Tripadvisor, Inc. (TRIP) Q2 2021 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the TripAdvisor's Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, today's conference call is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to TripAdvisor's Vice President of Investor Relations, Mr. Will Lyons. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Valerie. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our call. Joining me today are TripAdvisor's CEO, Steve Kaufer; and our CFO, Ernst Teunissen. Last night, after market closed, we distributed and filed our second quarter 2021 earnings release, and made available our shareholder letter on our Investor Relations website. In the release, you will find reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures discussed on this call. On our Investor Relations website, you will find supplemental financial information, which also includes reconciliations of certain non-GAAP financial measures discussed on this call as well as other metrics. 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, August 6, 2021. 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. And now with that, I'll pass the call over to Steve.

Thank you, Will, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. As covered in our shareholder letter, we were pleased to report that Q2 grew by 91% versus Q1, our net loss narrowed and adjusted EBITDA turned positive. Both monthly unique users and revenue as a percentage of 2019 levels improved each month throughout the quarter. Whereas last quarter we saw strength predominantly in the U.S. market, in Q2, we saw the recovery structure broaden, particularly in Europe. These results indicate that the recovery is well underway and that TripAdvisor is positioned well. We note the traffic and revenue improved in July versus June. And while we're mindful of the variants and their potential impacts on travel, in the high percentage of domestic travel, we remain optimistic about the second half of the year and 2022 when the recovery broadens as both urban and international travel return in full. While we're pleased with how we're successfully navigating the recovery, the TripAdvisor story remains much more than just getting past COVID. We see a huge opportunity to drive long-term growth and delivering more value to consumers and partners on our platform. We have and will continue to position the business for future growth by leveraging TripAdvisor's global scale, influence and competitive strengths to execute on our strategic growth initiatives. This includes building our direct-to-consumer subscription offering, TripAdvisor Plus, which we rolled out to all of the U.S. users in the quarter. We'll continue to invest in our product offerings, our tech and our go-to-market strategies in order to deliver customers the best experience possible and drive diverse growth across our platform. So in summary, Q2 had many encouraging developments. I want to thank TripAdvisor employees for their passion and commitment to helping hundreds of millions of consumers and partners get back to travel. To our loyal customers and partners, we will keep building our products and services to drive more value to you. I remain very optimistic about what's ahead. And with that, Ernst, let me turn it over to you for some additional thoughts.

Thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. Q2 results were beyond our expectations, and the progression of traffic and revenue improvements versus 2019 levels throughout the quarter is very encouraging. Increased case counts and other challenges posed by the pandemic at near-term uncertainty for the pace of the ongoing travel recovery, of course, however, we expect another positive step forward in Q3. Our expectation is that Q3 revenue as well as adjusted EBITDA will meaningfully improve versus Q2, both in absolute dollar terms, but also as a percentage of 2019, driven primarily by further improvement in Europe. In summary, uncertainty remains, but we believe the industry has entered a return to travel period and initial release of a significant pent-up demand that we've already seen. We continue to expect a better second half rebound and are optimistic about further significant travel recovery into 2022. This has already been demonstrated in terms of demand for domestic travel, primarily in the U.S., and we expect international travel as well as Europe and the rest of the world to follow closely behind. We believe we're positioning TripAdvisor well for not only a strong recovery, but for the long run. With that, we will now open the call for questions.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Naved Khan of Truist. Your line is open.

Yes, hi. Thanks a lot. A couple of questions from me. Maybe just on the - on your commentary about Q3 and how July saw further improvement from June on the face of that improvement slowed, maybe can you just parse it out for us between U.S. versus Europe? Are you seeing that continued improvement more in Europe and U.S. sort of flat lining or is improvement continued across both the markets? And then I have a follow-up question on TripAdvisor Plus.

Hi, Naved. This is Ernst. Yes, we've seen July improve from June levels in terms of percentage of 2019. The rate of improvement slowed May to June, as you saw in our numbers. It was a pretty significant step up as a percentage of 2019, but we saw continued progress. If you go underneath that, we saw Europe starting to increase more significantly, where early in the quarter it had been primarily the U.S. We saw on the hotel side, the auction maybe take a little bit of a step back in July relative to June as a percentage but only a few points, but our Experiences and Dining business continued to accelerate in July. And so overall, our July numbers compared to '19 were actually a little better than June, but not as much better as May to June.

