Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us today for the 2:30 spot of the Strategic Decisions Conference 2023. For those that don't know me, I'm Richard Clarke, the Global Hotels and OTAs analyst at Bernstein. Delighted today to be joined by Matt Goldberg for his first SDC, the CEO of Tripadvisor Today. Tiny bit of housekeeping. If there's any questions you want asking, we've got a Pigeonhole app. You should be able to find that link on the various materials you've got, and you can go on there, submit questions. There's also some questions on there already, I noticed. Thanks for those. You can vote for those to put them further up. We were chatting outside about, you know, how there may be some slight misunderstanding sometimes of what, you know, maybe most people know what Tripadvisor the website is, I suppose, but what Tripadvisor, Inc. is today. Maybe it's just a sort of introductory question. You can sort of say: What is Tripadvisor, you know, the company today, what are the, you know, the major components of it? Then we'll delve into each of them, I suspect. Yeah. Thank you, Richard. It's good to be here with you. Thanks for having us. Tripadvisor is a business and a company that has a common vision to be the most trusted source for travel and experiences. We have a family of brands, all of which pursue this in different ways. Tripadvisor itself, the brand, is a business that is the largest travel guidance platform in the world. It used to be that it monetized primarily through metasearch, and over time, our dependence on metasearch, our exposure to metasearch, has actually lessened, and we've diversified the revenue streams. Now we've developed a strategy which is actually gonna shift what Tripadvisor can do by putting the consumer at the heart of everything we do, focusing less about pulling them onto the site and bouncing them off to another site as our starting point, and more thinking about engagement as the starting point. If we nail that engagement, the monetization potential of a more engaged audience, underpinned by data, allows us to drive monetization and average revenue per user much higher. We're excited about that journey. It's the very beginning of that journey. I think the primary misperception is that we're just a metasearch business. Yeah. We're between a rock and a hard place because of that. We look at it very differently. We look at it as we have an incredibly trusted brand, we have an audience of scale, we have content that is unique, differentiated, and trustworthy, and that trust is really what gives us confidence that we'll be able to attract travelers to the site, engage them, and monetize. Now, next to Tripadvisor is one of the most exciting opportunities in all of travel, which is experiences. Viator is a two-sided marketplace for experiences, things to do in a destination. It is the largest and fastest growing two-sided experiences booking platform in the world, and it continues to grow. In Q1, we said 100% plus growth, and it has the advantage of being connected to Tripadvisor because you've got a guidance platform driving demand, and then you've got a booking platform that can really go deep and deliver a great booking experience. Next to those two, of course, is TheFork, which has a leadership position in Europe as a dining reservation platform. The reason that's so interesting is because Europe is, of course, an important destination for so many. Intra-Europe travel is important, and of course, the local European experience is just shifting to online booking reservations. We've got a nice position there. When travelers go, they tell us that one of the top things they want to think about is the dining experience. The three of them together can serve that mission, and I think together we have a nice portfolio with, you know, the potential for growth and profitability, and expansion over time. Let's start with Viator. You call it the most exciting, I guess also maybe potentially the most newsworthy today. You know, one of your rival companies has raised some more capital at a fairly sizable valuation, which potentially is interesting to you guys. You know, do you think internally, this strength of the experiences business over the last few years, you know, what's driven that? Why is Viator suddenly... You've owned it since 2015, so why has it suddenly leapt into this sort of rapid growth phase? What's driven that? How sustainable is that? Is it COVID, or is there something more sustainable in that growth level? Let me just say, you know, I saw the news today as well, and that's a nice valuation marker, given that we're larger and faster growing. Yeah. really, really like to have that valuation marker. You know, this category, of course, is not new, but it's been largely offline. You know, you used to do an experience, which is at the heart of travel, right? We want to go and have experiences. It's not about how am I gonna get there, where am I gonna stay, necessarily. It's about the memory I'm gonna create. This category had typically been word of mouth. It had been, a friend of a friend of a friend, or walking up to a kiosk. What's happened and been accelerated through the pandemic is that offline-to-online growth trajectory is happening. The supply side, which is pretty fragmented, has become more organized, and players like us and others have sought to really create an experience where supply and demand can meet and give a great experience overall. I think that there is room for tremendous growth. This is a market that has $300 billion of addressable market out there. Online today is probably just 25% of that. The offline to online is a huge growth opportunity, but there's also growth opportunity in geographic expansion. We're very strong in the U.S. We can look elsewhere. Category expansion, we tend to play in tours and activities. There's also attractions and events that are a meaningful opportunity. We think there's opportunity in addition to that, in the way that we connect a guidance platform to a booking platform. We think that gives us a good advantage as well. Maybe you can sort of set out your vision for how you think that experiences OTA industry is going to develop, you know, over the coming decades, even. You know, is it going to look a bit like the hotel OTA market? Is it gonna consolidate around a couple of players? You know, can Google become an influence in this