TripAdvisor’s Revenue Grows 18% as Consumers Seek Experiences

Consumers are hungry for experiences, and that’s been good news for TripAdvisor.

The travel service announced second-quarter 2023 earnings results Thursday (Aug. 3) that showed its experience earnings surpassing its hotel earnings for the first time, with overall revenue growth up 18%.

“[O]ur data from customer behavior on the TripAdvisor site reflects stability across room rates, quality of hotels, and length of stay,” CEO Matt Goldberg said during an earnings call. “Most encouragingly, we continue to see a meaningful opportunity to serve the traveler in search of experiences, which is increasingly core to travel planning.”

This year saw consumers up their spending on experiences, and PYMNTS research found 42% of consumers said they’re not willing to give up on travel and experiences even in the face of high inflation.

During the company’s second quarter, Goldberg said, Tripadvsor redesigned attraction pages and improved product discovery, exposing over 30% more travelers to bookable experiences than it did in the same quarter in 2022.

“This is consistent with our strategy to lean harder into TripAdvisor’s unique strengths — our breadth of supply across free and paid things to do and guidance from real travelers — while exploring ways to fully leverage Viator’s depth of complementary capabilities as the leading bookable experiences platform,” Goldberg said.

Viator is the company’s experiences marketplace, acquired in 2014. According to the earnings report, its revenues were up 59% year over year with gross booking value rising to $1.1 billion, a 40% increase since the same quarter last year.

Europe was a sore point for the company, where revenues were down. That comes as other companies are seeing their fortunes rise on the backs of increased interest in international travel.

For example, Marriott earlier this week reported a sharp rise in revenue per available room (RevPAR), a trend the company said was due to the ongoing recovery in global leisure and business travel, especially from crucial markets such as China.

To continue to drive revenue, TripAdvisor will lean into artificial intelligence (AI). Last month, the company recently added an AI-powered travel itinerary generator to its travel guidance platform.