You have joined the meeting as an attendee and will be muted throughout the meeting. Every participant is in a listen-only mode. Viewing the presentation and questions can be asked following the presentation. Furthermore, please note this call will not be recorded. We are pleased to be joined on this call today by Johannes Thomas, Trivago CEO and Managing Director, and Robin Harries, Trivago CFO and Managing Director. The information presented by management today, including responses to your questions, reflects management views as of today, Monday, February 24th. 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 Trivago's filings with the SEC for information about factors which could cause Trivago's actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. You will find reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures discussed today in Trivago's operating and financial review, which is posted on Trivago's investor relations website, ir.trivago.com. As always, you are encouraged to regularly visit Trivago's investor relations website for important content. Finally, unless otherwise stated, all comparisons on this call will be against results for the comparable period. Having said this, let me hand over to Johannes and Robin.
Yeah, hi everybody. Thanks a lot for joining today. I think there are good reasons and deep insights we want to share with you today. I think Trivago is a big opportunity in a big attractive market. We have done a lot of groundwork and are happy to share more about that. Before we go into the presentation, I would like to share a bit about us as a new leadership team. We joined in Q2 2023. Starting with myself, I'm Johannes Thomas, CEO of Trivago. I have spent a decade at Trivago before the pandemic. I've spent a lot of effort into building teams in marketing, in product, in partnerships, in the B2B space, in tech. I've been part of the journey of building Trivago from below 100 people to more than 1,500 people. I've been part of the management, bringing the company to IPO.
During the pandemic, my contract has run out. We had consolidated the company after a near-death experience, and that was a good point for me to leave as well. At the beginning of 2023, one of the founders and big shareholders of Trivago called me and asked, "Would you consider coming back to Trivago? Would you consider coming back with Trivago with a chance to build a new leadership team and bring back some of the people that have built Trivago in the first place?" Very mindfully, Robin, together with Jasmine, our CMO today, Andrej, our CPO and CTO today, we've been spending time together. How do we look at travel? How do we look at Trivago? We made the decision to come back in Q2 2023, Robin, a little bit later.
I think what we brought back to the company was, what is the blueprint that had made Trivago successful? A very data-driven approach, entrepreneurial approach, rapid learning, fast execution in the center of our doing. I think in the course of the presentation, we will highlight a few things that substantiate what we have been doing in rebuilding the company. We have really made more than almost two years now of groundwork behind us. We have invested into long-term initiatives. I think we are now seeing fruits. We have seen underlying trajectory that was very positive. Every quarter, we reported on it, what happened under the roof. We have now, last quarter, started seeing growth. The underlying trends are hitting our top line. We also highlighted this year, we expect strong, at least high single-digit growth. We see strong double-digit growth in Q1.
We really are at a turning point where we have worked very hard on. I think overall, Trivago is extremely well positioned. It's one of the biggest markets that exists, EUR 1.5 trillion in size. The hotel market of travel, the segment, is more than EUR 5 billion in size. Our market share there is less than 1%, while we have one of the biggest brands in the world. Trivago is well known in North America, South America, in major travel markets in Europe, Turkey, into the Asian region, where Japan is one of our biggest markets as a company, U.S. being the biggest market for Trivago. Really, an international company well positioned in terms of brand. You all know the cost pressure that has hit consumers over the last years. Travel has become very expensive. People say apart from security, price is the biggest struggle around travel.
We deliver on price. We help people save time and money. People can save up to 40% with us. A proposition that we think is highly relevant. We see great deals on the market, and we make them easily accessible for consumers. We always get the question, do we invest into growth, or do we focus on profitability? If you look top line, we are much smaller than where we have been before the pandemic. We have strong efforts to regain size, as it is important in travel to have a good size in a big market. As long as we see high elasticity in our marketing, we will continue to invest into growth and then gradually turn into more profitability over time. That is maybe as a starting outlining Trivago. Us as a leadership team, we are very excited that we came back mid-2023.
We are very excited about what we are now seeing in terms of numbers and the trajectory. We think we can continue to demonstrate over the next couple of quarters. With that, I would suggest we jump into the slides, and Robin kicks off with a general overview of the business. I will pick up later and share more about the strategy.