market? You know, where do you think this business goes to? Is 75% online realistic? You know, where, what is the real potential there? We look at this market and see a very similar set of conditions as the OTAs 10 years ago. We think there is opportunity, if you can bring supply and demand together and give great experiences, that people who don't even know there's a category today. You know, building awareness that this category exists, most people would love to book experiences online. We know from our surveys and the way we talk to travelers, that more than half of travelers thinking about traveling this summer, have started with being excited about the experience that they want to go and book. We know that three quarters of them will book before they go. 20% of them might even book with a window of one month or more. People when they become aware of the category, they get excited about the category, and so we see that growth continuing. Online will grow faster than the category as a whole. That CAGR is gonna be strong for a long time to come. We think that scale matters. When we look at our growth rate, you know, we are looking to drive awareness, we're looking to bring in new customers, and of course, we're to build our own brand. As we do that, we see that we're bringing in more loyal customers, they're engaging more, and they're spending more. Every one of our cohorts is shifting upward in repeat, which gives us a very strong indication that the lifetime value and the unit economics are improving. When we look at that business, we see a real opportunity to steal share, and there's a lot of growth potential. Maybe talk about the interaction between Viator and Tripadvisor. You, you sell experiences through Tripadvisor as well. Also, Viator is a platform in its own right. Do those two compete against each other? You know, what's your preferred way to sell an experience, or is it you are agnostic, where you actually receive that customer? Well, those two brands are compatible. Yeah. One stands for trusted advice, for guiding me to the experience that I wanna have and getting me to that point where I wanna book. You know, Viator, and that's a broad conception of experiences. Yeah. It's interesting, we have, just about as many, travelers coming to us for experiences as we do for hotels or restaurants, which have been very big historical categories for us. Most people don't realize that, we aren't exposing them to as many bookable experiences as possible. In Q1, it's interesting, we exposed 14 million more travelers to a bookable experience than Q1 2022. That was 62% more than the previous year. As we expose more to bookable experiences, we feel that we can drive that growth rate. If Tripadvisor is broad and trustworthy and really wants to guide the traveler to whatever experience makes the most sense for them, Viator has the potential to go very deep and be the booking, and focus on the funnel, and focus on the conversion, and focus on that experience that gets people coming back for more. We see it kind of like a T, that you can take a broad funnel and drive it through that booking experience. We're excited about the way the two fit together. Talk to us about balancing growth versus profitability at Viator. I mean, how long can you keep growing? I mean, you, I guess you've had a few quarters of triple-digit growth, but, you know, how long can you keep growing at, you know, healthy double-digit growth, and what do you want to do in terms of sort of reaching profitability? Is that your decision, or is that gonna be determined by the competitive dynamics? We always have our eye on unit economics and profitability. We have not put a marker out there in terms of timing or scale, but we already know we're at the scale where we can be profitable. If we pulled back on our brand marketing, we would be profitable this year. Brand marketing is important because as we brand market, people become aware of the category, understanding that we're the leader in that category. They come, they have a great experience, they repeat. It helps us with our unit economics, but it also helps us with our performance marketing spend, because, you know, branded search and SEM is more performant as you're investing in the brand. That's, that's exciting, and those are really good indicators. When we think about profitability, we know this is a very high gross margin business. We know that the number one spend level is sales and marketing, and scale matters. We can choose to get leverage on that sales and marketing spend at the moment that it comes. Of course, the competitive dynamic is important. It is a moment for us to lean in. We wanna be prudent. We committed this year that we will keep margins flat to last year. We're not looking at taking margins down in a major way. Because we're growing so fast, that allows us to make a healthy investment in really growing the category. The competitive dynamics you've got in there, obviously, the company that raised money today, GetYourGuide, is, I guess, presumably the number two player. You've also had Airbnb that's kind of come in and out a little bit of the market. Google's had a few iterations of trying to get involved in experiences. You know, how is the competitive dynamics, and how does Viator separate itself from those other players? It's a great question. You know, with Airbnb and Google, of course, these are very large companies with tremendous firepower, and of course, they've had their efforts at trying to solve this problem, and neither one of them has completely figured it out, right? That means that this is a problem really worth solving, so that's why we're leaning in so much and excited about our position. If you look at Airbnb, you know, they've tried to be differentiated by doing very bespoke experiences, by leaning into their hosts. That's hard to scale. I also think it's hard to build multiple marketplaces on the same platform and the same brand. That's why we're very thoughtful about the unique use of each of our brands. If you look at Google, they've taken a traditional Google approach. They do not wanna structure suppliers. They don't wanna deal with customer service. Those are problems that we can solve. Google's taken a search perspective on it. Google can be, you know, a partner to us and a place that we can really work with, and we do. You know, GetYourGuide is the most similar. Today, if you