TripAdvisor Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
August 6, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Tripadvisor signed a definitive agreement to sell TheFork to American Express for $700 million, with closing expected before year-end. The approximately $680 million in anticipated net proceeds should provide flexibility for debt reduction and/or share repurchases.
  • Neutral Sentiment: Q2 continuing-operations revenue was $442 million and adjusted EBITDA was $76 million, with both broadly in line with expectations; EBITDA exceeded expectations. Experiences bookings grew 5%, led by 10% growth at Viator, while TripAdvisor’s point of sale faced roughly a five-percentage-point SEO headwind.
  • Negative Sentiment: Management cited weather disruptions, higher cancellations, weakening U.S.-to-Europe demand, lower average booking values, and unfavorable geographic mix as pressures on Q3. Experiences revenue is expected to range from a 2% decline to 1% growth, while consolidated continuing-operations revenue is forecast to decline 7%–10%.
  • Negative Sentiment: Hotels and other revenue fell 21% in Q2 to $163 million, driven by sustained hotel shopper-volume and SEO headwinds, despite strong pricing. The company expects another 20%–23% revenue decline in the segment in Q3 and has reduced fixed costs by approximately 16% year to date.
  • Positive Sentiment: Tripadvisor remains focused on experiences as its primary long-term growth opportunity, investing in demand diversification, conversion, supplier onboarding, B2B2C distribution, and AI partnerships including Google Gemini. Management said repeat engagement, direct bookings, and supply expansion are improving, although AI-related traffic and monetization remain early.
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Earnings Conference Call
TripAdvisor Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

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Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the TripAdvisor Second Quarter 2026 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Angela White, Investor Relations Vice President. Please go ahead, Angela.

Angela White
Angela White
VP of Investor Relations at TripAdvisor

Thank you, Felicia. Good morning and welcome to TripAdvisor's second quarter 2026 financial results call. Joining me today are Matt Goldberg, President and CEO, and Mike Noonan, CFO. Earlier this morning, we filed and made available our earnings release. In that release, you'll find reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measure discussed on this call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this call may contain estimates and other forward-looking statements that represent management's views as of today, August 6th, 2026. 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.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

Thanks, Angela, and good morning, everyone. In Q2, group revenue and adjusted EBITDA were in line with expectations, which we delivered against a fluctuating macro backdrop. Overall performance reflected the underlying strength of our experiences business and our continued focus on simplifying our legacy offerings. During the quarter, we announced our proposed agreement to sell TheFork for $700 million. The transaction unlocks the value we've created at TheFork and is another step in focusing the company on experiences. Net proceeds from the transaction will provide us additional flexibility for our capital allocation choices. We believe American Express will be a natural long-term home for TheFork and an important ongoing strategic partner for TripAdvisor. The transaction continues to progress. We signed the definitive agreement on August 2nd and expect to close before year-end.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

Beyond the sale of TheFork, our portfolio review continues as we explore additional opportunities across the business to catalyze shareholder value. We're focused on enhancing the value of our assets and reshaping the company to deliver on our strategic priorities. Specifically, strengthening our leadership and experiences and simplifying our hotels and other offerings to optimize for profitability. This work is predicated on allocating our resources to the largest opportunities for sustainable growth and profitability, where we have the competitive position to be a global market leader. With that, let's turn to our operating performance, starting with our experiences segment. Across the large majority of our marketplace, bookings growth trended as expected. Performance on our largest owned and operated point of sale, Viator, grew 10% for the quarter, while sustained SEO headwinds in the TripAdvisor point of sale pressured overall segment growth.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

Bookings for the segment grew 5% overall in the quarter. Our marketplace flywheel continues to support our experiences strategy. We're making progress against each stage. First, generating higher quality demand. Second, converting that demand more effectively through our storefronts. Third, building stronger, more productive supply. Let's take each in turn. First, demand. We've continued to broaden the ways we reach, acquire, and re-engage customers. As travelers increasingly discover experiences across social and other mid-funnel channels, we're finding attractive new opportunities to diversify beyond paid search. The results are giving us the confidence to scale those investments with encouraging evidence that they can drive both incremental demand and attractive customer acquisition economics. At the same time, search remains a core channel in the experiences category, given the high intent nature of its leads.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

