Earnings Call Transcript - TRIP Q3 2025

Operator, Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tripadvisor's Third Quarter 2025 Conference Call. 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, Vice President of Investor Relations. Angela, please go ahead.

Angela White, Vice President of Investor Relations

Thank you so much, Felicia. Good morning, and welcome to Tripadvisor's Third Quarter 2025 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, November 6, 2025. 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.

Matthew Goldberg, President and CEO

Thanks, Angela, and good morning, everyone. In Q3, we delivered consolidated revenue growth of 4% to $553 million and adjusted EBITDA of $123 million or 22% of revenue. We were pleased with this performance, which beat our expectations on adjusted EBITDA and was within range for overall revenue growth. This week, we've initiated a set of changes that represent a fundamental shift in our operating model to support a more focused set of strategic priorities. These actions will sharpen our execution focus, which we expect to accelerate revenue growth, improve operating margins and create a more durable financial profile. To do so, we'll focus on three priorities. First, extending our leadership position in experiences to drive long-term growth by fully deploying our differentiated assets across Tripadvisor and Viator to win in this category. Second, leveraging our unique content, data and brand trust for an AI-enabled future by powering our marketplaces and positioning Tripadvisor at the center of an emerging AI ecosystem. And third, narrowing the focus at brand Tripadvisor to support experiences and our AI future while managing our legacy offerings for profitability. These priorities reflect a shift from optimizing individual brand strategies to speed our transformation into an experiences-led and AI-enabled company. We will direct our focus, talent and investments to what matters most, resulting in a simpler, leaner and faster-moving organization. Our plan is expected to drive significant operational efficiencies of at least $85 million of annualized gross cost savings, which Mike will discuss shortly. But this is not just a cost-cutting exercise. We are aligning ourselves to drive accelerated growth going forward. This is an important moment in the evolution of Tripadvisor Group. We're a very different company than we were three years ago with a portfolio mix now anchored in high-growth marketplaces, delivering more sustainable revenue and profit. In the past 12 months, Viator and TheFork accounted for almost 60% of group revenue, up from approximately 40% in the same period three years ago, representing a 27% CAGR over that period. In that time, these businesses contributed an incremental gain of more than $150 million of adjusted EBITDA and now comprise 30% of overall group profitability. Today, we are far less dependent on a legacy model built on SEO with its well-known structural headwinds. These trends have reshaped our financial composition, and we expect them to continue. Now let's walk through these priorities in more detail. Our first priority is extending our leadership position in experiences to drive long-term growth. Strategically, we're already well positioned to win in experiences. We've achieved scale and established a clear track record of growing the top line while expanding profitability from breakeven in 2023 and now approaching double-digit adjusted EBITDA margins. Earlier this year, we shared that Experiences is becoming the strategic and financial center of gravity for the group. Over the last 12 months, we've achieved $4.6 billion in GBV, driven by 17% items growth. And over that same period, for the first time, our total Experiences revenue has surpassed the revenue from our legacy business lines. Now experiences will become the unified focus of both Viator and Brand Tripadvisor. The global experiences TAM is expected to reach $350 billion in GBV by 2028, growing faster than any other category in travel. To date, we've been concentrating on the U.S. as our primary source market and focusing mostly on tours and activities. We believe we can accelerate our growth by addressing new geographic markets and expanding into new categories while benefiting from the tailwinds of growing demand and the offline to online shift. This is a dynamic, fast-growing category without a global digital brand leader. Going after this opportunity will be our primary objective as a Group. We believe that our strength to lead the experiences category lies in the differentiated assets across our brands that are hard to replicate. At Viator, we're leading in the world's biggest market with the largest global catalog of experiences. Our improved storefront is driving uplift in conversion, repeat and customer loyalty trends. Tripadvisor offers two key assets that we expect will drive growth and expansion in experiences, a trusted global brand and proprietary data on more trips and travelers than anyone else in the category. This combined reach, along with our third-party distribution creates unmatched value for operators. Together, we believe these capabilities give us a unique advantage for our experiences business that we have not yet fully realized. In order to accelerate the next phase of growth, we're unifying our Viator and Tripadvisor experiences operations, unlocking the power of all our resources to focus squarely on this opportunity. This is a significant