trivago N.V. (trivago) offers online metasearch for hotel and accommodation through online travel agencies (‘OTAs’), hotel chains and independent hotels.
The company's search-driven marketplace, delivered on websites and apps, provides users with a tailored search experience via the company's proprietary matching algorithms. The company generally employs a ‘cost-per-click’ (or ‘CPC’) pricing structure, allowing advertisers to control their own return on investment, and the volume of lead traffi...
trivago N.V. (trivago) offers online metasearch for hotel and accommodation through online travel agencies (‘OTAs’), hotel chains and independent hotels.
The company's search-driven marketplace, delivered on websites and apps, provides users with a tailored search experience via the company's proprietary matching algorithms. The company generally employs a ‘cost-per-click’ (or ‘CPC’) pricing structure, allowing advertisers to control their own return on investment, and the volume of lead traffic it generates for them, or a ‘cost-per-acquisition’ (or ‘CPA’) pricing structure, whereby an advertiser pays the company a percentage of the booking revenues that ultimately result from a referral.
trivago operates as a hotel and accommodation search platform worldwide. The company focuses on reshaping the way travelers search for and compare different types of accommodations, such as hotels, vacation rentals and apartments, while enabling its advertisers to grow their businesses by providing them with access to a broad audience of travelers via its websites and apps. The company’s platform allows travelers to make informed decisions by personalizing their search for accommodation and providing them with access to a deep supply of relevant information and prices. In the year ended December 31, 2024, the company offered access to more than 5.0 million hotels and other types of accommodation in over 190 countries, including over 3.8 million units of alternative accommodation such as vacation rentals and apartments.
The company's ability to refine user intent through its search function allows it to provide advertisers with transaction-ready referrals. Recognizing that advertisers on the company's marketplace has varying objectives, and varying levels of marketing resources and experience, the company provides a range of services to enable advertisers to improve their performance on the marketplace.
The company's search platform can be accessed globally via 53 localized websites and apps available in 31 languages. Users can search the platform on desktop and mobile devices, and benefit from a familiar user interface, resulting in a consistent user experience.
Segment
The company operates through three segments: Americas, Developed Europe and Rest of World (RoW).
The company’s Americas segment consists of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, the United States and Uruguay.
The company’s Developed Europe segment consists of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The company’s RoW segment consists of all other countries, the most significant by revenue of which are Japan, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong.
trivago's Search Platform
The company's accommodation search platform forms the core of its user experience. The company is a search and comparison product, and users do not book directly on the platform. When they click on an offer for a hotel room or other accommodation at a certain price, they are referred to the advertisers’ websites where they can complete their booking. The company maintains one of the largest searchable databases of accommodations in the world. As of December 31, 2024, the company's database included more than 5.0 million hotels and other types of accommodations, gathered through OTAs, hotel chains, independent hotels, and providers of alternative accommodations. As of December 31, 2024, the company offered access on its search platform to more than 3.8 million units of alternative accommodation, such as vacation rentals and private apartments.
The company’s users initially search via a text-based search function, which supports searches across a broad range of criteria. The search results show a user an accommodation listing page. For hotels, the page contains aggregated information, including:
Accommodation Information: The company displays information that is relevant to the user, such as the name, pictures, amenities, star rating and distance to selected location;
trivago Ratings Index: The company aggregates millions of ratings globally. The company produces a score for each property, which is updated daily to render relevant and valuable insights for its users while saving them time when searching for the ideal hotel or other accommodation. The rating is a single, easy-to-use score out of ten;
Reviews: The company provides reviews from third parties in a clear and concise format; and
Price Comparison: The company prominently displays a suggested advertised deal for each hotel or other accommodation, while also listing additional available offers from the company’s advertisers in a list format, including room types, amenities and payment options.
The company provides its services through websites and apps, including through the company’s mobile-optimized website available on mobile device browsers. The company’s full-featured native mobile app is available on iPhone, iPad, Android Phone and Android Tablet.
Marketing
Through test-driven marketing operations, the company has positioned its brand as a key part of the process for travelers in finding their ideal hotel or other accommodation. The company focuses the efforts of its marketing teams, and advertising spend towards building effective and efficient messaging for a broad audience.
The company has deployed the use of AI technology into its marketing campaigns, enabling it to trial and experiment with advertising strategies more extensively. For example, the company has produced localized TV advertisements in more than ten different languages, all featuring the same actor, but uniquely tailored for each target market.
The company's application of data-led improvement and innovation also informs its marketing strategy, which enables it to become increasingly more effective with its marketing spend. The company has built tools that capture data and calculate its return on many elements of its brand and performance marketing measures.