We continue to test, learn, and optimize across this quickly changing landscape, leveraging our proprietary data and bidding expertise to maximize efficiency. This is driving healthy double-digit growth in our paid channels. Outside of our marketing channels, we're also making good progress with rewards and incentives. What began as a series of targeted experiments is increasingly becoming a scalable lever for acquisition, conversion, and repeat engagement across the customer journey. While certain incentives may bring near-term pressure on take rate, the benefit to overall bookings uplift and return engagement drive favorable returns. Second, our storefronts. As travelers reach us, our product work continues to simplify the path to booking, delivering compounding conversion gains. Central to our product strategy is helping travelers make booking decisions more easily and with greater confidence.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

This quarter, continued improvements to personalization, how we surface and present reviews, and more specific availability details, are making it easier for travelers to quickly find the right experience and complete a booking. Together, these investments continue to strengthen the booking experience, lift conversion, and support our overall items growth, reinforcing our confidence in our product roadmap and our ability to drive sustainable items growth over time. Finally, our supply. Building the world's best experiences catalog isn't just about adding more products, it's about adding the right products, and we're focused on actively expanding supply where we see the greatest opportunity to serve unmet traveler demand. This strategy is paying off. We're seeing it in the performance of the supply we're onboarding in secondary and tertiary destinations. The inventory we target strategically is getting better traction, securing the all-important first booking significantly faster, and earning more per product than average.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

These products are also driving new customer acquisition by attracting a majority of their bookings from first-time customers. This, in turn, supports our category expansion, with many new customers booking in categories where we've been less penetrated, such as ticketed attractions and events. The key enabler of that strategy is making it easier for operators to bring high-quality experiences onto the platform. Continued investments in supplier onboarding and connectivity are reducing listing friction, helping operators get experiences live faster with richer, higher-quality content. Our supply is one of our strongest advantages and will continue building on our momentum. The benefits of our supply and product work extend beyond our owned marketplaces. They also strengthen our value proposition to partners, enabling us to power more experiences storefronts across the travel industry and beyond.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

The attractiveness of our offerings support the healthy growth in our third-party points of sale as we continue to add new distribution partnerships. Now, turning to hotels and other. This segment remains highly profitable, but is well understood to be challenged by structural changes in our primary SEO channel. Our stated objective remains the same, to simplify the business and drive alignment between revenue trends and costs. Year-to-date, we've reduced fixed costs by approximately 16% and will continue to evaluate further opportunities to streamline the business. Strategically, the profitability in this segment allows us to reinvest across our highest priorities and will continue to be disciplined about shifting resources and investment to areas of proven growth, particularly in experiences. Alongside the work we've discussed today, we're also preparing for the changes reshaping how people discover, plan, and experience travel. Experimentation is central to that effort.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

We've made it a core part of how we operate across the business, and we're seeing the results. Our experimentation velocity is increasing and contributing more incremental revenue year-on-year, which we expect to drive compounding impact over time. At the same time, we're ensuring our marketplace is available wherever travelers increasingly discover and plan experiences. Most recently, Viator became the first travel experiences partner for Google Gemini, adding to our growing list of partnerships across the leading AI platforms. We're also seeing encouraging early signs that our longstanding strengths in SEO, together with our trusted high-quality content, are translating well into AI-powered travel discovery. While AI-driven traffic remains small today, TripAdvisor and Viator are already among the most visible travel brands in Google's AI overviews. As we continue working with the leading AI platforms, we'll keep learning, adapting, and evolving to serve changing traveler behavior.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

Finally, we're utilizing AI to help us build our products and operate more effectively. This includes scaling our early pilots to improve engineering productivity, automate supply acquisition and customer service workflows, and help optimize marketing performance. We're also using AI tools to power our fraud detection for reviews, moderate and curate our content, and enable our workforce through productivity tools. We're encouraged by the breadth and impact of practical applications we're seeing in many ways across the company. Before I pass over to Mike, I'd like to leave you with this. While the operating environment remains uncertain, our conviction has never been clearer. We believe experiences is the largest long-term growth opportunity in travel, and every decision we're making, from where we invest to how we operate, is focused on extending our leadership in that category.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