Hi, I'm Robin. I'm the CFO of Trivago. I'm going to talk you through our investor presentation, which is also uploaded in our investor relations section. Okay, disclaimer. First of all, here are some numbers to our Q4. As you can see on the left-hand side in Q4, we had a top-line revenue growth of 3%. This is an important step for us because this is the first time that we can show revenue growth since Q1 2023. We believe that this is a turning point for our business. We were also happy about the bottom line. We had EUR 11.1 million adjusted EBITDA, which is a margin of 11.7%. In 2024, we started initiatives that are still ongoing, and we believe that we are on the right track. Johannes just mentioned it.
For the outlook for the full year, we expect at least high single-digit revenue growth and at least a break-even adjusted EBITDA bottom line. The start into the year was very strong. In January, we had strong double-digit revenue growth in all three segments, also in all marketing channels. This was a very strong start. This was stronger than expected in terms of top line and bottom line. The strategic initiatives that help us to fulfill our strategy are, for example, brand revenue, our brand marketing. Trivago became big in the past through aggressive brand marketing campaigns. In, for example, 2017, we had TV campaigns running in 50 countries at the same time. We started relatively early, and I think it was 2019. We developed internal tools that allowed us to scale TV advertising and brand marketing like other companies scale performance marketing.
We really look at direct response. We look at the spot performance. We look at brand after-effects. That helped us to grow very strong in the past. We started it again in the end of 2023. Over the course of last year, we rolled out in over 20 countries. Jürgen Klopp became one of our presenters. At the moment, we have TV campaigns running with him, for example, in the U.S., in Canada, in the U.K. Brand marketing was the revenue driver number one in the past, and it is still one of our revenue drivers. We are going to further scale it. Besides the marketing push, it is also important to further improve the product.
We have made significant improvements here in terms of user experience, in terms of conversion rates, and in terms of the quality per lead that we deliver to our partners, to our advertisers, which are direct hotels, hotel chains, or online travel agencies. We believe that the product today is stronger than ever. We also use a wide range of AI within our company. For example, our TV spots in the past, we had TV campaigns localized in over 30 countries. We had localized versions, for example, in Korea, in India, in China, and also in most of the countries. Today, we have one presenter or just a few presenters. We use AI to do the lip sync so that we only have one presenter. This costs us a lot of time and a lot of money.
Besides this, we just introduced our AI Smart Search, where users can go to our website and then search not only for a destination, but really can type in specific search requests. We also have our, when you go to our product, we show the fully AI-Generated Hotel Highlights, where we provide more information about the hotels. Besides this, there are many, many tools that our employees use frequently. We believe that we have been cultivating a performance culture and that we are very focused on delivering results and that we are on a very good track here. I think this can be also seen in our ambitious outlook that we want to outgrow the market and achieve at least high single-digit growth this year and then double-digit growth in the midterm. Trivago is a hotel price comparison, a hotel search.
We have listed over 5 million accommodations, which are hotels and alternative accommodations. We are in over 50 countries. We have over 50 localized websites and apps. We have around 600 employees. We deliver many, many visits to our partners. We generated last year EUR 461 million and generated EUR 10.2 million adjusted EBITDA. On the left-hand side, you can see markets where we have strong unaided brand awareness. Trivago is a global brand. It is one of the best-known travel brands in the world. We think that we have everything that we need to further scale Trivago and to come back to success and to strong growth. Here you can see an overview about the total revenues from the past. We were growing very strong until 2017, where we reached over EUR 1 billion in revenues.
In 2018, 2019, there were some marketplace adjustments on our marketplace where advertisers did down a little bit and went more for profitability. Overall, when we look at 2019, we generated over EUR 800 million revenues. Of course, COVID hit Trivago. The company went into survival mode. Directly after COVID, we kindly missed a little bit the opportunity to scale brand marketing investments again. Since the new management is back or the old new management is back, we have been starting this since the end of 2023 and scaling this. We believe that there is a lot of potential to come back to old revenue levels. When you look into the graph, you can see 2024 was EUR 461 million and 2019 was over EUR 800 million. On the right-hand side, you can see our global distribution of referred revenue.