Understood. That's helpful. On TripAdvisor Plus, it's been live on your site for month and a half now, available to anyone. Maybe any color or commentary on the uptick that you might have seen with consumer centers, the full launch versus your own expectations? And also maybe just on the usage, do you see the primary use case being that people who become subscribers to Plus use it right away or is that with the live or is there a percentage that do not end up using it? And then - can you just maybe speak to that?

Sure thing. Thanks Naved. Obviously, a topic I'd love to talk about. I got to start with the - it is very early days. But I have to say I think we're really on to something here. As I mentioned before, we have plenty of examples of fantastic subscription businesses in a bunch of other categories, but now you have in travel. And so with our traffic, our brand trust, we think TripAdvisor is just the ideal company to create really affordable plan that let's everyone, as we say, up their travel. As you know, we just launched the product a couple of months ago in the U.S. So the question I guess you're asking is, like what did we learn so far. Well, I'd say the biggest thing absolutely above our expectations is that, we're saving a lot of money for travelers. The average savings is an impressive $350. There are some bookings every single day that are saving a traveler over $1,000. So it's pretty amazing stuff and user discounts that hotels are passing along to our travelers, and they're just like, that's a great value proposition. Travelers pay $99 in this privilege to be able to get all these discounts. And as a matter of fact, we're testing an expansion into our experiences booking flow, not just the hotel booking flow, because we really want to kind of expand the offering. As you know, we have discounts on not only hotels, but experiences, and we want to leverage all the traffic to help even more travelers take advantage of these savings. But to be fair, no product lunches without some hitches. And so while I'm excited about the travelers' savings exceeding our expectations, to be candid, we haven't made as much progress signing big change, I would have hoped. But hey, we are great at listening, we're great at iterating and improving. And so we've taken to heart some of the feedback that we've heard from our hotel chain partners and believe we have a solution that will be much more in line with their goals, and that won't hurt the great value proposition that we've created for travelers. So unfortunately, right now, I'm not ready to announce anything, but we're getting a much better reception from chains to the changes that we're making to the product, and that's a critical part of building this two-sided marketplace. As you know, we signed a couple of other hotel chains, we're excited about that. And we've also partnered with Trip.com, specifically around Plus. And we're working closely with them to bring all of their supply, and they have a lot into the Plus ecosystem. In terms of the question on kind of are users booking right away. I'd say most users are seeing in the flow of booking their hotel. They're seeing that they can save money if they subscribe kind of along the way. And that's the no-brainer moment that we talked about in prior calls, pointing out that the savings that you make on this particular booking can more than pay for the subscription. Not all like that, but certainly most.

Got it. Thank you, Ernst, and thank you, Steve.

Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Shweta Khajuria of Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

On your part on your signing up more hotel chains, you mentioned in the letter that you've developed new ways to communicate hotel discounts in slightly differently, that's been more - that's been well received. So I guess, what was it? What was the change and how has the reception been so far from larger chains? That's the first question. And on the second one, also on TripAdvisor Plus, is the supply side onboarding a slower than expected process in general? Is that a product development focus for you in terms of once, let's say, a hotel says, okay, we are onboard. What is the process like until discount starts showing up? Thanks.

Sure. So I'd say the biggest challenge some properties have had with our current implementation is along the topic of rate parity where we're showing a discounted rate and hotels care a lot about having a standard rate across the Internet. And so we've heard that loud and clear. And so as I just mentioned, we're making some changes that we think goes a long way towards addressing those changes. And hopefully, you'll see those come to fruition in the next few months, as in live on the site and offering the opportunities for more and more hotel chains to join in. To be clear with partners like Trip.com, they have already a lot of inventory that is going to make a big difference we believe on the supply equation for Plus. When it comes to your question about asking individual hotels to sign up, we currently ask for a kind of the zero commission rate or a discounted rate that we can then show our travelers. There is some more for the hotelier to go create that rate so that we can show the savings. That's what earns the hoteliers a higher position on our site and gets them more bookings, because we're certainly preferencing hotels that are better deals for the consumer, and that's always what the consumer is interested in. So we think with some of the new things that we have under the covers, we can actually even make that sign-up process simpler. And again, I'll have a bunch more to say on that the next time we chat.

Okay. Thanks, Steve.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Bazinet of Citi. Your line is open.

