Good day, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to TripAdvisor's first quarter 2018 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference call over to TripAdvisor's President of Investor Relations, Mr. Will Lyons. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Amanda. Good morning, everyone, welcome to our call. Joining me today are Stephen Kaufer, our CEO, and our CFO, Ernst Teunissen. Last night after market close, we distributed and filed our Q1 2018 earnings release, and we made available our prepared remarks on our investor relations website located at ir.tripadvisor.com. In the release, you will find reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures discussed on this call. You will also find supplemental financial information, which includes certain non-GAAP financial measures discussed on this call, as well as other performance metrics. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this call may contain estimates and other forward-looking statements that represent management's views as of today, May 9th, 2018. TripAdvisor disclaims any obligation to update these statements to reflect future events or circumstances.
Please refer to our earnings release as well as our filings with the SEC for information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Now I'll pass the call to Steve, who'll share a few thoughts before we open the call up to your questions.
Thank you, Will, good morning, everyone. We're pleased with our strong start to 2018. Steps we've taken to preserve near-term EBITDA are taking hold, and we're progressing well on our long-term growth initiatives. We have a differentiated competitive position in the travel ecosystem with our global brand, our audience size, and the rich value proposition in the dreaming, planning, booking, in-destination, and sharing phases of a trip. Our overall influence in travel continues to grow, as evidenced by our continued traffic growth, and we're excited about our plans for the quarters and the years ahead. With that brief intro, Ernst and I are ready for your questions.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, if you do have a question, please press the star and the number one key on your touch-tone telephone. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. Our first question comes from the line of Lloyd Walmsley of Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.
Thanks. I have a couple if I can. For starters, it looked like a lot of the upside to revenue largely came from desktop revenue per hotel shopper. Can you talk about maybe the extent to which this was driven by self-help on the back of the redesign last year versus just an improved bidding environment and what you see in the 2Q? Secondly, on the direct marketing costs excluding TV, just wondering if you can explain how you guys were able to cut to that magnitude with such a limited impact on shopper growth. Was the spend that inefficient? Was it just the TV offset? How should we think about that growth, I guess, going forward in that direct spend ex TV particularly to the extent monetization improves and it changes the unit economics of some of those marketing channels? Thanks.
Thank you, Lloyd. This is Ernst. Good morning. Indeed. The overall auction performance within our core TA hotel business, that's what your questions zoom in on, we had a strong start to the year there, and it was generally ahead of our expectations. Let's go through the different components. On the RPS side, clearly the year-over-year performance on RPS was negative, mostly driven by the bid downs we had seen much earlier in Q3 of last year. The auction stabilized into Q4, as we said on our previous call, and we saw further stabilization into Q1 and in fact into Q2. That was a headwind compared to the year-over-year, but not an incremental headwind to what we had seen at the back half of last year. That's a negative on our year-on-year RPS performance, as is the shift to mobile.
We saw some positive in RPS as well, which is as you call self-help. We are seeing positive results from both the initiatives we've undertaken on our site as well as the incremental performance of our TV. We see some goodness there as well. It was a give and take on both elements. We were generally very pleased with our progress there. In terms of the reduction of sales and marketing, significant reduction of our direct online spend, but an increase of our TV spend. We spent $24 million on TV, which we didn't spend before. As you pointed out, the flat shopper growth was pleasing to us in that environment. You see on the one hand an impact from the reduced spend on online marketing.
Net, it worked out the way it did. Overall, we were pleased with that performance of our core hotel auction.
Okay, great. If I can sneak one more in maybe for Steve. If you look at the sponsored placement ads you guys are rolling out in a very healthy market, for example, with a lot of hotel activity, how should we think about how many impressions per shopper you guys get and click-through rates? Maybe stepping back, where do you see that new ad unit in three years as a percent of hotel revenue if the product's successful?
Well, thanks, Lloyd. A great question, I love talking about Sponsored Placements because it is a new product for us. It's appealing to all hoteliers and all restaurateurs globally. It takes advantage of the fact that there is and always has been a lot of traffic on our site, a lot of travelers who aren't yet ready to make a purchase, but TripAdvisor is being used to influence where in fact they're going to stay. For our hoteliers and restaurateurs to be able to influence where they're going to stay, where they're going to eat well prior to the purchase is a great benefit for our clients and obviously helpful to the travelers. You'll see Sponsored Placements appear on most every page. Certainly our, what we call our list pages.