Yeah, you can see that we are a truly global business. Developed Europe and Americas are almost same size, but also the rest of the world, 20%. Our strongest market is not Germany. It's the U.S., followed by the European market. As Johannes mentioned, Japan is also one of our top markets. As I said, we believe there is potential to increase the revenues, but we also think there might be potential in the stock price. When we went public, the stock price was $55. This was in 2016. Our market cap was over $ 3 billion. One year later, we reached our all-time high. The stock price was at around $120, and we had a market cap of over $ 8 billion.
In the end of November last year, we had a stock price of $1.62 and a market cap of around EUR 110 million, which was the cash that we had in our bank account. In the end of the year, the stock increased a little bit. After the last earnings call, we saw a further increase. At the moment, we are slightly before EUR 400 million. If you consider that we said that we had over EUR 130 million cash in our bank account in our last earnings call, the market or the enterprise value is still very low. Our investment highlights we are in a very attractive market. The travel market is huge. It's growing. You still see shifts from the offline segment into the online segment. Last year was an all-time high. This year, nice growth is expected.
We believe that we have a highly relevant product. It's stronger than ever. Our users can save up to 40% if they come to Trivago, compare prices. We see that we have more deals out there than pre-COVID. We see that also small advertisers really have good deals, and we compare many, many hotels from many, many partners worldwide. We are a leading global brand, leading travel global brand in the most important core markets except China. As I've shown you, we believe that there's nice profit potential and also a nice growth trajectory ahead of us. We believe that we already demonstrated that we know what we have to do and that we reach a turning point, I think, was one step into the right direction. When you look at Trivago, you have travelers that want to book a hotel.
You have some that go directly to the hotel chains. You have some that go through OTAs, online travel agencies like Booking.com, Trip.com, Expedia. You have some that go to Google, and you have some that go to us. We believe that we are very well positioned through our massive brand marketing. We reach out to users when they have a need. They come to Trivago, they search for hotels, and then we forward them to the OTAs or directly the hotels. We also work together with the hotel chains. The market, as I said, is huge. We believe that the market opportunity is a $500 billion market. That is the hotel segment. I think it is a very interesting segment, the second biggest in the entire travel market. When you look at research, you see that price and value is always super important for users.
When users, our customers, book a hotel, they want to get value for the money. They want to compare deals. They compare deals. They want to really get good prices. This is actually what Trivago is about. You go to Trivago, you search for a hotel, and we show you the different rates that are out there, and you have the chance to really get a great deal. Trivago is a marketplace which brings together demand and supply. Demand, we do a lot of marketing activities. We do brand marketing. We do performance marketing. There are not many companies out there that have spent so much brand marketing like Trivago for a single product. We believe that the key to success is brand marketing. Of course, we also do performance marketing like Google display marketing. The biggest value we see is in brand marketing.
This helps us to bring traffic to the website now and also to create a brand baseline and increase the brand baseline, which helps to build the brand. If you have a strong product and you reach users and they come to your website, they experience the product, they like it, they come back over and over again, and this is actually the baseline. Therefore, our focus is on building the baseline, on investing into brand marketing. We have our product, which we're continuously improving. We can see this in the conversion rates. If users click on the website, on the partners, on the prices, we deliver them to our partners, which are all the big brands like Expedia, Booking.com, Priceline.com, but also many regional and local players. We also work together with the big hotel chains like Hilton, Marriott.
We also have our own booking funnels. This is Trivago Book and Go. For example, if you go on Trivago.com, the U.S. platform, there you will often find also prices that are offered by Trivago Book and Go. This is operated by an OTA by Holisto, but the user has a feeling that he books on Trivago. This allows a very good user experience, or this leads to a very good user experience, to good conversion rates, and a good marketplace experience. I mentioned that Trivago is one of the leading travel brands in the world. Here you can see an overview. In many, many countries, we are number two. There are even two countries, for example, Brazil and Mexico, where Trivago is the strongest brand. Even in the U.S., which is a very big market, even there we have a quite good position.
