TRIP
#Sure.
Airbnb offers an interesting product.
We have a very competitive product in that space but we come at it more from a look, the individual who is looking for a great place to stay in London and they might pick a hotel, they might pick an apartment, they might pick even a more traditional vacation rental.
Our supply footprint covers them all and we are growing that around the globe.
So in a sense, Airbnb is a competitor, we don't particularly view their traffic or the person looking for the shared room as someone that is naturally on TripAdvisor, but for the other piece, for the city or for the urban inventory we do.
Hard to say given the strength of the hotel industry currently that Airbnb is a problem.
They just added a lot of supply into the equation and I personally believe that they are generating more travel on the part of consumers because of the supply that they have added.
I have no data point to back that up, but it is kind of logical to me as they continue to grow with the hotel companies and folks like us and other OTAs continue to be very strong in our markets.
In terms of the mobile experience, boy, tough question.
There's aspects of our app and our experience that I think are just terrific.
You can find great places to eat nearby where you are standing all around the globe.
You can book the hotel, we've stored your credit cards, two clicks and you are done.
There is tremendous amount of benefit that we have achieved I believe by delivering a great user experience for close in hotel shopping, places to eat, things to do, bringing the bookability of our attraction inventory onto the phone.
Really, really nice.
From a, is there more to do.
Absolutely.
I just think the amount of data that TripAdvisor has that can help you plan a trip that is so hard for us to figure out how to surface at the right time really hard to read your mind to know what you are going to be looking for next.
But we have got it because we have so many users, we have so much data on all topics related to travel.
Plus we've got the community standing behind us.
So do we bring that all to the forefront in a perfect way on the mobile small screen.
No.
So I still think we are in very early days in what we can do but we are incredibly well positioned because of the rich content across all travel categories and because of our installed app footprint which is as you know just huge.
So I would say way more opportunity ahead of us than we have tackled already.
We certainly keep an eye on them, but we never are able to detect whether their products have an impact on our business.
We are at such a scale, and that is a very recent release on their part.
There could be a factor at some point down the road, who knows.
I think I have said that to eight or 10 different Google product iterations over the past decade and my answer is still the same.
I will take both questions.
So on the revenue per shopper, as you pointed out, we did decelerate in Q4 on revenue per hotel shopper.
In total, revenue per hotel chopper declined by 12%.
And there's a couple of things if you unpack that and if you think about modeling that for the future, there's a couple of things going on there.
One important driver is currency, which had a significant impact on that, in the fourth quarter in particular.
The second factor you have to consider is that this is an aggregate number across all devices, and our mobile revenue per shopper is growing much more quickly ---+ sorry, our number of mobile shoppers is growing much more quickly.
So you've got a mix shift which drags down the average.
Having said that, we are very seriously improving our revenue per shopper in mobile in constant currency terms.
In 2015, we improved revenue per shopper in mobile by about 30%.
So we are improving, but it is still significantly lower monetization than desktop which is a negative impact.
Then we had, of course, Instant Book in the fourth quarter, which also negatively impacts that revenue per hotel shopper growth.
So as you think about that going forward, we do expect further pressure if you just aggregate now the desktop revenue per hotel shopper and the mobile revenue per hotel shopper.
Particularly on desktop but also on mobile, we expect negative pressure on that in the first half before the growth rate improves again on revenue per hotel shopper.
Let me just pop in for a second.
To the part of the question on the kind of absolute number of hotel shoppers, it is clearly growing stronger on the phone.
We are not projecting a lot of growth going forward on the desktop/tablet, simply because the user behavior is shifting.
When we look at modeling going forward, it is tough for us to do as well.
But I would point out the cycle, if you will, of as our revenue per hotel shopper improves, we are able to acquire more traffic on ours for breakeven traffic basis.
And of course, we are always trying to acquire more hotel shopper traffic growth.
Simply put, if we make more money per hotel shopper visitor, we can bid more on search engines and other traffic generating sources.
So some of the decline in the hotel shopper absolute number in Q4 would be related to our lower revenue per shopper number, which in turn means we were able to buy a bit less.
As that flips around second half of next year or whenever it does, you will get to see some of that growth reappear.
Sure.
So yes, from the definitional perspective when we talk about IB conversion it is folks that enter our booking funnel and come out the other end as a transaction.
Compared to meta, we send the click off to a partner and some of those partners we have some conversion related information, so we can tell what percent of the leads we send turn into a transaction.
So right, we say it is comparable.
