Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Expedia Group Q4 2022 Financial Results Teleconference. My name is Emily, and I'll be the operator for today's call. [Operator Instructions] For opening remarks, I will turn the call over to Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, Strategy and Investor Relations, Harshit Vaish. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Expedia Group's earnings call for the fourth quarter of 2022 that ended December 31. I'm pleased to be joined on the call today by our CEO, Peter Kern, and our CFO, Julie Whalen. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, reflects management's view as of today, February 9, 2023 only. We do not undertake any obligation to update or revise this information. As always, some of the statements made on today's call are forward-looking, typically preceded by words such as we plan, we expect, we believe, we anticipate, we are optimistic or confident that or similar statements. Please refer to today's earnings release and the company's filings with the SEC for information about factors which could cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. You will find reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures discussed today in our earnings release, which is posted on the company's Investor Relations website at ir.expediagroup.com. And I encourage you to consistently visit our IR website for other important information. Unless otherwise stated, any reference to expenses excludes stock-based compensation. And with that, let me turn the call over to Peter.

Thank you, Harshit. And good afternoon. And thank you all for joining us today. This past year was an important one in our company's journey. We did a ton of work and made great progress on many transformational initiatives, all while delivering record EBITDA. Q4 was yet another step in that journey, despite the impact to our P&L from the severe weather. Hurricane Ian in early October and the winter storms in late December drove up cancellations, causing bookings and revenue for the quarter to come in behind our expectations, despite demand otherwise accelerating through the quarter. The good news is that we have seen those booking trends come back much stronger in January post the disruptions. So, 2023 is off to a great start. And we were really pleased that our investment over the last several years in service technology and capabilities allowed us to deliver best-in-class service through these difficult travel circumstance. As I've said many times before, when your strategy is centered around long term retention of valuable customers, every element of the work must deliver for the traveler. So big thanks to our service team for all their hard work, especially over the holidays. Now, as we launch into 2023, I'm particularly pleased with how our strategy of investing in and retaining high lifetime value members is showing accelerating improvement across our business. For the fourth quarter of 2022 versus 2019, our new customers that became loyalty members grew over 60%. And we entered 2020 with a record number of active loyalty members, which is 10% higher than any prior year. And just as importantly, our quarterly active app users increased by approximately 40%. For us, these are the most important metrics to gauge the progress of our strategy. Just to remind you, our loyalty members…

Thanks, Peter. And hello, everyone. 2022 was a year of significant progress on our strategic growth initiatives. And our financial results are evidence that we are on the right path to deliver long term profitable growth. The accelerating success of our lodging business, particularly in our brand Expedia business in the US, which is the first of our brands to benefit from our transformative tech and marketing initiatives, enabled us to deliver total company record lodging bookings and revenue. And we did this while at the same time driving significant profitability with record EBITDA levels at over $2.3 billion and an EBITDA margin of over 20%. Our fourth quarter also benefited from continued strong lodging demand, but unfortunately was heavily impacted by Hurricane Ian in October, and the storms in the US during December. Absent these weather related events, as well as FX headwinds, our results on both the top and bottom line would have been at record fourth quarter levels. As far as the details regarding our financial performance for the fourth quarter, similar to previous earnings calls, I will discuss our revenue related and adjusted EBITDA growth metrics this quarter both on a recorded and like-for-like basis. The like-for-like growth rates excludes the contribution from Egencia, Amex GBT and the non-lodging elements of our Chase relationship. As a reminder, on November 1, 2021, we completed the sale of Egencia and our EPS business entered into a 10 year lodging supply agreement with Amex GBT. It is also important to note that our fourth quarter 2022 growth rates as compared to 2019 were negatively impacted by FX headwinds of approximately 250 basis points to gross bookings, 400 basis points to revenue, and 800 basis points to adjusted EBITDA or 70 basis points to our adjusted EBITDA margin. We believe…

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question today comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

Maybe two, if I could. In terms of thinking about moving all of your brands and all of your geographies on to the technology stack as we go through 2023, are there some elements of either costs that still have to be absorbed by the business model that we should be keeping in mind in 2023? And once that transition is over, how should we be thinking about possible lift from a business momentum standpoint on the other side of that transition? And maybe one quick follow-up on B2B. I know, obviously, we're not going to guide to the full year, but can you talk a little bit to some of the variables you're seeing in the B2B business that are building momentum or things that we should be keeping front of mind as we think about what growth and volume you might build in the B2B business through 2023?

