Tripadvisor Investing in Its Leading Experiences Amid Competition in Hotels
In 2026, Tripadvisor announced it would sell its dining brand TheFork and continue to allocate more resources to its leading experiences businesses that we think holds moaty characteristics, rather than its lagging hotel metasearch business, which we believe does not have a competitive advantage. We see this shift in focus as prudent and in line with our long-held view that the company's metasearch platform (where barriers to entry are lower than in online travel agency bookings) faces growing competition from mass market agentic artificial intelligence search products. We believe this competition will keep marketing costs elevated and cause its hotel-branded business to lose revenue share, blocking it from holding a network advantage during the next 10 years. To this point, Tripadvisor’s metasearch hotel revenue decreased 8% in 2025 and we estimate sales will decline 6% on average annually during 2026-35.
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