Tripadvisor, Inc. (Tripadvisor) operates as an online travel company worldwide.
The Tripadvisor group operates as a family of brands with the purpose of connecting people to experiences worth sharing.
The company operates across three business segments: Brand Tripadvisor, Viator, and TheFork. The company leverages its brands, technology platforms, and capabilities to connect its large, global audience with partners by offering rich content, travel guidance products and services, and two-sided...
Tripadvisor, Inc. (Tripadvisor) operates as an online travel company worldwide.
The Tripadvisor group operates as a family of brands with the purpose of connecting people to experiences worth sharing.
The company operates across three business segments: Brand Tripadvisor, Viator, and TheFork. The company leverages its brands, technology platforms, and capabilities to connect its large, global audience with partners by offering rich content, travel guidance products and services, and two-sided marketplaces for experiences, accommodations, restaurants, and other travel categories.
Brand Tripadvisor’s purpose is to empower everyone to be a better traveler by serving as the world’s most trusted and essential travel guidance platform. Since Tripadvisor’s founding in 2000, the Tripadvisor brand has developed a relationship of trust and community with travelers and experience seekers by providing an online global platform for travelers to discover, generate, and share authentic user-generated content (‘UGC’) in the form of reviews and opinions for destinations, points-of-interest (‘POIs’), experiences, accommodations, restaurants, and cruises in over 40 countries and in more than 20 languages across the world. Tripadvisor offers more than 1 billion user-generated reviews and opinions on over 9 million experiences, accommodations, restaurants, airlines, and cruises. Tripadvisor’s online platform attracts one of the world’s largest travel audiences, with hundreds of millions of visitors annually.
Viator’s purpose is to bring extraordinary, unexpected, and forever memorable experiences to more people, more often, wherever they are traveling. In doing so, Viator elevates tens of thousands of businesses, large and small. Viator delivers on its purpose by enabling travelers to discover and book iconic, unique and memorable experiences from operators around the globe. The company’s online marketplace is comprehensive and easy-to-use, connecting millions of travelers to the world’s largest supply of bookable tours, activities and attractions—nearly 400,000 experiences from more than 65,000 operators. Viator is a pure-play experiences online travel agency (OTA) singularly focused on the needs of both travelers and operators with the largest supply of bookable experiences available to travelers.
TheFork’s purpose is to deliver happiness through amazing dining experiences as the leading online restaurant booking platform in Europe. At the forefront of championing restaurant culture, TheFork harnesses technology to promote real life connections between diners and restaurateurs. With a network of approximately 55,000 partner restaurants across 11 countries, nearly 40 million app downloads and more than 20 million reviews, TheFork is a go-to platform for all food lovers to enjoy unforgettable restaurant experiences. Through TheFork, users can easily find restaurants according to their preferences, check real-time availability, instantly book online 24/7, benefit from special offers and pay directly to the restaurants. For restaurateurs, TheFork's technology enables them to optimize reservation management and occupancy rates, increase bookings and visibility, limit the impacts of no-shows, manage payments and streamline operations, all while accessing the broadest community of loyal diners.
Business Strategy
The Tripadvisor group operates in a unique position in the travel and experiences ecosystem as a result of the following:
The company operates in large, global, and growing addressable markets, including travel, experiences, and digital advertising;
The company has a large, global, and engaged audience making meaningful contributions that reinforces a relationship of trust and community; and
The company possesses a wealth of high-intent data that comes from serving its audience of travelers and experience seekers at different points along their journey - whether they are engaging on its platforms for inspiration on their next experience, planning a trip, or making a purchasing decision.
In the company’s Brand Tripadvisor segment, it offers a compelling value proposition to both travelers and partners across a number of key offerings that include accommodations, experiences, dining, and media. This value proposition is delivered through a collection of durable assets that are difficult to replicate: a trusted brand, authentic UGC, a large community of contributors, and one of the largest global travel audiences. The company’s strategy in this segment is to leverage these core assets, as well as its technology capabilities to provide travelers with a compelling user experience to help make the best decisions in each phase of the travel journey, including pre-trip planning, in-destination, and post-trip sharing. The company intends to drive new traveler acquisition and repeat audience engagement on its platform by offering meaningful travel guidance solutions and services that reduce friction in the traveler journey and create a deeper, more persistent relationship with travelers. The company evaluates investment opportunities across data, product, marketing, and technology that will improve and diversify the monetization of its audience through deeper engagement, which, it expects will, in turn, drive more value to its partners.
