TripAdvisor, Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to the TripAdvisor second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to TripAdvisor's vice president of investor relations, Mr. Will Lyons. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Valerie. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our call. Joining me today are TripAdvisor's CEO, Steve Kaufer, and our CFO, Ernst Tonneson. Last night, after market closed, we distributed and filed our second 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 investor relations website, you will find supplemental financial information, which also includes reconciliations of certain non-GAAP financial measures discussed on this call, as well as other metrics. 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, August 6, 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 for information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. And now with that, I'll pass the call to Steve.

Thank you, Will, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. As covered in our shareholder letter, we were pleased to report that Q2 grew by 91% versus Q1, our net loss narrowed, and adjusted EBITDA turned positive. Both monthly unique users and revenue as a percentage of 2019 levels improved each month throughout the quarter. Whereas last quarter we saw strength predominantly in the U.S. market, in Q2 we saw the recovery start to broaden, particularly in Europe. These results indicate that the recovery is well underway and that TripAdvisor is positioned well. We note that traffic and revenue improved in July versus June, and while we are mindful of the variance and their potential impacts on travel and the high percentage of domestic traffic, half of the year and 2022, when the recovery broadens as both urban and international travel return in full. While we are pleased with how we are successfully navigating the recovery, the TripAdvisor story remains much more than just getting past COVID. We see a huge opportunity to drive long-term growth and delivering more value to consumers and partners on our platforms. We have and will continue to position the business for future growth by leveraging TripAdvisor's global scale, influence, and competitive strengths to execute on our strategic growth initiatives. This includes building our direct-to-consumer subscription offering, TripAdvisor+, which we rolled out to all U.S. users in the quarter. We will continue to invest in our product offerings, our tech, and our grow to market strategies in order to deliver customers the best experience possible and drive diverse growth across our platform. So in summary, Q2 had many encouraging developments. I want to thank TripAdvisor employees for their passion and commitment to helping hundreds of millions of consumers and partners get back to travel. To our loyal customers and partners, we will keep building our products and services to drive more value to you. I remain very optimistic about what's ahead. And with that, Ernst, let me turn it over to you for some additional thoughts.

Thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. Q2 results were beyond our expectations, and the progression of traffic and revenue improvements versus 2019 levels throughout the quarter is very encouraging. increased case count and other challenges posed by the pandemic at near-term uncertainty for the pace of the ongoing travel recovery, of course. However, we expect another positive step forward in Q3. Our expectation is that Q3 revenue, as well as adjusted EBITDA, will meaningfully improve versus Q2, both in absolute dollar terms, but also as a percentage of 2019, driven primarily by further improvement in Europe. In summary, uncertainty remains, but we believe the industry has entered a return to travel period and initial release of significant bent of demand that we've already seen. We continue to expect a better second half rebound and are optimistic about further significant travel recovery into 2022. This has already been demonstrated in terms of demand for domestic travel, primarily in the US, and we expect international travel as well as Europe and the rest of the world to follow closely behind. We believe we are positioning TripAdvisor well for not only a strong recovery, but for the long run. With that, we will now open the call for questions.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star then one on your touchtone telephone. Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star then one. One moment, please. Our first question comes from Navid Khan of Truist. Your line is open.

Yeah, thanks a lot. A couple of questions for me. Maybe just on your commentary about Q3 and how July saw further improvement from June on the face of that improvement slow. Maybe can you parse it out for us between U.S. versus Europe? Are you seeing the continued improvement more in Europe and U.S. sort of flattening or is improvement continuing across both the markets? And then I have a follow-up question on CryptoGaza Plus.

Hi, Nived. This is Ernst. Yes, we've seen July improve from June levels in terms of percentage of 2019. The rate of improvement slowed. May to June, as you saw in our numbers, was a pretty significant step up as a percentage of 2019. But we saw continued progress. If you go underneath that, we saw Europe starting to increase more significantly, where early in the quarter it had been primarily the US. We saw on the hotel side, the auction maybe take a little bit of a step back in July relative to June as a percentage, but only a few points. But our experiences in dining business continue to accelerate in July. And so overall, our July numbers 19 were actually a little better than June, but not as much better as May to June.

Understood. That's helpful. Supervisor Plus, it's been live on your site for a month and a half now, available to anyone. Maybe any color or commentary on the uptake that you might have seen with consumers since the full launch? versus your own expectations, and also maybe just on usage. Do you see the primary use case being that people who become subscribers to Plus use it right away, or is that with a lag, or is there a percentage that do not end up using it? And then can you just maybe speak to that?