I'm looking for a hotel in the city, as well as in the cross-sells, when I'm looking at a particular hotel and it may not be right for me, I want to find out something, I want to look for a different property nearby or just a different option. All of those are good candidates for Sponsored Placements, just like any ad product, as we build out more clients with hoteliers, we're going to be getting much better at presenting the right hotel featured in that sponsored listing, so the click-through rate on that hotel will go up. I think it's fairly safe to say we have plenty of traffic on the site, given the couple of hundred million hotel shoppers.
The product is equally applicable on the phone and on desktop, it's not subject to a headwind challenge of any shift to mobile. It's particularly valuable for our widest range of clients. Not just our big ones, the OTAs, but also individual properties that want to make sure that they're discovered. In terms of modeling out where it could be in three years, we obviously think it could be quite large, but we're just at the beginning. For hotels, we just launched it at the very end of last year, early quarters. It's not particularly meaningful in anything right now, but thank you for the question, and I'm glad you're looking at it because it is a sign of where we think the business has wonderful growth potential independent of everything else that we're doing in the hotel category.
Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Justin Patterson of Raymond James. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you very much. Could you talk about the factors that drove the acceleration in the non-hotel segment in more detail? I did see you had some solid supply growth in there, curious on any more detail there. Secondly, could you talk about the factors behind the second half improvement in click-based revenue? Is that simply just a function of easing comps or are there some other operational factors you can point us to? Thank you.
Sure. This is Steve. I'll take the non-hotel drivers. Primarily as we've shared, experiences and restaurants are other bigger growing segments of that. For experiences, we think the supply growth is awesome and we look for it to continue. There's so many more attractions, tours, operators, experiences that can come online and take advantage of the demand that we already have. That's a pretty important lens to view this through, because as we bring on suppliers, you see our supply growth numbers, we're immediately able to turn that into revenue without necessarily the corresponding jump in that size of demand on the TripAdvisor site because we already have the demand. We're just able to monetize it a lot better when we have transaction capabilities. You see growth across our Viator points of sales, across our pure white label attraction or experience channels.
Of course, the TripAdvisor engine hums along faster than almost everything else. We're also particularly excited, obviously not for Q1, but going forward, with our latest acquisition in the space, which adds our Bokun, our software as a service business software for tour operators and experiences, to help us deliver really a better traveler experience by having more inventory available, better availability to last minute, more seamless frictionless ability to book on your phone when you're in destination, and all of the goodness that can come from having some direct relationships with the operators. Restaurants, it's more of the same, which is a good thing to be able to talk about as we improve seated diners, we continue to grow supply, and business is doing well in all of the markets that we're in.
To your second question about the second half in the auction versus first half in CPCs. We will, in the second half, lap some of the bid downs we saw in the second half of last year, so that is going to be a favorable year-over-year comparison versus the front half of the year. Some other things to consider there too is we are pulling back on marketing, as you know, and that will continue throughout the year. That is not necessarily a help later in the year. We called out FX as well as one of the components, the year-over-year performance of the dollar against the EUR and the GBP is less of a factor in the back half of the year if currencies don't change either.
You're absolutely correct in the statement that last year in Q3 we saw the most significant bid downs in our auction, and we will lap that when we get to the second half of the year.
Got it. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Ernst.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Deepak Mathivanan of Barclays. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Congrats on a good quarter. Two questions from me. First, revenue per hotel shopper on mobile was up 20% again in 1Q, you are going to see some tougher comps starting in 2Q due to the improvements you made last year. Can we expect monetization improvements on mobile to continue as we go forward? Second question, one of your meta search peers called out bid down by OTAs again in 2Q, all OTAs are saying continuous efforts to improve efficiencies. However, you noted improving trends in 2Q. Can you discuss whether you're seeing any bidding activity changes on the platform by OTAs? If not, can you maybe explain why that might be the case? Thanks.
Super. Happy to take the first one, and I'll let Ernst take the second. Yes, we've been making many quarters' worth of mobile rev per shopper improvements. Yes, we expect to continue to see that, in part because all of our ongoing optimizations to improve conversion on the site are either led by mobile or a mobile experience as part of the initial release. We have teams, as we have for a while, that work on improvements, and those obviously get rolled out on all of our platforms. We fully expect that to continue. I will point out sort of part 2 of that is more travelers are getting used to buying more things on their phone. Independent of TripAdvisor's action, that tendency to book means there's more qualified traffic on that device.