As Mike will cover in more detail, we're committed to investing behind this opportunity with a long-term lens on growth and margin expansion. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mike.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Thanks, Matt, and good morning. I will start with a review of our financial performance and then provide more information on July trends and our outlook for Q3. As a reminder, all growth rates are relative to the comparable period in 2025, unless noted otherwise. Before I cover performance. As we noted in our release this morning, any reference to consolidated results include only the experiences and hotels and other segments presented as continuing operations. TheFork, given the proposed sale announcement on June 15th, is considered held for sale under accounting guidelines and is shown as discontinued operations in our P&L statement and cash flows and balance sheet. This morning's release, our Form 10-Q, and our commentary on our group revenue and adjusted EBITDA now include only our continuing operations or experiences and hotels and other, and also include a recast for quarterly and annual periods.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

These continuing operations incorporate approximately $4 million in annual cost, roughly $1 million per quarter, that were previously allocated to TheFork. These expenses primarily pertain to corporate personnel and insurance. We anticipate recovering the majority of these costs in 2027 through a transition services agreement. On to the results for the quarter. Continuing operations revenue and adjusted EBITDA was $442 million and $76 million respectively, while revenue and adjusted EBITDA from TheFork classified in discontinued operations was $61 million and $11 million respectively. Relative to our expectations, which included TheFork, revenue was in line and adjusted EBITDA was above expectations. Turning to experiences. We witnessed an uneven recovery in the quarter with improvement in bookings growth from April to May, then stepped back modestly in June.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Domestic U.S. bookings improved throughout the quarter from April lows, with Hawaii destination bookings bouncing back to levels we saw earlier in the year. U.S. to Europe bookings softened through the quarter and remained at levels well below what we saw at the beginning of the year. We attribute this in part to persistent macro-related factors, including the continued geopolitical uncertainty and extreme heat conditions in May and June. The number of experiences booked grew 5% in Q2, in line with expectations. Our largest owned and operated point of sale, Viator, delivered 10% growth for the quarter. In our TripAdvisor point of sale, persistent SEO headwinds continued to outweigh performance in other channels. We estimate the impact of the SEO pressure accounted for approximately 5 percentage points of growth headwind to the segment.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

This drag to growth continues to moderate as SEO becomes a smaller share of overall bookings mix. Gross booking value, or GBV, grew 3% to approximately $1.4 billion. We estimate changes in currency were a tailwind to growth of approximately 1%. SEO pressure accounted for approximately 5 percentage points of headwind to GBV growth. Testing around discounting and a higher mix of lower priced items on our owned and operated points of sale drove lower average booking value, or ABV, year-over-year, resulting in a lower GBV growth rate relative to the bookings growth rate. Experiences revenue grew 3%, or approximately 2% on a constant currency basis. Revenue growth was pressured relative to bookings and GBV growth by an increase in cancellation rates, primarily driven by adverse weather and travel conditions in both the U.S. and Europe throughout May and June.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Adjusted EBITDA for the experiences segment was $31 million, or 11% of revenue, down 290 basis points. Deleveraged was driven by the free paid channel mix shift across Viator and TripAdvisor points of sale. Lower personnel and other costs partially offset the increased marketing as a % of revenue. We remain confident in our ability to capture a larger share of the global experiences market. Our product, marketing, and supply infrastructure provide the foundation required to scale beyond our mature markets. These capabilities also power our high growth B2B2C, or third-party partner offerings, which reach travelers in non-core geographies and categories still migrating from offline to online booking adoption. Investments in our B2B2C offering, which include improved integration, enhanced account management, and greater co-marketing capabilities, are yielding significant benefits.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