Sure thing. Thanks, Naveed. Obviously a topic I love to talk about. I got to start with the, it is very early days, but I have to say, I think we're really onto something here. As I mentioned before, we have plenty of examples of fantastic subscription businesses and a bunch of other categories, but not yet in travel. And so with our traffic, our brand trust, we think TripAdvisor is just the ideal company to create a really affordable plan that lets everyone, as we say, up their travels. As you know, we just launched the product a couple months ago in the US. So the question I guess you're asking is like, what have we learned so far? Well, I'd say the biggest thing absolutely above our expectations is that we're saving a lot of money for travelers. The average savings is an impressive $350. There are some bookings every single day that are saving a traveler over $1,000. That's pretty amazing stuff, and these are discounts that hotels are passing along to our travelers, and that's a great value proposition. Travelers pay $99 for this privilege to be able to get all these discounts. And as a matter of fact, we're testing an expansion into our experiences booking flow not just the hotel booking flow as we really want to kind of expand the offering as you know we have discounts on not only hotels but experiences and we want to leverage all the traffic to help even more travelers take advantage of these savings but to be fair no product ever launches without some pitches and so while I'm excited about the traveler savings exceeding our expectations You know, to be candid, we haven't made as much progress signing big chains as I would have hoped. But hey, we are great at listening, we're great at iterating and improving. And so we've taken to heart some of the feedback that we've heard from our hotel chain partners and believe we have a solution that will be much more in line with their goals and that won't hurt the great value proposition that we've created for travelers. So, you know, unfortunately right now I'm not ready to announce anything but we're getting a much better reception from chains to the changes that we're making to the product. And that's a critical part of building this two-sided marketplace. As you know, we signed a couple of other hotel chains. We're excited about that. And we've also partnered with Trip.com, specifically around Plus. And we're working closely with them to bring all of their supply, and they have a lot, into the Plus ecosystem. In terms of the question on are users booking right away, I'd say most users are seeing in the flow of booking their hotel, they are seeing that they can save money if they subscribe kind of along the way, and that's the no-brainer moment that we had talked about in prior calls, pointing out that the savings that you make on this particular booking can more than pay for the subscription. Not all like that, but certainly most. Got it. Thank you, Lance, and thank you, Steve. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Shweta DePittoria of Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

On your part on your... Signing up more hotel chains. You mentioned in the letter that you've developed new ways to communicate hotel discounts slightly differently. That's been well received. So I guess, what was it? What was the change? And how has the reception been so far from larger chains? That's the first question. And on the second one, also on TripAdvisor Plus, Is the supply side onboarding a slower than expected process in general? Is that a product development focus for you in terms of once, let's say, a hotel says, okay, we are onboard, what is the process like until discounts start showing up?

Thanks. Sure. So, I'd say the biggest challenge some properties have had with our current implementation is along the topic of rate parity, where we're showing a discounted rate and hotels care a lot about having a standard rate across the internet. And so we've heard that loud and clear. And so as I just mentioned, we're making some changes that we think goes a long way towards addressing those changes. And hopefully you'll see those come to fruition in the next few months, as in live on the site and offering the opportunity for more and more hotel chains to join in. To be clear, with partners like Crypt.com, they have already a lot of inventory that is going to make a big difference, we believe, on the supply equation for Plus. When it comes to your question about asking individual hotels to sign up, we currently ask for a kind of a zero commission rate or a discounted rate that we can then show our travelers. There is some There is some work for the hotelier to go create that rate so that we can show the savings. That's what earns the hoteliers a higher position on our site and gets them more bookings because we're certainly preferencing hotels that are better deals for the consumer, and that's always what a consumer is interested in. So we think with some of the new things that we have under the covers, we can actually even make that sign-up process simpler. And again, I'll have a bunch more to say on that the next time we chat.

Okay. Thanks, Steve.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Vazanen of Citi. Your line is open.

Sorry to just belabor TRIP Plus, but two quick questions. Is it fair to say that that $350 savings you talked about, in a weird way what we'd want to see over time is that savings number come down because it implies sort of deeper penetration and more receptivity for the consumer? Or am I thinking about that wrong? And then second, have there been any sort of impediments in terms of signing up hotel property owners? because of COVID where they just look at you and they say, you know, demand is so strong, we don't really need any help at this particular moment because sort of everyone wants to get out and travel and things get a little bit easier sort of as the world goes back to normal or is that not a fair characterization of the types of discussions you're having?