In almost all core markets, we are very good positioned. Yeah. Here you can see, again, the revenue development over the last couple of years and also the ad spend. As I said, the investment into brand marketing has been a revenue driver for Trivago and is still a revenue driver. You can see at the lower graphic that in 2024, the last year, we just spent half of what we spent in 2019. Since we see that the returns of our brand marketing campaigns are good and are successful, this is a driver. This is the way how we want to scale our revenues in the next years by scaling our brand marketing investments. There is room to further increase investments. We can see it. You can see it here.
By doing this, we will increase the baseline and expect that this will also lead to higher revenues. Trivago, sometimes I hear or sometimes people ask me, investors ask me, "Okay, can this business model earn money?" Because our adjusted EBITDA margin for 2024 was just 2%. I always give a clear answer, which is yes. Trivago was started in Germany and became then super profitable in Germany. We took the money, the profits, and invested into the European expansion into the other European markets. We became profitable in Europe. Again, we took the money and invested it into the U.S. We invested it into Asia. That is the reason why we could expand into 53 countries worldwide. In our most mature markets, we had nice profitability and nice margin. This is actually that you can see in the graphic below.
This is one of our biggest European markets, one of the mature markets. There is an example from 2019 pre-COVID levels, so the level we always compare to. Actually, two things are important. First is the local contribution margin. You have your revenue, you deduct all the marketing spend, and then you have your contribution margin. That was, in this case, 35%. We have a little bit of other revenue. Then you have your overhead costs. These were in 2019, went 17%. Overall, the margin was 20%. If you look at the upper graphic from 2024, you can see that the overhead costs with 23% are relatively higher because the revenues are lower. That means that if you grow the revenues, the relative amount of overhead costs will be smaller.
This will be also one way to further increase the margins. It is not only the margins, it is also the ROAS. Here you have an overview about the development from 2019 until 2024. When you look at the overhead costs in 2019, we spent EUR 145 million for overhead costs. In 2024, it is just EUR 105 million. We believe if we come back to the pre-COVID revenue level of around EUR 800 million, we will have much lower overhead costs than in 2019. The company today is much more efficient. The headcount is much smaller and much more cost-efficient. We believe that maybe we will save many millions here, which will go directly into the margin. This is one effect.
The other effect is that through further investment into brand marketing, and we saw this in the past, for example, in 2017 to 2019, we could increase our ROAS from 115 to 134. We believe the more we invest into brand marketing, the further we will also increase the ROAS, which will lead to a higher contribution margin. If you see the lower overhead costs, this will overall lead to a healthy margin in the mid to long term. Now I would hand over to Johannes.
Good. Let's look a bit deeper into our strategy and what we think will deliver growth in the medium and long term. You can basically see what we saw on the illustration before with the mobile phone. On the left side, you have marketing. We capture demand with marketing. On the right side, we have partnerships.
We are aggregating supply through our partners. In the middle, we have our product, the hotel search pillar. We have five guiding lights or strategic objectives, or you could call them. The number one is brand. Rebuilding our brand, continue investing in it. I think Robin talked about it. I would not elaborate much more on it. We are investing in any kind of brand marketing. Importantly, we invest on brand marketing where we can clearly measure returns. We are an extremely data-driven company. Whatever we invest, we want to see a direct response. We have per market, we have proxies of when do we get the money back. That is nothing we have long-term expectations on in a very tangible timeframe. We want our money back. If we see that in a marketing channel, we continue investing.
If we do not see that, we do not continue investing. Performance marketing is also part of the game, but it has a secondary relevance for us. We are very disciplined because where the contribution margin, where our profits are coming from, is brand. We invest this year, and we have compounding effects over many years. Whereas in performance marketing, through Google, for instance, the stickiness of users tends to be much lower. We have search, content, and deals. These are three strategic guiding lines that we follow on our product. Build the best search experience where we are just improving our core product. If you look back when we arrived and where the product is today, it is a very different product.
