TRIP 4Q YOUTUBE

02/10/14 04:47PM EST

In preparation for TRIP's FQ4 2013 earnings release tomorrow, we’ve put together the recent pertinent forward looking company commentary.

METASEARCH IMPACT

  • Since we rolled this out to 100% of our traffic in early June, we've driven more clicks per meta session and better downstream partner conversion, and although pricing remains choppy, we've seen a modest uptick in meta revenue per session. We continue to work on improving onsite and partner conversion, running multiple tests every week, and we expect more gains in this area.
  • We'll have lapped the transition completely by the end of Q2 next year, and so the whole transition piece will be behind us and it will be continued growth based on our hotel shopper numbers, and the rest of our ongoing conversion improvements that we work on every week.
  • For partners, coverage is strong and bidding frequency is up.

TV/BRANDING CAMPAIGN

  • According to Skift, Tripadvisor halted its TV campaign in the US market in January.
  • We are seeing some positive signs from this campaign, but it is too early to gauge the overall effectiveness.
  • We spent a couple of million in Q2, maybe a couple of million more at the end of September Q3 when we launched the campaign. And by the time Q4 finishes, we'll probably have spent close to $30 million or so.
  • We wanted to go heavy in order to be able to detect a lift that we felt comfortable that we could correlate with the specific TV spend. And we've been in market a lot in October and that will continue in November as well. And I'll report back in early Q1 with a more definitive, hey look, this is what we've learned from everything we were doing in TV.
  • Argentina is a relatively small market for us, so we thought we would be able to see it a stronger signal for the TV spend. France and Spain, key European markets for us. Picked two as opposed to going broad based and the U.S. is home market where we have the most traffic, hey, will we be able to see the results that we're looking for.

MOBILE INSTANT BOOKINGS TIMING

  • Sort of 2014 and if you look at how TripAdvisor historically delivers projects, it's perhaps we're known as faster than some other companies. I think earlier part of 2014 than later part of 2014 because it is kind of the next best thing we feel we can do on the mobile front. We have a lot of installs. We're still pre-installed on Samsung S4. We've got new native apps, Android and iPhone, that just rolled out, nice engagement we're seeing on both of those, but we're missing that booking functionality, so that's the clear next phase for our mobile strategy.

UPCOMING HEADWINDS

  • So meta over and done with (mid-2014), mobile less of a headwind. In international, will remain a bit of a headwind. Hopefully, we can acknowledge that as an ongoing headwind, but make it up elsewhere in the company as we improve our overall monetization of the site.

INTERNATIONAL

  • Our brand strength and our conversion numbers in the U.K. is outstanding, arguably sort of best in the world, and Brits like to travel a lot, so that's good for us; Australia is a pretty strong market for us; Japan has some structural weaknesses in terms of the commission rates that the local players are able to collect on hotels. And so, when the local OTA isn't making as much money on the bookings, they can't pay us as much, but we continue to grow in all of our markets. Europe, the Northern European markets are better than the Southern European markets. I don't think that has anything to do with TripAdvisor per se. I just think that's the macroeconomic climate for all travel providers.

VACATION RENTALS (CHINA)

  • We view it as a tremendous market. We still continue to invest in China, and so we still have a couple of points-of-sale that are growing in China. We like the investment, we're well positioned for the future, we're not commenting on the overall timeframe when that turns profitable, but it positions us well down the road with that growing market or worse comes to worse, we could curtail our investments and take those dollars and put them elsewhere.
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