Oh, two terrific questions, Jason. So if I had to project out over several years as we look to build more and more properties that will have some level of discounts that we can share, pass back to the travelers. Uh, yes, I would expect that overall savings on average to come down, But I think of that as more because we're building, hopefully building a habit with consumers that they're coming back to us to not only book that $1,000 trip, but now that they're getting the savings for an entire year, they're coming back to book the $200 trip. And that property may not have a great discount on it, but it may have a good discount on it. And of course, it's a lower overall spend. So they literally, that traveler may have saved $150 on the first purchase, a nice discount on a big ticket, and it's going to save $25 on the second purchase because it's a one night stay at a moderately priced hotel. Travelers happy about that. They're building more loyalty, reusing our product over and over again, coming to us first because they're able to find that that discount on more and more inventory, but you just do the math, and it was $150 savings the first time, $25 savings the second time, and that's going to be bringing your average down. I absolutely believe that we will always have a set of properties in pretty much every market that'll have tremendous savings on them because there's always, just in the hotel distribution industry, there's always a set of great properties that could use some extra demand at certain points in time. And TripAdvisor has the opportunity to be a great channel to distribute those rooms on a very incremental basis to hoteliers. To your second question on COVID impacting signing hotels, yes, but I think it probably has, but for a slightly different reason, I think, than what you had shared. You know, we're happy to sign hotels at a variety of discount levels. Our message is simply the higher discount that you sign with us the more visibility you're going to get on our site, but you can also start with a discount that is similar or even less than what your other distribution channels, than what you're paying to other distribution channels. You know, every hotel, even if they have a lot of demand, would always prefer to, A, they prefer to get bookings direct. But then when they go to alternate channels, they would like it to be the most cost efficient for them. And we think we can help do that for the hoteliers. The reason why I think COVID is impacting our ability to sign, to some degree, is simply being able to reach people. uh whether the hotels not come back to full staff or whether they're really focused on making sure their hotel is safe for guests or perhaps stealing you know i'm sure there are some cases where they are sold out and just don't want to kind of bother signing a new channel uh but i think it's probably more that they're still just getting back on their feet and growing their business uh globally all of which very solvable. It comes back to as travel recovers, hotels are always going to be looking for alternative distribution opportunities. For our model, we're a cheaper channel for hotels, a very flexible channel for hotels. So like the reaction when we talk to individual hoteliers or groups, has always been very positive. It's just been a matter of time and sometimes connectivity issues in terms of getting them all live on the site.

Super helpful. Thank you.

You bet.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Deepak Mathavanan of Wolf Research. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Just a couple ones. So first wanted to ask about the auction. Are you seeing mix of advertisers different now versus pre-COVID in terms of revenue contribution? Are smaller advertisers, hotels, OTAs now leveraging the platform more effectively than some of your larger customers from before? And then second one on plus, you have one large OTA right now on the platform. What do you think it takes to bring some of the other large OTAs to TripAdvisor Plus? Anything you can share there would be great.

Hey, Deepak, I'll take the first and I'll let Steve answer the second. Not really a change in advertiser mix versus pre-pandemic that we can discern at this point. So nothing really to call out in terms of a trend.

Steve? Steve? So, on Plus, we certainly have a lot of experience going back quite a few years with our instant booking initiative, bringing lots of aggregators all around the globe onto the platform. It takes time. In fact, some of the new product direction pieces that I alluded to actually, fortunately for us, get to reuse some of the instant book infrastructure that we had in place and have kept live. So I do think over time you will see some additional aggregators or OTAs as part of the equation. But from our perspective, they're not critical to have. We have a pretty good supply footprint now with Trip.com coming online and their global reach. From our perspective, while it's always nice as we surface an offer to a consumer to be able to pick amongst the best discounts for a particular property, it's actually a little less interesting from a consumer perspective because our goal is to always be surfacing offers that are better than the retail rate that is out there. And so I, you know what, whether we have, you know, five or 10 OTAs to kind of choose from surfacing a particular offer is less important than having a good offer. And as, as I've said, the supply footprint from trip.com, just the sheer number of properties that are available on their platform is really quite impressive. So we will continue to pursue additional aggregators, additional OTAs, but we don't view it as kind of critical to the success of the product.