I'll start at the top. In terms of moving the businesses on to a single technology stack and front end stack, I think hotels.com is an instructive example, in the sense that last year we talked about this a few times. As we're moving hcom across, we obviously did less to improve Hcom as a standalone entity, because all the engineers were working on moving it. So, you lose a little momentum as you're moving something. And then there is typically an uplift period where you've got to optimize the new stack and the new product on the new stack to get back to where you were, and then get all the benefits beyond that. So there is typically, if you will, a lull that takes place as you move things and some friction that you have to absorb in the numbers. So we did that with Hcom, as I mentioned. We're now getting the benefit of much faster testing between all the OTA brands. Vrbo is the next one to move. It will suffer a little bit of the same things. But we think we can absorb that, as Julie said, and still show the growth we are planning for this year. And that unlocks, then, of course, being able to do One Key and other things. So there's a lot of unlocks on the other side, but you do have to sort of weather a little friction to get across and we've weathered it in the last year's numbers. We have a little left to weather this year. Again, we think will drive very good growth despite that. And, of course, when it's behind us grow even faster. So, that's what we're really looking at. And then, on the other side of it, you get the benefit of…

Our next question comes from Lee Horowitz with Deutsche Bank.

Just thinking about the investment plans for 2023 and how that impacts margins. So on the one hand, you obviously have investments in One Key, driving some incremental marketing investments. What are the areas that you see potentially offset some of those incremental investments from perhaps fixed cost growth, maybe underlying marketing efficiency via bringing that function under a unified stack? Or perhaps other areas of cost efficiency that you see across the P&L?

We will be investing somewhat more in the loyalty program, but we expect, as we've talked about many times, we think about our investment in acquiring and retaining customers as everything from loyalty to discounting to direct marketing spend and performance brand, et cetera. And we expect to balance those things. So we don't expect the all up cost of that, if you will, to be expanding over the course of the year. It might shift between buckets. And we believe we can underwrite that with the total spend we already have. So there may be some noise. And when we get there, we'll explain it to you in terms of how the loyalty program will roll out. But we expect to absorb that all in all those line items, just trading them off, one against another.

One follow-up, if I could. Obviously, you're seeing really strong underlying demand for the industry with growth into January that looks really healthy. Obviously, this is maybe somewhat counterintuitive, given the state of the consumer savings rates and inflation. To what do you owe sort of this strong underlying demand for the overall travel industry, given the macro backdrop?

I think you've heard [indiscernible] talk about it for a while, and maybe it was hopeful. But we continue to see that people are prioritizing travel over just about everything. If any of you have been traveling, I'm sure you've seen it. Rates are still very high. Demand is high. Planes are full. So I think maybe it's still the effect of COVID and people realizing there's more valuable things to do with their lives. And it's not just like revenge travel, but it's beyond that. Like, I want to keep traveling, I want to keep enriching my life. But I think we're seeing high demand. We obviously think we're doing a good job of capturing that demand, relatively speaking, but the markets are strong. We still haven't seen really Asia come back fully. I'm sure we'll see pockets. We're all worried about it. But so far, demand continues to be quite robust. And we're really pleased with how 2023 is starting. So, with any luck, there'll be soft landings all over the world. And Asia will come back and the industry will remain robust through this year.

The next question comes from Kevin Kopelman with Cowen.

I had a follow-up on that. Could you help us think about or help us better understand the growth that you're seeing year-to-date? Should we think of that as kind of getting back to that high-single digit number? Or have you been able to surpass that?