More qualified traffic means more downstream bookings for our clients, which means they're able to pay more for the traffic. I would expect that to just be an ongoing secular tailwind for us in the category, leading me to my confidence that our RPS will continue to go up on the phone.
Deepak, to your second question about the behavior in our core hotel auction. As we said in our prepared remarks, we saw really stability in our auction environment in Q1. We saw the stability starting in Q4, as we had called out three months ago. We saw a continuation of that in Q1. We saw a continuation of that into Q2. We saw the environment as largely stable. We continue to work on making our traffic as attractive as possible for our partners through the experience for our users on our site by continuing to focus on the downstream impact that the traffic has for our partners, and we will continue to work on that throughout the year as it comes. Stability was basically what we have seen really since Q4.
Great. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Ernst.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Michael Olson of Piper Jaffray. Your line is open.
Hey, good morning. I have one question on non-hotel. That segment's becoming more material than I think many people realize, and looks like it's probably going to be 25%-30% of revenue this year. You talked about in the past mid-20s growth. Do you still feel that's the case over the next few quarters? What are you seeing from a competitive standpoint for experiences in restaurants in the markets that you're operating? Lastly, what could the long-term margins of that business look like? Thanks.
Yes. Non-hotel growth was strong this quarter, a strong performance. It's really a continuation of many of the trends in our restaurant and experience businesses in particular that we have seen throughout. There's a bit of a mix shift going on, of course, towards those faster-growing parts of the non-hotel segment, attractions and restaurants. Our outlook for the year remains as it was before. It's robust continued growth there that is going to, in our view, be similar to what we have seen in quarters past and last year. Good performance, good start to the year, and looking forward to continued growth there. In terms of the long-term margin profile, all of those businesses have attractive margin profiles. They have good take rates.
They have cost structures that are very scalable, we've seen some of that scalability of the cost structure really come through in margin over the last 18 months. We are confident that we can reach high margins there. We've said in the past that for the whole business over the long term, we expect to go to sort of mid to high 20s EBITDA margins, and these non-hotel businesses are going to be a significant contributor to that. We see them as very healthy P&Ls.
From a competitive perspective, I think of our biggest competitor is simply the traveler saying, "I'm going to buy it when I get there. I'm going to call up to make a reservation." It's just the lack of awareness that I can and should buy these experiences online. I think we have tremendous tailwinds to Just as hotels experienced a decade plus ago of, well, of course, it's now natural to find what you're looking for, to shop around to get the best price and the best experience online. TripAdvisor Media Group happens to have a huge amount of demand of people doing that now and then going offline to book because we didn't have the booking capabilities.
Again, it's tapping into the demand that we have, and while we certainly have competitors who are selling experiences online, it's much less a us versus them, in my view, than growing the total size of the pie of everything that is booked online. That's the huge opportunity over the next several years.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Mark Mahaney of RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Two questions, please. You talk about increasing your attractions inventory. I think it was something like 80% growth. Could you provide some details on what inventory, and specifically is rising, the particular types of attractions or experiences inventory that's growing faster than others? In terms of the outlook for the year, what would it take to have the hotel segment revenue actually grow in 2018? What would have to change in the back half of the year in order for that to actually flip and actually start growing again? Thanks.
Sure. Thanks, Mark. I'll take the first, Ernst will take the second. On the inventory side, we're really benefiting from the marketplace, we have a great view into where the demand is for travelers on TripAdvisor specifically, we target our sales reps or account managers to go fill that demand as much as possible with the opportunity to book the experience in advance. A lot of the growth is coming from the growing awareness of TripAdvisor as a big alternative demand channel for the owners, they're simply coming in and signing up.
We have a whole bunch of tech investments under the covers that are all around making that process to get more supply and continue that level of 80-plus% growth rate for many years to come because there is so much out there, because we have the demand, and because we always believe in providing the most choice possible for our travelers.
To your second part of the question, Mark, in terms of levers in the hotel business and sort of looking towards the back half of the year. The things that we are working on internally are the improvements to our site, to the overall experience for our users on the hotel, and thereby the improvement for our partners of our traffic. We have a number of initiatives that we're rolling out. We've talked about some of them in this quarter, both on the desktop and the mobile side, and we'll continue to work on that and expecting to see continued progress. On the TV side, we're investing more this year than last year, $100 million-$130 million.