Okay, that makes sense. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Hans.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Richard Clark of Bernstein. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. A couple, if I may. First one just on Viator, obviously a bright spot of the quarter. And maybe you can just talk about what is the potential for that kind of B2B side of experiences and maybe putting that in the context of the deal you've done with booking. How big can that be? You know, what Google's doing in that space? And how can you kind of rectify that against using TripAdvisor as the sort of top of the funnel for that? And is there any conflict there? Just one question on Trip Plus. Looks like you've softened the language a little bit. You used to talk about it potentially being a multi-billion dollar product. Now you're saying you can get a share of a multi-billion dollar market. Is that because you're seeing some copycat products coming in? Or is this just a sort of, am I reading too much into that change of language?

Hey, Richard. I'll take the first question. Very pleased with our performance and experiences. Very pleased in particular with the performance of our Viator point of sale. We have seen experiences as a category come back much faster than we anticipated in Q2. And we anticipated that the lack of international travel that we historically benefited from with experiences would slow down the recovery. But what we've seen is we've been very effective at repositioning our offer towards more domestics, particularly U.S. domestic, but now more recently Europe. and away from big city to outside of the city. And that's been very, very effective for us, very, very strong. Our U.S. bookings on our U.S. points of sale across experiences, all channels, TripAdvisor, Viator, the bookings were above 2019 in June. Very, very strong, even in the absence of big cities opening or really Europe opening significantly. Cancellation rates are still a little bit elevated, but they're lower than last year, but very, very strong performance. Viator as a channel actually overall globally was with their bookings above 2019 in June, which is very, very impressive. And it's improved again in July. And so really doing well. As you know, it's a huge market. It's still early days. 80% is still offline. We're a market leader. We have very, very strong global supply. And we feel that we have, as we've always done, a real shot to win in experiences. And we're doubling down on that now in the recovery. So very, very important. We play that along three different channels. We have Viator, which is a pure play OTA. Consumer, but an OTA. And then we have TripAdvisor, the channel TripAdvisor. which is much more integrated with the overall travel planning and overall travel experience on Trip at Pleasure. And then we have third parties that we sell to, which is a smaller channel of the three that I'm outlining. And we have signed up, indeed, the likes of Booking, but many, many other third-party parties, leveraging the strength that we have in supply to broaden the impact we can have on the industry. So all three of those channels, we believe, are well-positioned, and all are leveraging this really superior global access to pretty amazing tours and attractions that our consumers love. So we're pretty pleased with where we're going with this.

Yeah, this is Steve. To add on just one sentence to Ernst's comments, think of all that supply that we've gathered, that we've perfected, that we're able to merchandise, and now we want to know where are all the consumers that could want it. And you've got that pure play OTA named Viator.com growing like a weed, looking fantastic. TripAdvisor already has a ton of people planning their entire trip to a destination of which experiences is a key part. So great, we have that piece of the funnel. And then for the folks that aren't on our sites, we have this amazing third-party program with the likes of Expedient Booking and most of the other big names that can capture travelers or offer our wares to travelers who are not part of our own ecosystems. all of which benefits in a two-sided marketplace like Experiences are, all of which benefits the supplier because it's more bookings, which in turn helps everyone achieve all the things you get when you're the biggest player in town. So quite excited about our Experiences biz. To the question on Plus, You know, did the language soften? No, not at all. I started, I'm more excited about Plus every week that goes by. To put it simply, we literally have millions of travelers looking at hotels on our site every single day. You can call it 100 million a month in normal times. We've described on these calls the 160 million, I think we call it shots on goal, as in 160 million hotel meta search clicks in 2019 for stays that were of significance. And I called that at $750 or more. So it's 160 million people interested in clicking to a partner site because they're interested in buying a hotel room at 750. 750 being the number that kind of makes this a pretty easy purchase. Now go add another 100 million travelers a month looking at experiences. that's a lot of reach and influence and of course trip advisor overall has even more traffic than that but but but that 200 million they're looking at a hotel they're looking experience and those are the two categories that plus plays in right now so if a small fraction of those travelers sign up each month for our subscription product because they know they're going to save money on these hundreds of thousands of hotels hundreds of thousands of attractions we end up adding millions of subscribers over the next years with that same longer term opportunity in the tens of millions. So again, uh, we think it's, uh, uh, super interesting space for TripAdvisor to occupy fits extremely well with our, uh, our focus on guidance, leveraging the traffic we have, the brand trust we have, and kind of the things that people already know TripAdvisor for, and now introducing the subscription product, again, proven in so many other categories, and we believe is the next big thing in travel.

