Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tripadvisor Third Quarter 2023 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Angela White, VP of Investor Relations. Angela, please go ahead.

Thank you, Felicia. Good morning, everyone and welcome to Tripadvisor's third quarter 2023 financial results call. Joining me today are Matt Goldberg, President and CEO; and Mike Noonan, CFO. Last night, after the market closed, 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 measures 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 view as of today, November 7, 2023. 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.

Thanks Angela and good morning to everyone joining us today. For the third quarter on a consolidated basis, Tripadvisor Group delivered revenue of 533 million reflecting growth of 16% year-over-year. Viator achieved another solid quarter of outperformance with 41% revenue growth versus last year, and Tripadvisor Core also performed better than expected. Across both Viator and Tripadvisor Core, the progress in our experiences offering continues to exceed our expectations reflecting the large opportunity still in front of us in this category. TheFork made meaningful margin improvement on healthy top line growth, nearly reaching breakeven for the quarter. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA was a 127 million or 24% of revenue. These results reflect our continued progress in executing our segment strategies with strong financial and operational discipline. As a reminder, at Tripadvisor Core we're focusing on engagement and delivering world class guidance products to fuel our diverse monetization paths. At Viator we are reaching our leadership -- we are reinforcing our leadership position in experiences by investing in awareness, enhanced products, and repeat bookings to capture more market share. At TheFork we're driving revenue growth with significant margin improvement this year by delivering value to both diners and restaurants as the leader in the European dining market. I'm pleased with what our teams have accomplished in the quarter. We're leaning into the strength of our existing assets while ensuring that we build and innovate for the future. We're executing more efficiently and effectively across each of our segments, and we continue to solidify our position as the most trusted source for travel and experiences with Tripadvisor leading the way on the launch of the Coalition of Trusted Reviews, where we've brought together the leading platforms in the online review space to combat fake reviews and set global standards to best serve consumers.…

Thanks Matt, and good morning everyone. I’ll start by reviewing Q3 results and provide some color on expectations for Q4 as well as some preliminary thoughts on fiscal 2024. All growth rates for 2023 are relative to the comparable period in 2022, unless otherwise indicated. Now onto Q3, we delivered results that exceeded our expectations for the quarter. Consolidated revenue was $533 million, reflecting growth of 16%, or 13% on a constant currency basis. Adjusted EBITDA of $127 million, or 24% of revenue, was approximately 150 basis points better than the range we provided last quarter. Turning to the segment performance for the third quarter, Tripadvisor Core delivered revenue of $290 million, which represented 2% growth for the quarter. Branded Hotels revenue of $181 million declined 4%, an improvement from last quarter’s decline of 7%. Within Branded Hotels, we saw mid-single digit declines in hotel meta and high-single digit growth in our hotel B2B business. We were pleased with the stability of hotel meta in Q3, in particular coming out of the volatility we observed in Q2. Healthier trends emerged in July and carried forward through the rest of the quarter. The performance in the quarter, as compared to our outlook, was largely driven by sustained pricing strength, with volume broadly in-line with our expectations across both free and paid channels. Geographically, Europe performed better than our expectations–though on a year-over-year basis, it still lags the U.S. which continues to benefit from sustained pricing strength. We continued to see strong pricing growth globally while volumes lag last year’s levels. While pricing is heavily impacted by the overall health of the travel market, we believe the pricing trends we have witnessed this year are also a direct result of product decisions that we have made on the platform. Some of the…

Thank you. The first question comes from the line of Naved Khan of B. Riley Securities. Nave, please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot. Two questions for me. It's great to see the signs of leverage in Viator margins. Just a quick sort of question on how should we think about 2024. So Mike, I think in your prepared commentary you said you expect to see positive margins. But just give us a sense of like, the amount of leverage you are willing to kind of drive through that, understand there is a balance to be played out between growth and margins, so give us your thoughts there? And then maybe, on Accelerate 2.0. Just tell us what your expectations are, are you thinking you can drive more adoption through this revised version of accelerate?

Great, thanks for that. Yeah, just on your question one regarding kind of 2024 outlook for Viator. So I think it's a little early to put a very specific stake in the ground on growth and margin. That's what we will be developing over the coming, finalize in another couple of months. You know, I think the point we really want to make was one, we're excited about the portfolio. [Technical Difficulty] Sorry.