So on Trip Plus, but two quick questions. Is it fair to say that that $350 savings you talked about, in weird way, what we'd want to see over time is that savings number comes down because it implies sort of deeper penetration and more receptivity for the consumer or am I thinking about that wrong? And then second, has there been any sort of impediments in terms of signing up hotel property owners because of COVID where they just look even they said, demand is so strong, we don't really need any help at this particular moment because sort of everyone wants to get out and travel, and things get a little bit easier sort of as the world goes back to normal or is that not a fair characterization of the types of discussions you're having?

So two terrific questions, Jason. So if I had to project out over several years, as we look to build more and more properties that will have some level of discounts that we can share, pass back to the travelers, yes, I would expect that overall savings on average to come down. But I think of that is more because we're building, hopefully building a habit with consumers that they're coming back to us to not only book that $1,000 trip, but now that they're getting the savings for an entire year, they're coming back to book the $200 trip. And that property may not have a great discount on it, but it may have a good discount on it. And of course, it's lower overall spend. So they literally - that traveler may have saved $150 on the first purchase, a nice discount on a big ticket and is going to save $25 on the second purchase because it's a one night stay at a moderately priced hotel. Traveler is happy about that. They're building more loyalty, reusing our product over and over again, coming to us first, because they are able to find that discount on more and more inventory. But you just do the math, it was $150 savings the first time, $25 savings the second time, and that's going to be bringing your average down. I absolutely believe that we will always have a set of properties in pretty much every market that will have tremendous savings on them because there's always - just in the hotel distribution industry, there is always a set of great properties that could use some extra demand at certain points in time. And TripAdvisor has the opportunity to be a great channel to distribute those rooms on a very incremental basis to hoteliers. To your second question on COVID impacting signing hotels, yes, I think it probably has, but for a slightly different reason I think than what you had shared. We're happy to sign hotels at a variety of discount levels. Our message is simply the higher discount that you sign with us, the higher - the more visibility you can get on our site. But you can also start with a discount that is similar or even less than what your other distribution channels than what you're paying to other distribution channels. And so every hotel, even if they have a lot of demand, would always prefer to, they prefer to get bookings direct, but then when they go to alternate channels, they would like it to be the most cost efficient for them, and we think we can help do that for the hoteliers. The reason why I think COVID is impacting our ability to sign, to some degree, is simply being able to reach people whether the hotel has not come back to full staff or whether they're really focused on making sure their hotel is safe for guests or perhaps dealing - I'm sure there are some cases where they are sold out and just don't want to kind of bother signing a new channel. But I think it's probably more that they're still just getting back on their feet and growing their business globally, all of which, they're resolvable. It comes back to as travel recovers, hotels are always going to be looking for alternate distribution opportunities. For our model, we're a cheaper channel for hotels, a very flexible channel for hotels. So like the reaction when we talk to individual hoteliers or groups has always been very positive. It's just been a matter of time. And to some - and sometimes connectivity issues in terms of getting them all live on the site.

Super helpful. Thank you.

You bet.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Deepak Mathivanan of Wolfe Research. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Just a couple of ones. So first, wanted to ask about the auction. Are you seeing mix of advertisers different now versus pre-COVID in terms of revenue contribution? Are smaller advertisers, hotels, OTAs now leveraging the platform more effectively than some of your larger customers from before? And then second one on Plus. You have one large OTA right now on the platform, what do you think it takes to bring some of the other large OTAs to TripAdvisor Plus? Anything you can share there would be great.

Hey, Deepak. I'll take the first and I'll let Steve answer the second. Not really a change in advertiser mix versus pre-pandemic that we can discern at this point. So nothing really to call out in terms of the trend. Steve?

So on Plus, we certainly have a lot of experience going back quite a few years with our Instant Booking initiative, bringing lots of aggregators all around the globe on to the platform. It takes time. In fact, some of the new product direction pieces that I alluded to actually fortunately for us get to reuse some of the Instant Book infrastructure that we had in place and have kept lives. So I do think over time you will see some additional aggregators or OTAs as part of the equation, but not kind of from our perspective, they're not critical to have. We have a pretty good supply footprint now with Trip.com coming online and their global reach. From our perspective, well, it's always nice as we surface an offer to a consumer to be able to pick amongst kind of the best discounts for a particular property, it's actually a little less interesting from a consumer perspective because our goal is to always be surfacing offers that are better than the retail rate that is out there. And so whether we have five or 10 OTAs to kind of choose from surfacing a particular offer is less important than having a good offer. And as I've said, the supply footprint from Trip.com just the sheer number of properties that are available on their platform is really quite impressive. So we'll continue to pursue additional aggregators, additional OTAs, but we don't view it as kind of critical to the success of the product.