look at the experience OTAs, it's us leading, largely concentrated and strongest in the U.S., but also strong in Europe. It's GetYourGuide in Europe. Of course, it's a third player, Klook, in Asia. You have this kind of regional play. We are very focused on making sure that we are a global player. You know, that's something that we feel like again, scale helps, and so it's about serving customers in their local markets very effectively, and I think it's a strong position to start from the U.S. I guess we've got a question here about from the audience, which is about the potential of monetizing Viator at some point. It was on the cards before you became CEO. There was a confidential S-1 filed. Given it seems like you kind of see experiences as also being kind of core to getting people into Tripadvisor. How should we feel about the separation of Viator in the short or longer term? Well, as you said, that confidential S-1 was filed before I arrived. Yeah. I was aware of it. I had conversations before I arrived. I think, you know, maintaining optionality and creating optionality to crystallize value is always a smart thing to do. Right now, we are absolutely focused on executing against this business and this opportunity. Regardless of how that structure plays out, we wanna focus on being successfully serving consumers and suppliers. That's the focus. There's nothing that says these two things have to be part of one. There's no rule. You could have a relationship between the two and crystallize value and maintain that optionality. Today, we are focused on delighting users and travelers who are looking for that next experience, making sure that they wanna come back, and serving those suppliers by helping them drive their business and make sure they do it in a quality way. If we can do that, we'll get the two-sided marketplace to continue to do what it's done over the last year, and we're excited about the opportunity. Viator has B2B relationships with Booking, probably the most famous, but I think there's a lot of others out there as well. I mean, is there anything fundamentally different about the arm's length relationship with Tripadvisor, or is that model kind of there that you could be a B2B partner with? I think it's a great point. The number one point of sale is actually Viator direct. Yeah. That's our number 1 point of sale. Number 2 is Tripadvisor. That's because we can operate them together and find ways to do it. There is still tremendous upside, as I said, in operating those. Our third category is third parties, and there are literally several thousand of them, and there are some big ones. It's Expedia and Booking. We've talked about our Uber relationship. We're going out there and experimenting with third parties. We work with travel agents, we work with small players. That's been part of our strategy, is to make sure that we are showing up wherever people wanna book experiences and that we can supply that. I think you're right, we can create a commercial agreement regardless of what direction we choose for the business. Let me see if there's anything else on Viator on here, let's shift on maybe to the core business. Yes. Viator, obviously, the bit that is going very well. You talked about how metasearch has become a lesser important part within the business. I mean, what is the future of metasearch within the Tripadvisor framework? Can Tripadvisor exist without metasearch? Metasearch has a role to play. Mm-hmm. You know, metasearch delivers very high-quality traffic to partners who desire that traffic, and it's a great performance channel. Of course, there are other players that are playing there, too, like Google. The interesting thing is, both Google and the OTA partners, who largely are participating in our metasearch, they both want a viable alternative for obvious reasons. What we provide is a great alternative in context, and with the travel sort of content and community and sort of association, rather than being part of a broader offering. Our job is to reinforce the relevance of the metasearch business, and we think we can do that within our strategy. Number 1, we've brought together all of the data across the group, data from Tripadvisor, Viator, and all of it. We use that data to be much better about thinking about who's arriving on the site, the experience they wanna have, and driving them into the meta experience when it's appropriate, and driving them elsewhere when it's not. As we drive them into the meta experience, we can make sure that that data helps us deliver higher performing traffic, and we have ways that we're doing that. We can lean into international because we've been very strong in the U.S. We want to be even stronger in Europe. Rest of the world is coming back, but it's smaller. We want to lean into making sure that we are global. Then, of course, making sure that meta has a place in a mobile world, too, where we've probably under delivered over the years. We think we can reinforce it, but we don't believe the future growth of the business relies on it, because it's a very small percentage of the overall traffic that's getting monetized that way. A very large percentage is not getting monetized that way. If we lean into this engagement strategy and focus on what got us here, focus on people who wanna come and plan before a trip, who wanna be with us while they're on their trip, who wanna leverage our content, and we can enhance that content, who wanna have a mobile experience, that really matters when they're in destination or planning. If we lean into all of that, the engagement model drives not only media, which is both advertising and B2B, but it drives the marketplace. I just think that if you look at what we can do with marketplaces, look at the experiences category. We've already shown that we can do it, and there are other categories that we can drive, too. We can drive much more opportunity with restaurants. We can think about SMB in the hotel category that we're probably underserving, and we can think about other categories of activity that consumers want when they travel. Could be events, could be timed activities, all kinds of opportunities to match supply and demand. Maybe talking about some of this, you mentioned monetization there. I guess, you know, the age-old question a little bit with Tripadvisor has been: lots of users, and less monetization than some of the other companies in