. We have and will continue to position the business for future growth by leveraging our platform's breadth and our competitive strengths and executing on our strategic initiatives. Pre-pandemic, we grew many offerings by double digits, including our B2B business, display advertising, experiences, and dining. We've been actively improving these products as well as our tech and our go to market strategies in order to deliver customers the best experience possible and drive diverse growth. Add to that the innovation that we're bringing to travel in terms of our new subscription product TripAdvisor Plus. As many of you know from our last quarterly remarks, we see a huge opportunity ahead and fully expect that Plus is going to be a very exciting part of our future. We remain in beta in the U.S. today, but are pleased with our progress as we work to improve the product for consumers and work closely with partners to build out the offering. Converting even a small percentage of engaged TripAdvisor traffic, not to mention the hundreds of millions of visitors per month that are searching on TripAdvisor for hotels and experiences, implies a potential long-term growth opportunity of tens of millions of subscribers and a multibillion-dollar recurring revenue stream. I'll note that absolutely none of this is possible without the team, and I want to thank everyone at TripAdvisor for their ongoing commitment to helping millions of consumers and partners get back to travel. We've grown accustomed to executing through tremendous unpredictability, and I've been very proud of your continued resilience. I remain very optimistic about what's ahead. And with that, Ernst, let me turn it over to you for some additional thoughts.