Mark D. Okerstrom
Analyst · Ross Sandler with Deutsche Bank
Thanks, Dara. Overall, we're pleased with our first quarter results. Hotel revenue grew 24%, driven by room night growth of 28%, which was offset slightly by a 3% decrease in revenue per room night. Domestic room nights were up 15% year-over-year, while international room nights were up 43%. Note that room night growth comparisons in Q1 were much more difficult than they were in Q4. Also remember that the first quarter last year was helped by an extra day from leap year, which was more or less offset by this year's earlier Easter. But note that the Easter comp will create a bit of a headwind for Q2. Our international business continues to thrive with gross bookings and revenue growth of 30% and 36%, respectively. Importantly, we closed our acquisition of trivago in early March, and we're happy to have that business and team as part of the Expedia, Inc. family. trivago is an early-stage business growing very quickly, and we expect them to push on the gas pedal for quite a while. With less than 1 month of trivago in our results, they added a little more than 150 basis points of global revenue growth for the quarter. At the brand level, we continue to see healthy results for most of our brands with the notable recent exception of Hotwire, which is being challenged by 3 key trends: Firstly, the Domestic Car business has become increasingly challenging, primarily due to continued fleet constraints and associated efforts by rental car companies to drive up pricing. This environment creates clear challenges for the Opaque deep discount car rental business. In addition, Hotwire is probably the most countercyclical brand we have, so as economies stabilize and hoteliers see higher occupancy rates, the gap between Opaque pricing and retail pricing for consumers narrows, and this business comes under increased pressure. And lastly, the competitive intensity in the Opaque space has heated up with Hotwire's closest competitor recently launching a very similar deep discount product. To the upside, Hotwire is seeing nice international growth, but that business is not yet large enough to move the needle. Revenue from our air business grew 14% year-over-year. Ticket volume increased 9%, again largely due to our VIA Travel acquisition. Revenue per ticket was up 5%, primarily on volume incentive compensation for certain carriers. Note that because we will lap the VIA acquisition at the end of April, we don't expect such positive air trends to continue. Other revenue grew 29% for the quarter, primarily on growth in corporate travel fees, insurance and hotel metasearch revenue of trivago. In contrast, rental car revenue was a headwind. Now turning to key expense categories. Cost of revenue grew slightly faster than revenue in the first quarter, primarily on the impact of our acquisitions. On an organic basis, cost of revenue would have leveraged. As we expected, selling and marketing expense grew faster than revenue, primarily due to difficult comps, our continued marketing efforts to support improved product performance across our Expedia and Hotels.com brands, as well as our aggressive expansion in key international markets. Selling and marketing expense growth was also further amplified this quarter as a result of the inclusion of trivago's results, which added almost 400 basis points to selling and marketing expense growth for the quarter. As a result, looking forward, we now expect selling and marketing expense to grow faster in Q2 than it did in Q1, and the organic comps will get easier in Q3 and Q4. Growth rates will continue to be high throughout the year as the trivago team continues to invest aggressively to expand their scale and global footprint. Technology and content grew 27% year-over-year on higher headcount cost driven by continued investments in our key technology projects and fast growth and depreciation expense. For the remainder of 2013, we expect depreciation to grow sequentially in a pattern very similar to what you've seen over the past several quarters. As a result, we expect tech and content expense to continue to grow at relatively high rates on a reported basis but start looking better relative to revenue growth on a cash basis later this year. General and administrative expenses grew 19% for the first quarter with 700 basis points of growth coming from acquired businesses. In terms of capital allocation, since our last call, in addition to our dividend, we deployed nearly $700 million towards a combination of acquisitions and buybacks, closing our trivago acquisition and repurchasing 2 million shares for $127 million, an average price of $63.60 per share. Before covering financial expectations, I'd like to briefly highlight certain housekeeping items. First, there are some additional impacts to our P&L that will be driven by our trivago acquisition. In the back half of the year and in the future, we expect to see a significant increase in the minority or noncontrolling interest line on our P&L to account for the 37% of trivago currently held by minority shareholders. While not applicable to adjusted EBITDA, this will impact net income and adjusted net income. We're also expecting interest income to be negatively impacted by the cash outlay for trivago. Please note that interest income will also be reduced by cash paid per share repurchases so far in 2013, along with the payments we expect to make to Hawaii. Second, you may have noticed that our GAAP and ANI tax rates were anomalous this quarter. The GAAP impact was driven in part by a couple of sizable, nondeductible expenses, while ANI rate was driven in part by some favorable tax impacts from recent U.S. tax legislation. Though quite difficult to predict, for full year, we are estimating the effective rate of about 25%. Turning to our financial expectations for full year 2013. We continue to expect adjusted EBITDA growth in the low double digits with the possibility of hitting the low teens. Note that we have added adjusted EBITDA for trivago to our forecast in the range of $20 million to $30 million. However, we have reduced our organic forecast by a similar amount due primarily to the challenges we are seeing at Hotwire. In terms of the shape of the year, we now expect all of our annual adjusted EBITDA dollar growth to come in the back half of the year. With that, let's turn to questions. Operator, would you please remind listeners how to ask a question.