shift in our operating model designed to drive meaningful outcomes with more efficiency. Our conviction to go all in on this opportunity is grounded in what we've learned from a period of increased coordination between the Viator and Tripadvisor teams across marketing, product and supply over the past several months. Here are a few examples. From a demand perspective, as I shared last quarter, we've been experimenting with how Tripadvisor and Viator can operate together in a more coordinated manner, not as two separate brands with different goals, one focused more on growth, the other focused more on profitability, but as a united team aimed at winning the Experiences category. We began coordinated testing in marketing and found that we could compete more effectively on a combined basis to deliver more efficient marketing spend overall, improving revenue while maintaining profitability. This is just one experiment, but it demonstrates the power of treating our brands as complementary levers working together rather than as separate independent P&Ls. We also believe there's an opportunity to lead with Tripadvisor to put our large global audience in service to Experiences in key international markets while leveraging our high brand awareness to acquire more customers more efficiently in paid channels. From a product perspective, we've increased our experiment velocity and coordinated learnings across points of sale. As a result, our conversion rate has continued to show improvement at both Viator and Tripadvisor. In this new formation, we will lean even harder into these dynamics, focusing on key conversion drivers like personalization, pricing and availability with more resources deployed to scale our optimizations seamlessly across our full Experiences offerings. From a supply perspective, we're expanding on our unmatched scale, over 400,000 experiences globally and growing. In the last year, we've seen healthy double-digit growth in active products and suppliers. We're broadening our supply coverage in new categories and strengthening our presence in secondary and emerging destinations while building industry-leading connectivity with our recently updated APIs, now enabling real-time and dynamic management of pricing and availability. And we're using Tripadvisor data to identify where new supply is most needed, all while optimizing how new supply performs, improving conversion, refining pricing and smoothing the experience for both travelers and operators. By unifying our teams behind experienced leadership, we'll build on our strong marketplace flywheel. Our product and supply optimizations accelerate our conversion wins to fuel more efficient and effective marketing, which in turn compounds the conversion gains, driving higher repeat rates and improved unit economics. And now we're unleashing the full power of the Tripadvisor brand and its unmatched global awareness in service of Experiences. Our second priority is leveraging our assets to position ourselves for an AI-enabled future. Tripadvisor is among the most trusted names in travel, built on decades of authentic contributions. Sitting at the privileged intersection of hundreds of millions of travelers and the operators who serve them, we have unique insights about how people make travel decisions, a proprietary knowledge graph across experiences, hotels and restaurants, which is unique in the industry and a powerful foundation for what comes next. AI is collapsing discovery, planning and booking into a single conversational moment. For travelers, it means less friction and faster decisions. For Tripadvisor Group, it plays directly to our strengths in the space we helped invent, helping people travel smarter. At a time when it's hard to know what information to trust for a highly considered purchase decision like travel, we believe our first-party data, user-generated content and decades of trust, combined with supplier connectivity, detailed pricing information and booking gives us a unique advantage to lead in the age of AI. Over the past several quarters, we've experimented with a broad set of efforts to learn how travelers use AI. We built data science and machine learning capabilities to drive conversation and conversion, and we've explored the role of our content in the AI ecosystem. Here are a few things we've learned. First, our content and data are unique and valuable. Internally, it's been the foundation of our product innovation and growing engagement. And Tripadvisor is already among the most cited sources by LLMs. According to a recent third-party study, Tripadvisor appeared as the #8 overall and the only travel company in the top 20. Second, travelers have a very specific problem. It's hard to make decisions. There are too many options and getting it wrong means wasting time and money. That friction is why travelers come to Tripadvisor to inform and validate their travel decisions. While LLMs do a good job of generating high-level trip plans, the opportunity lies in the underlying recommendations, their social validation and actionability, which we are uniquely positioned to deliver to help travelers make it happen. And finally, AI is raising customer expectations as they look to solve these problems. Customers are choosing AI-native products over legacy products with AI features. They want technology to remove friction. We will follow the consumer and shift our focus from AI-powered features to a fully AI-native approach. Based on these learnings, we've identified