Makes a lot of sense. Thanks very much.

Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mario Lua Barclays. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. I have two on Plus. So I believe currently you're still mainly offering this description as a no-brainer decision, as it will pay for itself after the first bucking. But I believe before you mentioned the notion of potentially offering a free trial. So curious if that's still in the works to potentially onboard more members and to have a follow-up.

Sure. Yes, we have done some free trial programs. I'm sure we will continue to do some more. We're learning how to market a subscription product as it's our first one. I think it's a great opportunity. We've chosen not to go broad as in our entire audience with a free trial. We don't think that makes sense at this point for our partners. But, you know, I'd I'd go back to my statement that it's very early days. We feel with our audience reach, we have a lot of different ways that we can talk to them. We have literally hundreds of millions of members. The product is still rolled out just to the United States so far. And so whether it's a free trial, a bundle, better job putting it in the experiences flow, more marketing across the site, changing how We merchandise plus so that I think right now if you're going to save at least $75, we're going to put it front and center. We can play with that number up or down. There's just lots of different ways that we are essentially iterating on every month as we look for the magic formula that helps us scale.

Great, that's helpful. And then I know it's still early, but for members that have been using Plus for a few quarters, can you provide some color in terms of the magnitude of their booking frequency being a Plus member versus their historical patterns? Thanks.

Well, that's, so again, early days, it's really hard for us to look at a six-month cohort at this point, given that it's in beta to a small percentage. of our traffic in Q1, and it's always just hard for us to compare what that booking behavior would be compared to what that customer does otherwise. So we can see how it compares visits on our site, a stronger repeat, that sort of thing, but I'm not sure that that's telling us enough right now. You know, candidly, in my view, that's going to be a great question where we're going to have a lot more interesting data on in three months and six months than we do right now. But, you know, rest assured, we're looking at that sort of stuff. Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from James Lee of Mizzouho. Your line is open.

Thanks for taking my questions. I just have a follow-up on trip.com agreement that you guys have. I think the OTA have most of the hotel inventory in international markets. Just wanted to check on that. And also, is the discount from the OTA available all season, or does that need to be negotiated between you and Trip.com after the onboarding process? Or is it automated where the OTA can enter inventory in the system real-time? Thanks.

Hi. I don't want to give too much color on the specifics of the contract, but know that, you know, we look at the size of their inventory, their interest in sort of helping facilitate bookings to our global audience. And given the size of our global audience and the amount of inventory they have, there's not going to be anything manual about the whole process. so uh we aim to scale you know we have experience working with uh ota's and bringing breadth of inventory on board to trip advisor uh in our sort of past lives and trip.com has distributed their inventory to other players as well so uh again i i think it's a a pretty good match the Trip.com has global inventory. They literally have tons of hotels in every single country in the world. Historically, Trip.com has served more outbound travel from China, but with their acquisitions, they've established a much more global footprint of travelers as well. And so no one supplier will ever offer the complete set of inventory that we're looking to build. But Trip.com is absolutely a key and trusted partner in helping us bring Plus to not only more hotels across the U.S., more hotels across the world, but over time, more hotels in more languages to serve more markets.

And one quick follow-up, Steve. Any, from a consumer's perspective relating to Trip+, any tweaks to your membership benefits as you continue to learn from the consumer behavior? Thanks.

Oh, I have nothing to announce now, but absolutely, we expect to be adding more benefits over time. We have Dalton Flight Club, we have Hertz, two pretty compelling benefits, and we see plenty of opportunity to add more in the years to come. No one subscriber in a travel club is going to use all of the benefits, but every additional thing that you add that ends up Getting used is another reason why that individual is going to be sure to renew in addition to the savings on the hotels and experiences that we already offer. So we're looking ahead towards renewal opportunities and want to make sure that every Trip Plus subscriber is getting value on the things we offer and things that our partners can offer. Great. Thank you.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll just turn the call back over to Steve Kaufer.

Terrific. Thank you, everyone, for joining the call. Travel recovery is underway. We will continue executing our long-term focus strategy to drive meaningful value in the years to come. A big thank you to all of our employees as well as to TripAdvisor customers worldwide. And a big thank you to our shareholders for their shared belief that TripAdvisor can play a key role in shaping travel in the years ahead. Please get your vaccines and stay safe. And I look forward to updating everyone on our progress next quarter. Thanks all.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference. Thank you all for participating. You may all disconnect. Have a great day.