I think as Julie pointed out, January was north of 20% up in lodging, GBV, gross bookings. So we're definitely running ahead of high single digits so far. We'll have to see how the rest of the year plays out, rest of the quarter, rest of the year plays out. But it's really been driven by pretty much all quadrants. It's our brands. It's our B2B business. It's geographically dispersed. APAC is coming back a little stronger, but that's a relatively small base for us. So, it's been pretty broad. And right now, it's definitely running well ahead of where we were in the fourth quarter.

Yeah. And I think just to remember, even when you go back to the third quarter, we also had high single digits. So really the fact that we're holding that ex all the storms and the noise that we've been talking to you guys about, and it's been accelerated in the fourth quarter, and we're seeing a step change as we enter into 2023, as well as with our Bex US business, we think that's a really good sign that we've got some strength ahead for this year.

And I'd add, Kevin. I talked a little bit on the first question about friction. We spent a lot of last year doing some heavy lifting on things like hotels.com, having reduced testing, etc. We really spooled that up in the fourth quarter, and it's accelerating further now. So just the ability to be back and really innovating on the product in the day to day and the product is really valuable and it's increment by increment. It's small pieces. But when you add them up, it really can drive a lot. So conversions improving, lots of things are improving. So I think we're just starting to multiply those effects of all the work we've done along with the marketing and everything else. And hopefully, also, we're working in a good demand environment, which helps. But I think those things are just more tailwinds than headwinds again, and that's just helping to drive us a little faster.

Just one quick follow-up on that. Can you touch on ADR trends? The kind of slower number in Q4, was that just related to the weather incident?

Yeah. That was I think called out in our remarks. But that was pretty much solely due to the weather-related incidents. ADRs have been holding pretty strong, but still elevated. I don't think we've heard anyone else speak of any issues with ADRs. We've seen a little bit of movement in Vrbo. But again, it's coming of off really high levels, and it's not that significant. Slight movement. But ADRs are really holding strong for us across the board.

The next question comes from Lloyd Walmsley with UBS.

Two, if I can. First just on the – I think on the marketing, the all-in the marketing side, loyalty, discounting and marketing and the plan for that to kind of be balanced through the year, is there a point where you get to the other side of kind of some of this longer dated spend and feel like you're going to see leverage as this bears fruit? And then sort of related to that, it sounds like the stats around loyalty and app users show a compelling uplift. How convinced are you guys that those boosts are incremental and kind of causal rather than just coincident with your heaviest users just gravitate towards those things? Anything you can share there would be great.

So on the marketing side, from a leverage perspective, we actually are leveraging with our all-up spend with, obviously, loyalty and discounting which are contra revenues. When you look at totality on the year, we are leveraging and we expect to hold that, if not improve it, next year. I think we're just wanting to make sure we make the point that on any particular quarter, you can see movement, right? Because we're shifting our spend and have started to do that now for a couple of quarters where we're putting more of our spends into long term investments. And so, you could make that investment today and get the benefit two or three quarters out. And so, it's not about any one particular 90 days that we should be judging per se, the total bucket of our spends. So, we're really focused on leveraging it in total on the year across the entire spend profile. So, I think that's how you should think about it. I think it's great that we've seen it leverage. We're shooting for that again here. And I think when you look at things like the types of customers, the high lifetime value customers that we are getting and are getting significantly more in brand Expedia US business and we're seeing that translate into really strong revenue, it's a pretty exciting time to see this all come to fruition.

I would just add on your question of causal or not. What we've seen, Lloyd, is that we've been able to greatly expand the numbers at a pretty rapid pace and bring more and more people into the loyalty plans and into app usage. And our historical – those trends I gave about 2x and 2.5x with even higher multiple for app loyalty members, those have held even as we've expanded the pool. So, it's not just the devotee who's becoming a loyalty member. It's really everybody that we can get into loyalty, that we can get into app usage starts to see all the member benefits, starts to get the pricing benefits and points and other things. And that's consistently sticky at bringing them back. And as Julie says, over time, we'll create more leverage in the model because once we have this bigger and bigger base of loyal customers, then the marketing beyond that, beyond loyalty, et cetera, becomes, again, trying to buy the right customers in given places and add them to the pool. And that we think we can do more effectively once we have a bigger base and more efficiently.

