Tripadvisor Inc TRIP

Tripadvisor's Strengths Are Experiences and Dining, While Its Hotel Business Faces Stiff Competition

In late 2025, Tripadvisor announced it would allocate more resources to its leading experiences and restaurant businesses that we think hold 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, in the first quarter, Tripadvisor’s metasearch hotel business remained soft, with revenue decreasing 29%.