We are seeing nice traction on TV, it's still not a ROI positive spend in quarter, we see improvements to the returns there, and we're hopeful that we can continue to see that and confident that we can get that to a long-term profitability. We're looking at that and the success of those campaigns and our ability to tweak those as we go forward. Those are some of the biggest drivers that we are focused on internally and continue to work on, and to the extent that we're successful there will impact our success in the back half on revenue.
Thank you, Ernst. Thank you, Steve.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Kevin Kopelman of Cowen and Company. Your line is open.
Thanks. I had a question on attractions. Can you talk more about the bookings trends, what kind of growth are you seeing in attractions bookings, and has that also accelerated as you accelerated supply? Can you also talk more specifically about how the Bokun deal will be integrated and benefit the attractions business, and will that deal have any impact on the financials this year? Thanks.
On the first question, we saw, to start at the high level in non-hotel, impressive overall growth in our non-hotel segment, 36%. As you can imagine, our experiences business being a large part of that business being a very important contributor to that. That kind of revenue growth is created by continued bookings growth as well. We saw continued nice performance on bookings, and particularly, which is something we're excited about internally, the growth on our TA site is very impressive and ahead of the kind of overall revenue growth for non-hotel would imply, significantly ahead of that. That's exciting to us because that ultimately strategically for us long term, that platform, the TA platform, is the most scalable platform for us in our experiences business.
We have so many users already on our experiences pages on TA and able to continue penetration there, continue conversion there is a huge opportunity for us, and also economically a very attractive opportunity because we have so much traffic already on our site that we don't have to additionally acquire. Steve, do you want to tackle the Bokun question?
Yeah. With this new company, we're able to help bring a lot more inventory online because so many of the experienced companies still don't have any software that helps them run their business that can also deliver the online bookability. Point one for Bokun is, hey, it's a great company. We welcome them all into the fold. Point two, the software that they have really should be, and we're making available globally to bring the inventory online so that travelers on Trip or on the Viator or on our third-party channels can find it and book it. That's just a win-win all around. With Bokun part of the family, we're able to make that easily done for attraction owners, make it very affordable for attraction owners, and that obviously helps our entire ecosystem. 2018 financial impact.
Ernst, do you want to comment on the meaningfulness of it?
Yeah, don't expect too big an impact on the financials this year of Bokun. It's an acquisition that we're going to integrate and then accelerate organically, it's not going to be material to our numbers for this year.
Okay, thanks. A quick follow-up. Does it make sense to start talking about attractions on the TV ads? When do you expect to see ad spend for non-hotel start to grow again? Thank you.
That's a great question, and I don't want to tip my hand on when we would be doing that. I will reiterate that part of our differentiation, part of the awareness of TripAdvisor in the travel ecosystem is the fact that we have much more than just hotels. To be clear, we love hotels, and we expect that to return to top-line growth, and we're showing great progress in the system there. Part of all of TripAdvisor is helping you on the entire trip, and we want to make sure everyone knows about that. One should reasonably assume that we will grow our marketing of attractions and other things in ways that work for our other businesses, such as TV. I'm not giving you a particular timeframe, but certainly setting the expectation that it's more a matter of when, not if.
Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Ernst.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is on the line of Douglas Anmuth of JP Morgan. Your line is open.
Good morning. This is [Dave Young] for Doug. First question, how do you plan to balance the message around best price with your value proposition and user reviews as you ramp your brand campaign? Could you share any early feedbacks in new markets you've entered and what you're seeing there? As a follow-up, could you provide more details around what you are doing to build a more holistic end-to-end user experience that you mentioned on the letter?
Sure. We have tremendous brand awareness in almost every country around the world on the topic of reviews, a trusted community, always use TripAdvisor to plan the trip. A surprising number of people didn't understand that we also have one of the best price comparison engines out there. If you're looking not only for the best hotel, but that hotel at the best price, if you're looking to compare, do your own individual trade-offs between, well, am I willing to spend an extra $10 for a slightly better hotel or not, TripAdvisor is the perfect place to do it. That message is the core message that we're running our TV ads with, and it's working. We're driving increased price awareness of TripAdvisor as a place to find the best price, to compare your deals. As you know, we did that last year.