a few specific AI opportunities, each of which we believe has the potential to become the primary way travelers engage. The first opportunity is in the planning phase when travelers have a rough idea of an itinerary and are trying to decide what's right for them amidst the unlimited options. Tripadvisor's first-party data and insights position us to curate the most personalized recommendations validated by relevant travelers and make them as immediately actionable as possible. The second opportunity is during the trip itself. Travelers make a lot of last-minute decisions around what to do, see and eat, but availability, pricing and logistics are tricky, especially in Experiences. So we'll leverage our assets to help travelers experience the destination better while traveling. This presents an opportunity to deploy geo-aware recommendation algorithms and deliver proactive offers with single tap booking and access to real-time customer support. We're advancing rapidly on these opportunities and expect to launch an AI-native MVP for the planning phase in the coming weeks in Q4. From there, we'll intend to build a strong foundation to scale and continuously iterate and enhance the customer experience. Of course, we're also exploring how Tripadvisor can deliver value to travelers as a deeply embedded partner with broader AI platforms. As part of our learning agenda, we're directly integrating our Tripadvisor and TheFork brands into ChatGPT through first-of-their-kind apps with a differentiated approach from others. We expect these to be live over the next few weeks. We've signed valuable licensing deals with the majority of the leading AI companies, and we're experimenting with use cases like Agentic and multimodal AI. Ultimately, whether we scale AI value creation through on-platform innovation or off-platform partnerships will be decided by our customers. We believe that by focusing on where we are uniquely positioned to serve travelers, maximizing speed of execution and continuing to fuel the content flywheel that is our most differentiated asset, we can position Tripadvisor at the center of the AI ecosystem in travel. Our final priority is narrowing Brand Tripadvisor's focus. Beyond experiences in AI, we'll optimize Brand Tripadvisor's portfolio to enhance profitability. Over the last few years, we've invested incrementally in Tripadvisor's broad engagement strategy designed to fuel new monetization paths and stabilize our legacy offerings. However, we recognize that the pace of impact from these investments has not been enough to offset increasing pressure from the shifting SEO landscape. So in our most mature legacy categories, we'll focus strictly on optimizing for profitability. We'll deprioritize the areas that we expect to be in secular decline in favor of shifting resources towards our marketplace growth opportunities while driving efficiency across areas that are more exposed to ongoing headwinds. Operationally, this will reduce our headcount and better align costs with revenue expectations. Let me be clear. Taken together, these actions are not a deprioritization of the Tripadvisor brand. In fact, we believe Tripadvisor will play an even larger role in Group level value creation moving forward. Hotels and restaurants will continue to be an important part of planning a trip and the hundreds of millions of travelers coming to Tripadvisor each month will still enjoy those features. Our partners will continue to benefit from access to these audiences. While this functionality isn't going away, we'll shift Tripadvisor's focus and resourcing to areas where we believe we can deliver the most value to customers, leverage the brand and traffic to drive experiences growth, position our content and data at the center of the AI ecosystem and enhance profit from the legacy portfolio. In addition to this set of priorities, TheFork will continue to execute on a financially disciplined growth strategy. This quarter, the segment continued its strong performance with growth of 28% and a 22% adjusted EBITDA margin, nearly double what it was last year at this time. We will continue to build on our position as the leader in European dining and prioritize the diversification in revenue across B2B and B2C while increasing profitability. We're also excited about the team's innovation agenda, which includes an AI-powered booking assistant that's driving an uplift in conversion and a social feed that allows diners to discover restaurants based on reviews and contributions from their contacts. In summary, we believe that the priorities we shared today position us well for the future to drive value for shareholders. As part of this ongoing program of work, we will also take additional steps to review our group portfolio as we determine where we'll invest and where we'll simplify further through partnership or divestment. We are building a stronger Tripadvisor Group focused on faster-growing categories with large TAMs, durable transactional economics and strong supply. We're prioritizing areas where we have a proven track record and the capabilities to win. We'll do fewer things better, move faster and optimize the lines of business where our scale or competitive position can't lead the market. We believe that our actions will strengthen our financial profile by reducing costs, accelerating revenue growth and growing profitability, both in the experiences category and for the group as a whole. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mike.