Sorry about that.

We lost our connection I think.

I think, yeah, Now -- It is Matt. I can assure you, it wasn't anything you said. It was all. So yeah, you were asking about Accelerate 2.0. and we're really excited because of course, Accelerate has been a terrific program, which is really conveying clear value as operators opt in for more and more products. More than half of products are opted in at this point. And so what the team has been doing has been really looking at how to expand that program to really boost the operators who are looking for more demand. And this is driving more operators who are willing to participate above the minimum margin, and continuing to boost the take rate. And so we've seen more than pretty significant double-digit growth and more products coming in. And the weighted average margin boost is increasing and that's really delivering a better take rate and so we're excited about that and we're looking to scale that as we go forward.

Understood. And Mike, I think we lost you kind of midway through the commentary on margins, just -- is can you just recap it?

Yeah, sorry. Too bad. I didn't know we lost you. Yeah, my points were a couple points on your questions on specifics around Viator. So one, it's early to give specifics around growth and margin. That's what we'll be developing over the next -- finalizing next couple of months. The main points we want to convey is one, we are very excited about the portfolio delivering EBITDA growth next year and that's with all the brands contributing to EBITDA. So that's point one. Point two, was when we think about full year profitability for Viator it's what we've been talking about for some time. It is the unit economics we've been seeing, it's the repeat behavior we are developing, giving us confidence that we are moving into that area of profitability for Viator. And that's what's exciting for us. On the February call we'll be giving more guidance around this specifically.

Awesome. Thank you, Matt. Thank you Mike.

One moment for your next call. The next question comes from the line of Ben Miller of Goldman Sachs. Ben, please go ahead.

Hey, thanks for taking the questions. Just on Viator, you've talked a lot about some of the in house work you've done to optimize the user experience and customer journey to drive retention and repeat rates, just curious how much of that is still ahead of you in 2024 versus behind you and what that roadmap looks like? And then on the cost savings in the Core and TheFork, how are you thinking about the flow through of that versus reinvestments in both segments? Thanks.

Thanks, Ben I'll take the first question about Viator product and then Mike, I think will take the second. So I think there is a lot of headroom on Viator product, the team is very focused and disciplined about what it delivers quarter-by-quarter and annually. And we see many, many more opportunities than we can go after. And so, as we look at where we're focused, we've been focused on the app which is driving significantly more app downloads. I think 50% more app downloads, and really thinking about how to improve the post booking journey. And of course, the app converts better than any other surface. So we're really excited to continue leaning into the app. They're also spending time thinking about loyalty and how travelers can be rewarded to drive further repeat. So they're just testing a rewards program, which will roll out as well. And the initial tests have been really quite positive about items and also lift and repeat. There's a lot we can do going forward using data. So of course, we have a unified data platform now and the team has been experimenting with leveraging data from across the group including Tripadvisor data to drive audiences that will make it far more effective. There's also experimentation going on in pricing. And similarly, as we continue to offer award winning customer service, leveraging AI to drive augmented customer service, that'll be great quality and also improve handle rates significantly. So there is a lot we can be doing. And we're excited about Q4 roadmap and 2024.

Yeah Ben, on the cost savings and just to reiterate a little bit, we've said for Core is the 35 million annualized savings and then we introduced our new incremental to that was 10 at TheFork, just to be clear, and there's no confusion. Yeah, when I think about the question around flow through to next year, I think, one emphasis is that the team has done a lot of hard work this year, like building a great foundation to implement strategy work. And I think that cost savings work is a big piece of that. I think we're evaluating how to execute against our strategy. our strategy is very important as to in the long term, growth and margin of Core. And so a lot of the work on the savings it allows us the opportunity to evaluate investing, rather than necessarily flowing that all through to margin. And these are the choices that we're making and evaluating right now.

One moment for your next question. The next question comes from the line of Lloyd Walmsley of UBS. Lloyd, please go ahead.