Okay. That makes sense. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Ernst.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Richard Clarke of Bernstein. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. A couple if I may. First one, just on Viator, obviously a bright star of the quarter. Maybe you can just talk about what is the potential for that kind of B2B side of experiences? And maybe putting that into context, the deal you've done with booking, how big can that be? What Google is doing in that space? And how can you kind of rectify that against using TripAdvisor as the sort of top of the funnel for that? And is there any conflict there? And just one question on Trip Plus. Looks like you've softened the language a little bit, you used to talk about it potentially being a multi-billion dollar product, now you're saying, you can get a share of a multi-billion dollar market. Is that because you're seeing some copycat products coming in or is this just a sort of am I reading too much into that change of language?

Hey, Richard. I'll take the first question. Very pleased with our performance in experiences. Very pleased, in particular, with the performance of our Viator point-of-sale. We have seen experiences as a category come back much faster than we anticipated in Q2. And we anticipated that the lack of international travel that we've historically benefited from with experiences would slow down the recovery. But what we've seen is we've been very effective at repositioning our offer towards more domestics, particularly U.S. domestic, but more recently, Europe and away from big city to outside the city. And that's been very, very effective for us, very strong. Our U.S. bookings, on our U.S. points-of-sale across experiences, all channels, TripAdvisor, Viator, their bookings were above 2019 in June. Very, very strong even in the absence of big cities opening or really Europe opening significantly. Cancellation rates are still a little bit elevated, but they are lower than last year, but very, very strong performance. Viator as a channel actually overall globally was with our bookings above 2019 in June, which is very, very impressive, and it's improved again in July. And so really doing well. As you know, it's a huge market. It's still early days, 80% is still offline. We're a market leader. We have very, very strong global supply. And we feel that we have a, as we've always done, a real shot to win in experiences, and we're doubling down on that now in the recovery. So very, very important. We play that among - along three different channels. We have Viator, which is a pure play OTA consumer, but an OTA. And then we have TripAdvisor, the channel TripAdvisor, which is much more integrated with the overall travel planning and overall travel experiences on TripAdvisor. And then we have third-parties that we sell to, which is a smaller channel of the three that I'm outlining. And we have signed up in the likes of bookings with many, many other third-parties, leveraging the strength that we have in supply to broaden the impact we can have on the industry. So all three of those channels we believe are well positioned and all are leveraging this really superior global access to pretty amazing tours and attractions that our consumers like. So we're pretty pleased with where we're going with this.

Yes, this is Steve. To add just one sentence to Ernst's comments, think of all that supply that we've gathered, that we've perfected, that we're able to merchandise and now we want to know where are all the consumers that could want it. And you've got that pure play OTA named Viator.com, growing like the wheat, looking fantastic. TripAdvisor already has a ton of people planning their entire trip to a destination of which experiences is a key part. So great we have that piece of the funnel. And then for the folks that aren't on our sites, we have this amazing third-party program with the likes of experience booking and most of the other big names that can capture travelers who offer our wares to travelers who are not part of our own ecosystem, all of which benefits in the two-sided marketplace like experiences are, of which benefits the supplier because it's more bookings, which in turn helps everyone achieve all the things you get when you're the biggest player in town. So quite excited about our experiences business. To the question on Plus, did the language soften. No, not at all. I started - I'm more excited about Plus every week that goes by. To put it simply, we literally have millions of travelers looking at hotels on our site every single day. You can call it 100 million a month in normal times. We've described on these calls the 160 million, I think we call it shots on goal, as in 160 million hotel metasearch clicks in 2019 for stays that were of significance, and I call that as $750 or more. So it's 160 million people interested in clicking to a partner site because they're interested in buying a hotel room at $750, $750 being the number that kind of makes this a pretty easy purchase. Now I'll go add another 100 million travelers a month looking at experiences. That's a lot of reach and influence. And of course, TripAdvisor overall has even more traffic than that, but that 200 million, they're looking at a hotel, they're looking experience, and those are the two categories that Plus plays in right now. So if a small fraction of those travelers sign-up each month for our subscription product, since they know they'll save money on these hundreds of thousands of hotels, hundreds of thousands of attractions, we end up adding millions of subscribers over the next years with that same longer-term opportunity in the tens of millions. So again, we think it's super interesting space for TripAdvisor to occupy, fits extremely well with our focus on guidance, leveraging the traffic we have, the brand trust we have and kind of the things that people already know TripAdvisor for, and now we're introducing the subscription product, again proven in so many other categories, and we believe is the next big thing in travel.