the space. You know, what are the really sort of incremental monetization opportunities that you can see, that you can extract more money from those users that maybe you're not extracting any money out of at this stage? Well, I think we can do a better job, delivering a media solution to advertisers that are both endemic and non-endemic. As you know, I spent a bit of time in that space, in digital media companies and data-driven, advertising companies. We have a real opportunity as we leverage this data, and we drive this engagement model to bring that audience to bear on all kinds of, advertisers. You know, we recently reorganized. We're working on our operating model and our go-to market. We've streamlined, so we can go and have a singular conversation with the enterprise hotels. And talk about what do they want to do direct? Obviously, they're going to use OTAs sometimes. They want to do a lot direct. They want to serve their loyalty programs. We can talk about how our audience, as they're searching, what they want to do, we can deliver a more relevant, a more personalized, a higher intent audience, and really focus on attribution, and deliver a more performing opportunity. You know, our media business has largely been concentrated in display. That's not where the growth is. We're starting to experiment with video, CTV, social. There's a lot we can do to drive other formats and a much stronger, highly engaged audience in media. That's not all. I think our B2B business is really interesting because there are so many, literally millions of businesses around the world that want access to an audience that's traveling, that's high intent, that's thinking about where they want to go, and I think we have probably under-indexed in how well we can serve. We are experimenting now with what do we want our go-to-market to be, how much of this can we do self-serve? How do we create the kinds of products and services with the attribution that really helps, you know, these small businesses make difficult marketing choices? We think we can be a go-to brand with a go-to audience for many of them. You talked about coming from the experience of display marketing. When you joined, what was your kind of assessment of the display marketing initiative at Tripadvisor? I guess a lot of it felt quite untargeted, not travel-related. Why wasn't it done before? Why wasn't there a good display marketing business or any marketing business, let's say, you know, that was incremental to the business? Well, there has been, right? I don't want to suggest that we haven't done some of this. Sure. We've had some amount of diversification, but we think we can take it further. The answer is that we were optimizing for a different model, which was an arbitrage model. What we want to do is maintain our metasearch business, but we begin to optimize for an engagement model. If we can optimize for an engagement model, we see a lot of accelerants that can. We talked about on our earnings call in the first quarter, some moves that we've made where we've seen some green shoots, where we're seeing that as we provide different kinds of planning tools, as we enhance our content and serve it up in a different way, we are seeing higher levels of engagement, click-through, less bounce rates, more contribution of content, and it's actually flowing through to GBV and experiences. The hypothesis that I came in with has some really nice early green shoots, but I recognize this is a show-me story. You know, we want to deliver this quarter by quarter. What you'll see us do is you will see us execute on these initiatives, show how it's being delivered again in our products, talk about KPIs that are good indicators, and it'll flow through to our financials. You know, the conversations that we're having in advertising are really interesting. You know, we've done some really interesting non-endemic deals, like with L'Oréal, which is a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal, where they're really focused on how do they position themselves for travelers. Fuze Tea. Certainly the destination marketing organizations are leaning into us, and we're getting much more creative than we've been in the past. Sponsorship, using new technologies, AR, VR, doing a lot of very creative work with our content studio, Wanderlab. We're producing videos for the DMOs. We're doing a lot of really interesting work, and I think it's really just the beginning of us leaning into this. We will move from being somewhat siloed to being a far more integrated approach, where the consumer is at the center, that engagement picks up, and the beneficiaries are our partners, advertisers, small and medium-sized businesses, categories like experiences, where we can match supply and demand, and ongoing reach for metasearch. If all of those work together, the financial profile of this business will be a nice growing business, with margins that we said this year will be stable. We're holding margin this year. We're not suggesting that we want to make some big speculative investment, but we don't have anything built into our revenue from the strategy. That builds year-over-year, so 2024, 2025, as the engagement model picks up. Of course, all of that sits side by side, this massive growth opportunity in experiences. Would you expect the core will deliver stable growth over time, or is it going to be that steady, and then the growth comes from the experiences business? I think it will be stable. I think it will grow. We've said on our last call, we want to be at or better than overall travel market growth. We think we can deliver that across the portfolio. Of course, we want to make sure that, you know, this margin is stable and expands over time. You've mentioned a couple of times trip planning. Is this effectively a new-ish product for you? Are we going to see something different on the Tripadvisor app or Tripadvisor website that's helps with this trip planning? Maybe any sense of what that might look like? First of all, I think the use case for many travelers that come to Tripadvisor is trip planning. We just haven't made it particularly easy to do. There is a trip planning tool that's very rudimentary, and actually we've had over 10 million trips planned in the last year, but we haven't really leaned into it. We are looking at doing product innovation around trip planning. We're looking at how do we leverage all of the