Mike Noonan, CFO

Thank you, Matt, and good morning. I'll begin by discussing our financial performance and later provide details on the cost savings program, the implications of our operating model changes for segment reporting, and some insights on Q4. All growth rates referenced compare to the same period in 2024 unless stated otherwise. In Q3, consolidated revenue met our expectations at $553 million, reflecting a growth of 4%, while consolidated adjusted EBITDA outperformed our forecast at $123 million, making up 22% of revenue. The Viator segment saw an 18% increase in the number of experiences booked. Sequential growth improved across both the Tripadvisor and Viator platforms, with third-party points of sale continuing to exceed overall segment growth. Notably, experiences booked via the Tripadvisor platform have returned to growth during this quarter. In North America, our primary market, bookings growth improved sequentially across both platforms, which we attribute to the strength of our brands and effective coordinated marketing efforts. Gross booking value, or GBV, increased 15% to about $1.3 billion, and revenue rose 9% to $294 million. Changes in foreign exchange positively impacted GBV revenue growth by around 3 percentage points. The ongoing discrepancy between the growth in the number of experiences booked and revenue growth is mainly due to the rapid increase in our third-party merchant bookings relative to 2024. As a reminder, merchant bookings typically have a lower average booking value, affecting GBV growth compared to volume growth. They also yield a lower implied take rate, impacting revenue growth relative to GBV growth. While the implied take rate is less than for our owned channels, third-party merchant bookings are valuable both financially and strategically as they contribute to an appealing profitability profile and largely come from outside our core markets, helping us capture additional traveler demand as we grow our new and repeat booker cohorts globally. Viator’s adjusted EBITDA stood at $50 million, or 17% of revenue, marking a 550 basis point margin improvement primarily due to a more efficient marketing channel mix. Our direct channels and repeat bookings are both growing significantly, enhancing our profitable growth profile as repeat booking cohorts gain traction. Additionally, the increase in third-party merchant bookings, which incur no marketing expenses, has contributed to the segment's overall marketing leverage. Cost reductions in marketing have more than balanced out slight rises in personnel costs associated with targeted investments in technology, product, and supply. Overall, these trends reinforce our confidence in the long-term margin potential for this business as it scales. For Brand Tripadvisor, Q3 revenue was $235 million, an 8% decline that fell short of expectations. We encountered stronger-than-expected traffic headwinds that intensified throughout the quarter, negatively impacting both free and paid channels. In our branded hotels sector, revenue reached $143 million, down 5%. Strong pricing in hotel meta across both free and paid channels was overshadowed by increasing traffic volume headwinds. Regionally, slight growth in U.S. hotel meta revenue was offset by declines in Europe and APAC. We will continue managing our branded hotels business for margin stability rather than pursuing low-margin revenue in this area. Our focus remains on enhancing the quality of our hotel offerings and providing highly qualified demand to our partners, a strategy reflected in the sustained pricing growth we observe. Media and advertising revenue dropped 11% to $36 million, mainly due to the aforementioned traffic challenges during the quarter. Experiences and Dining revenue fell to $47 million, down 9%. While unit volume growth for Brand Tripadvisor's Experiences returned to growth this quarter, the revenue growth has lagged behind. Experiences revenue performance has remained stable sequentially, and we anticipate further growth in Tripadvisor's Experiences revenue as a result of our new operating model. Brand Tripadvisor's adjusted EBITDA was $59 million, or 25% of revenue, surpassing our expectations. Despite the increasing traffic headwinds in the quarter that added pressure to revenue, the team managed to effectively handle the rising reliance on paid channels, demonstrating fixed-cost prudence to exceed margin expectations despite adjusted EBITDA pressures. At TheFork, Q3 revenue was $63 million, reflecting a 28% increase and a 20% increase in constant currency. B2C bookings volume grew 11% across all channels and 13% through TheFork's branded direct channel. The growth in B2B subscription revenue remains strong as restaurants opt for higher-priced premium plans, further underscoring the strength of the features and overall value we provide. Although B2B subscription revenue makes up a smaller portion of TheFork's total revenue, it is increasingly contributing to the overall revenue mix, a trend we expect to continue as the team diversifies its business model. Adjusted EBITDA at TheFork was $14 million, or 22% of revenue, showing an approximately 10 percentage point margin improvement primarily driven by efficiencies in personnel costs. Moving to consolidated expenses for the quarter, cost of revenue accounted for 7% of revenue, improving by 10 basis points. Marketing costs were 41% of revenue, rising by 150 basis points. Modest leverage at Viator was offset by deleverage at Brand Tripadvisor due to the traffic challenges mentioned earlier. Personnel costs as a percentage of revenue improved by 100 basis points. Investments in Viator personnel balanced out lower personnel costs at Brand Tripadvisor. Excluding share-based compensation, personnel costs were roughly flat as a percentage of revenue. Technology costs remained under 5% of revenue, consistent with last year. General and administrative expenses as a percentage of revenue improved by about 70 basis points, primarily due to lower real estate costs. Regarding cash and liquidity, Q3 operating cash flow was $45 million, and free cash flow was $26 million. Over the last twelve months, operating cash flow reached $347 million, and free cash flow was $261 million, reflecting significant improvement from last year thanks to better working capital and one-time cash tax settlement charges from the previous year. Total cash and cash equivalents as of September 30 were about $1.2 billion, including around $350 million in Term Loan B proceeds raised in the first quarter of 2025, which we plan to use to pay off our outstanding convertible notes due in April 2026. After accounting for deferred merchant payables of about $393 million and the $350 million term loan, our remaining excess cash balance is approximately $475 million. During