TripAdvisor’s Third Quarter 2016 Earnings Preview

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TripAdvisor is expected to release its third quarter 2016 earnings on November 9th. So far this year, TripAdvisor’s performance has not been promising owing to its continued investments across its platforms as well as its strategic acquisitions. To add to its worries, strong competitors like Google are coming up with newer mobile applications for tourists, such as the recently released Google Trips that might provide strong competition to TripAdvisor’s tours and attractions platform. However, the company’s management as well as leading hotel chains and even Priceline has placed faith in its hotel booking platform, Instant Booking’s future. Coupled with this, TripAdvisor’s aggressive expansion of its non-hotel platform might also boost the future growth for the company.

How Important Is  The Instant Booking Platform For TripAdvisor’s Future Growth?

TripAdvisor’s management conveyed to its investors that though the company’s performance might remain dampened in 2016, it is expected to make a turnaround thereafter. Till now, its biggest investment and an expected game changer for the company, the Instant Booking platform, hadn’t been as successful as was earlier expected, given that the company’s users are accustomed to making searches and reading reviews on its platform before booking elsewhere. It is still a question as to how far TripAdvisor might be successful in changing this mindset of its users. In the online travel world, there are examples like metasearch site Kayak, that also tried introducing a booking feature a few years ago but unfortunately, it did not meet with success. It is also noteworthy to mention that the online travel world is one of tough competition. Not only existing OTAs, but also social media platforms such as Facebook and search engines like Google are venturing into the market, making it tougher for TripAdvisor to succeed.

However, it should also be kept in mind that the world’s major hotel brands and Priceline’s booking.com – the top accommodation booking platform in the world – have placed their faith on Instant Booking indicating Instant Booking’s potential growth capability. Also, according to TripAdvisor’s CEO Stephen Kaufer, the transition from a metasearch to a hotel booking platform is making TripAdvisor forego short term revenues and hence the growth seems dampened at present.

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The fate of TripAdvisor’s Instant Booking is still a question that remains unanswered. Given that over 80% of the company’s revenues come from the hotel division, its success is crucial for TripAdvisor’s future growth. In case things go wrong and Instant Booking fails, there’s also a chance for the company to become an  acquisition target for a bigger OTA.

How Is TripAdvisor’s Non-Hotel Segment Shaping Up?

TripAdvisor’s attractions, restaurants, and vacation rentals segment seems to be growing well. TripAdvisor had boosted its tours and attraction offerings after forming Marketplace with the help of its 2014 acquisition, Viator. After the launch of Marketplace in 2015, Viator’s bookable properties had almost tripled from 11,000 to 32,000 in Q4 2015. TripAdvisor’s Marketplace has 690,000 listed businesses currently and the restaurant platform has 4.1 million listings. Its HouseTrip acquisition, added around 815,000 vacation rental properties on its platform. TripAdvisor has been pretty aggressive with the building up of its attractions, vacation rentals, and restaurant booking websites over the last couple of years. In August, the company acquired New York-based Citymaps, a map-based guide for things to do in a city. The company had been founded in 2010 and has so far raised $12 million from investors. Citymaps might further help with the growth of Marketplace. TripAdvisor’s management believes that attractions can be its next billion dollar revenue generating segment while the market is still in a fragmented state. It is said to have a $80 billion market potential in the U.S. and the U.K. alone.

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Notes:

1) The purpose of these analyses is to help readers focus on a few important things. We hope such lean communication sparks thinking, and encourages readers to comment and ask questions on the comment section, or email content@trefis.com
2) Figures mentioned are approximate values to help our readers remember the key concepts more intuitively. For precise figures, please refer to our complete analysis for TripAdvisor

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