Skift Take
TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer gets mystical about the company following "our North Star, navigating our path toward creating the best user experience in travel." Investors could care less about TripAdvisor journey toward the North Star as long as it means great returns on their investments, which ultimately is Kaufer's goal, as well.
TripAdvisor sees great financial potential in Instant Booking, especially as consumers looking for hotels on its sites increasingly use mobile phones, but for now the feature is dragging down revenue and earnings.
In fact, the rollout of TripAdvisor Instant Booking, currently available in all of the company's English-speaking markets on mobile and desktop and slated for a global rollout in the next few months, adversely impacted 2015 revenue and EBITDA by $36 million and $26 million, respectively.
Part of the reason is the shift to mobile as TripAdvisor's mobile hotel shoppers, including those opting to book on TripAdvisor or to click on metasearch links to third-party sites, grew 36 percent in 2015 compared with 10 percent growth for desktop and tablet users.
The hitch is that hotel shoppers on TripAdvisor using mobile phones monetized at just 30 percent the rate of desktop and tablet users in the fourth quarter of 2015, although that was an improvement from 19 percent in the ye
