Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the TripAdvisor First Quarter 2026 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone and then wait. Then you'll hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Angela White, VP of IR. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Therese. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to TripAdvisor's first quarter 2026 financial results call. Joining me today are Matt Goldberg, President and CEO, and Mike Noonan, CFO. Earlier this morning, we filed and made available our earnings release. In that release, you'll find reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measure discussed on this call. 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 7, 2026. 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. With that, I'll turn the call over to Matt.
Thank you, Angela. Good morning, everyone. We're pleased with our Q1 performance, with group revenue in line with expectations and adjusted EBITDA ahead of expectations. We delivered this result despite the challenging macro backdrop that intensified late in the quarter, which Mike will take us through in detail shortly. As a reminder, last year, we made an important strategic shift. We reoriented TripAdvisor Group around our objective to build the world's largest experiences marketplace. The experiences category represents the largest growth opportunity in travel. It's highly fragmented, still early to come online and supported by durable tailwinds for growth. It's a market where scale matters, and our scale advantage is reinforced by our high-intent travelers, trusted brands, industry-leading supply, and long-established category authority.
Along with our shift to experiences, we also set out to unlock the power of our data so Tripadvisor remains at the center of travel, discovery, planning, and booking as the journey evolves with AI. To simplify our portfolio of legacy offerings to optimize for profitability as we prioritize other growth opportunities. Today, I'll walk through the progress we're making across our strategy, beginning with experiences. Through the first 2 months of the quarter, our experiences segment delivered particularly encouraging momentum, with GBV growth accelerating from 16% in the prior quarter to 19% in January and February. Viator, our largest point of sale, was even stronger, with bookings and GBV growing more than 20% in January and February. In late February, that momentum was interrupted by geopolitical events in the Middle East, along with acute disruption in 2 key leisure markets: Mexico and Hawaii.
Together, these factors drove a sharp decline in booking volumes and a spike in cancellations, which has since improved. The strength we saw in experiences in January and February reflects both healthy underlying demand in the category, as well as early evidence of the strategic changes we put in place last year. We're seeing that progress emerge across the full experiences marketplace. Tighter coordination across demand, our storefronts, and supply is strengthening the flywheel and driving tangible results. On the demand side, we've unified the Viator and TripAdvisor marketing teams to drive alignment and long-term efficiencies across both headcount and partner spend. We're becoming more efficient and precise in how we allocate our marketing investment across channels. We're operating our two brands together in our paid search portfolio and improving spend efficiency without compromising overall performance.
We're also leveraging our intelligence across channels through improved testing and modeling, giving us better visibility into where investment can work even harder across the broader marketing mix. This, in turn, helps us move more dollars into higher return channels such as paid social and affiliates. Finally, we're driving incremental growth in direct and owned channels, such as CRM in the app, through product improvements, pricing capabilities, and rewards. As traffic lands in our storefronts, our product work is simplifying the path to booking, which drives incremental volume and compounding conversion gains. As an example, on the TripAdvisor point of sale, we've seen more than 20% growth in conversion over the last two quarters.
Our velocity of experimentation is improving the overall product experience to help customers make more confident booking decisions through better review and product availability merchandising, as well as an AI-enabled pre-booking chat on the Viator app. We're providing more flexible payment options to establish a stronger global payments foundation, which we expect to drive further conversion gains as we lay the groundwork for international growth. Underpinning these efforts is our supply, a long-standing advantage that drives our conversion rates. We're focused on building the right inventory in the right places as quickly as possible by expanding into geographies and categories where we see unmet demand, and it's making an impact. Where we've added strategic supply, over half the bookings came from new customers, a strong leading indicator that it's attracting incremental demand.
