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Tripadvisor, Inc. (TRIP)

Q3 2025 Earnings Call· Thu, Nov 6, 2025

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tripadvisor's Third Quarter 2025 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Angela White, Vice President of Investor Relations. Angela, please go ahead.

Angela White

Analyst

Thank you so much, Felicia. Good morning, and welcome to Tripadvisor's Third Quarter 2025 Financial Results Call. Joining me today are Matt Goldberg, President and CEO; and Mike Noonan, CFO. Earlier this morning, we filed and made available our earnings release. In that release, you'll find reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measure discussed on this call. 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, November 6, 2025. 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. With that, I'll turn the call over to Matt.

Matthew Goldberg

Analyst

Thanks, Angela, and good morning, everyone. In Q3, we delivered consolidated revenue growth of 4% to $553 million and adjusted EBITDA of $123 million or 22% of revenue. We were pleased with this performance, which beat our expectations on adjusted EBITDA and was within range for overall revenue growth. This week, we've initiated a set of changes that represent a fundamental shift in our operating model to support a more focused set of strategic priorities. These actions will sharpen our execution focus, which we expect to accelerate revenue growth, improve operating margins and create a more durable financial profile. To do so, we'll focus on three priorities. First, extending our leadership position in experiences to drive long-term growth by fully deploying our differentiated assets across Tripadvisor and Viator to win in this category. Second, leveraging our unique content, data and brand trust for an AI-enabled future by powering our marketplaces and positioning Tripadvisor at the center of an emerging AI ecosystem. And third, narrowing the focus at brand Tripadvisor to support experiences and our AI future while managing our legacy offerings for profitability. These priorities reflect a shift from optimizing individual brand strategies to speed our transformation into an experiences-led and AI-enabled company. We will direct our focus, talent and investments to what matters most, resulting in a simpler, leaner and faster-moving organization. Our plan is expected to drive significant operational efficiencies of at least $85 million of annualized gross cost savings, which Mike will discuss shortly. But this is not just a cost-cutting exercise. We are aligning ourselves to drive accelerated growth going forward. This is an important moment in the evolution of Tripadvisor Group. We're a very different company than we were 3 years ago with a portfolio mix now anchored in high-growth marketplaces, delivering more sustainable revenue…

Mike Noonan

Analyst

Thanks, Matt, and good morning. I'll start with a review of our financial performance, and later, we'll provide more information on the cost savings program, what our operating model changes will mean for how we report our segments and some thoughts on Q4. As a reminder, all growth rates are relative to the comparable period in 2024, unless noted otherwise. Q3 consolidated revenue was in line with our expectations of $553 million or 4% growth and consolidated adjusted EBITDA exceeded our expectations at $123 million or 22% of revenue. In the Viator segment, the number of experiences booked grew 18%. Growth improved sequentially in both the Tripadvisor and Viator points of sale, while growth in third-party points of sale continued to outpace the overall segment. Importantly, the number of experiences booked through the Tripadvisor point of sale returned to growth this quarter. In North America, our largest source market, we saw bookings growth accelerate sequentially across both points of sale, which we believe is reflective of the strength of both of our brands as we scale our coordinated marketing efforts. Gross booking value, or GBV, grew 15% to approximately $1.3 billion and revenue grew 9% to $294 million. Changes in FX positively impacted GBV revenue growth by approximately 3 percentage points. The difference between the growth in the number of experiences booked and growth in revenue continues to be driven by the high growth of our third-party merchant bookings relative to 2024. As a reminder, merchant bookings generally have a lower average booking value, which impacts GBV growth relative to volume growth. They also carry a lower implied take rate, which impacts revenue growth relative to GBV growth. While the implied take rate is lower than our owned and operated points of sale, third-party merchant bookings are both financially and…

Matthew Goldberg

Analyst

Thanks, Mike. Before we start Q&A, I wanted to take a moment and welcome Alex Dichter to our Board of Directors. Alex joins us with many years of experience as an adviser and operator with deep travel industry knowledge and an extensive background working with organizations across multiple travel verticals to transform and scale their businesses. This is the first step to bringing on fresh perspectives from independent directors, and we're excited to have Alex join the Board. He joins us as Greg O'Hara departs, and I want to thank Greg for his contributions and leadership over the years. With that, I'd like to turn the call back to the operator for Q&A.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from the line of Richard Clarke of Bernstein.