We've seen our positive results. We've increased our spend. That piece of the strategy is working, and we've found no indications, or we haven't seen any indications that it's hurting our brand or consumer awareness as the trusted review site that we started as. Not saying that that'll be the only message going forward, but am certainly saying it's working for us now. Details on the holistic end-to-end user experience. Well, if you think about what TripAdvisor offers today to so many people, they might come in starting their travel plan with a flight search, move to a hotel search, think about what they want to do in destination, of course, they need to eat. Some of that is during the trip, some of that is well in advance, some of it is armchair traveling. We have so many users that of course, it's touching all segments.
The end-to-end experience that we talk about, you see in some of our travel planning tools that are on the site now, that we really want to highlight so that this is an ongoing kind of work stream. It's been ongoing. It will continue because it's a core differentiated feature of TripAdvisor that you can do all of this planning, and it's really hard/impossible to do that anywhere else. We have a business unit that we call Core Experience dedicated to providing the common user experience across everything on the TripAdvisor point of sale, then working on some of the newer functionality that we haven't launched yet, we haven't talked about yet, that will help drive an experience that, as we say internally, is more than the sum of the individual shopping experience. It's more than the sum of the parts.
I'll have to keep you in suspense on that for a bit longer.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Naved Khan of SunTrust. Your line is open.
Thanks a lot. Can you give us a sense of the magnitude of contribution you're getting from the sponsored product? And just to clarify, is this revenue stream showing up under the Display line, or is it part of other lines as well? And then on GDPR, can you give us your commentary on what we should expect, if at all, in terms of impact from the rollout of this regulation in Europe?
Hi, Naved. I'll take the first part of the question. The sponsor placements are part of the revenue line called Display and Subscription, so that second revenue line within our hotel segment. It is not particularly material. It was a contributor to the growth in that revenue line in this quarter year-over-year, in the grand scheme of things, not a large part of our revenue yet. As Steve was talking before, we have ambitious plans for the long term, so it'll become more and more meaningful as we progress. In our Q1 results, not a particularly material number.
The GDPR, we've obviously, like most companies, been aware of it for quite some time, so we don't expect a meaningful impact on our business at this point.
Thank you, Ernst. Thank you, Steve.
Thank you. Our next question is on the line of Brad Erickson of KeyBanc. Your line is open.
Hi, thanks. Just a couple follow-ups. The ad spending optimization's clearly having a nice impact on the bottom line. How do you balance that relative to the shopper growth? Or I guess to ask it a little differently, is it safe to say that sustainable hotel shopper growth is absolutely contemplated in your revenue target of double-digit growth? And I guess, do you think some of the product enhancements can allow for that even if you throttle ad spend to some degree and shopper growth remains a little bit relatively more depressed?
Yeah. I do think returning to hotel shopper growth is in the cards. Again, we've throttled some of our performance spend, which helps us drive better quality traffic to the site, and therefore more downstream bookings, the core thing that we care the most about. We've also ramped up our television spend. Why? Because that'll drive more shoppers and more qualified shoppers to the site. I'd still reiterate, we're certainly looking for growth in hotel shoppers and overall hotel revenue as we've done our changes. The things I was referring to a few moments ago with the CoreX business unit and some of the improvements that are coming obviously aim to build out a more complete travel experience, which in turn gets more people engaged in the funnel, drives more membership, which drives more overall usage of our product. That, by definition, helps grow hotel shoppers.
As large as we are, we feel there's still plenty of room to have more people find and use TripAdvisor to plan their trip.
Got it. I think you've been getting some downstream data for a while from some of your customers. Can you just talk about how you're utilizing that and what changes you've made as a result of seeing that data? Does that have anything to do with some of this performance ad optimization? Thanks.
Yes. Insightful question. We have been receiving performance data, to be clear, it's just the signal from our partners that says, many of our partners, not all, that the clicks that we send downstream have turned into bookings on their side because all of our clients are looking to sell that hotel room, and it's less about raw traffic to them as bookings that we drive. As they give us this signal that says, "Hey, click A is more valuable than click B," we can in turn change our traffic acquisition mix and our on-site behavior of how we're pulling travelers through the shopping experience to make sure they're more qualified. I'll give you a very simple example of the latter.