We're also simplifying our onboarding process for these valuable new operators, leveraging AI-assisted sign-up to speed the process, which has more than doubled sign-up conversion. Together, this work is creating a stronger and more coordinated experiences flywheel. Our execution is delivering key metrics to improve our performance, better marketing efficiency, increasing experimentation velocity, higher conversion rates, stronger supply productivity, and growing customer loyalty. All of these help improve our unit economics, as evidenced by direct channel bookings growth in Q1 that was well above our segment average. Moving beyond experiences to our other marketplace, TheFork, where the business outperformed against both top-line growth and profitability. Revenue grew 23% or 11% in constant currency with a healthy 8% EBITDA margin. We continue to diversify our revenue mix with B2B and partnerships revenue outpacing growth in the B2C marketplace.
Our restaurant base continues to skew premium as premium restaurant share grew approximately 500 basis points over last year, and nearly half of newly acquired restaurants are entering at premium tiers. We're continuing to drive an innovation agenda at TheFork that lays the foundation for the future. With 80% of diners now coming through the app, we continue to focus on improving the diner experience. Our AI assistant, Ask TheFork, is making restaurant discovery more intuitive through full content search across menus, photos, and reviews. While still scaling, this feature is showing encouraging signals, improving recommendation relevance, engagement, and conversion versus traditional search. With TheFork Social, we're reshaping discovery from anonymous ratings to trusted community recommendations. This feature is already showing markedly higher conversion, now accounting for roughly 10% of users and 15% of bookings.
We're also using AI to drive productivity across the business with approximately 40% of B2C customer support queries now handled through AI. Together, this execution points to a business that's well-positioned for durable long-term growth and expanding profitability. We're pleased with the performance we're seeing in our marketplace businesses. We expect AI-driven productivity gains across our product and engineering organizations to further accelerate that progress. AI is now a critical part of our infrastructure, increasing the speed at which teams can build, test, and deploy. As AI-enabled workflows become embedded across our R&D organization, we're seeing execution gains, including a 5 to 7 times increase in average engineering output in one of our recent AI-native pilots. AI is increasingly embedded in our operational work, from improved booking experiences and simpler supply onboarding to increasing automation across customer support.
Beyond productivity, we're also executing to ensure Tripadvisor remains central to travel as the consumer journey increasingly shifts into AI-led discovery and planning. This plays to one of Tripadvisor Group's greatest strengths: our data. With 1 billion reviews, photos, points of interest, and diversified contributions across geographies and categories, it's not just vast, it's also trusted, structured, and constantly refreshed. It reflects how travelers explore, compare, and book across millions of businesses, with much of that intelligence tied directly to experiences, pricing, and real-time availability. Our data assets enable us to work directly with the world's largest horizontal AI platforms. These partners include OpenAI, Perplexity, Microsoft, Amazon, and most recently, Anthropic, where we launched Tripadvisor and Viator apps within Claude. Each of these partnerships gives us valuable early learnings about how these users engage and convert with an opportunity to scale the value of the relationship further.
What we're seeing so far is encouraging. While the total volume from AI sources is still small, the conversion is already among the highest of any channel in our portfolio. Beyond partnerships, we're using our data advantage to rapidly iterate on our own AI-native experience. With the high volume of visitors who seek us for trusted advice, we have a scaled test bed that allows us to learn from multiple entry points across diverse use cases. We're testing, learning, and expanding in a considered manner, serving half of our web traffic in English-speaking markets. As we innovate with AI to help travelers solve problems in real time by comparing options, validating preferences, and making better booking decisions, we're putting the judgment of real travelers front and center.
Wherever AI-led travel discovery ultimately lands, we believe the data layer that provides trust, relevance, and confidence to transact will define the winners, and we expect to be firmly among them. The final component of our strategic shift is to simplify our hotels and others business as we focus on growth opportunities elsewhere. This remains a profitable part of the portfolio, but one we recognize is structurally challenged. As we continue our transition from a subscale metasearch player to the leading experiences marketplace, we're managing this business accordingly, reducing fixed costs, prioritizing areas where we can drive attractive returns, and pursuing partnerships in categories where we aren't positioned to be the global leader. We began to see the initial financial benefit of that approach in Q1, with total fixed costs down approximately 14% and personnel costs down 18% year over year.