Brand Marketing
To grow brand awareness and increase the likelihood that users will visit the company’s websites and use its apps, the company invests in brand marketing globally across a broad range of media channels, including TV marketing, on demand video platforms and online video advertising. The company also generates travel content as a means of engaging with travelers, which is distributed online via social media, its online magazine and email.
Branded channel traffic refers to traffic to the company’s platform through one of its localized platform websites, one of its downloadable mobile applications, branded search engine marketing channels (or ‘branded free traffic’) for keyword searches that are inclusive of the trivago brand name, and/or paid keyword searches that include the trivago brand name, such as ‘trivago’ or ‘trivago hotel’.
Performance Marketing
The company markets its services and directly acquire traffic for the company’s websites by purchasing travel and hotel-related keywords (excluding keyword combinations inclusive of the trivago brand name) from general search engines (referred to as ‘search engine marketing’), such as Google and Yahoo!, and through advertisements on other online marketing channels, such as advertising networks, social media sites, and affiliate websites. The company calls this performance marketing channel traffic.
Allocation of Marketing Spend
The company takes a data-driven, testing-based approach to making decisions about allocating marketing spend, where it uses tools, processes, and algorithms, many of which are proprietary, to measure and optimize performance end-to-end, starting with the pretesting of the creative concept and ending with the optimization of media spend. The company continues to develop the methodologies it uses to inform decisions about how much it spends on each marketing channel. It looks at a range of metrics, including behavior on the trivago website, as well as subsequent booking behavior with its advertisers, to determine the optimal mix of spend. The company assesses the returns on marketing spend by looking at a range of factors, both short and long-term, including impact on referral revenue, user retention, and advertiser engagement.
Sales & Account Management
The company's sales and account management team build and grows relationships with OTAs, hotel chains, and other travel companies, including hospitality technology providers. From facilitating their participation in the company's marketplace to growing the adoption of its products, the dedicated teams provide ongoing consultation and guidance to advertisers around CPC (cost-per-click) and CPA (cost-per-acquisition) bidding options, product updates, and optimization opportunities. The company proactively engages with its advertisers to better understand their specific objectives, to offer solutions through its marketplace.
Independent hotels receive dedicated attention through the company’s customer success team. With tailored solutions for hoteliers, the company enables independent hotels to generate business insights and direct business through their official website by advertising their rates directly in its price comparison, allowing them to compete with the large OTAs and chains.
Marketing Tools ad Services for Advertisers
The company offers its advertisers a suite of marketing tools to help promote their listings on the company’s platform and drive traffic to their websites. The company’s tools and services provide tailored solutions for OTAs, hotel chains and independent hotel advertisers to help them manage their presence on its marketplace and steer their investments according to their budget and traffic needs.
Marketplace
The company designs its algorithm to display hotel room and other accommodation rate offers that it believes will be attractive to its users, emphasizing those offers that are more likely to be clicked and ultimately booked on its advertisers' websites.
The company considers the completion of hotel and other accommodation bookings, which it refers to as booking conversion, to be a key indicator of user satisfaction on its website. At the core of the company’s ability to match users’ searches with large numbers of hotel and other accommodation offers is its auction platform, which it calls its marketplace. With its marketplace, the company provides advertisers a competitive forum to access user traffic by facilitating a vast quantity of auctions on any day.
CPC Bidding Model
The company’s advertisers continue to participate in its marketplace primarily through CPC, or cost-per-click, bidding. Advertisers that use this method submit CPC bids for an advertised rate for a hotel. Advertisers can submit and adjust CPC bids on the company’s marketplace frequently - as often as twice per day - on a property-by-property and market-by-market basis and provides it with information on hotel room and other accommodation rates and availability on a near-real time basis. CPC bids can be adjusted upwards or downwards for a set of dimensions (length-of-stay, booking-window, standard-date, group-size) as determined by the advertiser.
The company also offers its advertisers the opportunity to advertise and promote their business through hotel/accommodation sponsored placements on its websites. This service is generally also priced on a CPC basis and guarantees that the advertiser's placement is in a pre-selected slot, typically at the top of the company's search results.
Cost-Per-Acquisition Model
The company also offers its advertisers the opportunity to participate in its marketplace on a CPA, or cost-per-acquisition, basis, whereby an advertiser pays the company a percentage of the booking amount that ultimately results from a referral. The CPA model enables the company's advertisers to be charged only in the event a user ultimately completes a booking, allowing them to reduce their risk, as they only pay when an actual booking takes place.
