The question on many travel industry minds:
What’s next for Tripadvisor Group? The company, which includes tours and activities
platform Viator, disappointed analysts with its recent second-quarter results, leading to its share
price falling almost a quarter.
Revenue from continuing operations fell
about 7% to $442 million, with hotels and other down 21% to $163 million.
Experiences revenue grew just 3%, and segment EBITDA still fell 19% to $30.8
million on a shift toward paid channels.
Tripadvisor cited search engine
optimization headwinds and intensifying competition, among other factors.
“Ongoing pressure in the hotel business and
surprisingly weak outlook for the experiences piece,” wrote BTIG analyst Jake
Fuller in a research note. “Experiences was supposed to be the growth business
and TRIP is now guiding to flattish revenue.”
A month later, Tripadvisor has yet to
recover and speculation is mounting—again—over its future, following activist
investor Starboard Value’s intervention in February, when it called for a sale of the whole company. That
standoff was defused in March, with Tripadvisor accepting Starboard Value’s
nomination of new directors to its board.
The investor also agreed not to further
publicly criticize the company, with a deadline running until shortly before
the nomination deadline for Tripadvisor's 2027 annual meeting, according to the
cooperation agreement filed with the SEC.
Then in June, Tripadvisor agreed to offload
its restaurant booking platform TheFork to American Express.
But following the departure of Pepijn Rijvers, its chief business officer,
for Airbnb, further questions surround the company’s next chapter.
Playing to its strengths
Experts say Tripadvisor’s main asset of a
billion reviews, built up over a quarter of a century, has both pros and cons.
The “human” data is a goldmine because trust is becoming the newest commodity.
Speaking to AI Magazine this year, Matt Goldberg,
Tripadvisor’s CEO, said, “In a world of AI, trust becomes increasingly more
rare, more precious and more valuable–knowing who you can trust and the
provenance of where that information came from.”
Tripadvisor has already signed several deals with artificial
intelligence (AI) platforms, with Viator recently named as the first connected app for travel experiences inside Google Gemini.
As well as a billion reviews, Tripadvisor has 400 million active monthly unique
visitors, and some 12 million business listings, according to its last Transparency Report.
“Tripadvisor has built trust at scale over
the years,” said Jamie Lee Abtar, brand and strategy director at Mirabelle
Communications and author of Strategic Branding in Tourism. “One of the
questions is really about how they turn that trust into action at scale.”
She argued that with the emergence of AI,
Tripadvisor’s data is both a threat and opportunity.
“I feel like they really should have tried
to compete by not trying to be another generic AI trip planner that already
exists,” she said. “Their advantage is more in the sense of that human
experience behind the technology. They've built this enormous brand over the
last couple of decades. That’s the opportunity available.”
Lee McCabe, partner at Claymore
Partners and a former exec at Facebook and Expedia, agreed that
reviews were “still a valuable asset” at a time when people remain suspicious
of AI.
“Tripadvisor could become the trusted human
evidence behind AI travel recommendations. But it needs attribution, traffic
and transaction revenue. Otherwise, it is simply providing free raw material
for the platforms replacing it,” McCabe said.
A spokesperson for Tripadvisor told
PhocusWire leveraging the depth of its data and content has been a long-term
part of its strategy, reflected in a number of partnerships over the years.
The value of legacy
At the same time, legacy can come with a
cost.
“The brand has value, but ‘iconic’ can be
another word for famous rather than relevant,” McCabe said. “Younger travelers
increasingly start with Google, social media, an OTA or AI.”
McCabe recalled working at Expedia in 2011
when it spun Tripadvisor off to shareholders.
“The bet was Tripadvisor could become
Booking.com or Expedia faster than they could become Tripadvisor,” he said.
“The opposite happened. The OTAs added
hundreds of millions of reviews while keeping control of the customer and the
booking. Google now has vastly more review content overall. Tripadvisor still
has the billion reviews but no longer owns the front door.”
Capturing the zeitgeist
The “front door” question looms large for
all OTAs as AI platforms start to dominate search.
As traditional search falters, online
travel companies are not only realigning their marketing strategies but
entirely rethinking how travelers plan and book. That strategy often involves
acquiring more nimble platforms, as in the case of Expedia buying Layla to speed up its AI strategy.
“Other OTAs fall into the same trap. AI
wants to enable consumers to design their day out, rather than discover
existing days out [that are] predesigned by tour operators,” said Alex
Bainbridge, CEO of Autoura,
which recently launched platform PlanMyVisit.
He added that for trip planning, OTAs
should replicate Uber’s model.
“You don’t select from 10,000 A-to-B
combinations. You say, ‘I am here, I am going there,’ and the product is built
for you,” he noted. “This is how AI works too, you don’t select an itinerary
from a tour operator but you say, ‘Hey, I want to see this, we are starting
from this hotel, and we have a restaurant reservation at 18:00 back at the
hotel.’ AI generates the day out.”
The Tripadvisor spokesperson said
partnerships have been a significant and differentiating part of its experiences business for more than a decade, adding that Tripadvisor powers
“Experiences” storefronts for thousands of partners.
Sizing up suitors
The tours and activities sector continues to expand with larger online players
making waves, including Expedia buying Tiqets. Consolidation in the
sector looks set to continue, and Tripadvisor’s drop
in share price has pushed its market capitalization down to about $1.1 billion.
If Starboard Value were to push for a sale, who would make a good fit?
“As a standalone company, the product is
quite limited,” said Martin Soler, partner at Soler & Associates. “But as part of a
bigger company it would make sense.”
He said Airbnb would make a viable buyer.
“They’re looking to grow in hotels. This would suddenly make them indispensable
to hotels. Plus they would get metasearch data, inventory and rates of tons of
hotels. Other OTAs won’t be happy,” he said.
Just last month, the Tripadvisor and Airbnb announced a partnership and plans to bring a
selection of Tripadvisor experiences to the Airbnb platform.
Claymore Partners’ McCabe added, “Viator is
probably the crown jewel, and Airbnb is the obvious buyer. Expedia makes the
most sense for the whole company, while private equity is probably the most
likely buyer if the real plan is to break it up.”
Viator remains the leading experiences
marketplace, according to Phocuswright and Arival’s The Outlook for Travel Experiences 2019–2029
report, published in February 2026.
Kin Meng Sio, CEO of Lights On,
has debated a list of suitors in a LinkedIn post that runs the gamut from credit card companies to hotel chains. There
is even a suggestion for Italian technology conglomerate Bending Spoons,
whose mission is to “acquire and improve digital businesses.”
The Tripadvisor spokesperson said the most
relevant update concerning Starboard Value was the cooperation agreement that
it announced in March this year. They also said
the company was focused on unlocking long-term shareholder value, with a clear
direction of simplifying the portfolio to concentrate the company around
experiences, where it sees its most significant long-term growth opportunity.
Starboard Value’s truce holds for now,
leaving Tripadvisor roughly a year to prove that a billion reviews can be
converted into traffic and revenue, rather than free material for the platforms
now standing between it and the traveler.