We expect that run rate benefit to continue as we move through 2026. The focus is straightforward: align our cost base with our revenue profile and optimize hotels and other for contribution profit while leveraging our trusted brand, reach, and data for experiences and AI. Before I pass to Mike, I want to step back and reconnect our strategy to what you're now beginning to see in our results. We've made 3 deliberate choices. First, to put experiences at the center of the company. Second, to position Tripadvisor Group for an AI-driven shift in travel. Third, to simplify the legacy business and manage it for profitability. As we've started to execute on this path, we're making visible progress in each of these areas. We accelerated our experiences growth ahead of the March disruptions.
We're leveraging AI to speed our execution, improve our products, and add partnerships with every major LLM platform. We've made progress simplifying our legacy business to create the focus, capacity, and room to invest in our experiences future. In short, we're becoming an experiences-first company built for sustainable growth and profitability. Last quarter, we noted that we were formally exploring alternatives for TheFork, and we continue to make good progress. While we have no definitive announcement at this time, the work has reinforced our view that this is a highly attractive asset whose value may not be fully reflected within the current portfolio, and we expect to provide an update in the near term. We continue to review our portfolio and explore all options to deliver the simplicity, focus, and scale that we believe will catalyze meaningful shareholder value ahead.
We had a strong start to 2026. Despite the external disruptions, we remain confident in travel's resilience and the long-term growth profile of the areas we're prioritizing. With that, I'll turn it over to Mike.
Thanks, Matt. Good morning. I'll start with a review of our financial performance and then provide more information on what we saw in April and our outlook for Q2 and the full year. As a reminder, all growth rates are relative to the comparable period in 2025, unless noted otherwise. Q1 consolidated revenue was $382 million, a decline of 4% and in line with expectations. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA was $22 million or 6% of revenue, slightly above our expectations. We're pleased with this performance considering the macro volatility that started in late February. Experiences began the first quarter with strong momentum, progressing through late February when growth slowed significantly and cancellations rates spiked with the onset of several macroeconomic events.
In Mexico and Hawaii, two of our larger destination markets, civil unrest and severe flooding caused a surge in booking cancellations and a deceleration in forward bookings growth for those destinations. In March, we also saw the conflict in the Middle East begin to weigh on performance. While a direct exposure to the region is limited, the conflict influenced other key travel corridors, such as European International and U.S. to Europe routes, leading to heightened cancellations and tepid demand. Taken together, these events most acutely impacted revenue growth in March, given revenue is impacted by both cancellations and demand softness. GBV and bookings volume are gross of cancellations, but are impacted by demand. For the quarter, the number of experience booked grew 11%, finishing just shy of our low teens expectation. We estimate approximately 3 points of growth headwinds to these macro events.
Before the disruptions, January and February showed strong momentum, with the segment growing bookings 15%, and Viator, our largest point of sale, accelerated to approximately 20% growth during that same period. However, following the onset of these macro events, demand softened, leading to total segment bookings growth of mid-single digits in March. In key destinations like Hawaii and Mexico, growth and experiences booked shift from well over 20% in January and February to a double-digit growth deceleration in March. Other regions, including the U.S., also experienced a step down, particularly among international travelers. While U.S. domestic and U.S. to Caribbean routes also slowed from January and February, they still achieved healthy mid-teens growth in March. Gross booking value, or GBV, grew 13% to approximately $1.2 billion. We estimate changes in currency were a tailwind to growth of approximately 5%.
GBV growth was in line with our bookings volume pattern, which was impacted by decelerating demand. GBV growth was strong in January and February at 19% and an acceleration from 16% growth in Q4. On the vital point of sale, which accounts for the majority of the segment's total GBV, growth was even faster, exceeding 20% in the first two months of the quarter. However, segment GBV growth also slowed to mid-single digits in March as a result of the softer demand environment. Experiences revenue grew 8% and 4% in constant currency, slightly below our expectations due to an estimated 4-point growth headwind from heightened cancellations and softer demand. Revenue growth in January and February was strong at approximately 15% before moderating to approximately flat in March.