Richard Clarke

Analyst

I'd just maybe like to ask a question on your revenue growth assumptions going forward. I think you said you think you can accelerate growth. I'm just wondering what the shape of that will be. If you're investing even less in the sort of meta and Brand Tripadvisor product, is the revenue growth -- can you still stabilize better than the mid-teens guide you set out for Q4? And with the new organizational structure, would you expect your Experiences segment to be able to grow faster than the 9% sort of high single digits that Viator is doing at the moment? What's the kind of shape of revenue growth going forward?

Mike Noonan

Analyst

Yes. Richard, it's Mike. I'll take this. In terms of thinking about the longer-term shape of revenue and as reflective of our overall operating model, I'll say a few things as we set ourselves up. In Experiences, we do think the operating model and how we're allocating investment to Experiences, we are expecting our Experiences in our new segment to reaccelerate next year, right? And that is both a focus on two things: one, geo TAM expansion, looking at new source markets to acquire bookers, very important in that equation and category expansion as we think about other opportunities to bring other types of things to commercialize in the storefront, think of attractions, right, for example. So those are two important things as we think about that reacceleration statement next year. We also then, I think, as we think about our hotels and other category, which would be our other second new segment, I think we're taking a very pragmatic view of what this looks like. We are -- when you think about the traffic headwinds we've seen, particularly accelerating in the free channels and then you take that with how we will be investing in growth, meaning we're not going to be prioritizing growth necessarily in the paid channels just for growth. We're going to really divert those resources to Experiences. We would expect continued revenue headwinds next year. And then in TheFork, just to round out in terms of the growth, we are continuing to expect that TheFork is going to grow nicely with continued margin evolution. So when you take that all in, when we think about where we sit today, and to be clear, we will be refining our plans as we move through the next 3 months. From a consolidated perspective, we would expect that we would grow both revenue and EBITDA next year. When we take into consideration the cost savings program that we've enacted that really stop the growth of fixed costs in both the Viator and Brand TA segments, which we'd deliver about -- we said about 1 point of margin improvement to the consolidated financial profile next year. So again, important moves we're making today that we believe are important for growth in margin for next year, but not just next year. It's really how we set ourselves up for the next several years and driving the experiences opportunity we have in front of us.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Naved Khan of B. Riley Securities.

Naved Khan

Analyst

A lot to digest here and I think some of the steps here that you described, Matt, do make sense. I'm just wondering, as you look to reaccelerate growth in the Viator business or the Experiences business, is it possible to kind of get kind of closer to your closest competitor? I think they recently disclosed around 30%. And also, you have kind of expanded margins very nicely in this segment. Is it possible to remain on this margin expansion trajectory as you accelerate growth? How -- give us your thoughts on how we think between the trade-off between growth reacceleration versus margins?

Matthew Goldberg

Analyst

Thanks, Naved. And I think you've hit right at the core of why we are so enthusiastic about this fundamental shift to our operating model because we believe it allows us to do just that, reaccelerate growth while we continue to expand margins. And we are already really leading the category today. You can look at it in many different ways and make judgments about who's got the best profile. But let me tell you what I'm excited about our profile. We believe we're in a real position to shape what comes next as the global brand leader in this category. Together with Tripadvisor, it's the category's largest, most trusted and most profitable platform, and we are building it for sustained growth. Why do I say largest? It's largest because of our scale and reach. We're the global leader in scale with unmatched supply and reach, 400,000 experiences, 65,000 operators. And of course, we can more fully tap the hundreds of millions of travelers using Tripadvisor monthly, giving that supply more visibility and more demand that really no competitor can replicate. And the proof points in my mind are the last 12 months GBV of $4.6 billion and 17% items growth. and we believe we can accelerate off that. Being trusted has an advantage. We've got this global reputation of trust, and it's a foundation to grow Experiences globally. A very good percentage of our audience from Tripadvisor is coming outside the U.S., even though Viator has primarily focused on U.S. source market. So that gives us immediate credibility to expand experiences into new markets. We think there'll be lower barriers to adoption in those source markets where travelers already know and use Tripadvisor. And we think that it signals sort of a reliability, which is critical for the emerging category. And in Europe alone, we have 70% brand awareness and it's relatively unmonetized today. So by focusing Tripadvisor on Experiences, we have many, many times more visitors to go take advantage of than others. And finally, profitability. We are driving this performance with financial discipline. And what we've shown is that the category can scale profitably. And we're the only ones who have shown that. And we're doing it efficiency and with discipline and performance. And so Viator was profitable since 2023. Last year, we delivered a mid-single-digit margin. The last 12 months, we have a high single-digit margin, and we are approaching double-digit margins. And as we move from regional strength to building a global platform, we think that, that leadership is within our capability, and we're going to go after it. So thanks for the question. We're super enthusiastic about reaccelerating growth and expanding margins.