Q3, we did not repurchase shares because of the operational changes and cost savings programs under consideration. However, we plan to resume our open market repurchases this quarter, in line with our previously communicated approach, pending a stable macro environment. We currently have around $160 million remaining in our authorization. We believe our cash situation and net leverage ratios indicate a solid capital structure that provides adequate cash for our operational needs. Moving on to the gross cost savings program mentioned by Matt in his introductory remarks, we are refining our strategic focus to accelerate efforts in areas where we believe we possess distinctive assets capable of creating significant shareholder value. We see realigning our strategy, resources, brand, and data assets across Viator and Brand Tripadvisor into a new operating model as a promising opportunity to boost growth and innovation. This shift will lead to a simplified organization and more efficient operations. We plan to launch an annualized gross cost savings program of $85 million in Q4, which we’ll implement through 2026 and expect to fully realize by 2027. This program will primarily involve a 20% reduction in headcount across Brand Tripadvisor, corporate G&A, and Viator, along with other operating cost efficiencies resulting from our operating model change. In 2026, the net effect of these savings is projected to be under $85 million due to the timing of these actions, with about $10 million of the savings expected to be recognized in Q4 of this year. Our plan to invest in reaccelerating experience growth in 2026 may counterbalance some of the savings impact. It’s premature to provide detailed guidance for next year, but our early estimate indicates that this program could improve the consolidated adjusted EBITDA margin by roughly 100 basis points in fiscal '26. We will provide another update next quarter as we finalize the '26 plan. We also intend to align our reportable segments with our new operational model and resource allocation strategy next quarter. We expect to maintain three segments: Experiences, Hotels and Other, and TheFork. We believe these changes will offer investors a clearer view of the growth, margin performance, and future opportunities across our entire Experiences business while also clarifying how we’ll manage our legacy businesses. Let me briefly explain the key changes in our segment structure. In the Experiences segment, the definitions and disclosures for unit volume, GBV, and revenue will remain consistent with the current Viator segment reporting. However, the cost profile will adjust to encompass all fixed and variable expenses related to both brands, previously split between Brand Tripadvisor and Viator. This adjustment will eliminate the need for intersegment eliminations for Experiences, which are currently recorded as affiliate marketing expenses in Viator and intercompany revenue in Brand Tripadvisor. The Hotels and Other segment will effectively be the existing Brand Tripadvisor segment but without revenue and expenses related to experiences. Finally, TheFork segment will remain unchanged from its current disclosure. As these changes are still being finalized, I will provide guidance for the fourth quarter and full year in line with our existing segment structure. Regarding our outlook for Q4, we anticipate benefiting by about $10 million to adjusted EBITDA from our cost savings program, impacting both Brand Tripadvisor and Viator, but we are not assuming any revenue benefits from our new organizational structure just yet. For Q4, we expect consolidated revenue to be roughly flat compared to last year and consolidated adjusted EBITDA margin to be around 11% to 13%. At Viator, we project total bookings growth of approximately 16% to 18%, driven by acceleration at both the Viator and Tripadvisor points of sale. We do expect some sequential pressure on GBV growth due to effects from promotions and a higher mix of lower-priced tickets to average booking value. Revenue growth is expected to align with or slightly surpass Q3 growth. The adjusted EBITDA margin may decrease by about 100 basis points due to a one-time indirect tax credit from last year. Without this one-time adjustment, we anticipate Viator's adjusted EBITDA margin to rise by approximately 200 basis points. For Brand Tripadvisor, we currently foresee a revenue decline in the low teens, assuming that the traffic challenges from Q3 continue. The adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to decrease by about 900 basis points, mainly due to pressure in the hotel meta free channels and planned marketing expenditures related to our ongoing coordinated efforts in Experiences. At TheFork, we expect revenue growth in the mid-teens, benefiting from a currency advantage of about 10 percentage points. We anticipate a sequential decline in growth as we are now comparing against the scaled growth initiatives in B2B and partnerships introduced in Q4 of the previous year. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to remain approximately flat year-over-year. In light of our Q4 outlook, we revise our full-year consolidated revenue growth expectations to 3% to 4%. However, our projections for adjusted EBITDA margins remain the same at 16% to 18%. We are enthusiastic about our strategic direction as we conclude the year, believing that the operational changes and cost-saving initiatives will sharpen our focus and enable us to grow consolidated revenue and adjusted EBITDA while improving the adjusted EBITDA margin in fiscal year 2026. In Experiences, our targeted investments will unlock a greater total addressable market and position us to enhance revenue growth and increase adjusted EBITDA. At TheFork, we will persist with a financially disciplined growth strategy, optimizing our legacy offerings and implementing cost-saving measures to enhance profitability amid structural headwinds. Over recent years, we have made significant strides in fostering a deliberate business model diversification strategy to increase revenue and adjusted EBITDA contributions from our marketplace businesses. As Matt highlighted earlier, this year, we expect revenue from Viator and TheFork, our marketplace ventures, to account for 60% of total consolidated revenue and 30% of total adjusted EBITDA under our current segment reporting. With our new operational model and segment reporting framework, we foresee this revenue mix shift to continue steadily, and we expect the adjusted EBITDA mix to surpass 50% of consolidated EBITDA in fiscal 2026, reflecting our strength as an experiences and AI-enabled company and improving our overall marketplace mix. We look forward to providing more details during our Q4 earnings call next year. Now, I’ll hand the call back to Matt.