Adjusted EBITDA for the experiences segment was a loss of $19 million, or -11% of revenue, which was in line with our expectations and reflects typical seasonality. De-leverage was driven by increased investment in marketing, which offset lower personnel costs. Importantly, marketing costs as a % of GBV were flat year-over-year. Our coordinated marketing strategy across Viator and TripAdvisor is yielding strong results, particularly in high-intent pay channels. GBV growth in the pay channels for the combined points of sale peaked at 24% in January and February before the onset of these macro events. Over the long term, we expect to realize marketing leverage through improved ROIs in pay channels as well as through loyalty programs, product enhancements, and a greater volume of direct bookings as repeat cohorts continue to scale.
Repeat customer growth remains healthy, and we continue to observe lower acquisition costs for traveler cohorts beyond their first booking. Additionally, we are steadily increasing the share of bookings from direct channels such as our app, which is demonstrating significantly higher growth compared to other channels. Turning to TheFork, Q1 revenue was $57 million, representing 23% growth, or 11% in constant currency. Total B2C channel bookings grew 6%. While revenue mix continues to be weighted towards B2C monetization, we are encouraged by the ongoing progress of our B2B strategy and the value restaurants find in our premium software, where B2B revenue grew over 50%, which includes currency tailwinds of approximately 12 percentage points. Adjusted EBITDA at TheFork in Q1 was $5 million, or approximately 8% of revenue, reflecting margin expansion of over 15 percentage points.
The leverage was driven by lower marketing and fixed costs as well as the phasing of certain other marketing costs from Q1 into Q2. Turning now to our Hotels and Other segment. Q1 revenue was at $158 million, a 20% decline. Better than expected performance was driven by strong pricing in paid channels within our hotel meta offering. While pricing growth was strong, it was offset by sustained volume headwinds. Median advertising revenue reached $28 million, a 9% decline, represent a sequential improvement due to growth in off-platform revenue. Adjusted EBITDA in Hotels and Other was $37 million or 23% of revenue. Margin compression was primarily driven by lower revenue and the ongoing shift in free paid channel mix. Fixed costs declined by approximately 14%, but increased as a percent of revenue.
We expect the cost reductions announced in Q4 2025 to more fully benefit personnel expenses in the second half of 2026. Turning to consolidated expenses. Cost of revenue in Q1 was 9% of revenue, an increase of approximately 190 basis points. This was primarily driven by the growing mix of experiences related transaction costs within consolidated revenue, along with a higher mix of off-platform media advertising costs in hotels and other. Marketing costs were 46% of revenue, an increase of approximately 330 basis points. This was driven by growth in experiences marketing spend, which more than offset declines in both TheFork and hotels and other. Personnel costs were 34% of revenue, lower by approximately 220 basis points. Lower personnel costs in HNO more than offset growth in personnel costs and experiences in TheFork.
Absent share-based compensation, personnel costs were approximately 28% of revenue, lower by approximately 60 basis points. Lower year share-based compensation expense was primarily due to the forfeitures related to our cost savings program announced in Q4 2025. Technology costs in Q1 were 7% of revenue, an increase of approximately 80 basis points, primarily driven by higher licensing fees and data center costs. G&A costs were approximately 4% of revenue, lower by 60 basis points. This figure includes the recovery of costs associated with an external fraud incident from late 2022 and expenses related to shareholder activism, both of which were excluded from our adjusted EBITDA results. Turning to cash and liquidity. In Q1, operating cash flow was $118 million, and free cash flow was $101 million.
The increase in operating cash flow and free cash flow was due to changes in working capital related to the timing of receivable and vendor payments, which more than offset lower net income. Total cash and equivalents at March 31st were approximately $1.1 billion. Subsequent to quarter end on April 1st, we repaid our convertible notes which reduced both cash and short-term debt by approximately $345 million. Excluding our deferred merchant payables of approximately $406 million, our excess cash balance after repayment of the notes was approximately $369 million, and our total debt was approximately $838 million. During the quarter, we had no share purchase activity.