The Brand Tripadvisor segment plays an important role in the company’s portfolio. For over two decades, it has built difficult to replicate assets, such as a trusted brand, authentic content, a large community of contributors, and one of the largest global travel audiences. The company’s long-term strategy for the Brand Tripadvisor segment builds on its heritage and the reasons hundreds of millions of travelers come to Tripadvisor each year.
In the company’s Viator and TheFork segments, it provides two-sided marketplaces that connect travelers and diners to operators of bookable experiences and restaurants, respectively. Within the Viator and TheFork segments, the company is investing in growth, future scale, and market share gains to accelerate its market leadership position, while working to improve unit economics on both sides of the marketplace with the goal of sustainable future profitability. This means driving awareness and higher quality audience engagement, which will drive greater repeat bookings, more direct traffic, and translate into improved unit economics over time. The company’s investments on both sides of its marketplace, as well as in its primary offerings, are intended to deliver a differentiated value proposition that will drive sustainable market leadership as its partners, operators, and travelers find themselves in an increasingly competitive marketplace environment. The company is focused on continuing to grow both its supplier base and its user base by offering innovative tools and features on its branded platforms, and through continued awareness of its brand through marketing efforts.
The company is focused on executing initiatives across Tripadvisor group through organic investment in data, products, marketing and technology to further enhance the value it delivers to travelers and partners across its brands, platforms, and segments. In addition, it may accelerate growth inorganically by opportunistically pursuing strategic acquisitions.
Business Models
The company manages the Brand Tripadvisor segment primarily through the following revenue sources and related business models:
Tripadvisor-branded Hotels Revenue: The largest source of Brand Tripadvisor segment revenue is generated from click-based advertising on the company’s hotel meta platform (also referred to as its hotel auction), which consists primarily of contextually-relevant booking links to partner websites, which predominantly include OTAs and hotels. Click-based advertising is generally priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, with payments from partners determined by the number of clicks generated on a commerce link multiplied by the CPC rate for each particular click. CPC rates are determined in a dynamic, competitive auction bidding process. The company also generates click-based advertising revenue on a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) basis, with payments from partners determined by a contractual commission rate based on a traveler click generated on its platform that ultimately results in a hotel booking and stay via the partners’ websites.
The company provides additional business-to-business (B2B) offerings to hotels and related accommodation partners that deliver other unique opportunities to further promote, advertise, and operate their businesses, as well as merchandise their inventory on its platform. These include a subscription-based advertising solution, with revenue determined by a contractual fee and time duration, or other CPC-based advertising solutions through hotel sponsored placements on its platform.
Media and Advertising Revenue: The company offers endemic and non-endemic advertisers opportunities to promote their brands primarily through display-based advertising (or media advertising) placements across its brands on its platform. The company’s advertising clients are predominantly direct suppliers of hotels, airlines and cruises, as well as destination marketing organizations (DMOs), OTAs, and other travel related businesses. Display-based advertising placements are predominantly sold on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) basis.
Tripadvisor Experiences and Dining Revenue: The company merchandises, on the Tripadvisor platform, bookable experiences available on Viator and bookable dining reservations available on TheFork and earn affiliate marketing commission revenue on bookings that are driven by its platform, which are fulfilled by Viator and TheFork, respectively. These transactions generate intercompany (intersegment) revenue which is eliminated on a consolidated basis.
The company provides additional B2B offerings to restaurant partners that deliver other unique opportunities to further promote, advertise, and operate their businesses, as well as merchandise their businesses on its platform. These offerings can be subscription-based, with revenue determined by a contractual fee and time duration, or CPC-based advertising solutions through restaurant sponsored placements on its platform.
Other Revenue: The company provides travelers additional offerings across various other travel categories, including cruises, vacation rentals, flights, and rental cars. It provides these offerings across a collection of brands that complement and reinforce its segment strategy of providing differentiated guidance that helps travelers reduce friction and make better decisions. The company’s vacation rentals platform displays and promotes vacation rentals inventory, including contextually-relevant booking links to third-party booking partners, in exchange for which, it earns a commission when travelers complete a booking on the third-party booking partner's website. The company’s cruise, flight, and rental cars offerings generate revenue primarily through click-based and display-based advertising solutions.
