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Travelzoo (TZOO)

Q3 2016 Earnings Call· Thu, Oct 27, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, everyone. And welcome to the Travelzoo Third Quarter 2016 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode. And the floor will be open for questions following the presentation. Today’s call is being recorded. Before introducing you to your host and beginning with the Company’s presentation, the Company would like to remind you that all statements made during this conference call and presented in the Company’s slides that are not statements of historical facts, constitute forward-looking statements, and are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could vary materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements are described in the Company’s Forms 10-K and 10-Q, and other periodic filings with the SEC. Unless required by law, the Company undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Please note that this call is being webcast from the Company’s Investor Relations Web site at www.travelzoo.com/earnings. Please refer to the Company’s Web site for important information, including the Company’s earnings press release, issued earlier this morning along with the slides that accompany today’s prepared remarks. An archive recording of this conference call will be available on the Travelzoo Investor Relations Web site at www.travelzoo.com/ir, beginning approximately 90-minutes the call has completed. Now, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Holger Bartel, Travelzoo’s Chairman and Global CEO. Sir, you may begin.

Holger Bartel

Management

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, and thank you for joining us for today’s Travelzoo third quarter 2016 financial results conference call. I am Holger Bartel, Chairman and Global and CEO of Travelzoo and joining me today is Glen Ceremony, the Company’s Chief Financial Officer. Glen will walk you through today’s format.

Glen Ceremony

Management

Thank you, Holger, and everyone for joining us today. For the format of today’s call, I will review our third quarter financial results and then Holger will provide an update on our strategy. Thereafter, we will open the call for our question-and-answer session. Now, please open our management presentation, which is available on our Investor Relations Web site at www.travelzoo.com/earnings, to follow along with our prepared remarks. Slide three provides the key financial highlights for the quarter. Our revenue for the quarter was $30.4 million, down 10% year-over-year, or down by 7% in constant currencies. Our non-GAAP earnings per share this quarter was $0.12, which is $0.09 higher than the prior-year period. Our members grew to over 29.1 million and our social media followers and mobile app downloads continue to increase. Slide four highlights our revenue by segment. Revenue in North America was $19.1 million, representing a year-over-year decrease of 8%. Revenue in Europe was $8.8 million representing a year-over-year constant currency decrease of 5% and the Asia Pacific revenue was $2.6 million, representing a year-over-year constant currency decrease of 10%. The next few slides cover further detail of our revenue for each of our three segments. Slide five shows North America year-over-year revenue decreased by $1.6 million, $600,000 was due to lower voucher sales for local as we have focused our business on the most attractive markets. And $500,000 was due to travel, primarily due to the elimination of unprofitable business activities offset by growth in revenue from hotels. The remaining $500,000 of the decline was due to lower search revenues from our pull-back on the search traffic acquisition spend. Turning to slide six, there was $948,000 negative FX impact on Europe revenue. Europe year-over-year revenue on a constant currency basis shows that overall Europe revenues decreased by 5%.…

Holger Bartel

Management

Please turn to slide 15. Our growth strategy continues to be built on two pillars. On one hand, we are looking to grow our audience. Together with our Asia-Pacific business, we now have over 29 million members worldwide, and that base continues to grow. At the same time, we are working to enhance our products to serve our users better. We not only want them to receive deals from us by e-mail and social media, but we also want to help them when they are actively searching for something specific, like a hotel room on a certain date. Revenues per member has been decreasing over the past three years as we streamlined and focused our business, but we believe that product enhancements should result over-time in higher revenues per member. Slide 16 highlights how our investment priorities are aligned with these two pillars of our strategy; growth in our audience; and improvements of our products. First, we continued our increased investment in acquisition of new members during the quarter. We added 750,000 in new members and grew our already strong social media presence. We also increased our investments in Asia-Pacific. New members are expected to yield benefits to our business for years to come. Second, we have been working to enhance our products to make them more mobile friendly and easier to use. So that members can search for specific years faster and better. We launched a new responsive Web site most of our U.S. based users, which we plan to roll-out around the globe in the next two quarters. Third, we continue to enhance our hotel platform for the Asia Pacific hotel searches. We’ve doubled the number of hostels on the platform year-over-year, and we communicate to our members more actively that they can find hotels deals when they…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. The floor is now open for the questions [Operator Instructions] Thank you. And our first question comes from Ed Woo from Ascendiant Capital. Your line is now open.

Ed Woo

Analyst

Just a general question in terms of what you see in the travel industry right now in terms of -- and the great impact from Brexit that you’ll be able to continue for next year, and then also just both the North American and Asian travel market?

Holger Bartel

Management

So when European being hit the trend that we spoke about during our last call that Europeans are avoiding certain travel destinations. It decreased a little bit throughout the quarter, and the Brexit actually was rather positive in terms of interest of travellers in going to the UK. So, at the beginning of the third quarter, we saw increased searches for travel to Britain, and indeed for Travelzoo members that we have outside of England, they were looking more for deals to that country. North America, we haven’t really seen any nature new trends, except that I would see in certain cities like New York and other big cities, you start seeing more of an impact of Airbnb on the hotel business, particularly New York. There is now a lot of availability, and we are seeing that hotel rates in the first quarter of 2017 look like they are -- they will be going well on quite a bit. Asia-Pacific, the story also is the same. China, the Chinese travellers look to travel more and more abroad. And I think, we really see that overall travel is becoming more and more global, and this is something we want to pick up on going forward into 2017. I don’t see we have leveraged enough the opportunity of our Travelzoo members in various countries look and find deals in other countries, and that’s something we’re going to focus on more in the future.

Ed Woo

Analyst

You mentioned more and more impact in the U.S. with Airbnb and possibly rates going down in first quarter, I’m not sure. Do you think Airbnb will have a bigger impact? And I guess are you guys going get more involved in that space. I know some of the bigger OTAs have moved to either acquire [indiscernible] adding more alternative combinations, I am not sure what side. Are you guys going to have a strategy for that?

Holger Bartel

Management

So the impact of Airbnb on hotel is probably more a question for hotels, which you see that hotels come to us and want to promote more aggressive deals in the first quarter in places like New York. And that’s good for us. In our past model of really promoting deals by email and now more with social media, it’s been difficult for us to promote very specific offers for a specific apartment like, Airbnb does. But of course we are thinking about how we can have our members benefit from that trend. And yes there might be in 2017 how we’re going to do that. It’s not something we have really been doing in the past.

Operator

Operator

Thank you [Operator Instructions]. I’ll turn the call back now over to Mr. Holger Bartel.

Holger Bartel

Management

Okay, thank you everyone for joining me today, me and Glen for today’s call about the third quarter. And we look forward to speaking with you again next time.