Thanks for all the sense. Thanks very much.

Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mario Lu of Barclays. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. I have two on Plus. So I believe currently you're still mainly offering the subscription as a no-brainer division as it will pay for itself after the first booking. But I believe before you mentioned the notion of potentially offering a free trial, so curious if that's still in the works to potentially onboard more members? And I have a follow-up.

Sure. Yes, we have done some free trial programs. I'm sure we will continue to do some more. We're learning how to market a subscription product as it's our first one. I think it's a great opportunity. We've chosen not to go broad as in our entire audience with a free trial. We don't think that makes sense at this point for our partners. But I'd go back to my statement that it's very early days. We feel with our audience reach we have a lot of different ways that we can talk to them. We have really hundreds of millions of members. The product is still rolled out just to the United States so far. And so whether it's a free trial, a bundle, better job putting it in the experiences flow, more marketing across the site, changing how we merchandise Plus so that - I think right now we've - if you're going to save at least $75, we're going to put it front and center. We can play with that number up or down. There's just lots of different ways that we're essentially iterating on every month as we look for the magic formula that helps to scale.

Great. That's helpful. And then I know it's still early for members that have been using Plus for a few quarters, can you provide some color in terms of the magnitude of their booking frequency being a Plus member versus their historical patterns? Thanks.

Well, that's - so again, early days. It's really hard for us to look at a six month cohort at this point given that it's embedded to a small percentage of our traffic in Q1. And it's always just hard for us to compare what that booking behavior would be compared to what that customer does otherwise. So we can see how it compares visits on our site, a stronger repeat that sort of thing, but I'm not sure that that's telling us enough right now. So candidly my view that's going to be a great question where we're going to have a lot more interesting data on in three months and six months than we do right now. But rest assured, we're looking at that sort of stuff.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from James Lee of Mizuho. Your line is open.

Hey, thanks for taking my questions. I just have a follow-up on Trip.com agreement that you guys have. I think the OTA have most of the hotel inventory in international markets, just wanted to check on that. And also is the discount from the OTA available all season or does that need to be negotiated between you and Trip.com after the onboarding process or is it automated where the OTA can enter inventory in the system real-time? Thanks.

I don't want to give too much color on the specifics of the contract, but know that we look at the size of their inventory, their interest in sort of helping facilitate bookings to our global audience. And given the size of our global audience and the amount of inventories they have, there is not going to be anything manual about the whole process. So we aim to scale. We have experience working with OTAs and bringing breadth of inventory onboard to TripAdvisor. In our sort of past lives and Trip.com, it's distributed their inventories to other players as well. So again, I think it's a pretty good match. The Trip.com has global inventory that literally have tons of hotels in every single country in the world. Historically, Trip.com has served more outbound travel from China, but with their acquisitions, they have established a much more global footprint of travelers as well. And so no one supplier will ever offer the complete set of inventory that we're looking to build, but Trip.com is absolutely a key and trusted partner in helping us bring Plus to not only more hotels across the U.S., more hotels across the world, but over time, more hotels in more languages to serve more markets.

And one quick follow-up, Steve. Any - from a consumer's perspective relating to Trip Plus, any tweaks to your membership benefits as you continue to learn from the consumer behavior? Thanks.

I have nothing to announce now, but absolutely, we expect to be adding more benefits over time. We have Dollar Flight Club, we have Hertz, two pretty compelling benefits. And we see plenty of opportunity to add more in the years to come. No one subscriber in a travel club is going to use all of the benefits, but every additional thing that you add that ends up getting used is another reason why that individual is going to be sure to renew in addition to the savings on the hotels and experiences that we already offer. So we're looking ahead towards renewal opportunities. And we want to make sure that every Trip Plus subscriber is getting value on the things we offer and things that our partners can offer.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. There are no further question at this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to Steve Kaufer.

Terrific. Thank you everyone for joining the call. Travel recovery is underway. We will continue executing our long-term focused strategy to drive meaningful value in the years to come. A big thank you to all of our employees as well as to TripAdvisor customers worldwide. And a big thank you to our shareholders for their shared belief that TripAdvisor can play a key role in shaping travel in the years ahead. Please get your vaccines and stay safe, and I look forward to updating everyone on our progress next quarter. Thanks all.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference. Thank you all for participating. You may all disconnect. Have a great day.