It varies a lot of course, type of property, point of sale, even time of year.
So we are just trying to point out that we have achieved comparable to meta.
And to your second question what trends do we see within, it is a little bit early to say exactly what trends we see of which type of users would migrate from meta to Instant Book.
But it is something we are watching quite closely.
You are by the way identifying also why we are really focused on the aggregate revenue per shopper improvements because some of these interplays between meta and Instant Book are a little bit more complex than you may think on the surface.
Sure, in some cases.
A lot has to do with the user intent, so we presume our big meta partners have a lot of user intent that says I am going to their site and I am ready to book.
So I drive right through the funnel conversion rate very high.
We have some percentage of our traffic coming to TripAdvisor or arguably most of our traffic coming to TripAdvisor right now with a high research intent and we pull them through the funnel and get them to click off to a partner.
Sometimes they convert.
If we are able to train folks to come to TripAdvisor when they are ready to book then they are we believe more likely to go down the Instant Book path, so our conversion rate would be higher than our average traffic we send off to meta.
Yes, that is a very believable, it is a thesis that we would love to prove to be true sooner rather than later.
I wouldn't say it is makes our meta leads any less quality, I think it is just a testament to that we have been successful at driving a higher intent purchaser to TripAdvisor when they are ready to do that booking.
We have a lot of options there.
So the display that you currently see on our site I can almost promise you it will change somehow at some point because we are still iterating.
What you are referring to I believe is what we internally called the click distribution.
So when someone is looking at a hotel page, what percentage are clicking on Instant Book versus the top meta offering versus the second, third, etc.
So a majority of the clicks are still going into the meta flow versus Instant Book on average.
And we don't necessarily view that as a bad thing for where we are today.
We know we can influence that a lot depending on how we choose to present Instant Book as an option.
We do carefully measure, I don't disclose, but we carefully measure the conversion rate for Instant Book, when our prices are as good versus not as good versus better than the meta options and you can imagine that has an impact.
The biggest thing that we can do to your question is to actually get Instant Booking available on more properties in more markets then sort of build more partners underneath the instant booking placement.
So in the US for instance, we have really good coverage right now.
You look at most any city or most any hotel and there is probably if it is bookable online there is probably an Instant Booking option because we have a good selection of partners between the brands and the OTAs.
Not as good in one of our newer foreign language markets because we don't have some of that room level content yet.
Excellent question.
The meta rollout, some of those challenges were more driven by our clients' ability to upgrade or change their bidding mechanism and styles and measurement based upon what we were doing and we have a lot of partners, a lot of clients.
So they all had to move forward on the change.
With Instant Booking, a client who is an Instant Booking partner has to do a decent amount or some technical work to get integrated but it doesn't really have much of an effect on all the rest of the partner.
So the rollout schedule and timing is much more under our control because, especially with the Priceline Group now, we can basically roll out in just about any market that we want to and we don't need the other partners to do any technical work.
So lessons learned.
Look, with the meta we needed to have given our partners more warning, more sample, more time, a bunch of things but it doesn't apply quite as well to the IB rollout here.
To the question of users changing the behavior well, I think meta was a lot easier on the users back then because they put in their dates and they just got more information.
Hip-hip-hurray.
Here we actually have to teach them what this book on TripAdvisor button means because it is not what they are used to getting on our site.
And that is new ground for us and we are doing a bunch of stuff right and I am sure ---+ I know we will be doing a bunch of stuff differently in the coming year to help drive home this new functionality and the benefits our travelers will receive when they experience Instant Booking.
I'll take the first one.
So we don't break out within our Other segment, which as you know comprises of Viator, but also TheFork and our vacation rental business.
We don't break out separately the revenues, but Viator is a healthy part of that and also has very healthy growth rates within that.
That is as much as we want to say about that.
In terms of China when we talk about a global IB rollout, China is certainly included in that.
We have a deal with the Priceline Group, which has a tremendous amount of global inventory, as well as inventory inside of China directly through Priceline and the ability to transact.
So we actually don't need an additional relationship with Ctrip in order to provide Instant Booking for Chinese travelers, domestic or international.
Though obviously we would welcome additional Instant Booking relationships with every OTA, including Ctrip all around the globe.
Great.
Thank you all for joining on the call and thank you to all TripAdvisor employees for your hard work in 2015.
I'm very thankful to be able to work with such a great team.
2016 is another important year for our business and we are moving quickly to deliver the best user experience in travel.
Thanks all and talk to you soon.