The next question comes from Anthony Post with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Maybe one big picture question about the shape of the year. Your marketing spend is over 50% of revenues. I know you're working on a lot of projects to build a better customer base. Can you help us think about how you think about that long term? And when you said leverage this year, does that mean on that line? Are you thinking about as a percentage of bookings for 2023? Secondly, just a comp question. I know there's some tough virus comps – easy virus comes right now. Ton of bookings float in kind of in the spring. How are you thinking about the shape of the year, for our models?

I'll let Julie deal with the second one. But to your first one, I think the way to think about is you've got to break it up a little bit. First of all, we've got expanding B2B business, where commissions are part of our marketing spend. So as that business grows and has been growing currently faster than our B2C business, you've got some movement into that mix, where the commissions are higher than this 50% level. So, it's pulling the number higher. At the same time, we're trying to use marketing to build this base of customers, leverage the model. And as the base of direct gets bigger, right, you're driving more business from direct and you start to get leverage in what you're spending to add new people to the funnel because the new people become a somewhat smaller piece of the overall pie of business. And so, that is where I think you will start to see us gain leverage, is as the big base of loyalty and app members grows and grows and grows, and we're very focused on retaining them, lowering churn, all the pieces that go into that. That is how we get a bigger direct business that we're driving on top of adding new people to the funnel. But that spend is now on top of just a bigger and bigger base of customers that keep coming back. So that's where we believe long term we get that leverage from. And the better we get at it, who knows how we will balance growth and profitability, but that is the base on which we build. Can you repeat the second question? I'm sorry, Anthony.

We have easy comps now with virus first couple of months. And then you saw a big flood of bookings into the industry in April and May. Just want to make sure people are thinking about the models right and how you how you think about that.

So for top line comps is what your suggesting?

Comps to last year.

And bookings, yeah.

Obviously, [Technical Difficulty] that we believe on the year that we can drive double-digit comps year-over-year. We're obviously not speaking how it plays out by quarter. But I think what's super exciting is how we started 2023 at these levels with greater than 20 on our [Technical Difficulty] gross bookings and really coming out of the year strong. That gives us a lot of confidence. That plus Bex US and how it's performing under the covers gives us a lot of confidence for the momentum as we move throughout the year. But I wouldn't get ahead of us right now, still early in the year, early in the quarter, but we are committing to the double-digit growth on the year.

Next question comes from Bryan Fitzgerald with Wells Fargo.

A couple of questions, guys. Could you give us an update on China outbound, your partnerships there and how those work in relation to other players in the market and any early thoughts on how you would pursue that opportunity as they reopen? The second one was just really quickly on the test velocity that it can grow 4x, Vrbo cuts over in the first couple of quarters, if I got that right. If you had to put a bow around the amount of testing across all your properties, are we in the ninth inning in terms of – or eighth inning in terms of [indiscernible] and then we're homing in on that 4X test velocity.

China first. Our biggest relationship there is outbound with trip.com in China, and then we have some smaller relationships and some offline travel relationships. It's early days, there's tons of interest. I'm sure you'll hear this from other players, but there's a lot of shopping going on. But it's still fairly challenging for outbound travel between the political issues, between airlift which is challenging, and there's still a lot of unique rules now getting in and out of China that the airlines are dealing with, making it hard to fly direct and so forth. And then, of course, you've got the issues of Russian airspace, with great issues with European airlift to China. So it's going to take a little while to work itself out. But interest is very high. We are seeing uplift, but we expect a big uplift to be still a little ways out. But it's very exciting, obviously, and hopefully, some of the things that are going on will quiet down, and we'll continue to see more robust cooperation between various governments to make it more possible. Certainly, the US travel industry is doing a lot to lobby to get rid of various restrictions. The second piece, we are already planned at 4x velocity. So that has a lot to do with bringing sort of the core classic OTA brands together. So Hotels, Expedia, and then some of the smaller brands that ride the same rails already. Vrbo is the next thing to come across. And it will benefit from a lot of similar testing. But it will also be a somewhat unique product in its own right. So, the 4x has nothing to do with Vrbo coming across or not. It's really around core OTA. When Vrbo comes across, it will get the knock on…

The next question comes from John Colantuoni with Jefferies.

