Good day, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, welcome to trivago Q4 earnings conference call 2019. At this time, all participants are in listen- only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be the question- and- answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone keypad. I must advise you the call is being recorded today, Wednesday, the February 12th, 2020. We are pleased to be joined on the call today by Axel Hefer, trivago CEO and Managing Director, Matthias Tillmann, trivago's CFO. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, reflects management's views as of today, February 12th, 2020 only. trivago does not undertake any obligation to update or revise this information.
As always, some of the statements made on today's call are forward-looking, typically preceded by words such as "we expect," "we believe," "we anticipate," or similar statements. Please refer to the Q4 operating and financial review and the company's other filings with SEC for information about factors which could cause trivago's actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. You will find reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures discussed today in trivago's operating and financial review, which is posted on the company's IR website at ir.trivago.com. You are encouraged to periodically visit trivago's investor relations site for important content. Finally, unless otherwise stated, all comparisons on this call will be against results for the comparable period of 2018. With that, let me turn the call over to Axel. Please go ahead.
Welcome to our Q4 earnings call. As you might have noticed, we have changed the format of our release and sent out a shareholder letter yesterday covering the key developments of the business and the market. We are going straight to our Q&A. Operator, we are ready to take the first question.
The first-
Operator, can we take the first question, please?
The first question comes from line of Naved Khan. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks a lot. Maybe a couple of questions. I think in your prepared remarks, Axel, you talked about running large-scale tests in the H1 . Can you maybe give some color on what kind of test these might be? What kind of geos would they cover? Then I have some follow-ups.
Sure. Hi, Naved. Thanks for asking the question. I hope you can understand that we cannot give more details here beyond what we have disclosed already. I would say is this, we are currently running larger incrementality tests in certain performance marketing channels, and the aim of that is to help us to really understand better where we are spending efficiently and at the level that is right for us, and sustainable in the long run. At this point, we cannot give more details than what we have disclosed already.
Got it. Maybe a few clarifications. On the coronavirus, obviously, it seems like the situation is pretty fluid, but maybe, can you share some color on maybe the last few weeks, what you might have seen in volumes maybe dropping off or what is it that you're seeing the most? Maybe just as it regards your exposure to Asia, what markets are you most exposed to? On the guide, maybe, on the H1 you said you expect positive EBITDA. Should we expect EBITDA to grow year-on-year, or is that not necessarily the case?
Yeah. On your first question, as you know, generally speaking, it is very hard for us to quantify what the exact impact of the coronavirus is. We do see a drop in revenue, specifically in Asian Pacific countries, so that's the region that is most affected. Again, it is very hard for us or anyone also to forecast how this will develop. We looked back what other data points are out there, and obviously SARS is one, but it can play out very differently. We have not been around as a company back then. At this point, it's too early to say what the impact will be. As I said, we do see softer business in those markets and revenues are down. How big the actual impact is a bit hard to tell. On your second question, on guidance.
Yes, we said that H1 will be positive. If you look at H1 2019, we had an EBITDA of around EUR 40 million. Saying it's positive means clearly that is down year-over-year. As we also said, our ambition is still for the full year to increase slightly our EBITDA. That's our focus. H1 will be down year-over-year, but positive.
Great. Thank you.
Thanks. Next question, please.
Thank you. The next question comes from line of Brian Fitzgerald. Please ask your question.
Thanks, guys. In the letter, you mentioned leveraging some of the learnings from your brand campaigns in the Americas. What do you see working there? Is it some of the recent Mr. trivago creative? Anything else you can call out? With the shift in messaging towards this value prop of price comparison, how has that been resonating through, and what are you seeing in terms of impact to traffic and conversion? Thanks.
Thanks, Brian. In Americas, we really started to focus more on our key value proposition early last year, in Q2. That's when we tested a slightly more focused message. Then we rolled that out over our peak season in Q3, and there we have seen very positive results. If you watch those commercials, they are still with the Mr. trivago, so in the same concept. I would say, the key difference is that we are just more focusing and trying to basically show what our key value proposition is. How we compare. As we have said before, given the success, we are planning to adopt those also for other regions, and we have actually started early this year. Similar spots are running right now in Europe and in rest of the world.
At this point, it's a bit too early to tell if they're equally successful. The plan is really to get the insight and data now to be ready for the peak season in Q3.