We are seeing robust GBV growth from this channel, comprising hundreds of merchant partners, thousands of travel agents, and other distribution partners. While macro factors have impacted our top-line performance this year, we remain confident in the trajectory for durable growth and long-term margin expansion. Our flywheel investments are yielding measurable improvements in direct bookings and unit economics, particularly with our high intent channels. Our B2B2C offering continues to scale with a favorable margin profile that directly supports overall segment profitability. Turning now to hotels and other segment. Q2 revenue was $163 million, a 21% decline, and in line with expectations. Strong pricing growth in hotels was more than offset by sustained hotel shopper volume headwinds. Media and advertising revenue declined 12% to $31 million, driven by on-site traffic related headwinds, which offset growth in off-platform revenue.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Adjusted EBITDA in hotels and other was $46 million, or 28% of revenue, down approximately 100 basis points. Adjusted EBITDA was higher than our expectations, primarily due to lower than anticipated personnel and other fixed costs. Adjusted EBITDA margin deleverage was driven by an ongoing shift in free paid channel mix and higher technology costs, which more than offset lower personnel costs. Turning briefly to TheFork, which as noted, is no longer a reportable segment and classified as discontinued operations given the proposed sale announcement. Q2 revenue was $61 million, representing 13% growth or 10% in constant currency. Adjusted EBITDA was $11 million, or approximately 19% of revenue. Turning to consolidated expenses from continuing operations. Cost of revenue in Q2 was 7% of revenue, lower by approximately 70 basis points. This is primarily driven by a benefit of approximately $2 million related to indirect tax refund.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Marketing costs were 49% of revenue, an increase of approximately 500 basis points. This was driven by ongoing pressure from free paid channel mix, including the aforementioned SEO headwinds impacting TripAdvisor experiences and the SEO H&O segment. Personnel costs were 22% of revenue, lower by approximately 400 basis points, primarily due to lower costs in hotels and other, and lower share-based compensation, or SBC expense. Lower SBC expense was primarily due to forfeitures related to our cost savings program announced in Q4 of 2025 and lower annual grant values beginning in 2026. Absent SBC, personnel costs were approximately 19% of revenue, lower by approximately 200 basis points. Technology costs in Q2 were 5% of revenue, a modest increase of approximately 40 basis points, primarily driven by lower revenue. Technology costs on an absolute dollar basis were largely flat.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

G&A costs were approximately 3% of revenue, higher by 130 basis points, primarily due to a difficult comparison of lower G&A expense in Q2 of 2025 resulting from a one time true up. Now turning to cash and liquidity. In Q2, operating cash flow was $141 million and free cash flow was $130 million. Total cash and cash equivalents at June 30th were approximately $843 million, reflecting the paydown of our convertible notes on April 1st, which reduced both cash and total debt by approximately $345 million. In addition, $52 million of cash is included in discontinued operations due to the pending sale of TheFork. Excluding deferred merchant payables of $484 million, our excess cash balance was approximately $359 million, and our total debt was approximately $836 million.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Regarding share repurchases, our program remains active with $110 million remaining, but we did not repurchase shares in the public market due to our ongoing portfolio review, which included the sale of TheFork. We remain committed to our share repurchase program, and we will continue to evaluate opportunities for capital return while balancing our capital structure requirements, market conditions, and other relevant factors. As we plan for the closing of TheFork transaction, we anticipate approximately $680 million of net proceeds. The sale proceeds will provide us flexibility in our capital allocation choices, prioritizing debt reduction and/or share repurchases. Turning now to July trends and our outlook for Q3. July performance remained uneven, reflecting a mix of factors. Unusual weather in the U.S. and Europe dampened bookings growth and increased cancellations throughout the month.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

We continue to see weakening overall demand in the U.S. to Europe travel corridor, our largest corridor, and pressure in average booking values, driven primarily from a higher mix of lower priced experiences. The year-over-year shift in geographic mix impacted take rates, pressuring revenue. The combination of these factors will impact the Q3 experiences performance. We expect growth in experiences booked to improve slightly from Q2 despite these headwinds, though GBV growth will face pressure from the aforementioned lower average booking values and currency movement. Higher cancellations and take rate dynamics will further pressure revenue growth relative to GBV growth. Our guidance assumes stability in recent trends. Starting with our experiences segment for Q3, we expect a flat to modest improvement from Q2 in experiences booked to approximately 5%-7% growth.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