Ranking and Sorting Algorithm
In determining the prominence given to offers and their placement in the company’s search results, including in comparison search results for a given location and on detail pages for a given property, its proprietary algorithm considers a number of factors in a dynamic, self-learning process. These include (but are not limited to) the advertiser’s offered rate for the hotel room or other accommodation, the likelihood the offer will match the user’s accommodation search criteria, data the company has collected on the likelihood an offer will be clicked and the CPC that the company’s advertisers will be charged.
CPC and CPA levels play an important role in determining the prominence given to offers and their placement in the company’s search results. Advertisers can analyze the number of referrals obtained from their advertisements on the company’s marketplace and the consequent value generated from a referral based on the booking value they receive from users referred from its site; to determine the amount they are willing to pay. Generally, the higher the potential booking value or booking conversion generated by a referral and the more competitive the bidding, the more an advertiser is willing to bid for an accommodation advertisement on the company’s marketplace. This means that the levels of advertisers’ CPC bids generally reflect their view of the likelihood that each click on an offer will result in a booking by a user. The company excludes from its marketplace auction offers where the CPC has been set to a de minimis level, as this typically denotes room inventory that the advertiser has withdrawn for some period of time from its active inventory on trivago.
By managing their CPC bids, their CPA campaigns and hotel room and other accommodation rates submitted on the company’s marketplace, its advertisers can influence their own returns on investment and the volumes of referral traffic it generates for them.
Strategy
The company continuously optimizing its brand budget allocation as well as its ads. The company is constantly enhancing the user experience by conducting tests on all aspects of its product. By co-creating and innovating with the company’s advertising partners, it intends to unlock user value throughout its metasearch platform and to remain a relevant marketing channel for the company’s advertisers, driving high quality traffic.
Customers
Customers that pay to advertise on trivago include OTAs, including large international players, as well as smaller, regional and local OTAs; hotel chains, including large multi-national hotel chains and smaller regional chains; individual hotels; providers of alternative accommodation, such as vacation rental or apartments.
The company generates the large majority of its referral revenue from OTAs. Certain brands affiliated as of the date hereof with its majority shareholder, Expedia Group, including brands Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire, Wotif, Vrbo, and ebookers, in the aggregate, accounted for 37% of the company's referral revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024. Booking Holdings and its affiliated brands, including Booking.com, Agoda, and priceline.com, accounted for 39% of the company's referral revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024.
Competition
Competition for Users
The company’s principal competitors for users include online metasearch and review websites, such as Google Hotel, Kayak, Skyscanner, Check24 and TripAdvisor; search engines, such as Bing, Google, Naver and Yahoo!; independent hotels and hotel chains, such as Accor, Hilton and Marriott; OTAs, such as Booking.com, Agoda, Priceline, Ctrip, TUI, trip.com and Brand Expedia; and alternative accommodation providers, such as Airbnb and Vrbo.
Competition for Advertisers
The company’s principal competitors for advertisers’ marketing spend include print media, such as local newspapers and magazines; other traditional media, such as TV and radio; search engines, such as Bing, Google, Naver and Yahoo!; online metasearch and review websites, such as Google Hotel Ads, Kayak, Skyscanner, Check24 and TripAdvisor; social networking services, such as Facebook and X (Twitter); websites offering display advertising; email marketing software and tools; connected TV (CTV) streaming services and online video channels, such as YouTube; and mobile app marketing.
Seasonality
The company experiences seasonal fluctuations in the demand for its services as a result of seasonal patterns in travel. For example, searches, and consequently the company's revenue, are generally the highest in the first three quarters, as travelers plan and book their spring, summer, and winter holiday travel. The company's revenue typically decreases in the fourth quarter (year ended December 31, 2024). Seasonal fluctuations affecting the company's revenue also impact the timing of its cash flows.
The company typically invoices once per month, with customary payment terms. Therefore, the company’s cash flow varies seasonally with a slight delay to its revenue and is significantly affected by the timing of its advertising spend.
Intellectual Property
The company has registered domain names for websites that it uses in its business, such as www.trivago.com, www.trivago.de, and www.trivago.co.uk. The company's registered trademarks include trivago, ‘Hotel? Trivago’, ‘trivago Rating Index’, Youzhan, and its trivago logo. These trademarks are registered in various jurisdictions. Reflecting a brand revamp, the company additionally registered a trivago trademark reflecting the new style, as well as a new trivago logo trademark in its key markets.
Government Regulation
In particular, the company is subject to an evolving set of data privacy laws. trivago is subject to the GDPR, which has been in effect since May 25, 2018, and which has recently led to the imposition of significant fines on various companies. Due to the global nature of the company’s operations, trivago is subject to an ever changing and growing patchwork of privacy laws, including the UK Data Protection Act 2018 the Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD) and the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.
History
trivago N.V. was founded in 2005. The company was incorporated in 2005.