Great, thanks for taking the questions and apologies if you've covered some of this already, but wanted to just dig into the long-term strategy around more integration of generative AI, like what are you seeing so far in your trip planning product in terms of consumer uptake and kind of the overall impact on the platform and how do you see that evolving over the next year, how big of a priority is this and how meaningful could this become? We'd love to get your thoughts on that. Thanks.

Thanks Lloyd. Of course, we've been working on AI and ML for a long time in this company, when generative AI became something that everybody was talking about. I was very clear that we have urgency and focus on it and we think about it in three ways. One is what we can do to really drive activity in our product. And you've seen us do that with our itinerary builder, and really leveraging our data, the proprietary first party data that we have. Clickstream data, behavioral data to really understand users, and then to deliver an itinerary that is highly personalized, and with the right kind of prompt engineering to deliver a good experience. And that product, of course, is now delivering a really good number of generative AI itineraries. It's double-digit percentage of total itineraries being created and growing. And we're seeing that those users are returning at a much higher rate, as I mentioned, and this is without significant product marketing or further enhancements of the product. So now we look to enhance that product and really drive monetization and further integration coming out of it going forward. We also have been doing a lot with our content, right. We have this incredible vast billion reviews that are from real people. And we have gotten -- we've been improving the product so that we continue to have [indiscernible] and relevance, which gives us an incredible content dataset to be to be leveraging. And, of course, our audience and brand of trust. So we think generative AI around our product is going to continue to be meaningful and we'll look to leverage it across all of our categories, hotels, experiences, and restaurants. We will also leverage generative AI for productivity and we're exploring lots of use cases across how we think about trust and safety and what we're doing to make sure we have the highest quality reviews. Translation and localization as I mentioned, before customer service, engineering productivity, marketing productivity, we can imagine a use case for every functional area and we're going to be leaning in for the long-term. And then finally, we want to be very thoughtful about how we partner with the best of class LLMs and the large tech platforms, as we think about being a part of the generative AI ecosystem, whether we choose to be a direct partner or frankly, select the ones that we feel we're getting the most value from, and choose not to work with and therefore block the others that don't. So we think we've got a good strategy for the long-term and this is a long term proposition. It's very early days but we're excited about where we are.

Alright, thank you.

One moment for your next question. The next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth of J.P. Morgan. Doug, please go ahead.

Good morning, this is Dave on for Doug. Thanks for technical questions. I have two. So first one, could you provide a little more color on the Viator Q4 [ph], just a little 20% of growth expectations includes, any view on improvement and growth in the back half of the quarter? And then secondly, just looking at modification, is the goal to drive more revenue per user using democracies those you already have in place, or do you see an opportunity to add new monetization options over time? Thank you.

Yeah, I'll take the first one on Viator Q4. So yeah, I would say, when we think about Viator and outlook for Q4, I would say a couple of things; one, it is a tougher comp or a tough comp, lapping still very high growth rates in that fourth quarter. And then secondly, I would say, as I said in the prepared remarks, October, we did see some volatility coming out of the Middle East, and some of it leaked over into Europe. And that was -- that's part of our forecast. So I think those are two areas that would be I would tell you in terms of how our thoughts are thinking around Q4 for Viator.

Yeah, thanks. And in terms of monetization, you're absolutely right, our strategy is less about having a vanity metric of users and much more about focusing on the highest value users that are going to significantly drive ARPU. And as you know, we will continue to attract an audience of scale and we feel that we can stabilize the top of the funnel. But we really believe that we can convert more of them into highly engaged users, into members that drive deeper into our site, and further engagement through our mobile app, which will deliver much stronger monetization and ARPU. Now, it's also true that we believe we can diversify monetization. Of course, we've been a business in the very early years of this business that at Tripadvisor in particular, that was driven by CPC economics, and more frequently we are driving a balance with increasing CPM economics. And of course, marketplace economics where we are increasingly matching, supply and demand and taking a percentage of the transaction. That's what we've seen in our marketplaces, our experiences marketplace, and we believe there is a lot of headroom there for Tripadvisor as we add new categories, as we add new geographies where we can go deeper into slivers of demand and match with supply. It may be Viator supply, but it could also be supplied from elsewhere and we're excited to continue to do that. And we will also lean in to our mobile app experience to really drive that diversification as well.

