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Online Travel

TripAdvisor Instant Booking Shows 'Slight' Improvement But It's Still Ugly

Dennis Schaal photo
Dennis Schaal

Photo Credit: TripAdvisor Instant Booking is a long play by the travel content giant.  TripAdvisor

Skift Take

Because of the proliferation of mobile devices and the propensity of TripAdvisor's metasearch users to meander off course after clicking off the TripAdvisor site, the company needed to do something dramatic such as Instant Booking to adapt to the future. As it plays the unglamorous "long game," the outcome of TripAdvisor's gamble won't be known until at least 2017.

When a CEO talks about "playing the long game" in characterizing quarterly results, then you know what's next. TripAdvisor released its second quarter results August 3 and missed analysts' expectations on both earning per share ($.038 actual versus $0.42 expected) and revenue ($391 million in reality versus $402.5 million that was the consensus estimate). On the key metric that TripAdvisor has identified regarding 2016 goals, the company saw its revenue per hotel shopper, which includes click-based advertising from metasearch and commissions from Instant Booking, fall 19 percent year over year in the second quarter. That decline compares somewhat favorably to the 24 percent year over year r

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