The company has gone through a three-year back and front-end migration during the pandemic that resulted in the product having actually less features, functionalities, and weaknesses that we did not have before, which is often happening after a tech migration. We have improved the product a lot from images to price accuracy to AI features we have added to our product, which I will touch on in a bit. I think that delivered a much better experience. If you use Trivago compared to others, I think you will see that we have nice elements and features that others do not have. I think a core thing that guides us is simplicity. We do not overwhelm people with content. We try to give you distilled insights that are very important for decision-making, which is the content pillar that we have in the middle. We are aggregating.
We are distilling and showing you what's really important and not overwhelm you with thousands of reviews unless you really want to. We have deals, which is very elementary for why you use Trivago. The first two is more save time. We make the search across sites much more simple. We have hotels that we give you the full view on hotels. We give you full view on availability. One booking site might have a room available. Another booking site doesn't. The price comparison deals, it's really one exact same room has many different prices. We aggregate it and display it to you in a meaningful way. Our initiative below it, most of our value comes from core feature improvement. Features that our users face in any search that can be images, how we are displaying AI highlights. Every little touchpoint needs a lot of attention.
It is a very smooth search experience. We have a focus that we already last year had, which was around member proposition. Getting people to log into our platform, the biggest asset we have, we can show you even better deals if you are logging in. At the same time, you can save your hotels and share lists with other people. There is an extended proposition we want to build and customize if you are logged in as a member. Personalization happens not only when you are logged in. We have launched initiatives over the last couple of months that have demonstrated a substantial conversion improvement by personalizing search results. Get to that. We have AI initiatives that deliver into the product as well. On the partnership side, a big topic was Trivago Book and Go.
Is Trivago Book and Go where we have invested into a company, a tech provider that provides a booking engine and powers our Book and Go product and also enables other partners to join this booking funnel. The idea is that you can choose most options to book on Trivago, especially if you use our app or if you are a member. We have smart bidding where we support smaller partners that have not so much data and being more effective in our marketplace. Let's go through a few points. We have talked about Jürgen Klopp. He is live in many markets. We make him speak Japanese. We make him speak French. We make him speak Italian through the power of AI, which is a technology we started leveraging. I think our first AI campaign was end of 2023. Amazing. Great cost saving.
At the same time, we can make him talk different things so we can explore and test out different messaging to our user. A great campaign, promising results. Very happy how we started into the year with Jürgen Klopp. We have talked about implementing a performance culture and a culture that focuses on learning and execution. That was one thing coming back to Trivago that was really different than before the pandemic. There are probably many reasons why that's the case. We have seen the company becoming more thinking and less doing. An entrepreneurial spirit of we have a hypothesis. How do we throw this in front of users and not sit in a room with many people thinking what could be right? What's the minimum viable product we could deliver? Put it in front of people's usage and then understand whether it creates value.
We have multifolded the amount of tests on our sites. You have hundreds of tests over the course of the year live. I think at the same point in time, we have 50-60 different versions of Trivago out there. We constantly see what actually creates user value and what does not. That is at a scalable global way. This, I think, is a strong emphasis on how we have been able to execute faster, get the teams to deliver faster, and have higher ambitions we hold them accountable to. This has resulted in, maybe I jump to that for a second, in much higher conversion rates, which we also demonstrate here. You can see the conversion rate is basically how many people come from Trivago and book on the partner side.
You can see that this has gone up a lot, I think around 35%. The likeliness that a user books on the partner site has increased a lot. The best proxy for when people come back is conversion rate. If we build a better product that converts users better, that means they have a better experience and they have a higher likeliness to come back and a higher likeliness to talk about us. Conversion rates came up a lot, which strongly correlates with the amount of tests we have done. What have we changed? Maybe a bit of a sense on what direction we have been testing. We are about deals. I think it was rather difficult to find deals on Trivago a few things about two years back. We have highlighted deals, identifying them and show them to our users.
One I'm very excited about is the one you see here on the right side, member-only deals. We give you strong teasers why you should log in and that we build a strong relationship with our users if they are logging in. Apart from that, we have all kinds of deals more visible to users. I talked about content and how we have polished the way we distill content. This on the left side was in 2023, which was decent. On the right side, you see a much more rich experience. On the top, you see our AI highlights, the good to know, where we give you really distilled insights on what's important to know about this hotel. You not only see it in the slide out here at the bottom, but also on top where you see the big image.