Matthew Goldberg, President and CEO

Thanks, Mike. Before we start Q&A, I wanted to take a moment and welcome Alex Dichter to our Board of Directors. Alex joins us with many years of experience as an adviser and operator with deep travel industry knowledge and an extensive background working with organizations across multiple travel verticals to transform and scale their businesses. This is the first step to bringing on fresh perspectives from independent directors, and we're excited to have Alex join the Board. He joins us as Greg O'Hara departs, and I want to thank Greg for his contributions and leadership over the years. With that, I'd like to turn the call back to the operator for Q&A.

Operator, Operator

The first question comes from Richard Clarke of Bernstein.

Richard Clarke, Analyst

I would like to ask a question about your revenue growth assumptions moving forward. You mentioned that you believe you can accelerate growth, and I'm curious about what that will look like. If you're investing even less in the meta and Brand Tripadvisor products, can you still achieve better revenue stabilization than the mid-teens guidance you provided for Q4? Additionally, with the new organizational structure, do you expect your Experiences segment to grow faster than the current high single digits performance of Viator? What can we expect regarding revenue growth in the future?

Mike Noonan, CFO

Yes. Richard, it's Mike. I'll take this. Regarding the long-term revenue outlook and our operating model, I have a few points as we approach this. In Experiences, we anticipate that our new segment will experience a reacceleration next year, which is driven by two key factors: first, expanding our geographic total addressable market by looking for new source markets to attract bookers, and second, exploring category expansion to include additional offerings in our storefront, such as attractions. Both of these factors are crucial for that anticipated reacceleration next year. As we look at our hotels and other categories in the second new segment, we are taking a practical approach. Given the traffic challenges we've encountered, especially in free channels, we are adjusting our investment strategy. We won't prioritize growth in paid channels merely for growth's sake; instead, we'll focus those resources on Experiences, which means we expect ongoing revenue headwinds next year. Additionally, regarding TheFork, we continue to expect solid growth alongside evolving margins. Overall, when considering our current position, we will be refining our plans over the next three months. From a consolidated viewpoint, we expect to see growth in both revenue and EBITDA next year, factoring in the cost savings program we've implemented, which aims to stabilize fixed costs in both the Viator and Brand Tripadvisor segments, contributing about one point of margin improvement to our consolidated financial profile next year. These are significant steps for enhancing growth and margin not only for the upcoming year but also for laying the groundwork for the following years and capitalizing on the experiences opportunity ahead of us.

Naved Khan, Analyst

There is a lot of information here, and I believe some of the steps you've mentioned make sense. As you aim to reaccelerate growth in the Viator or Experiences business, can you get closer to your main competitor, who recently revealed around 30%? Additionally, you've improved margins nicely in this segment. Will you be able to maintain this trajectory of margin expansion while accelerating growth? Please share your thoughts on balancing the trade-off between reaccelerating growth and maintaining margins.

Matthew Goldberg, President and CEO

Thanks, Naved. And I think you've hit right at the core of why we are so enthusiastic about this fundamental shift to our operating model because we believe it allows us to do just that, reaccelerate growth while we continue to expand margins. And we are already really leading the category today. You can look at it in many different ways and make judgments about who's got the best profile. But let me tell you what I'm excited about our profile. We believe we're in a real position to shape what comes next as the global brand leader in this category. Together with Tripadvisor, it's the category's largest, most trusted and most profitable platform, and we are building it for sustained growth. Why do I say largest? It's largest because of our scale and reach. We're the global leader in scale with unmatched supply and reach, 400,000 experiences, 65,000 operators. And of course, we can more fully tap the hundreds of millions of travelers using Tripadvisor monthly, giving that supply more visibility and more demand that really no competitor can replicate. And the proof points in my mind are the last 12 months GBV of $4.6 billion and 17% items growth, and we believe we can accelerate off that. Being trusted has an advantage. We've got this global reputation of trust, and it's a foundation to grow Experiences globally. A very good percentage of our audience from Tripadvisor is coming outside the U.S., even though Viator has primarily focused on U.S. source market. So that gives us immediate credibility to expand experiences into new markets. We think there'll be lower barriers to adoption in those source markets where travelers already know and use Tripadvisor. And we think that it signals sort of a reliability, which is critical for the emerging category. And in Europe alone, we have 70% brand awareness and it's relatively unmonetized today. So by focusing Tripadvisor on Experiences, we have many, many times more visitors to go take advantage of than others. And finally, profitability. We are driving this performance with financial discipline. And what we've shown is that the category can scale profitably. And we're the only ones who have shown that. And we're doing it efficiently and with discipline and performance. And so Viator was profitable since 2023. Last year, we delivered a mid-single-digit margin. The last 12 months, we have a high single-digit margin, and we are approaching double-digit margins. And as we move from regional strength to building a global platform, we think that, that leadership is within our capability, and we're going to go after it. So thanks for the question. We're super enthusiastic about reaccelerating growth and expanding margins.

Mike Noonan, CFO

I'll just add to your second point. We are really pleased with the unit growth, and it's crucial for us to focus on the key metric, which reflects real customer conversion and the ability to retain customers. This is incredibly important, and we will continue to prioritize scale and unit volume growth. Regarding margins, our disciplined approach to acquiring new users centers on improving margins. We are excited about accelerating into new geographical areas next year, which may require some modest investment. Overall, I expect the model to continue delivering margin enhancements.

Ronald Josey, Analyst

This is Robert on for Ron. Can you maybe give us a sense of new user trends at Viator and as you continue to expand into the secondary and tertiary markets and into newer categories, help us understand your approach to growing supply in each of these newer markets.