Great. I had one other one that was on the ad mix, in terms of the market dynamics and ad spend, and related party revenue mix on the slide in the deck. By the way, thank you for providing this beforehand. Did Booking step on the gas? Did Expedia pull back, or did everyone pull back and Expedia pull back more? Any color you can give us on just how that as a bucket is trending?
Yeah, sure. Indeed, the mix has changed. Expedia has reduced the overall relevance for our business and Booking has gone up. We, as in the past, don't comment and cannot really comment on individual advertisers and their behavior in the marketplace. The overall result on our revenue mix is exactly what you're describing.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question come from line of James Lee. Please ask your question.
Yeah. Thanks for taking my question. Just want to update, follow- up on the question regarding Booking.com and the OTA spending, and maybe in the context where you talk about potentially double-digit revenue decline in EU in the H1 of 2020. Last quarter, you guys mentioned that you reversed the landing page assessment, and you also did some testing that seemed promising. Maybe help us reconcile your statement on EU versus some of the positive development that you've seen with OTA advertisers. Also my second question is regarding a statement that you made in the shareholder letter, where you talk about significant changes, with your approach with advertisers that include recalibration of marketing mix, changes in marketplace, and introducing alternative revenue stream. If you can elaborate those three elements, please. Thanks.
Okay. Thank you for the question. I think question one and two are related. Just to clarify the comment in the letter. We are conducting a very significant test in the H1 of the year that are aiming to optimize and recalibrate our performance marketing spend. The expected impact of that on developed Europe , just of that optimization alone, may be double- digit. That's how the two questions I think are related. That is just the impact of the testing, in addition to the underlying business performance. The results of the test obviously are very difficult to forecast, but the aim of these tests is to calibrate the spend to an optimal level. Coming to your third question, alternative revenue streams.
We are running various tests to test whether other revenue streams than our traditional CPC-based revenue are accretive to the overall business. As with any test, it's difficult obviously to share too much insight because they are tests as they have still uncertainty. One that I can share is that one of the revenue streams that we are looking into is sponsored listings. We are, as of today, as far as I know, one of the very, very few remaining players in the industry that does not offer the opportunity to really sponsor a listing and significantly boost a listing. There is significant demand for that product coming from our advertisers. It's a very frequent request. We've started to build infrastructure to really test this concept a couple of months ago and are testing it as of today as we speak.
That is a potentially promising alternative revenue stream, but there are also others that we look into. Even with a sponsored listing, just to be very clear, if we are not satisfied with the test results, we will not proceed. We continue to stay very focused on our test-and-learn approach. We are testing various things in parallel, and we'll adapt and fine-tune our strategic direction, as I said in the letter, as we see the results.
Okay. Just to clarify your statement about declining on the EU. That headwind is specifically to the large-scale testing you have on performance advertising. As far as the testing that you did with some of the OTA advertisers, including Booking.com, that continued to be positive. Is that fair to say?
What I said is that the potential double-digit impact is just the impact of the test. We did not comment specifically on the underlying business performance. There is a headwind overall through the coronavirus, clearly. Much, much stronger than Asia Pacific than in other markets, but you do see it to a certain extent in other markets as well. There is some general softness in Europe and the rest of the world overall. Yeah. Those are basically the three ingredients that you need to put together to come up with an estimate of the trajectory in the region.
Got it. Thanks.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Shyam Patil. Please ask your question.
Thanks. It's Ryan on for Shyam. Just wanted to ask about your alternative accommodation strategy in 2020, and how material that can be to the business. Secondly, you talked about Google a little bit in the letter. How do you view the role of metasearch going forward, given Google's recent initiatives? Thanks.
On alternative accommodation, the focus of last year has really been to increase the overall availability, and also to build relationships with all the key players in the market. Whereas this year, the focus is on really improving the product. What you can expect to see is more and more product features that are specifically designed for alternative accommodation and a better integration of alternative accommodation into our standard flow. There, we've got a nice pipeline of things that we are working on. In terms of financial impact, I don't think it's fair to say that this will have a huge impact on this year.
This is more a strategic direction of ours, where we do believe that the increasing hybrid user behavior and the increasingly hybrid inventories that are out there will lead to a significant growth of demand for a product that is comparing across different accommodation types. These kinds of things don't happen from one day to the other. Those are more trends that evolve over years. We do believe that we are currently leading in terms of offering a tool in that direction, and we want to continue to lead that development. It is more a strategic direction that we do think will be a big differentiator in the future.