While the program remains active, we were unable to purchase shares in the public market due to our ongoing portfolio review. We will continue to evaluate opportunities for share repurchases, balancing our capital requirements, market conditions, and other relevant factors. Turning now to our outlook for 2026 and Q2. In the month of April, cancellation rates improved after spiking in March, while bookings demand began to recover as we exited the month. We expect bookings and GBV to continue to recover throughout the quarter, reaching normalized levels as we exit Q2. Due to book-to-travel timing in Q2, we expect revenue growth to lag bookings and GBV growth. While we are encouraged by the early signs of recovery in April, macro uncertainty remains a key consideration for the rest of the year.
Our current outlook assumes that the leisure travel environment continues to normalize through the peak summer season. However, our outlook does not incorporate any further deteriorating of macroeconomic conditions or geopolitical disruptions. Given the discretionary nature of travel, we will continue to monitor the macro environment as we manage the business moving forward. As a result, our Q2 outlook anticipates consolidated revenue down by mid-single digits. On a segment basis, we expect experienced bookings growth of approximately 5%-8% and revenue growth of approximately 2%-5%. Macro headwinds and resulting impact of cancellations will most immediately impact Q2 revenue growth given the compounding effect of higher cancellations and lower demand. We expect growth to re-accelerate in the second half of the year.
We expect revenue growth at TheFork of approximately 10%-13%, which includes approximately 400 basis points of currency benefit based on recent exchange rates. In hotels and other, we expect declines of approximately 21%-24%, after which we expect to lap easier comparisons in the second half of the year. We expect Q2 consolidated adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 15%-17%. In experiences, we expect margins of approximately 12%-14%, approximately flat with last year. At TheFork, we expect margins of approximately 11%-13%, lower versus last year due to the aforementioned timing shift of marketing spend from Q1 to Q2. First half adjusted EBITDA margin is expected to be higher than last year by approximately 500 basis points. In hotels and other, we expect margins of approximately 22%-24%, lower versus last year.
Lower fixed costs more than offset by hotels free paid channel mix skewing more towards paid channels and increased media costs due to higher mix of off-platform revenue. For the full year, we've adjusted our outlook based on the impact these macro events are expected to have on the first half of the year, but have left the second half of the year unchanged given the level of uncertainty that still exists today. Updating for the impact of these macro events have on the first half alone would result in approximately flat consolidated revenue growth and approximately flat adjusted EBITDA margin for the full year. It's still early in the quarter, and the macro environment remains dynamic, but we continue to see strong traction in our experiences business, and our belief in the size of this opportunity remains unchanged.
We remain focused on extending our category leadership and accelerating revenue growth while expanding profitability. We will monitor developing trends and provide an update on our next call. With that, I'd like to turn the call back to the operator for Q&A.
Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question-and-answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question today comes from Richard Clarke from Bernstein. Your line is open.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Just you mentioned you're sort of tracking geopolitical risks through the back end of the year. Should we take that to mean, you know, the Middle East, you know, continued weak demand in Mexico, or are you also sort of beginning to see some signs of that geopolitical sort of macro risk coming into the U.S. as well? Because I know you mentioned domestic bookings of Viator were also down in March. Are you seeing some sort of macro weakness maybe beyond the sort of geopolitical evidence you're also seeing?
Thanks, Richard. I'll kick it off, and if Mike wants to add anything. No, we were referencing tracking the broad macro, which includes both, you know, how the consumer behaves, as well as geopolitical. Of course, we've all seen varying levels of disruption over the years, and every situation is different. One thing we know is that the travel consumer has always been resilient in the face of external disruptions. Travel always bounces back. We're confident of that. The question is when and how. What we wanna do is to focus on the things that we can control to enable travelers as they're looking to discover, plan, and book, and we think we're well-positioned to continue to serve them. We don't see why resilience won't be part of the equation.
