Can TripAdvisor Turn Things Around? The Debate Rages
Photo Credit: Tripadvisor is pushing users to book their trips on TripAdvisor via mobile phones. Pictured are vacationers in Cartagena, Colombia. TripAdvisor
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Can TripAdvisor, with all its content and global reach, become another Booking.com-like success story or will TripAdvisor's prospects fade? There are plenty of possibilities within that range, too, but much depends on TripAdvisor's transition into a booking plus metasearch site. That's the $9 billion question -- and there's a wide range of opinion on the outcome.
There's a debate under way among investors -- and quietly within the travel industry, too -- on whether TripAdvisor can make its booking feature, TripAdvisor Instant Booking, work from a financial standpoint and get back on course after a disappointing second quarter in which Instant Booking and other factors dragged down results and the company missed earnings and revenue expectations.
Anyone who tells you they definitively know the answer as to whether TripAdvisor has made a mistake in its quest to become a booking site to supplement its metasearch, or lead-referral, business might also try to sell you the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. [It's not for sale.]
However, if you consider TripAdvisor's track record when it transitioned in 2012 to 2014 from reliance on browser windows popping up in hotel search to side-by-side comparison-shopping, or metasearch, on TripAdvisor, then there is some cause for guarded optimism.
TripAdvisor CFO Ernst Teunissen said in February that he