It's relatively easy for us on our site, if we wanted to say essentially, "Click here to partner A, click here to partner B," very loud, without first helping the traveler understand whether this is the right hotel for them. We generate more clicks, which in the old model would've generated more revenue for us, but it wasn't necessarily generating more bookings. By making sure the traveler on our site is more qualified, they understand what they're looking to purchase before we send them over to our client site. That increases the bookings, and of course, if our bookings increase on the client side, our CPCs hold or go up.
To connect the dot with the marketing spend. What that means, if we have better insight into the downstream booking performance, we found that some of our marketing spend that looked good from an ROS perspective on a click base, looked less good on a downstream booking behavior, and that is the kind of spend that we're addressing in our reduction of marketing spend, which is an improvement for profitability, and it is a pressure on revenue and a pressure on the number of bookings, but particularly on profitability, it's a bit positive.
Got it. That's great. Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question is on the line of Peter Stabler of Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.
Good morning. This is Rob on the call for Peter. Wondering if you could give a sense of how that business is doing, maybe how fast non-hotel is growing, excluding vacation rentals at this point. Also a follow-up on Core Experience. Wondering, has there been any benefit there already? Is there anything that you're testing? If so, what kind of lift are you seeing in cross-sell or product attach rates or wherever the relevant metrics may be? Thank you.
I'll start with the first part of the question on the rentals business. The rentals business is a stable business for us. It is not one of the drivers of growth in non-hotel. That is really driven by our experiences and our restaurant business. It's a good business for us with good margins. We benefit not only from the various brands that we have in rentals, but we benefit from making all that supply available on our TripAdvisor site as well. It's a good business for us. As we think strategically about which areas of the business we are investing to grow, it is focused on our restaurants and experiences business.
When we look at some of the CoreX improvements, again, some of it is just very foundational. You'd have to look carefully to see it on the site. The site's becoming more consistent across all of our different verticals. Some of it is just we're putting a smarter cross-sell or smarter offer in front of the user when a hotel doesn't have availability. We don't want to lose them, let's make some other recommendations, let's make them better recommendations. We see meaningful wins there. I paint it as they're all relatively small individual wins that happen several times a month, and they just add up over the course of the year. That's part of what we call our revenue optimization or our site optimization.
It's across, again, the site, the app, our CRM, our emails, our notifications, all the things that we have with respect to a traveler who's on a journey and making sure we're sending them the right message at the right time, given that we're more than a one-product company.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of James Lee of Mizuho Securities. Your line is open.
Thanks for taking my question. Is it fair to say that the improvement RPS is also due to your performance advertising optimization strategy, where you're focusing more on retargeting as opposed to prospecting? Also maybe at what point will you start focusing on prospecting as you start, maybe potentially start growing hotel shoppers? Is the TV advertising the way you prefer to do it? Lastly, for TV advertising ramping up, how should we think about the new market you'll be investing this year? Thanks.
Sure. I'll try to hit all of those. Of course, retargeting is a part of our performance-based advertising, but it's been that way for a while. I'd say there is RPS improvement because we're looking closer at the downstream booking signal versus the straight click count when we're buying our advertising, as Ernst was talking about. I wouldn't say retargeting was a much bigger or much smaller component than it has been. The TV ramping in our new markets, because we saw success when we launched last year in our top six, we're obviously continuing and spending more there, but also expanding into an additional set of markets. We expect a similar growth curve in terms of the TV return on ad spend. The curves are all what you'd expect.
The newer markets will take a little longer to build. Right now we're receiving some of the benefit of having started the TV almost a year ago now.
Yeah. Steve, can you also talk about the most important benefit on the Bokun acquisition? Does it allow you to increase your instant bookable attraction listings a lot faster than you would have otherwise to do it yourself? I'm just curious if that would be one of the major benefit in terms of ramping up the success and help you to drive more bookings on attraction specifically?
Well, I think of it as just one of the many things that we're doing to invest heavily in our experiences business unit. We're making onboarding supply from any partner, direct from the attraction or through any other aggregator, much easier. That's an initiative. We've got our international initiatives, making sure that our tours and attractions can be booked in as many languages as possible. We have our ongoing conversion optimizations, both on TripAdvisor and on Viator, to help the traveler find what they're looking for faster and easier and book it. We have the longer-term supply initiative of enabling, through Bokun, thousands of additional suppliers who will eventually go online, but through this technology can ideally go online a lot sooner.