There's uncertainty in the macro, and that's why we say we're gonna track it, and we're monitoring this, right? It's not just the Middle East conflict, it's its impact on, you know, energy prices, potential fuel shortages, capacity, and how that all plays out. Consumer confidence, we know, has been at a lower point, and it got worse in March when the conflict started.
We combine that with other factors like inflation and unemployment. What we know is that travelers are gonna go out and find a way to travel, even if they adjust to being closer to home and shorter stays. That's in fact what we actually saw, you know, even in March and into April as demand shifted from maybe long haul, cross-regional corridors into domestic and intra-regional corridors, which was more resilient. We saw, you know, booking windows contracting, length of stay dipping a bit. The U.S. traveler has been the most resilient on a relative basis, really across the board. We're watching, you know, what happens with long-haul travel, how domestic share increases. Of course, we've got great supply as domestic is more of a priority.
We will watch that and adjust accordingly. We feel, you know, that there will be build back through Q2. Again, it's hard to predict the back half of the year. We are confident that in the medium to long term, travelers are gonna bounce back.
Oh, thank you for your question. Our next question is from Naved Khan with B. Riley Securities. Your line is open.
Great. Thank you very much. Just a couple of questions from me. One on the-- I think, in your prepared commentary, you said that more than half the bookings are from new bookers. When do we-- when should we start to see sort of the older cohorts start to layer in and account for a bigger chunk of your bookings? Maybe just on the cancellations and sort of you spoke about, you know, macro impact. Can you maybe-- it seems like there are a few things going on, right? You mentioned Hawaii, you mentioned Mexico, and obviously there's the conflict in West Asia.
maybe can you just isolate for us the impact from West Asia and how big was that versus the others? I think in total, I think, like you said, 300 basis point of impact, but just kind of parse it out for us. Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah. Let me parse this a little bit, Naved. I, you know, I think the key point that we're saying around, you know, new bookers, is important. I think Matt's commentary, that was really around the supply piece and really how we think about supply as strategic supply and how we use that to attract new bookers. That, that's kind of inherent in our formula, how we acquire. Yeah, these, you know, these booker cohorts will grow over time, and this is the formula of how we think about a new acquisition booking, and, you know, a piece of that important aspect of new acquisition. As it relates to your cancel rate question, I would say a couple things.
You know, as you pointed out, the macro impact on bookings growth was about 3 points in Q1, 4 points on the revenue, bigger on revenue because of the cancel impact. The cancel impact in Q1 is probably a little bit greater because we saw a lot of those cancels in March. You know, for us, we had, you know, 2 kind of, as Matt Goldberg said in the first question, 2 very distinct events. We had the Mid East event, also these unique events to us, which is really Mexico and Hawaii. You know, Mexico and Hawaii are meaningful destination geos for us. You know, each in, kind of, the mid-single digits or greater. When we think about impacts, that has a meaningful impact.
You know, I think they will normalize over time because these are more unique events in themselves. Again, they are important to us.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question is from Doug Anmuth from J.P. Morgan. Your line is open.
Great. This is Dai on for Doug. Thanks for taking the questions. I have 2. The first one on AI LLM traffic. I know you guys said you're still early and small, but you also noted higher conversion. What do you believe is driving that uplift, and what other near-term behavioral differences are you seeing versus traditional channels? Secondly, in the release, Mike, you talked about disciplined investments. Could you talk about what that means for the experiences segment? How are you prioritizing incremental dollars across marketing versus product versus data or AI in experiences? What are the 1 or 2 internal milestones you'll be using to judge the success in 2026? Thank you.
Thanks. I'll take the first, and Mike will take the second. You know, on AI first traffic, we are seeing that it is relatively small. It's a relatively small % of the mix. It's growing quickly, and these are relatively high intent because of the way that conversational search works, right? You wind up getting answers to a variety of questions and then being potentially interested in what you've learned to go and book.