assets that we have, and, I think you know, we've been focused on data and AI for a long time, but I've really put the focus on data to bring our group data asset together, and we think we can leverage the advances in generative AI to make a difference in trip planning. To do that, what we said is, what really differentiates us? You know, we think having reviews from real people who have actually been there, that are trusted, that are sourced from a brand people trust, has value. We think that is a tremendous value driver. We're going to leverage that, but we're also going to be there with those who are driving the large language models and experimenting. We've already announced that we're going to participate in the plugins with Microsoft OpenAI. Google Bard, we are going to experiment and learn. We are going to think about what do we want to share? How do we make the most of that ecosystem? What's the value exchange? There's talk of, is it gonna be licensing? Will it be traffic? What we know is we have a fantastic set of data. We have proprietary data that no one else has access to. We can choose to use that for our members only, for example. We have 130 million members that come to our site, that are logging in, and if we wanted to, we could create an experience just for members. I think there's a lot of different avenues we can go, and what I would say is we see AI accelerating this strategy. We recognize that there's a lot unknown about AI. We've been at it, and we've got a robust team working on it. Going back to the meta search business again, you know, you talked about how Google wants an alternative as well. Maybe you can just sort of elaborate on that view. They want you to be competitive into their auctions, is that they're trying to keep you in there? And how is the kind of competition versus Google? You sort of would you say you've seen a meaningful shift of consume, of spend on meta search shift to Google, or have they kind of created their own category of them? Yeah, look, Google is a fantastic competitor, and I don't think anybody would suggest that, you know, they're gonna go headlong into competing with Google. When you compete with Google, you wanna do two things. You wanna focus on how to differentiate from Google, and you wanna focus on how the co-opetition can help you partner with Google. Of course, we need to have conversations with them, and we are having conversations with them. When I say they want us to exist, that's for multiple reasons. Number one, they've got regulatory challenges. They would like to have competitors in these spaces. They do not wanna destroy the competition. Sure. They also, you know, we're a paying user of Google. They want us to continue to pay, and so we have really good conversations around how we can differentiate, how we can focus on what we're gonna do best, and how we can partner there. Of course, you know, we're not rosy-eyed about it. We recognize that Google has, in many ways, advantaged their own monetization, and that's had an impact on us. We're very focused on differentiating and finding ways that we can cooperate that will be effective for us. Maybe we can talk about Tripadvisor's own marketing strategy, because, you know, you, it seems to me like in the pandemic, you switched off all performance and brand marketing, pretty much. Now you're sort of leaning back into some performance marketing, but brand marketing doesn't seem particularly prevalent. You know, how do you think about marketing the Tripadvisor brand? Are you gonna lean more into performance marketing than brand marketing? Come back to it? Yeah. So you're right. At the pandemic, brand marketing went off. Performance marketing's been there. We do use SEM, we use other performance channels to make sure that we have traffic at a good return. We're very focused on discipline and the ROAS that we look to have, that's been stable over time. Certainly the experiences space, performance marketing is very important, we're doing that across both Tripadvisor and Viator. You know, we're doing brand marketing with Viator right now, it's working really well. As I said, it actually helps performance marketing. With Tripadvisor, we're doing some smart partnerships where we can be very focused on getting the brand out there. Of course, you know, people recognize our brand when they travel the world and see our brand show up, at hotels and restaurants that they go to. It's a, it's a brand that really suggests you can trust, this place. I think as we look at how we want to market the brand, the most important thing is trust. We would want to market the brand at that moment where we've done something with the product that we really want to speak to, as new and different and unique, and I think that time will come. What we don't want to do is we don't wanna return to a level of spend that, you know, isn't necessarily serving a very clear purpose. We will be focused and judicious about our brand spending. If we think about the sort of wider dynamics within metasearch, you know, you stopped disclosing things like average users, you know, a bit before the pandemic. How have those maybe qualitatively trended? I think it's fair to say the metasearch business has underperformed the overall recovery in hotels. Is that down to traffic? Is that down to monetization of traffic? Is that down to cost per click dynamics? Is it geographical differences? You know, maybe you can sort of understand? You know, it's interesting because as I was articulating our strategy to you before, the key part of the strategy is that, yes, of course, it's important what comes in at the top of the funnel, but actually what's more important than the top of funnel number is what are you doing with that traffic and how do you focus on higher quality traffic that you can monetize more effectively? We're putting a real focus on that. I think that will start to drive our ARPU levels up. We've been known as lots of traffic, lower levels of monetization. I would like to see our average revenue per user move in that direction, and that's what our strategy calls out that we will do. You know, when I think about how the auction has performed, of course, coming back from the pandemic, price has been, you know, the driver of that performance. We've been healthy in the U.S., and the U.S. auction has gotten back to 2019 levels. We haven't seen that as much in Europe and