Google?
Oh, sorry. Your second question on Google. Yeah, in terms of product changes, product development, there are obviously continuous changes in the product. We don't see a significant change there. We see the dynamic pretty much stable. What is the future of metasearch? We continue to believe that there is a pretty significant user segment that is requiring a metasearch product because they are not decided and their travel frequency is moderate. We do think that by offering a focused and specialized product, we have an edge over a generalist. On the other hand, it's also fair to say that by competing with a player that has a very large share of users starting every single journey on the platform, that is a key advantage. It will be a tough competition going forward.
We do believe by specializing and developing a tailored product just specifically for accommodation search, we will continue to have an edge from a user value perspective.
Thanks.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth. Please ask your question.
Hi, this is Dae for Doug. Thanks for taking my questions. I had two. The first one's around privacy-focused regulatory and platform changes that limit targetability has been a focus lately. I'm just curious to hear if you're seeing any changes in your ability to target users in your marketing channels. Secondly, you talked about large-scale testing affecting Developed Europe revenue and coronavirus in the rest of the world. Just wondering what you're seeing in terms of, or what you're expecting from Americas since that region doesn't seem to have the kind of issues that you have in Developed Europe and the rest of the world.
Yeah. Thanks, Dae. On your first question, I guess you're referring to the litigation in Australia. There the court provided new guidance on how results of comparison sites like trivago and others should be displayed in Australia. We've been working to understand the implications of this decision on our website design and its overall impact on the Australian travel industry and the way websites are to be designed in Australia. Obviously, we plan to keep operating an Australian website, and we will take steps to comply with the requirements communicated in the decision. How it relates to other jurisdictions, there-
The only thing I would say is part of the court's opinion included views that differed significantly from those of other national regulators that we have worked with. That being said, we expect to continue to see an increasing regulatory scrutiny on the consumer-facing business practices of providers of online travel search and booking services. Your second question was on the large-scale test in Europe. You want to know if we plan anything similar in other regions as well, or what was your question? Can you say again?
Just around what you're expecting from Americas in the H1 , given you're not planning a large-scale test there, or Wuhan coronavirus impact should be somewhat limited in that region. Do you expect growth there?
Yeah, thanks. No, that is correct. If you look at the two big impacts for Q1 and potentially beyond, the large-scale test is so far limited to developed Europe, there we do not plan to do that anytime soon in Americas or other regions. Coronavirus mostly affects countries in rest of the world. There we see a very limited impact on Americas. If you look at Q3 and Q4 of last year, you already saw that Americas was outperforming. That is a trend that continues so far in 2020. Obviously, the two impacts support that direction.
Got it. Thank you.
Thanks. Next question, please.
Thank you. The next question come from line of Lloyd Walmsley. Please ask a question.
Thanks. Two, if I can. First, just going back to thinking about monetizing sponsored listings. How do you guys feel about exit media? Is that something you're investigating as well? What are the key things you're looking to determine as to whether to make these tests permanent? Secondly, I guess at the time of the IPO, you always show the cheapest booking option at the top under each hotel, and it was the hotel sort order that was determined by pricing. I guess that changed. When did that change, and what are the key drivers of the algorithm for hotel sort at this point?
Okay. Thanks, Lloyd. On sponsored listings and other alternative revenue streams, if you look at the history of trivago and also the product as it stands today, it is extremely lean, extremely clean, and that is what our users appreciate. For any other revenue stream, the challenge is to increase the revenue per user, at the same time, not impacting the value proposition and the look and feel of the product. The smoother and the more seamless an alternative revenue stream can be integrated into the existing product, and the less intrusive it is, the more likely it is to be permanent. That is one of the key trade-offs that we are looking at for any of these revenue streams. Having said that's why I actually picked out sponsored listings.
That is probably of all the different options that we are thinking about, one that is most natural, if you look at competitors' products, and is very non-intrusive to the overall user experience, and even positive in a lot of cases. That's the key trade-off. Any more detail is very difficult to give, but that's the basic idea that we are testing and where we are balancing the different data points against each other. On the algorithm, I cannot share with you exact details, when exactly we are changing what, because it's obviously very sensitive and also from a competitive perspective topic. We have continuously changed our algorithm, so it's really evolving, and we tend to test, obviously, all changes that we are doing.