The challenge, of course, with these sources and, you know, our strategy has been to weave this AI product development through our own products and services to drive the flywheel and improve, you know, the metrics that I described in my opening remarks, and also to begin to connect that intent with the ability to book. When you think about these sources coming in, that is the biggest gap, is that intent and the work that's happening, and people experimenting with a new way of discovering and planning to booking, which is lagging.
We think that, to bridge that gap is really all about the data, the content, the trust, and the inventory, which we feel really good about our position for experiences and beyond, to provide that trust layer, that human judgment to bridge that gap. We recognize it's early innings. We think it's exciting. We spend a lot of time thinking about GEO and how our teams can adjust, all the work we've always done to drive this AI-first traffic. That's, that's going well, and we think we have a lot of capabilities there. It's small but high intent, and we see it as a meaningful opportunity ahead.
Yeah. On the experiences investment question, I would say when we look at investment experiences, we look at it across all phases of the flywheel, so to speak, product supply and demand. On the product side, as you can imagine, it's all things of how you drive conversion rates. That's the key KPI that we use to manage and measure effectiveness of the investment there. That's across all aspects of the storefront, this on all the surfaces. On the supply side, this is what Matt touched upon in his prepared remarks, it's not just adding the most supply or more supply, it's adding strategic supply, the key word is strategic. That means, is it adding to the flywheel? Is it adding to conversion rate?
Is it driving incremental bookings for us? That's the key KPI that we're using to measure the incrementality of that supply driving incremental bookings. On the demand side, it's really around how we have organized ourselves, you know, starting last year, combining the teams, managing the 2 points of sale in a unified, coordinated way. How are we using those investments in tooling, channel diversification to drive growth and ROI. There's trade-offs in that, obviously. Giving ourselves the position to make those trade-off choices around growth and profitability.
Thank you for your question. One moment. Our next question is from Nafeesa Gupta of BofA Securities. Your line is open.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. On the experiences outlook revenue growth of 2%-5%, building in almost like a 5-point detail versus 1st quarter, is that mostly on Middle East now? Like, is that 5-point total in Middle East versus 3-point of the 1st quarter headwind? Is there any impact of Mexico and Hawaii in that? My 2nd question, on TheFork, could you maybe tell us a little bit where the process stands today and whether a transaction is still an active priority? In case that comes through, how would you prioritize the use of proceeds? Thank you.
Great. I'll take the first question, you know, Matt can take the second one. On the Experiences guide for Q2, revenue guide for Q2, the base assumption is that we build up through the quarter, and then as we exit the quarter, to get back to a more normalized levels. Implicit in that guide is the fact that we would continue to have impact in the business, Mexico, Hawaii, and broader Middle East during that quarter. The broader Middle East conflict would probably be the larger of those three impacts, yet assumption would be we'd gradually have recovery as we move through the quarter. The impact, you know, as we said, it's 4 points in Q1. You can't really size the impact in Q2.
Obviously, if you look back to what our previous expectations would be, it would be much higher than 4 points, impact in Q2, for sure.
Yeah. On the second question related to TheFork, in our strategic pivot last year, we said we'd focus on experiences and simplify our portfolio. Of course, we also announced that we're conducting an ongoing portfolio review, and we've made good progress to date. Of course, TheFork is a great asset. It's performing well. It has a really bright future. We also recognize we don't have to own it to deliver on our strategy. We can have a commercial relationship. We are making good progress, and of course, we'll provide an update if and when we have something definitive to announce.
As it relates to proceeds, if we were had additional cash, you know, as an outcome of that process, we would have flexibility and choices to make about expanding our capacity for capital return to shareholders, whether that be additional share repurchases or to pare back debt. We'd also have an opportunity to invest further in our experiences strategy. We could see both organic and inorganic opportunities there. Given, you know, our free cash flow profile is healthy, it gives us the flexibility to focus on both.
Thank you.