the rest of the world. We're very focused on that international opportunity. Yes, price has been healthy, and of course, demand is coming back. Demand is better, 2023 than 2022. The actual clicks going through are not at 2019 levels, but the price has compensated for that, and price has held. It's held, it's been healthy. That's what we said in Q1. That's a good dynamic for us. Of course, as I said, this is not the future big growth driver of this business, but it is a sustainable and we believe has long life. Our strategy is, as I said before, to reinforce it through data, through thinking about international, through thinking about this, how the engagement model serves by delivering even better quality traffic. ... Tripadvisor Plus, is it still ticking along in the background? Probably, or is there a, is it still possible to join Tripadvisor Plus? Yeah. you know, what do you see as the sort of future of that sort of, I guess, direct-to-consumer type product? Well, Tripadvisor Plus, of course, was the initiative of my predecessor. I look at it as a fantastic test bed for us about what a paid model could look like. It's not the final answer, I do not believe. We think the starting point that's really interesting is a free membership model. As I mentioned before, we have 130 million members. Those members come in, they give us their email. What membership allows you to do is to come and basically contribute to our website and leave ratings and reviews. We think there's an opportunity to convert that membership and grow it by really leaning into rewarding engagement. There are a number of different ways to do that. If we can get free membership underpinned by data working really well, that membership model will create a very nice funnel for us to experiment with paid models. I think the starting point of a free membership model that rewards engagement and loyalty is a good place for us to start. Let's just delve a little bit more into the, to the shorter term, if we, if we may. You know, are you seeing any evidence that the consumer has changed, you know, I guess either in a positive way, like they started to research more because, you know, they're coming out of the pandemic, and they're being a bit more selective, they're becoming more price conscious. Is there any change in behavior that you're sort of seeing in the consumer, sort of as we exit COVID and potentially enter a slightly weaker consumer macro environment? Yeah, the consumer's been really interesting, and, you know, many of the things that we held true pre-pandemic about different economic indicators and what it might mean for travel demand have not held because the consumer's been very strong and has come back strong. You know, we said in our Q1 earnings that the consumer demand was very healthy. We said we didn't see anything to suggest there was any kind of pullback. Certainly, our survey data suggested that there was gonna be a strong summer. You know, we saw eight out of 10 travelers saying that they were planning a summer trip. Nine out of 10 of them were saying, "I'm gonna spend as much or more than last year." International travel is on the rise. It's at pre-pandemic levels in the U.S. and Europe from our surveys. APAC intent to travel over the summer is double what it was last year. There's a lot of really good indicators. I think a key driver is this shift from, you know, I want to consume, you know, things to I want to have experiences. I want to go out and do things in the world. That is the biggest shift that has created a new normal for the travel consumer. What's interesting is, travel, as a category, is being defended in the discretionary bucket at higher levels than other discretionary categories. People really want to defend. It's not that the economy, I think the two major things are, what is the personal balance sheet of a consumer, and what is their view of the future and what it might mean for them? If you look at those two, you know, certainly what we're hearing is that four out of 10 travelers say they may adjust, the adjustment isn't always, "I'm not gonna go on that trip." They say, "I'm still gonna go." Only three out of 10 say, "I'm gonna cancel the trip," they may say, "I'll go on a shorter trip. I may stay closer to home. I may choose to drive rather than fly." I think the demographic that's most likely to be impacted by the economy is the millennial demographic. They are more likely than average to be concerned with the economy. you know, this experience sort of trend is real. More than half of travelers told us this summer, the thing that they are most excited about is the experience that they want to book, that's just a new thing. It used to be that I looked at the world and said: Where do I want to go? How am I gonna get there? Where do I want to go? Where am I gonna stay? I think many more travelers are starting with not only where do I want to go, but what experience do I want to have? Where am I gonna go to have that experience? that's the starting point, and that's a great position for Tripadvisor in our asset. Do you actually see that cross-selling reversing then? You used to sell a hotel first, and then you try and sell them an experience, and now you're actually selling them the experience… I think that is it. you try and sell a hotel afterwards. I think that is a use case that we are increasingly seeing. People begin with the experience first. It's something to watch. I think it is a trend line that we're very interested in. We're seeing some really interesting indicators there. We're not seeing too much of a consumer downturn in travel so far by the sounds of things. I. Would you somewhat welcome a more sort of selective consumer? Do you think that Tripadvisor's core business has maybe been hurt by the fact that people, you know, the fish have been jumping into the boat, as it were, and people have just been booking very quickly and not doing much research, and a bit more research and price comparison might help them? Then maybe just extending that question to if whether you agree with that or not, you know, how do you feel about sort of Viator, and maybe TheFork as well, if we do start seeing the consumers sort of cut back a bit? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, we think that all of our brands have a role to play in whatever economic environment. Of course, the pandemic was something totally different. We saw how the business could adjust, and it adjusted, and it came back. You know, we believe, certainly, I understand the intent of the question, that perhaps price comparison is more interesting in an environment that is less positive, but we would never hope for that kind of an environment, and we think we'll perform in either event. I think, you know, our businesses, as I said, I think there is a normal, where people are defending this kind of discretionary spend. you know, we believe that our businesses can perform, and if we see, you know, volatility or change, you know, we have, all kinds of levers that we can pull to make sure that we perform in that environment as well. Just taking your comments on what you're seeing in the macro environment and, you know, maybe we can just ask about the guidance that you've kind of given so far. You know, you had Viator, you said, was 60% up in April, but you expected it to slow. You expected other growth rates to moderate through the, through the quarter. That was mainly comp issues. Is that what you're seeing? I'll just comment on what we said in the quarter. Yeah. That's true. We had over 100% growth in experiences. In April, we saw 60%. Yeah. it is, you know, we had the Omicron in Q1, which made it an interesting comp, but then an explosion. Mm. Omicron then carry through the summer. That comp is what we're talking about. I think we will have continued growth through the year. Certainly experiences we see are growing, even though it won't necessarily be at those levels. I think we said that, in April, we saw the fourth growing at 20%. We can see that kind of a growth rate being something that carries through. You know, through all of this, one of the things we're very focused on is making sure that we are right-sized, that we are focused on, you know, the fixed cost saves that we did during the pandemic, and that we're not foolish about adding back fixed cost. That, you know, our marginal cost and the way we lean into marketing is right-sized for the environment. That's the good news, is that we can focus on that and deliver the guidance that we gave. Love it. Maybe just spend a bit of time on The Fork. I think everyone's probably fairly appreciative that Viator was in this rapid growth phase, you know, the losses to achieve that growth. The Fork, I guess, appears more like a mature business. You know, it doesn't feel like it should be growing as fast. Maybe just talk about the structural opportunities you see for The Fork. Is there a lot more restaurants you can sign up, and what's the sort of pathway to make that a profitable business? With TheFork, it's really important to know that, you know, we made investments in previous years in technology, product, and with some replatforming based on some of the acquisitions. Now is the time to take advantage of those investments. We're driving that business towards a much better margin profile in the back half, and we expect to come out of 2023 in a profitable state and take that into 2024. It's interesting, you know, Europe is in a different phase of its life cycle in terms of offline to online around dining. You know, still a lot of consumers moving online. TheFork is taking advantage of that in Europe. It has a really good position. There is no other pan-regional competitor that has that position, so you've gotta kinda look market by market. We look at both sides of the marketplace. We think there are new restaurants that we can add, and we've seen some stabilization there that's been really good, and we're working very hard to make sure we serve those restaurants. We give them data that helps them manage their business. We have payment options that helps them bring in new customers, and, you know, we've got loyalty programs that keeps people coming back. On the demand side, of course, you know, the European consumer is very excited about booking online, so, you know, if we can give them a really good experience in the app... By the way, the app is performing really well. We've been the number 1 most downloaded dining app in the world for a few quarters, and I think last quarter we were even more than the next 2 combined. That's where we are in the life cycle, so I don't want to pat ourselves on the back too much, but it's a really good indicator, and we do have people coming to that app. What that means is, more direct, more repeat, and it really helps our unit economics. We think that business is on the right trajectory, and we think that it'll get to profitability and by the end of the year and go into 2024 that way. You talked about TheFork app. I guess you also mentioned earlier on mobile, wanted to improve the mobile strategy. Is your ambition that consumers would download three Tripadvisor apps, Tripadvisor, Viator, or TheFork? Do you wanna have one integrated consumer-facing app that would deal with all- I don't- three parts of the business? We have three different brands that do different things. They have audiences that overlap sometimes, but are unique. I think what we do is to differentiate each brand for its unique audience and what they're coming to do. I don't think we need to necessarily mash the apps together, but we can create experiences, so if you're being guided by Tripadvisor, there can be opportunities for multiple categories. Mm. When you go to Viator, you really want to book an experience, so let's give you the best possible way to do that. And when you're using TheFork app, you're thinking about dining in Europe. You're either going there because it's your holiday destination, or you're traveling in between countries, or it's your local, and we wanna give you a great experience, and we wanna reward your loyalty, and we wanna keep you coming back. Tripadvisor is a global brand. Viator is a global brand. TheFork is a bit more regionally focused. Yeah. Can it also become a global brand? Are there opportunities here in the U.S. or other countries you could enter? You know, geographic expansion for TheFork is not our top priority. We think we can go much deeper in Europe. There are certainly secondary markets, and there are markets that are at scale and performing better. We wanna lean into those markets. We actually made some smart decisions. I think we had some far-flung territories that we've brought back. We don't wanna necessarily be doing investing in territories that we don't have the benefit of being the clear