For revenue, we expect declines of 2% at the low end and growth of 1% at the high end, which includes approximately one percentage point of currency headwind. We expect experiences adjusted EBITDA margin of 14%-17%, which reflects expected revenue pressure this quarter, as well as continued prepaid mix shift primarily on the TripAdvisor point of sale. In our hotels and other segment for Q3, we expect revenue declines of approximately 20%-23%. We expect adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 22%-25%. Segment expectations result in expectations for Q3 continuing operations revenue declines of 7%-10% and adjusted EBITDA margin of 17%-20%. Given the current operating environment, we have adopted a more prudent outlook for the second half of 2026. We expect modest improvement in revenue growth across both segments in Q4, assuming one-off travel disruptions do not recur.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Further acceleration remains dependent on a more normalized macro backdrop. We also anticipate the typical seasonal step down in adjusted EBITDA margin as we move from Q3-Q4. Despite the mixed environment, we remain focused on capturing the long-term opportunity experiences, fueling durable growth through disciplined investment and margin expansion. With that, I'd like to turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A.

Operator

Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. The first question comes from the line of Richard Clarke of Bernstein. Richard, please go ahead.

Richard Clarke
Richard Clarke
Analyst at Bernstein

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess I'll just start with one. You're obviously calling out a lot of sort of macro and corridor pressures, I guess we've seen your nearest rivals in your two segments GetYourGuide saying they did 34% gross booking guide, in H1 in North America. Trivago is growing its revenues at about 21% in hotels. Appreciate probably a bit of a different profit focus, now you've got $700 million or $680 million coming in from TheFork. Are there investments you can make in the business that mean you can kind of match some of that peer revenue performance, or is there anything structural holding back what they're doing compared to what you're reporting?

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Yeah. Thanks, Richard. It's Mike. I'll take the first part of that, or Matt can add on. Listen, I take the question and thank you for the question. I think just a few points on the relative growth rate. When you think about North America, I think there's a vastly different size comparison. We are scaled significantly higher than our next largest competitor in North America. We do say that our Viator, our most scaled and mature channel, has been growing in the mid-teens. When you look at the mix impact, we certainly have seen some headwinds coming from the TripAdvisor point of sale. We're pretty pleased when we look at the overall demand profile, and which largely comes through the pay channels particularly in Viator that we've been maintaining shares.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

I think there's a bit of just the comparison around the scale point I want to make there. As we think about these investments, and I think you've heard from us pretty consistently where the investments need to be, which is in the flywheel and the demand source supply, and we're investing across all three of those. We are continuing to keep a very long-term focus there. In demand, you heard us talk a little bit about this quarter, diversifying some of our marketing mix, really moving into other channels away from SEO, and we're starting to accelerate that, and we're excited about some of the early results in that result. In the store, which is all about conversion, how we get our teams working faster and faster around conversion, app, all these things we continue to devote to.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

You're seeing these investments in the P&L today through our personnel and through technology costs. Then finally, in supply, which we've been pretty consistent the past couple of quarters about how we talk about our supply advantage, which we do firmly believe that we have today, but how do we improve that? It's not just the number of supply, but how do we bring highest quality supply in that contributes to the first two points of the flywheel, which are conversion, and we're matching that demand with the supply. In some ways, we are very aware there's a lot of macro things happening. We're probably a little more unique in the environment relative to some of our very large-scale competitors in the travel sector, which have large scale and geographic diversity. We remain very committed for long-term investments around those three areas. Matt.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

Yeah, no, I think you handled it well. We do see meaningful opportunity ahead. I think sometimes these averages belie what's going on underneath and some of the strength that is there that we see, but certainly, there's an opportunity to go to new source markets internationally and drive category diversifications because where we play are not the largest or the highest growing source geos or categories, and we have a real opportunity to go after that. We intend to. There's a lot of good things happening underneath. We're seeing really good growth from retained and reactivated users. We're seeing improving repeat rates. We're seeing our booker cohorts coming through lower cost channels. We're seeing some of the items booked in key areas looking really good, conversion improving. We see a lot of opportunity to lean into, and we will invest prudently behind all of that.

Operator

One moment for your next question. The next question comes from the line of Naved Khan of B. Riley. Naved, please go ahead.