Thank you for your question. Our next question is from Brian Pitz with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Thanks for the questions. Maybe two quick ones. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on your strategy for monetizing your proprietary data, the over 1 billion reviews through collaborations with the major AI platforms. Separately, maybe on Viator, what trends are you seeing in terms of repeat booking behavior and long-term customer retention on that asset? Thank you.
Thanks, Brian. I'll take the first and maybe Mike will break down the second. We're excited about our partnership discussions with AI. You know, last year, we really established a very strong foundation to learn, you know, what partners wanted from us, and we did that across a set of partners to learn. Of course, there was value exchange there, and I think I've said in the past that, you know, it was meaningful and growing. We, you know, we signed deals with OpenAI, putting our all three of our brands, Viator, Tripadvisor in TheFork apps and ChatGPT through product integration there. We experimented around Agentic. We got a licensing deal. You know, we did an early deal with Perplexity around AI first search to learn there.
Of course, you know, Amazon and Microsoft and others, and now Anthropic, which we are excited to get working with. Each one of these relationships comes with value, and it also comes with a learning agenda, and we are in conversations about how we can deepen and scale because we believe we have many of the things that they are looking for. Here's what we've learned. Our data is valuable, and it's incremental. We haven't. You know, we block if we don't have a relationship, and as we continue to add, the freshest material has to come through one of these transactions. The data's structured, and it helps address customer problems through judgment and real traveler insight.
We bring all of that along with our knowledge of the category, and there's a real opportunity to go further and think about, would we be willing to allow some of these partners to train with our data? Because that hasn't been a part of our relationship in the past. We are looking at different business models that could make sense and different objective functions. We've got good conversations going. We think we can do something better and bigger with one or more of these. You know, that conversation is a big opportunity because of the gap I described between the number of travelers who are experimenting with AI and the small number who actually book with AI.
We think that gap gets closed by bringing a judgment layer and trust that comes from our brand, content and data at scale, going deep. We're excited about the conversations. We continue to execute. Of course, we'll update as we go further.
Brian. On the second point, while we didn't really call it out specifically in prepared remarks on the repeat behavior, it is still a very fundamental point of how we think about margin building for our long-term margin profile. You know, our repeat cohorts are growing faster than the average, which has been the case for some time. Our retention rates remain very consistent, and so we're very pleased with the continued steady progress here. As I said, you know, these cohorts take time to build, but are a key underpinning to our long-term margin target.
Great. Thank you so much.
Thanks, Brian.
Thank you. Our next question is from Tom White with D.A. Davidson & Co. Your line is open.
Hey, this is Wyatt on for Tom. Thanks for taking the question. I've got one on AI. With one of the major LLMs now allowing advertisers, and I realize it's still early, but how do you think about that channel going forward versus the existing ad channels? Can you share any early takeaways on that? Thanks.
We're testing with that party that you described. It's early, but we were a launch test partner so that we could really understand it. The volume isn't particularly high, but we do think it could be an interesting channel because there's a great amount of intent through those channels that I mentioned earlier. It makes it interesting for us. We think of it as an expanse of that platform for the future for those who choose to do it that way, and we think we can capture the intent now. We'll continue to test and scale as we would with any other high potential platform.
For those who aren't choosing to put advertising on their platform, we think that there's a real opportunity to monetize by bringing our market leading experiences inventory into these channels and really drive both volume of demand and conversion, given the intent. We think there are multiple ways to win. We think we're well set up to do that.
Got it. Thank you.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. One moment, please. I'm showing no other questions at this time. I would now like to turn it back to Matt Goldberg for closing remarks.
Thanks for joining us this morning. Before closing out, I wanna briefly welcome our newest board members, Andrew Cates and Dhiren Fonseca, who joined the board late in the first quarter. Andrew and Dhiren each bring energy, experience, and insights from both inside and out of the travel sector that I have no doubt will be valuable ahead. We're excited to execute through peak travel season to capture demand and deliver on our strategy, we look forward to our next up-update. Thank you all.
Goodbye. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. You may now disconnect.