winner. We're very focused on being a European focused brand today. About 5 minutes left, so let's talk about generative AI. Oh, yeah. I'm sure you've got something. You've mentioned it a couple of times, you're gonna use it. you know, How much of a game changer really is it gonna be for the travel industry overall and Tripadvisor as a platform? Are you the natural sort of use case for it within the space? I think generative AI is one of those technologies that comes along, by every indication, will be pervasive. It'll be involved in every industry. It'll make our lives easier. It'll drive productivity levels higher. It will create opportunities to think about products and services that we couldn't deliver as effectively in the past. It's incumbent on every business to start with the proposition: "What do I have that's unique, that will allow me to take advantage of this technology?" I believe that businesses that have a very strong brand that stands for trust. That have content sets that are reliable, that have proprietary first-party data, and we have a very large asset there. They have a real opportunity. Now, to do it, you've got to think about, "How do I want to integrate this new technology into my products and services? How do I want to participate in the ecosystem? You know, I've spent a career, you know, when the search paradigm came around, I was working in media, and, you know, worked with the search players to figure out how we play in the media world. You know, I was at Lonely Planet when the digital mapping wars were happening, and we figured out how to play in that. I think we will participate, we will experiment and learn. We're gonna play with Google, we're gonna play with Microsoft. They understand the value of our content and our assets. That's why they want us to play with them. You know, everybody's trying to figure out what the monetization and value exchange is going to be. There may be distribution opportunities, there may be financial opportunities. I think we have a real opportunity to make sure that our products leverage our assets and do that in a really thoughtful way. I see it as an accelerant to our strategy. I said to the team when it came around, I was like, "Let's not focus on driving the hype cycle. Let's not worry about getting the early headline. Let's focus what we can do differently." I think we can offer up a generative AI experience and product offering that feels different than what you're seeing elsewhere, that leverages enhanced content, that creates more context, that brings you to the moment where you might want to book and allows you to do that in the setting that we provide. I think we have many opportunities to win. Like everybody else, we're going to learn along the way. I think that's the most important thing. I mean, just, do you think it also creates more competition? We've got a question here is: What was the fundamental reason, going forward, consumers will plan a trip on Tripadvisor versus using generative AI? Obviously, there's gonna be some crossover there, but... Fine. you know, does it create more competition? Maybe related to that, how do you protect your proprietary content? I think you can. Yeah. Because anyone can read the reviews at the moment. Yeah. You know, in terms of competition, there will be a lot of people that will try to figure out how to leverage the technology. The question is: How can you offer a product and services that you can rely on? I think with AI, trusted information has never been more important, and we start from that basis of trust. You know where the source material is coming from. I think that, you know, as we get inundated with information that we just don't know where it comes from, it may not be good enough, so we'll have to go further, and I think we can be one of those places that people go further. In terms of protecting, you know, We would never want to stand in the way of innovation. You know, a lot of our content is available, freely available, already, and that is no problem. I think, you know, I don't think you start from a place, How do I put walls around all of my content? You start from the place of: What are the assets? It's not just about the content, it's also about the data. We've got proprietary first-party data, signals of intent, behavioral data, who's coming to our sites. That data, we can pick and choose how to use it, where to share it, how to take advantage of it. I do think the use case of coming to Tripadvisor will be strong, and I also think we will continue to be a vibrant player in the ecosystems that are emerging right now. You want to play there, you want to position yourself to play, and we will. I'm excited about this technology. I'm not foolhardy or Pollyanna-ish about it. I think we all have a lot to learn, but I don't worry that somehow, you know, we've got to put up walls. Maybe just final question. You, you talked about a lot of, you know, innovation and things going on at Tripadvisor. It It doesn't sound like you're looking to, to do an enormous amount of capital investment. You know, the company's sitting on $1 billion of cash, about 40% of the market cap right now. What can you do with that? I mean, do you want to buy back shares? Is there a way you could buy out Liberty? Is that a possibility you could look to do? You know, what, what is the sort of use case for the cash at this point? Well, of course, we do have a strong balance sheet. We like that. As we talk about what's gonna happen in the macro, it's always nice, as you think about uncertainty, volatility, to have a nice balance sheet. I think all capital uses are on the table. Certainly, we think about equity, we think about debt, we think about organic, we think about inorganic. Liberty has been a terrific partner. We value the Liberty relationship, and they bring expertise and support that is important. You know, we haven't had any conversations about that, but I think we have multiple opportunities, and, you know, we will look at being very judicious about how we deploy it. I can assure you, it's not something we won't do anything with. We have opportunities that we want to go after. I think experiences is so interesting. Really making sure that we have a great position there is a great way to think about using our capital. I think that's it. Thanks very much for your time today. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yes. Cheers.