Mike Noonan, CFO

Yes, I'll address that quickly, and Matt can add his thoughts. This is a great question as it relates to our strategy for reacceleration. In the U.S. and North America, our primary market, we are experiencing a strong growth rate in repeat revenue from our returning customers, which is crucial as these long-term customers become less dependent on paid acquisition channels. It's a fundamental part of our business model. Regarding new users, we are very cautious, which contributes to our overall growth strategy, as we assess new user acquisitions based on their return on investment and their contribution to our long-term margin goals. We believe that expanding geographically is essential, and as Matt mentioned, we will focus on areas where our brand, such as Tripadvisor, is well-recognized and has high traffic volumes, particularly in Europe, which allows us to grow our new user base at attractive returns. We are excited about this approach, and it is a key principle in our strategy for reacceleration.

Matthew Goldberg, President and CEO

Yes. And look, I just want to add, Rob, that the marketplace flywheel that we have working between how we generate demand across both of our brands and do that with an ROI-driven acquisition strategy, the way we expand geographically, bring those new users into our store and give them a better experience where we're leveraging AI to do personalization and matching and our sort to be far more relevant for them and then making sure that we have the right supply in those secondary, tertiary markets in new categories. All of that works together to attract new users, get them coming in, converting and then being more loyal, so you get the new and repeat working really well together. And we think that our marketing tests and the tests we've done on our product and with our supply across the two brands allow us to do that with more efficiency than we've ever been able to do it before, and we're going to scale that.

Unknown Analyst, Analyst

Got it. That's great. And then as a quick follow-up, Matt, you had mentioned a few months ago that AI was already making a difference financially across the business today. So can you maybe elaborate on how AI is driving cost efficiencies across the business? And then given your focus on AI going forward, help us understand how you're thinking about the potential revenue opportunities and licensing deals ahead.

Matthew Goldberg, President and CEO

We are fully integrating AI throughout our organization. From an efficiency and productivity standpoint, we've implemented it in several enterprise use cases, particularly in customer service, where we're achieving significant improvements in content moderation and fraud detection, along with advancements in localization and marketing strategies. This gives us a considerable edge, and we plan to expand its use across all areas of our business. As we prepare for next year, we aim to measure our AI initiatives clearly to evaluate the effectiveness of our pilots and scaling efforts. We are equipped with the necessary tools, and we are enthusiastic about this ongoing journey. Moreover, we are leveraging AI to foster innovation in our products. Over the past few years, we have developed AI infrastructure that enhances our offerings. We've demonstrated our capabilities through various projects, such as improving trip planning, itinerary management, and content summarization leading to our recent travel assistant initiative. All these efforts are steering us toward becoming fully AI-native, allowing us to serve customers in the ways they prefer. We are committed to focusing on our AI innovations without getting sidetracked by less relevant pursuits. We plan to launch an AI-native minimum viable product soon, and we are excited about its potential. Additionally, our approach to partnerships has proven to be distinct, and we are witnessing positive value exchanges. Looking ahead, we see the opportunity to scale this further and are actively engaging in discussions to do so. Overall, we feel optimistic about the future of AI in our business.

Dae Lee, Analyst

This is Dae Lee speaking on behalf of Doug. I have two questions. Firstly, with the shift to an experience-led strategy, will the consumer experience on Tripadvisor change? Additionally, how do you expect the Tripadvisor and Viator brands to be positioned for consumers looking for experiences in the future?

Matthew Goldberg, President and CEO

Yes. So thanks for that. Absolutely, the user experience will change because we are going to primarily be focused on how the Experiences category can play on Tripadvisor. We will continue to offer the features that we've had in the past, but our primary focus as we allocate resources, as we set goals with all of our KPIs is going to be driving that experiences future. And we do believe that bringing it together under one team, which we've already proved that we can do with our product, all of the work we're doing in the store to optimize the funnel to take friction out, all the myriad of little things we do to drive conversion and loyalty and repeat will benefit both brands, both points of sale, which will come together in a more seamless fashion so that consumers can engage with us wherever it makes the most sense for them. And I think that will drive that flywheel that we were talking about, which once you get it going, really has a lot of potential to accelerate our revenue.

Mike Noonan, CFO

I want to emphasize that this effort is not a new initiative for us. We've been actively engaged in this area, as demonstrated by our discussions on coordinated bidding. The insights we've gained from this have allowed us to become more confident in what we can achieve with the Tripadvisor points of sale. We're very enthusiastic about this and see it as a crucial element in our plans for enhancing experiences moving forward. On the unit side, the third-party mixing has been increasing significantly, though it starts from a smaller base. We have consistently mentioned that the other channels, particularly Viator, which is the largest, along with Tripadvisor, make up the vast majority of this growth. Viator has been growing at an average rate, while Tripadvisor has lagged behind. Earlier this year, Tripadvisor was even experiencing a decline year-over-year, but improvements have been seen mainly due to product efforts and coordinated bidding. During this quarter, both channels showed growth, with Tripadvisor turning positive again, which reflects unit growth. Looking ahead, we are very optimistic about our merchant third-party business for the reasons we've discussed before, and we will keep collaborating with our partners to enhance that. We are also focused on our owned channels at both Viator and Tripadvisor, and we will continue our efforts there. We anticipate that our Q4 guidance will include expectations of modest acceleration in both the Tripadvisor and Viator channels.