We do think that the more recent design changes that we have rolled out are really industry-leading in terms of transparency, and also promoting the core value proposition of ours, which is comparison, and that the design is better than what we have used in the more recent past.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Brian Nowak. Please ask the question.
Thanks for taking my question. I have two. The first one, it's a little bit going back to Lloyd's question of sort of the IPO versus where we are now. I guess, actually, I'd be curious to hear your perspective as you look back over the last few years on user growth. Talk to us about some of the biggest learnings you have on what has worked well in driving users and where you still face challenges in bringing more users to the platform. As you look over the course of the next year to two, what do you think is the key to really driving faster, sustained user growth over the next couple of years? The second one, just to get a little more into the 2020 guide so we can understand the puts and takes.
Talk to us about the expected total spend on marketing and advertising internally. Is that directionally going to be up, down, stable? How are you thinking about marketing investment through the 2020 year?
Yeah, sure. What has worked well in attracting users, and what hasn't? That's a very interesting question. I think if we just don't go back to the IPO, but even a bit further, the core differentiator that we've had in the market was always our TV advertisement. By going very, very early, very aggressively into TV advertisements, I think we had a unique opportunity to build a brand, even as a relatively speaking, small player, with a unique positioning. I continue to believe that that is really absolute core of our marketing communication. When you then look at the times of really rapid growth, we saw a big opportunity and also significantly invested into performance marketing. Since the IPO, and we've talked about this many times, we have seen this traffic mix of roughly 50/50, as optimal.
To be perfectly honest there, one of the reasons why we are now conducting these tests is that we are not sure that in the current market environment, this mix is still the right mix. We want to challenge our view there and see whether it is actually better to change that mix going forward. If we wouldn't have a hypothesis there, obviously we wouldn't do a large-scale test. We do think there is a good chance that the 50/50 is not the right approach for the future. Again, as on a lot of the other points that we've discussed, we are very test and learn-driven. We will only do things where we see positive results from our test. It is too early to be very, very certain about the direction, but we have a clear hypothesis there.
Yeah. Then on your second question on guidance. We've decided to not give specific guidance at this point. The reason being that it is quite volatile right now, and we are running certain tests that make it very difficult also for us because the results will depend on the outcome of those tests. Specifically to ad spend, the large-scale tests we are running in Europe, has an impact, obviously, on the level of our ad spend, and it's too early to tell what the right level will be. Depending on the outcome, it could change. In addition to that, with the situation in Asia right now with the coronavirus, obviously there you see a drop in business volume. We started to adjust our spend levels.
Depending on how this develops, we could ramp up quickly again or spend limited advertising euros in that region. That's also a bit hard to tell. What I can say is that revenue will be down, and we believe that RPQR, so Revenue per Qualified Referral, will be broadly flat, including a positive mix shift towards higher RPQR countries. As we mentioned in the shareholder letter and discussed earlier, we expect EBITDA to be positive in the H1 , and our ambition is still to increase the full-year EBITDA year-over-year.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Thank you, Brian.
Thank you. The next question come from line of Tom White. Please ask your question.
Great. Thanks for taking my question. I apologize if I missed this, but could you guys comment on any impact from the bid modifiers that you rolled out in the back half of last year to either the quarter or how their impact may be contemplated in the outlook? Also curious if the outlook presumes that you guys roll out any additional meaningful bid modifiers for advertisers. Thanks.
Absolutely. On the roll out of the bid modifiers, we have to say that the adjustment of all market participants is taking longer than what we anticipated. We still do think that there is some level of not optimal bidding going on with certain advertisers. Our expectation is that until mid of the year at the latest, that will have been optimized by everybody, and we are working closely with everybody who needs our support there. Having said that doesn't mean that there are not additional dimensions and optimizations regarding bid modifiers that are positive from our perspective and that are worth rolling out.
We are looking into some other modifications to make the auction even more granular and allow for more targeted bidding, which is something that we do believe is in particular in the market environment where the overall growth is coming down, becoming more and more important. To summarize, there is still some adjustment going on, and we are planning to make further changes, but we will, of course, consider the pace of adaptation and adjustment, and we don't want to rush changes.
Thank you.
Thank you. Dear participants, once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone keypad. Dear speaker, there are no further questions at this time. Please continue.
Many thanks for joining our Q4 earnings call. Just to summarize, the times are rough. We do have a clear plan, and we are focused on what we can control. Thanks again, and talk to you next quarter.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.