Great, thank you.

One moment for your next question. The next question comes from the line of Niall Mitchelson of Bernstein. Niall, please go ahead.

Hi, there. Thanks for the question. I just wondered if you could break down some of your Q4 guides for Core as to how much you think sort of that mid-single decline will come from matter and some of the other moving parts because obviously this much business was up in the quarter. So maybe you could break that down as to how much is driven by matter? And then another question, if I may, the buyback guidance of 250 million, how are you thinking about the timing of that and how do you sort of balance with the cash you have on your balance sheet as well and capital returns to shareholders?

Yeah, thanks. Great. Yeah, on Core I think the guide of what we gave you is heavily influenced. We didn't give you a breakdown on the business units at Core, but obviously it is heavily influenced by the Core auction business. In terms of Core auction business I'd say a couple things; one, for Q4 it's really more dependent around pricing assumptions. I think Q4 tends to be historically lower pricing, just seasonally. And then secondly, we are lapping some product changes, which I referenced in my prepared remarks around pricing benefit has really helped us this year. And, we just want to be prudent as we continue to lap those changes, and think about how it impacts us in Q4. So that would be the biggest kind of -- biggest way we thought about Q4 for the auction business. In terms of the buyback program, we are very excited about this. When we think about overall capital allocation, this is an important part of that framework. We still want to provide adequate liquidity and think about value creative M&A, we've talked about that for some time this year, as well as making sure we're maintaining a strong balance sheet and liquidity position. The buyback, we do want to execute opportunistically, according to as we think about overall liquidity needs, we do want to maintain a strong liquidity profile. So we'll be evaluating that as we progress over the next two years, where we see excess capital that we're generating from free cash flow that we could deploy to the buyback incrementally over time, and are excited about the program.

One moment for your next question. The next question comes from the line of Jed Kelly of Oppenheimer & Co. Jed, please go ahead.

Hey, great, thanks. Thanks for taking my question. Just circling back to some of the pricing commentary you had and the differences between Europe and the U.S. Was some of the pricing due to the European market just being so good. And a lot of your partners receiving higher organic traffic and should we expect like an improvement in next year? And then can you just give us an update on what your fixed cost baseline should be going into next year after the cost cuts? Thank you.

Yeah, so on the pricing side, Jed and good to hear from you, the pricing side for Q3, our pricing was better than anticipated. But still, lags I can say other regions, U.S. and Europe. I think pricing is better in free than paid. The pay channel in Europe continues to be very competitive, and the pay channel in Europe and globally, we continue to manage for profitability and robust targets, as I said in my prepared remarks, which has remained stable year-over-year. It's hard to see how if that changes next year, I think, we expect that to continue to be a competitive market. And as we sit today, we expect to continue to kind of approach that market in a similar way as well as how we approach other markets. In terms of fixed cost base, I think I will just repeat back kind of what I said before in my earlier remarks, we think about Core, we are -- with the activities we did this year, we are excited about the opportunities to think about where we invest for growth and strategy, I'd say, long-term growth, and the opportunities and decisions we make around how we think about that in savings. We continue to be prudent as to where those savings came from, in terms of headcount reductions, primarily in G&A and some of our sales and marketing functions while protecting a lot of the areas around innovation that we have been making this year, which is very important to our long-term growth and health and underpin all the things that Matt has talked about earlier. So we're excited about the position we put ourselves in and again, we'll be making some of those trade off decisions as we finalize planning over the next couple months.

Thank you.

One moment for your next question. The next question comes from the line of Brian Fitzgerald of Wells Fargo. Brian, please go ahead.

Thanks. I know you guys kind of hit this a bit already. Maybe wanted to try and parse out hotels meta in Europe a bit more. If you had to assign percentages or weightings for impacts or influences there from the consumer side versus from traveler partners and bidding dynamics, can you, and I know they're all related, but could you talk to that dynamic and maybe what's impacting the most with meta in Europe?

