Tripadvisor Finetunes Its Subscription Travel Bet
Photo Credit: Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii in October 2018. Flickr/Creative Commons / Alan Light
Skift Take
Perhaps you spent the pandemic moving house, baking bread, or home-schooling your kids. Tripadvisor spent the crisis tweaking its product mix to sell more subscriptions while also refreshing its mobile app. Mad props to everyone for making the most of things.
Tripadvisor has spent the pandemic changing its tune, metaphorically speaking.
For years, the Massachusetts-based company run by co-founder and CEO Stephen Kaufer sang the praises of a model where consumers could read reviews of travel services and then either click away to book them or else book instantly through its site and app. Now the $5 billion company has moved away from trying to draw the largest audiences possible to instead woo its most loyal fans into coughing up money for exclusive discounts and perks on travel.
On Friday, Tripadvisor used its second quarter earnings call to give analysts an update on its annual subscription-based membership program, Tripadvisor Plus, which it began discussing in late 2020, as Skift was first to report.
"It is very early days but I have to say, I think we're really on to something here," said Kaufer. "We have plenty of examples of fantastic subscription businesses in a bunch of other categories, but not yet in travel. So with our t