The company’s Viator segment offers travelers a comprehensive online marketplace that provides access to nearly 400,000 experiences and more than 65,000 experience operators. These experiences are instantly bookable online in over 200 countries. Viator's business model relies on the success of travelers and operators who join its marketplace and generate consistent bookings over time. As experience operators become more successful on its platform and as travelers return over time, it benefits from the recurring activity on its marketplace. The company generates revenue through commissions for each booking transaction it facilitates directly and indirectly through its platform. Through Viator, the company also powers traveler experiences bookings on behalf of third-party distribution partner websites, including the Tripadvisor platform, as well as many of the world’s major OTAs, airlines, hotels, online and offline travel agencies, and other prominent content and eCommerce brands. For the majority of experience bookings, it collects the full amount charged to the traveler at the time of booking and remit the operator’s portion after the booked experience occurs. In addition, Viator offers the company’s ‘Reserve Now, Pay Later’ payment option, which allows its travelers the option to reserve certain experiences and defer payment until a date no later than two days before the experience date.
TheFork segment offers travelers and diners a comprehensive online marketplace that provides access to approximately 55,000 restaurants to discover and book reservations in 11 countries across the U.K., western and central Europe. The company primarily generates revenue for each booking reservation it facilitates on its platform, calculated on a per seated diner fee basis and paid for by the restaurant partner. The company also generates revenue on a subscription basis from restaurant partners by providing, for a fee, access to premium online reservation booking software and related services offerings to help them more effectively and efficiently manage their business, as well as partnerships with non-restaurant partners providing dining experiences to elevate and unlock benefits for their users and members.
Seasonality
Consumer travel expenditures have historically followed a seasonal pattern. Correspondingly, travel partner advertising investments, and therefore the company’s revenue and operating profits, have also historically followed a seasonal pattern. The company’s financial performance tends to be highest in the second and third quarters of a given year (year ended December 2024), which includes the seasonal peak in consumer demand, including traveler accommodation stays, and travel experiences taken, compared to the first and fourth quarters, which represent seasonal low points. In addition, during the first half of the year, experience bookings typically exceed the amount of completed experiences, resulting in higher cash flow related to working capital; while during the second half of the year, particularly in the third quarter, this pattern reverses and cash flows from these transactions are typically negative.
Marketing
The company has established world-renowned, widely used, and recognized brands through the innovative and efficient implementation of marketing and promotional campaigns. Particularly, the company has been successful with the strategic use of a number of cost effective online and offline marketing channels to reach travelers and diners, including its own platform channels (i.e., websites and apps), online search engines (primarily Google), social media, email, generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms (i.e., chatgpt), media via public relations, partnerships, and content distribution. The company continues to focus on its ability to attract and engage new and repeat users and encourage users to directly visit its websites and apps. The company has the ability to manage its marketing investments across its portfolio of brands to optimize results for it.
Competition
Across the company’s three segments, it primarily competes, and in some cases partner, with the following businesses:
General OTAs, such as Expedia, Booking Holdings Inc. (Booking), Airbnb, Traveloka, Despegar, Trip.com, and their respective subsidiaries and operating companies;
Experiences OTAs, such as GetYourGuide, Klook, and TUI Musement;
Hotel metasearch providers, such as trivago, Kayak and Skyscanner;
Online search, social media, and marketplace platforms for advertising spend, such as Google, Facebook, X, Pinterest, and Snap;
Emerging online advertising businesses, such as ad-supported retail and entertainment platforms like Amazon, Spotify, and Walmart;
Global and regional restaurant technology providers for reservation management and related services, such as OpenTable, Resy, and Tock.
Commercial Relationships
The company has commercial relationships with a majority of the world’s leading OTAs, as well as thousands of other travel partners, pursuant to which these companies primarily purchase traveler leads from it, generally on a click-based advertising basis.
For the year ended December 31, 2024, Booking (and its subsidiaries) accounted for 10% or more of its consolidated revenue, and together with Expedia (and its subsidiaries), the company’s two most significant travel partners, accounted for approximately 22% of its consolidated revenue.
Intellectual Property
In connection with the company’s copyrightable content, it posts and institutes procedures under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and similar host privilege statutes worldwide to gain immunity from copyright liability for photographs, text and other content loaded on its platform by consumers.
Regulation
The company is subject to laws that require protection of user privacy and user data. As its business has evolved, the company continues to receive and store a greater volume of personal information. This data is increasingly subject to laws and regulations in numerous jurisdictions around the world. For example, in 2018, both the E.U. and the United Kingdom adopted the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. GDPR, which imposes stringent requirements on the processing of health and other sensitive data.
History
TripAdvisor, Inc. was founded in 2000. The company was incorporated in 2011.
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