Of course, if they're going online, it's helping them fill their tours, and it helps TripAdvisor monetize those great experiences, and the consumer wins because whether you book in advance or in destination, they have that level of convenience. Again, there's a number of players in that particular space helping attractions go online, and we feel we can accelerate that overall trend, which will help us and help everyone else in the attractions category.
Great. Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes on the line of Jed Kelly of Oppenheimer. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks for taking my question. Just two. As experiences becomes a larger percentage of non-hotel, should we expect similar seasonality patterns, or how should we view seasonality in the non-hotel segment?
Yes. Our marketing in non-hotel is increasing. It's significantly higher than last year, and not a significant break with how we approached marketing for non-hotel last year. Not much to call out there in terms of a difference of this year versus last year. In terms of seasonality, non-hotel is a more seasonal business than our hotel business. You have seen that in past years, which impacts both the revenue, but particularly the profit profile of the business. It is a little bit more seasonal, driven by our vacation rental business in particular, but also our attractions business is seasonal. The restaurant business itself is a little bit seasonal, but not as much as the other two businesses.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mark May of Citi. Your line is open.
Hi, this is Zach actually on for Mark. Two questions. Could you talk about your plans for further investments in the attraction space? Obviously, you've Bokun last month, but I guess what opportunities are you seeing there? Secondly, it appears that some of the larger OTAs are continuing to rationalize their online direct marketing spend. I guess, do you have a sense of when that'll start to stabilize? Thanks.
Yes. Thank you. In terms of the areas where we invest on the experiences side, the attraction side, you saw the graph in our prepared remarks about our bookable supply. There's a big focus on making sure that more and more supply is bookable on our sites, both the Viator site, but particularly also the TripAdvisor site. That's a big focus area, making sure we have more and more supply to put in front of the large audience that we have already. We have incremental investments this year around our international non-English speaking sites, making sure that we have more revenue coming from non-English speaking sites, which is where our business still skews and where we see a big opportunity going forward.
Obviously, continuing to make investment in the underlying product, and in our marketing into it as well, Bokun is another example of opening up a new area there. There's plenty to invest in on the experience side. As we've said before, the fact that we've improved our margins in non-hotel is not a reflection of us holding back on investing on the experiences side. We are going full speed ahead and the business is fully focused on driving revenue growth for the long term. That's where our focus is. Your question is then shifting to our hotel business and particularly to our core auction business again, in terms of OTA behavior and rationalizing performance spend. As we've said in previous quarters, yes, we did see some of that in the back half of last year.
As we said on this call and in our prepared remarks, we saw stabilization that happened in Q4. We saw further stabilization into this quarter and into Q2, not much more to report from our end on that front.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is on the line of Brian Fitzgerald of Jefferies. Your line is open.
Thanks, guys. Revenue per hotel shopper continues to improve nicely, there still remains a fundamental gap there. There's reasons why. Any dynamic to call out with respect to convergence or closure of that gap? Maybe how big was the gap a year ago relative to today? Thanks.
Yeah. I assume you're particularly referring to the gap desktop to mobile, we have been closing that gap. We called out the 20% plus RPS improvement on mobile this quarter year-over-year, where desktop clearly was down. We are narrowing the gap. The gap over the last year or so has narrowed by about 10 points. We are now closer to the 40% monetization of mobile to desktop, a year ago we were closer to 30%. That number is ticking up every time, we continue to work hard on making sure that gap narrows. As the gap narrows, obviously the impact that the shift to mobile has on our RPS starts to abate, that is an important economic part of our model.
As we look forward into this year beyond, we're looking at lapping the bid down. It's a very important point at the back half of the year, the crossover point at some point where the mobile shift is actually not going to be as much of a headwind as it has been in the past. We are very focused on that. You've seen the improvement that we made on the mobile side. We continue to make improvements there, see some runway ahead of us.
Great. Thanks, Ernst.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you have a question, please press the star and the number one key on your touchtone telephone. Our next question comes from the line of Heath Terry of Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Pardon me, your phone might be on mute. I'm showing no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Stephen Kaufer, CEO, for closing remarks.
Well, great. Thanks again, everyone, for joining the call. 2018 is off to a good start, and I want to thank all TripAdvisor Media Group employees around the world for their continued hard work. I look forward to updating you on our progress in the next few months. Thanks, everyone.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.