I wanted to start with the comment you made about the Expedia brand performing well, and that some of your smaller brands and geographies have been sort of dragging down the overall business because of sort of intentional decisions to deemphasize them. So, I'm just curious if there's going to be an inflection point when those smaller brands and geographies become less material, so that the overall growth improves as it starts to mirror the Expedia and Vrbo brands? The second question is there's been a big uptick in conversations about AI. And I'm curious if you could unpack where you see the biggest opportunities to leverage AI capabilities across the business and how that could alter your trajectory in the travel ecosystem. Customer service is obviously one that immediately comes to mind, but curious to get your perspective on that as well.

I think we could probably talk about your second question for a couple hours. But I'll take your first one first, which is, yes, we precisely believe that with brand Expedia – again, we talked about Expedia in the US. Expedia is obviously in a lot of countries. And the issue has been not everything we've developed was immediately available in all languages and all geographies. Likewise, not on all brands. So as we start to be able now with hotels.com on the same stack, with each benefiting from the same goodness that comes from tests and other things, we're going to be able to roll out that playbook to more and more places. Now, there's still some work to do. Hcom's loyalty programs still different than Expedia. Once we have One Key, that will simplify that whole ecosystem as well. But we believe that those big brands, inclusive of Expedia, hotels.com, now on the same stack, and Vrbo and our B2B business, they will inflect past the slower growth of some of the smaller things. But to be clear, we want to move back into geographies, we want to play this playbook out in more places, this is not about, like, keeping the good and slowing down the bad. And then there's no bad, but slowing down the slower growing. This is about keeping the focus on the winning strategy and deploying it in as many places in as rigorous and controlled way as we can. And you're winning in more places and driving the business that way. So, it's a bit of, you're right, the big, good stuff overtaking the slower growth stuff. It's also about deploying the strategy to some of the slower growth items where we think we can still drive, whether it's a geography or…

The next question comes from Tom Champion with Piper Sandler.

Maybe two quick ones for Julie. Julie, can you just quickly restate and clarify the guidance and expectations for the year? I think it was double digit growth. Is that in bookings? Is that versus 2019 or year-over-year? Can you just restate that for us? And I was also curious, your comments around headcount. It seems like a little bit of a different comment than we've been hearing this earnings season. How are you thinking about headcount through the year?

From a guidance perspective, we said double-digit growth. That's on both top and bottom line, and it's relevant to – year-over-year. So, as I mentioned at the beginning that we're going to be switching next year to no longer be, per se, to tracking against a four year old metric. We're going to move to year-over-year. And so, that guidance is relevant to that. Regarding headcount, yes, that is different than probably what you've heard in other places. I think what's important to remember is that the team here did an incredible job, taking out $1 billion worth of cost over the last couple of years. And so, we're coming at this from a different spot than many other tech companies and so forth. And so, we've taken out a lot of that cost already. And heads, I think we're down – at some point, down 30% or so. And so, again, coming from a different spot. We're really being thoughtful about what we invest back into, for obvious reasons. We're watching the economy just like everybody else. Obviously, we're seeing incredibly strong business, but we're being thoughtful about who we invest back into. And really, our investments are primarily in product and tech to support our growth initiatives and to get us over this line. Peter has been talking about getting this tech stack completed. And so, we feel like we're in a great spot to be able to do that with limited levels of headcount growth and maintaining our strong financial discipline, keeping our cost structure below our sales growth.

The next question comes from Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan Chase.

This is Dae Lee on for Doug. I have two. So, revisiting the demand comments, is this something that you're seeing across deals and accommodation types? Or are there any particular deals or maybe property types that might be driving some of that strength that you're seeing? With obviously your January comment, what's changed from 4Q to January that might be driving strong lodging growth in January and how sustainable do you think those vectors are going forward?