Naved Khan
Naved Khan
Analyst at B. Riley

Great. Thank you very much. Just a couple of questions from me. Maybe just on Viator first. Just talk about what kind of retention rate and repeat rates you're seeing from the Viator cohorts that you have acquired. If I look at the sort of the marketing spend, as a % of revenue, it was up significantly. Is that a part of the mix between 3P versus Viator point of sale, or is there something else going on? Maybe touch on the price sensitivity, which you may or may not be seeing from the consumer. Other OTAs have talked about how consumer is resilient, and I'm wondering if any sort of price considerations are showing up in your bookings for Viator. Thank you.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Yeah. Hey, Naved, Mike, I'll try to hit those. I think you kind of answered it in your last part on question one around marketing mix as a % of revenue. I think we look at marketing as a % of GBV, year-over-year, that did increase about a point, from like 11.3 to like 12.4. It's a little bit more consistent than looking at a revenue basis. Even there, some of that very modest leverage is just due to the prepaid mix and particularly SEO on TripAdvisor. Importantly, when we think about marketing efficiency, which I think is getting to part of your question, when we look at our SEM costs versus the GBV we derive from SEM, that has remained flat year-over-year.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

We really have had a very consistent approach as to thinking about our ROAS targets on both channels. That has remained pretty consistent, and there really has been no deterioration on the cohorts we see. We continue to see repeat rates that have been pretty consistent. As we've said, as those cohorts build, those repeat cohorts carry a very different margin profile and a key part of our thesis around long-term margin expansion, which have not changed. In terms of the price sensitivity, we did call that out.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

We have seen average booking value to come down under pressure a bit, really across geos, products, we see a higher mix of this lower priced items or bookings come into the mix, which we do believe is a bit of a macro signal because it has started around the time at the end of Q1, we saw a little bit happening into Q2 more fulsomely. Again, it's baked into our Q3 guidance, which we'll see if that's proved to be conservative or not, but we do believe that is a key input and is reflective of macro.

Naved Khan
Naved Khan
Analyst at B. Riley

Thank you, Mike.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Thanks, Naved.

Operator

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

Lloyd Walmsley
Lloyd Walmsley
Analyst at Mizuho

Thanks, guys. Can you give us an update on where your exposure is today to SEO at this point, maybe by segment or point of sale, so we get a sense of the forward risk? Separately on the AI side, can you just give us an update on your native AI product and sort of where you are there, what engagement looks like? The opportunity maybe to work with AI labs, either for more licensing revenue or more closely on a product. Anything you could say or update us on that would be great. Thanks.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Hey, Lloyd. I'll hit the first one, Matt can hit the second. We called out a little bit more explicitly in our prepared remarks on SEO exposure for experiences. We did say that from a segment perspective, there's about five points of headwind on the units growth, experiences book growth, right? Around 5-10, going from reported five would be up to around 9% or 10%. That is almost entirely driven by TripAdvisor. There is some very small SEO exposure in Viator, but really very modest. As we said, we will continue to think that would work its way down. We expect that to be less pressure as we move next year. For H&O, it is different. Our hotels business, which was really built on the back of SEO, we continue to work through that.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

We continue to think about our customer experience, how we get a great customer experience, how we give a very high intent click, that's very valuable to our advertisers, which we have been focused on, has been the driving force around a lot of our product work. We do think over time, we will work through that. It continues to be a channel that has still some size, although it has diminished greatly over the last several years.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

Yeah, Lloyd, I'll take your second question. Thanks for that. As you can imagine, we are very active on the AI front. When we think about AI, we think about really having meaningful impact on our business in three ways. First, we want to really accelerate our experiences marketplace flywheel. That's an internal opportunity, we're going at it across product and R&D, driving experiment velocity across marketing to drive efficiency and our customer acquisition. Supply, the way that we target and onboard customer service, the way that we use AI to really offset costs and be far more effective there, then engineering to step change our productivity levels. There's a lot going on there. Of course, we also think about our native AI offerings, that centers on really two moments for the travel journey.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

It's the planning phase sort of when you're in destination. On the planning side, we're really refining how we tailor travel guidance to personalize answers based on what we know about travelers, we're working with leading LLM models and leveraging our data. That continues. We've got millions of people who are using that product. It's a really nice platform for experimentation. I think with all of these products, what you want to do is experiment and learn, drive that velocity, then scale the things that work, we continue to work on that. These are not things that you will see showing up immediately in the P&L, they're areas where we are getting stronger and stronger about what we've learned and how we're going to take that forward.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