Mike Noonan

Analyst

And I'll just add to the second point of your question. Yes, sorry. And just to underscore a few points that Matt said, we are really pleased with the unit growth. And I think I want to make sure that we all focus on the most important metric, we think, is that because it's a statement of real customer conversion and it's a statement of you have the ability to bring back customers on a repeat basis, and that's super important. And so we'll continue to really focus on driving that scale and that unit volume growth. And on the margin, I would say we -- this model, as we continue our disciplined new user acquisition is really around growing margins. And I think we will continue to think about, particularly as we're excited about reaccelerating next year into new geos, there'll be some modest investment into that. But all in all, I expect to continue to see the model produce margin enhancement.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Ronald Josey of Citi.

Unknown Analyst

Analyst

This is Robert on for Ron. Can you maybe give us a sense of new user trends at Viator and as you continue to expand into the secondary and tertiary markets and into newer categories, help us understand your approach to growing supply in each of these newer markets.

Mike Noonan

Analyst

Yes, Rob, I'll take that real quick, and Matt can chime in. Great question because it does tie directly of how we're thinking about the reacceleration point. In the U.S. and North America as our core market, we continue to see very high repeat revenue growth rate from our repeat customers, very important, because that is long-term customers and they generally -- the more times they come to us, the less reliant they are on paid channels. It's part of our core flywheel. On new users, we are very disciplined, right? And it does explain some of the overall growth profile because we are looking at new user acquisition in light of do those ROIs make sense and do they contribute to our long-term margin targets. So we're very disciplined in terms of that new user acquisition. We do believe that a core tenet of the geo expansion and Matt mentioned some of this around where we would think to go would be, hey, where is our brand Tripadvisor, for example, well known, a lot of traffic volumes, which is in Europe, gives us the opportunity to grow that new user base at attractive ROIs, and we're excited about that. And again, is a key principle of how we're thinking about that reacceleration comment?

Matthew Goldberg

Analyst

Yes. And look, I just want to add, Rob, that the marketplace flywheel that we have working between how we generate demand across both of our brands and do that with an ROI-driven acquisition strategy, the way we expand geographically, bring those new users into our store and give them a better experience where we're leveraging AI to do personalization and matching and our sort to be far more relevant for them and then making sure that we have the right supply in those secondary, tertiary markets in new categories. All of that works together to attract new users, get them coming in, converting and then being more loyal, so you get the new and repeat working really well together. And we think that our marketing tests and the tests we've done on our product and with our supply across the two brands allow us to do that with more efficiency than we've ever been able to do it before, and we're going to scale that.

Unknown Analyst

Analyst

Got it. That's great. And then as a quick follow-up, Matt, you had mentioned a few months ago that AI was already making a difference financially across the business today. So can you maybe elaborate on how AI is driving cost efficiencies across the business? And then given your focus on AI going forward, help us understand how you're thinking about the potential revenue opportunities and licensing deals ahead.

Matthew Goldberg

Analyst

Yes. Thanks, Rob. So we're deploying AI fully across the organization in every part of our organization. And from an efficiency and productivity perspective, we've done it in a lot of enterprise use cases across customer service, where we're making major strides in our content moderation and fraud detection, the way we localize, the way we think about driving our marketing teams. It's giving us a lot of advantage. And we will continue to roll that out in every area of the business. In fact, as we're planning for next year, one of the things we want to do is really measure that very clearly so that we can see not only the pilots making sense, but the way we scale that making sense. And I think our -- we've rolled out the tools to do that, and we're excited about how that will continue. More importantly, right, is the way that we are using it in our product to drive innovation. And we've learned a lot over the last couple of years. We've built the AI infrastructure, and we've leveraged it for our product enhancements. And we've shown in succession how we can work with trips and planning and itineraries to the way that we summarize and synthesize our content through to a travel assistant, which we recently learned. And these were all efforts that are leading us to a place where we can go fully AI native and really serve the customer however and wherever they want to engage with that. So we're building on those learnings from our AI innovation. And we are setting ourselves up to put a deep focus on that and not get distracted by trying to chase other things that might not make as much sense at the expense of being able to do it. And that's why we're going to launch an AI native MVP in the coming weeks, and we're excited to continue that. I will say I also believe that the way that we are doing partnerships has been differentiated, and we're learning. We're seeing good value exchange. And we believe that going forward, we can really scale that opportunity. So we're always having conversations to do that. So feeling real good about the AI future.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth of JPMorgan.