Yeah, so just to start, the U.S. is our largest market for sure. I'd say, in Europe, the dynamics are similar that we saw good dynamics coming out of Q3. They were consistent as we moved into October. So October trends are very similar to what we saw in Q3. I think Europe remains a competitive marketplace in the paid channels. It's one that we are going to be very prudent as to how we approach that. And as I said earlier, be consistent in thinking about our role as targets. Our volumes have been down in the paid channels, better in the free channels. And that dynamic is not new there Brian though, and one that we continue to manage we believe for a profitable business in Europe. So we're, I'd say your remains very competitive. But we're very pleased with how we are executing against that backdrop.

And Brian, it's Matt. I just wanted to be clear, the bidding dynamics and the auction are good, and the relationships with auction partners are strong. We meet regularly, we talk about how we can drive product enhancements that really helped them achieve their goals. I think those dynamics are good.

Awesome. Thank you, Mike. Thanks, Matt.

One moment for your next question. The next question comes from the line of Tom White of D.A. Davidson & Co. Tom, please go ahead.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. Just you touched on supply trends at Viator and curious we are ramping supply down this area, focus areas. Matt, you made a comment earlier about kind of the vanity metric, I think you related -- you are talking about kind of consumers or users but curious whether that kind of view informs how you think about supply at all with Viator? Thanks.

Yeah, the vanity metric point it was around Tripadvisor Core, and how we think about really leaning into the most important users that come to us rather than the number of top funnel which we're focused on. At Viator, you know, Viator has the best supply team in the business. And they've proven that by ramping up supply, focusing on quality supply, and really developing programs to deliver for suppliers and operators. And we try to be the best partner we can and supply is always a focus. And I think it is a continuous area to think about, where do we see demand coming in and how do we have the right products and the right partners on our platform. And again, I think that the programs that they have been delivering over time and the take rate is just a really clear example of the value that we are providing to suppliers even as we scale.

Thank you.

One moment for your next question. The next question comes from the line of Kevin Kopelman of TD Cowen. Kevin, please go ahead.

Great, thanks a lot. Could you touch a little bit on the competitive landscape in Experiences as Viator and maybe characterize your position at Viator and any changes or how you see it developing? Thanks.

Yeah, so obviously, the experiences category is large and growing, it gets a lot of attention. It's a competitive market. I think I've spoken in past calls about how it's largely broken down by region and we are very focused on building out a global platform. Now, we've seen a lot of players come in and go out and of course, we're always watching what's happening in the ecosystem. But we actually think that the competition is just a good signal that this is a really interesting market. And so as the market leader, we want to be focused on innovation and really differentiating the way that we deliver as we scale. The largest competitor in this market is probably still the majority offline bookings rather than some other company in this space. And so, our teams are just so focused on how we bring the traveler online, how we drive awareness to the category, and to what we're doing in the category at Viator. And the behaviors that we think are going to emerge and really helping make it easy. This is how the category is going to be one. And our performance suggests we're on the right path.

Thanks Matt.

one moment for the last question. The last question comes from the line of John Colantuoni from Jefferies. John, please go ahead.

Hi, there. This is Chris on for John, thanks for taking our questions. Curious about the different components of the restructuring charges incurred in the quarter and are expecting for the fourth quarter. Can you just give us some more color on the individual pieces of that 18 million, how much of it is kind of severance versus other things that you're doing, and is that breakdown consistent across Core, Viator, and TheFork? Thank you.

Yeah, good question. So yeah, the restructuring charge that I mentioned in my prepared remarks, majority of that is really around TA Core. Now TA Core is really around the vast majority as its headcount related, so it will be severance costs and severance payment, things like that. And as I mentioned earlier, a majority of that is around G&A functions and sales and marketing. We did keep investment in areas like technology and content for a longer-term strategy. Similarly, for TheFork, I would say similar type of breakdown. I think, a little bit more diverse, but really headcount related. And Viator was really around restructuring of moving some product teams into low cost locations. So not a savings for Viator but really a reallocation, a long-term savings I think for more efficiency perspective, the reallocation of resources to a more efficient location.

Alright, very helpful. Thank you.

At this time, I'd like to turn the call back over to CEO, Matt Goldberg.

Thanks, Felicia. And thanks again to everyone joining us today. We're excited about the progress we're making on our stated strategy in each of our segments, and focused on closing out the year strong as we look forward to 2024. See you soon. Thanks.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.