On the in-destination piece, we actually had an MVP go live recently. We're really working with mobile first. Obviously, it's critically important that we get more people into our mobile app and engage there. We want to help people quickly find the things that are nearby, bookable, and aligned with the plan. We're out there testing. Again, we've got great volumes to be testing. We're driving rapid experimentation. We're iterating fast based on those insights and really thinking about how that will shift the product. Again, these are early efforts. We will experiment and learn. We feel good about them. Finally, the question you asked about how we want to work with the AI labs and thought leaders. I think there is a lot we can be doing. We've been as active as maybe anyone, signing deals with OpenAI and Perplexity, Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

Obviously, there are a few we can't talk about. We recently announced that we're the first to work with Google Gemini. We're partnering to integrate our experiences inventory. That's an area we're very excited about. We think learning there will put us in a good position to serve travelers wherever they may lead. We're also focused on AEO and really making sure our visibility is incredibly high. We get really nice high-intent traffic that's growing very rapidly, but it's still pretty small. It's dwarfed by where search has been historically. These deals are contributing value. They're growing. We look for a balance of licensing revenue traffic. There are ways that we can think about experimenting around product.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

We have nothing to announce today, but there's a lot of active conversations, and we think we're incredibly well-positioned with our data content brand to really work with the AI leaders out there. Again, it's a good setup. It's a very dynamic space. We're doing a lot internally, we're doing a lot natively, and we're doing a lot with partners, and I think you'll see that continue to be something that we talk about over time.

Lloyd Walmsley
Lloyd Walmsley
Analyst at Mizuho

All right. Thank you.

Operator

One moment for your next question. The next question comes from the line of Nafeesa Gupta of Bank of America Securities. Nafeesa, please go ahead.

Nafeesa Gupta
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. There are multiple factors which are weighing on third quarter experiences, revenue, and bookings, weather-related cancellations, Europe, U.S. demand, lower booking values. Which one among these would you say is the largest issue that you're seeing? Do you see it as temporary, or is it more structural? Is what I'd like to understand in these revenue segments.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Hey, Nafeesa. It's Mike. I'll take that. Listen, July, as we said in prepared remarks, was a bit uneven. It was a little bit of continuation we saw it in June. All of these things, we do believe firmly that they're transitory and that they are not structural. When we look at, particularly cancel rates is one of the biggest impacts. Listen, our business, as we said, is largely a North American booker origin business. A very large corridor for us is U.S. to Europe. We can all look at the news headlines and see really the unfortunate weather and events that are happening there. It's not unsurprising that you may see higher cancellation rates, particularly in the areas that we are so strong, which is guided tours and activities. A lot of them are outdoors. We understand that.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

When we look at that, we view that very much as transitory, not structural. I think the overall demand environment, again, is weighed on, particularly around all the macro factors we've said. Again, for us, though, you got to look at it. We have a lot of mix in our business. Continue to see the Viator point of sale growing nicely, as we said. Even then, we believe that that point of sale can grow much faster behind the investments we talked about earlier. That point of sale has been growing in the mid-teens this year. Listen, our business, just where it is today, we feel so strongly about the opportunity. As Matt said, it's the highest growth category within travel. It's a long-term growth opportunity. We're working through some macro events.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

We're not going to stop the investments that we think will produce durable, long-term growth ahead of the category. We're looking forward to getting past some of these macro events into more normalized travel behavior.

Nafeesa Gupta
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Thank you. The second one, could you also talk more about continued portfolio review and any other strategic opportunities that you are exploring?

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

I don't know that I heard the question. You're asking about the portfolio review. Look, we continue to look at every part of the portfolio and determine where do we want to invest, where do we want to pull back and maybe optimize, and where might we want to divest. We want to catalyze shareholder value ahead. I would say there's never been an option off the table. We want to look at any option that is in the interest of shareholders. Our work is intended to reshape this company to focus more directly on experiences and simplify the portfolio, because we understand that the complexity has been something that has not been rewarded. We're allocating our resources to enhance the value of the portfolio regardless of where we land on the portfolio review.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

Our strategic priorities are designed to create value on their own, because we're focused on creating the strongest experiences company as possible and to simplify our organization to do it most effectively.