Dae Lee

Analyst

This is Dae Lee on for Doug. I have two. Firstly, on -- with the reset to an experience-led strategy, will the consumer experience on Tripadvisor change? And how do you expect Tripadvisor and Viator brand to be positioned for consumers shopping for experience going forward?

Matthew Goldberg

Analyst

Yes. So thanks for that. Absolutely, the user experience will change because we are going to primarily be focused on how the Experiences category can play on Tripadvisor. We will continue to offer the features that we've had in the past, but our primary focus as we allocate resources, as we set goals with all of our KPIs is going to be driving that experiences future. And we do believe that bringing it together under one team, which we've already proved that we can do with our product, all of the work we're doing in the store to optimize the funnel to take friction out, all the myriad of little things we do to drive conversion and loyalty and repeat will benefit both brands, both points of sale, which will come together in a more seamless fashion so that consumers can engage with us wherever it makes the most sense for them. And I think that will drive that flywheel that we were talking about, which once you get it going, really has a lot of potential to accelerate our revenue.

Mike Noonan

Analyst

I'd just add a few things on to that, Dae, which is this work has -- this is not a cold start. We've been doing this work. And you've seen us talk about the coordinated bidding as an example of this. And the learnings we've gotten from that has enabled us to lean in and actually gain increasing confidence around what we can do in the Tripadvisor points of sale. So we're very excited and it's a key point of -- as we think about experiences reacceleration.

Dae Lee

Analyst

Got it. And as a follow-up to that, what's been driving the acceleration in volume growth at Viator? And then for your guide for 4Q, what will drive acceleration, especially given the tough 4Q comps? Are there any specific channels, products or regions that's driving the acceleration?

Mike Noonan

Analyst

Yes. On the unit side, it's -- on the unit side, it's really been the 3P mixing higher, and that's been growing very fast, albeit on a much smaller base, but growing very fast. I think we've consistently said it around the other channels, Viator, which is by far the largest channel and TA and Viator are the vast majority of that. Viator has been generally growing around the average, and Viator has been growing lower than the average. And earlier in the year is actually -- it was declining year-over-year. But that has been improving largely because of the efforts around product that Matt just mentioned, largely because of the efforts around coordinated bidding. And this quarter, we just mentioned that both channels accelerated in the quarter. The TA point of sale actually turned to positive growth in the quarter, again, reflective -- and these are all on unit basis to be clear, all reflective of that. And so as we move forward, we are very excited about our merchant 3P business for all the reasons we've talked historically, and we'll continue to work with our partners to advance that. But the work very much continues on our owned and operated channels at both Viator and Tripadvisor point of sale, and we're going to continue to work on those. And we expect embedded in our Q4 guide would be expectations of both the TA and Viator channels to have modest acceleration again.

Matthew Goldberg

Analyst

Yes. And just remember, Tripadvisor Experiences has previously been a drag on growth. That's going to shift, and it will no longer be a drag on growth, and we'll get these things working really well. We have marketing products, supply, data plans to do that.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Jed Kelly of Oppenheimer & Co.

Jed Kelly

Analyst

Just two. Will you market -- will the go-to-market strategy for your Experiences, will that be built more around the Viator brand or the Tripadvisor brand? And then can you talk about how you think potentially expanding into other experiences into other regions, particularly Western Europe?

Matthew Goldberg

Analyst

Yes. So the go-to-market strategy is something that we can continue to work on, and we think that it will be where we believe we have the strongest ability to go. Now both brands can exist in both markets because they do different things. They are different products, right? Viator is a very focused vertical when you kind of already know I want an experience and I want the best way to book it. Tripadvisor still is a broad planning and recommendation platform across multiple categories. And that's not going to necessarily change where we'll put our focus and energy is in making sure that if you come to find your hotel, we're also doing a really good job to cross-market experiences to you in a fundamental way. If you're thinking about where you want to eat, there's probably a really interesting tour around that restaurant that we want to make sure you know about and book. So it will depend category by category in experiences and market by market, how we go to market. We think both brands can be there. We may choose to lead with one or the other depending on the market.