I think, to your first question, we're not seeing anything – I'm sure we could dissect every variable and find some difference, but there's not anything, when you look at it broadly, that says luxury is doing well, but the bottom is doing poorly or vice versa. We are generally a little more biased towards the middle and upper end of the market. And we are seeing fairly consistent strength. As I mentioned, APAC, measured against itself, is coming back faster, but it had a longer way to come back. Obviously, the West has been back for a while. But it's also seeing nice growth. So APAC for us is not big enough to drive our overall number. So it really is kind of everything. And by and large, it's every class of product and class of – every type within a class of product. So there's nothing we've really seen that's driving like, wow, luxury is off the board and everything else is making up for other things. So we haven't seen much movement between products or trade downs or any of that. It's been pretty consistent. January, as I mentioned, we believe it's a combination of a lot of work we've put in in terms of improving the product, getting through some of the hardest transitions, getting back to testing, getting our marketing machine refined, and that's constantly improving. And we've been talking for a long time – Julie mentioned that we've been investing for a while in some of these long term vectors. And as we've all talked about, we gave up some short term business to focus on app downloads, to focus on getting the right kinds of customers. And we knew it would take some time for this to start to multiply on itself and get the benefit because people don't always book travel 20 times a year. So I think this is the benefit of time of catching up and stacking up the base of members, this base of app users, improving the product. As we've gone, we've launched a bunch of great features around flight tracking and comparison shopping and smart shopping and collaborative shopping and a bunch of new products, all of which have been very engaging in their own right. We're rolling those out to more places all the time. We just recently rolled out flight tracking to the rest of the world outside the US. So we're seeing great benefits in those things. And I think they're just starting to stack up now. There's no magic to January 1. So I can't tell you exactly why January. But post all the disruptions of the storms, we've seen really strong, robust demand and rebound. And I think it's a combination of a ton of hard work across our entire company.

Our final question today comes from Deepak Mathivanan with Wolfe Research.

Maybe a couple of ones for Julie. So, first, the guidance on margin expansion was helpful, but curious if you can put any more specificity to it. Understand that, obviously, macro creates a lot of uncertainties. But is there a level that we can expect should macro trends kind of remain consistent with what you've seen in January and maybe recovery holds up through the year? Also another financial question, maybe on buybacks. What is the philosophy in terms of maintaining the velocity of buybacks? Is 4Q kind of a good proxy for us to think about, given the business is very cash flow generative and you have plenty of capacity?

On margin expansion, I think, first of all, it's important to remember that we're ending this year with record EBITDA levels and margins that are expanding 200 basis points, and we're committed to expanding on top of that. So, we're really proud of where our margins are. Certainly, we would love to give a target, but I think at that point – I think I even said this last time that when you give the target, then they want the higher target. So, we're really pushing towards driving efficient growth and driving profitable growth. And we think as we're starting to demonstrate when we're getting these lifetime value customers that we can get more efficient, as we have started to do on the year with our marketing spend, and we're deriving the top line to levels that we're seeing has accelerated through the Q4 and coming in even stronger in 2023, all of that should be bode well for us to be able to drive profitability and EBITDA. And so, that's about where we're going to commit to at this point, is margin expansion. But over time, we can update you on as we move through. From a buyback perspective, as I said earlier, we're really committed to buying back our stock. We believe it's the best use of capital to maximize shareholder returns at this time. Certainly, with that momentum we're seeing in the business, our stock is still undervalued, we believe, and so therefore, we believe buying back our own stock is the best return. So we're going to continue with that. We're going to buy back opportunistically. Obviously, as you mentioned, and as we said earlier, we did buy it back on an accelerated basis, $350 million approximately in the fourth quarter. And that was on top of another $150 million that we had started sort of the end of September. And so, we're going to be continuing with these elevated levels and buying back opportunistically as we go throughout 2023.

I think that was it. So thank you all for joining us. Appreciate your time and look forward to our next update. Take care. Thank you, operator.

That concludes today's call. You may now disconnect your lines. Have a nice day.