Nafeesa Gupta
Analyst at Bank of America Securities

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

Thank you.

Operator

As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. One moment for your next question. The next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth of JPMorgan. Doug, please go ahead.

Dae Hong
Dae Hong
Analyst at JPMorgan

Morning. This is Dae Hong for Doug. Thanks for taking the questions. Following up on your comments about macro headwinds being transitory, I guess broadly looking at the challenges that you're facing right now, do you guys have any line of sight on when those challenges or headwinds might normalize? Is there a way to think about as those challenges normalize or your growth initiatives kick into higher gear, when we can expect to see revenue start to reaccelerate and the margins also beginning to expand again? Thank you.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Yeah. I'll take that. Listen, I think you would expect us to be prudent in our guide as we think about Q3 and the rest of the year, because it's very hard to understand when they do cease to abate. They will over time, as they always have in travel. Listen, when you go back to where we were start of the year, we had very high overall segment, kind of mid-teens, high teens, and Viator in the 20s in some categories growth rates. This is where we are going to get back to, right? It really accelerate from there, we believe. Again, we don't see anything different in our business other than fighting through some of these things.

Mike Noonan
Mike Noonan
CFO at TripAdvisor

Weather impacts, people trading down to lower priced tours and attractions As the macro abates or people feel better about the discretionary income they may have in their pocket to spend on higher pricings, those things will come back, and it will alleviate the pressure, certainly on a GBV and revenue basis. Our overall ambition has not changed. As Matt talked about in an earlier question, beyond this and expanding into different geos, expanding into different products and different product mix are all really exciting for us and we believe can take us into a different revenue, help escalate or accelerate from there. I think we feel pretty good about the long term.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

Let me just speak to the macro because we all are seeing the same thing, I'm not going to repeat that. We also know travelers are going to find a way to travel, and we see travel intent durable for the fall. It's led by the U.S., which seems a bit stronger in terms of intent than perhaps last year. Domestic is picking up some at the expense of international, we'll have to watch that. We do see it across categories. Those who are thinking about economic uncertainties, actually, they indicate they're placing more value on experiences in a pretty good way. When they plan their travel, when they plan their budget, they're going to go do that.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

Now, some of the mix we talked about with price, it could be that they elect lower price experiences, we'll be there to soak up that demand for sure. What we know is that experiences continues to play an increasingly durable role, that 80% of travelers say they would cut any other part of travel than experiences, it's influencing destination choice and travel planning, particularly among younger customers and Americans, we think we're really well positioned to go take advantage of that. I do think some of the uneven environment is going to pass, we can't predict timing of that, we can put our business in a position to be there as it does. We like the resilience we're seeing, we're certainly keeping an eye on trends as we look forward.

Operator

I am showing no further questions at this time, so this does conclude the question and answer session. I will now turn the call back over to Matt Goldberg for closing remarks.

Matt Goldberg
Matt Goldberg
President and CEO at TripAdvisor

Thanks. Thanks for joining us this morning. Before closing out, I just want to briefly welcome our newest board members, Carl Sparks and Laura Bisesto, who joined the board following our June shareholder meeting. Carl and Laura each bring operational and strategic perspectives that will provide insight for our strategic priorities ahead. I also want to congratulate Jeremy Philips on his appointment to chair. His role as our lead independent director has provided invaluable leadership during key transition periods, and I know we're going to benefit from his continued guidance. Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank all of our employees for the things they do every day to achieve our ambition. We look forward to providing further updates next quarter. Thank you all.

Operator

Goodbye. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.

Executives
    • Angela White
      Angela White
      VP of Investor Relations
    • Matt Goldberg
      Matt Goldberg
      President and CEO
    • Mike Noonan
      Mike Noonan
      CFO
Analysts
    • Richard Clarke
      Analyst at Bernstein
    • Naved Khan
      Analyst at B. Riley
    • Lloyd Walmsley
      Analyst at Mizuho
    • Nafeesa Gupta
      Analyst at Bank of America Securities
    • Dae Hong
      Analyst at JPMorgan
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