Mike Noonan

Analyst

Yes. And I'll follow up on that point, which is your second question on geo expansion. So we are excited about geo expansion, particularly as we think about accelerating growth in new users. When we look at the geos, obviously, we want to look for a large addressable TAM and look for areas we actually have a competitive advantage and Europe clearly is that when we think about the large TAM size, but we also think about -- and this is where it's so critical about the operating model change. The traffic and brand awareness of Tripadvisor is very large there. And so our ability to really enhance and tighten our focus around experiences, leveraging the Tripadvisor brand is going to be very important to how we think about that expansion. And that doesn't mean -- and Viator will always play a point, and we have two brands to think about how we want to grow in the new market. So a lot of work underway as we're working on this, but we're very excited about that expansion opportunity.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from the line of Nafeesa Gupta of Bank of America.

Nafeesa Gupta

Analyst

So my first question is on Metasearch. How are you thinking about the legacy business now that you are consolidating both the experiences in Viator and Tripadvisor? Will that business still have investments that you were planning for the last couple of quarters? And the second one is on Fork. There are reports going around regarding exploring sale of TheFork. Any thoughts on that? And how should we think about TheFork revenue growth in 2026 given the B2B lapping?

Matthew Goldberg

Analyst

Well, thanks for those questions. First of all, on our meta business and our hotel business, the hotel product continues to provide real value for both travelers and partners. We have the best advice, the most photos, and we're trusted really over everyone else in the space. And we recognize that with Google taking more and more share of the search traffic for themselves, we're just not going to be able to grow that business at the level of profitability that we'd like. So we know that it's an important part of the journey that travelers find value and price compare, and we're able to send our partners really good quality leads. And we've done some really good product work there to drive conversion rates higher. And we're -- I think we're still focused on that. But what we won't do is we're not going to continue to invest incrementally. You can think of it as an add-on or incremental product to our primary focus that we will make sure maintains the quality for both travelers and partners. Now as it relates to your question about TheFork. TheFork is a great business that is performing really well. We are excited about the path of sustainable growth and the improving profitability profile that really benefits the Group. But of course, we consistently evaluate all options to unlock value in all of our assets, and that includes TheFork. And our primary focus is what's going to drive the most shareholder value ahead. Nothing is off the table. We see it's a leader in core European markets. We have a good and mix of B2C and with growing B2B, and that's giving us advantage. And as a leading European dining platform, we know it's a valuable asset, both for global and regional travelers. It is run separately. There's optionality there. And we recognize there have been precedent transactions out there that suggest TheFork is a highly valuable asset, especially given its unique scale position in Europe. So optionality, and we are focused on it. We love what the team is doing there.

Nafeesa Gupta

Analyst

Just on the revenue growth for Fork, how should we think about that going ahead? I know this last couple of quarters, there was a lot of FX tailwind as well. And how should we think about next year?

Mike Noonan

Analyst

Yes, sorry about that. Yes, listen, I think a couple of things important to understand the growth profile. Big picture, one, but we still expect nice growth and profit improvement next year for sure. We are -- we will have a bit harder comp next year because we're comping and we're seeing some of this before. We're comping some very strong growth in B2B as well as some of the partnership initiatives we've put in place. So we would expect a step down in growth year-over-year, but we still believe we're very excited about the revenue diversification strategy. We're very excited about the B2B business and the ability to continue to grow into our existing restaurant base, new restaurant base, more and more premium plans. Those all offer a very, very nice upside as well as we continue to see very healthy growth -- volume growth in our B2C business, particularly in our proprietary Fork network. So I think, yes, there'll probably -- there will be -- we expect a step down in growth from what we saw this year, but still very healthy as we move into next year.

Operator

Operator

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn it back to Matt Goldberg for closing remarks.

Matthew Goldberg

Analyst

Thank you all for joining us on this morning's call. The changes we walked through today represent a meaningful shift in our strategic focus and how we'll deliver value for shareholders ahead. We're excited to move into this new phase of our growth for the group. Before I close out, I also want to take a moment to acknowledge the impact these decisions have on our teams. We're grateful for their continued hard work and dedication. We look forward to updating you on our progress and plans for 2026 on the next call. Thanks, everyone.

Operator

Operator

Goodbye.