Matthew Goldberg, President and CEO

Yes. And just remember, Tripadvisor Experiences has previously been a drag on growth. That's going to shift, and it will no longer be a drag on growth, and we'll get these things working really well. We have marketing products, supply, data plans to do that.

Jed Kelly, Analyst

Will the go-to-market strategy for your Experiences be more centered around the Viator brand or the Tripadvisor brand? Additionally, can you discuss the potential for expanding into other experiences in different regions, especially Western Europe?

Matthew Goldberg, President and CEO

Yes. So the go-to-market strategy is something that we can continue to work on, and we think that it will be where we believe we have the strongest ability to go. Now both brands can exist in both markets because they do different things. They are different products, right? Viator is a very focused vertical when you kind of already know I want an experience and I want the best way to book it. Tripadvisor still is a broad planning and recommendation platform across multiple categories. And that's not going to necessarily change where we'll put our focus and energy is in making sure that if you come to find your hotel, we're also doing a really good job to cross-market experiences to you in a fundamental way. If you're thinking about where you want to eat, there's probably a really interesting tour around that restaurant that we want to make sure you know about and book. So it will depend category by category in experiences and market by market, how we go to market. We think both brands can be there. We may choose to lead with one or the other depending on the market.

Mike Noonan, CFO

We are excited about expanding into new geographic areas, particularly as we aim to accelerate user growth. We are looking for locations with a large total addressable market and where we have a competitive advantage, and Europe fits that criteria due to its significant market size. The change in our operating model is crucial, as Tripadvisor has strong traffic and brand awareness in that region. Our focus on enhancing experiences while leveraging the Tripadvisor brand will be vital for our expansion. Viator will also play an important role, and we have two brands to consider as we grow in new markets. We have a lot of work in progress, but we are very enthusiastic about the expansion opportunities ahead.

Nafeesa Gupta, Analyst

So my first question is on Metasearch. How are you thinking about the legacy business now that you are consolidating both the experiences in Viator and Tripadvisor? Will that business still have investments that you were planning for the last couple of quarters? And the second one is on Fork. There are reports going around regarding exploring sale of TheFork. Any thoughts on that? And how should we think about TheFork revenue growth in 2026 given the B2B lapping?

Matthew Goldberg, President and CEO

Thank you for those questions. Regarding our meta business and hotel sector, our hotel product continues to deliver significant value for both travelers and partners. We offer the best advice, the most photos, and have established trust in the industry. However, we acknowledge that with Google capturing an increasing share of search traffic, we won't be able to grow that business as profitably as we would like. It's essential for travelers to find value and compare prices, and we can provide our partners with high-quality leads. We have made considerable improvements to increase conversion rates, and we remain focused on that. However, we will not make further incremental investments. You can view it as a supplemental product to our main focus, which we will ensure maintains high quality for both travelers and partners. As for your question about TheFork, it is a strong business that is performing very well. We are enthusiastic about its sustainable growth and improving profitability, which benefits the Group. We continually assess all options to unlock value from all our assets, including TheFork. Our main concern is what will drive the most shareholder value moving forward. Nothing is off the table. TheFork is a leader in key European markets, with a solid mix of B2C and growing B2B segments that gives us an advantage. Being a leading European dining platform, it is a valuable asset for both global and regional travelers. It operates independently, providing optionality. We are aware of past transactions that indicate TheFork is a highly valuable asset, particularly due to its unique position in Europe. We are focused on exploring all options and we appreciate what the team is accomplishing there.

Mike Noonan, CFO

Yes, I apologize for that. I think it's important to understand the growth profile in a big-picture sense. We still anticipate solid growth and profit improvement next year. However, we will face a slightly tougher comparison as we reflect on previous strong growth in B2B and our partnership initiatives. We expect a decrease in growth year-over-year, but we remain enthusiastic about our revenue diversification strategy. We are excited about the B2B business and our potential to grow within our existing and new restaurant base, as well as through more premium plans. These aspects present significant opportunities, and we continue to experience healthy volume growth in our B2C business, particularly in our proprietary Fork network. While we expect a step down in growth compared to this year, we still foresee healthy progress as we head into next year.

Operator, Operator

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn it back to Matt Goldberg for closing remarks.

Matthew Goldberg, President and CEO

Thank you all for joining us on this morning's call. The changes we walked through today represent a meaningful shift in our strategic focus and how we'll deliver value for shareholders ahead. We're excited to move into this new phase of our growth for the group. Before I close out, I also want to take a moment to acknowledge the impact these decisions have on our teams. We're grateful for their continued hard work and dedication. We look forward to updating you on our progress and plans for 2026 on the next call. Thanks, everyone.

Operator, Operator

Goodbye.