You see in the middle, you see what's particular about the hotel. That's exactly where we want to help the users to take a better decision. You will not find this on any other website to the distinctiveness you have it on Trivago. You might have it has free Wi-Fi or it has a pool or so. What makes the hotel really unique, that's what we're trying to point out here. We have much more features in terms of search options. You can have more than 25 additional filters on Trivago. Very detailed way of searching. We used to have that. We didn't have that in 2023 anymore. We brought this back. A big spectrum of filtering on Trivago, which is very important for conversion rate. You can see how we have boosted our member sign-ups.
The amount of branded users that come to us, they come to Trivago directly, how many of them log in. We have almost doubled this part of the traffic. We've almost doubled this ratio. That will continue a focus for us. How many people are logged in? For us, it's another proxy for who is a core user for us. If you log into Trivago, you have a different experience. We can be even more deal-oriented and build a custom experience for those users so they have a stronger login to our platform, which is important for profitability in the long term. With personalization, I touched on this, what this basically is.
We look at what have you done on Trivago, what devices are you using, what's your search context, and we are adapting the search results based on that with really fantastic results and conversion rates. It makes a big difference what hotels we are displaying. This is AI-powered as well and machine learning that is getting smarter and smarter over time. We're putting more parameters into the model and improve the way we are delivering a good experience to our users. AI highlights and AI search. We've also touched on this. I explained the right side. If you look here at the left side, you also don't find this with any other website. You have a free search experience. You can type whatever you want and get relevant hotels as a result. In this example, luxury hotel with Burj Khalifa view.
It shows you here now in the search results, you see already some AI highlights on the left side on the item elements. On the right, you get an explanation why this hotel is relevant. This new way of searching, we are putting gradually in front of users. We do not expect this to be a step change. It is rather users gradually adopting new ways of searching. We have already new tests live where we show traditional search and the free search, the free or natural language search next to each other. I think what is important here, I am skeptical whether for a hotel search, a chatbot experience or a GenAI experience in a chat UX is the right way for Trivago.
What we do instead, we give you the functionality of GenAI in Trivago so you keep your basic user experience that people are used to to explore hotels instead of then getting three hotels that you do not know exactly whether it is relevant or not. This is a direction we are excited about for how we are leading the field in AI. We are working with market leaders like Google on innovating and pioneering what they can do actually and what we can do. We talked about conversion rates. Conversion rate is good and an important indicator for how happy are users on Trivago. I think with a much better product that is demonstrated here.
At the same time, our partners get better leads, higher quality leads, which we see turning into higher bids in our auction marketplace as well as being more happy overall because we deliver them higher quality leads. Our marketplace is basically back to or goes back to pre-pandemic levels. More 2019, during 2022, you can see that Booking.com at times had a very high share in the marketplace. In 2022 Q3, it had more than half of our marketplace was coming from Booking.com, which we think is an unhealthy balance. You now can see that basically this is back to where it has been before the pandemic and the trajectory is healthy. We are at a marketplace that we think is a good place.
We introduced the second price auction in our marketplace in the course of this year, which has been part of supporting small players to reduce economic risk on Trivago and to bid more aggressively. Trivago Book and Go, just to give you a demo here, you have seen this or we have talked about it, Robin and I. You have an experience as if you would be booking on Trivago. This is an effort that's connected to our member experience as well. We want users to have an option to book on Trivago, especially the deal option. You can see even on this side, you have players like Clicktrip that nobody has heard about. We want to aggregate these players into our Trivago Book and Go product and give you the option to book on Trivago.
We know this elevates conversion rates a lot for our partners. Partners that participate, instead of booking on their site, book on our facilitated booking interface, they will get better conversion rates. That is good because they become more competitive in our marketplace and can get a bigger share of the pie. This is not only good for our partners, but also for our users because they have a more consistent experience. You do not go to different sites and need to sign up there. We give you a smooth experience. You could see it as being a hybrid experience between a meta search or search versus an OTA. We are something in between. If you are a member, we want to give you more convenience at the general direction. I think that is it for our presentation.
Overall, as a summary, I think important, we are well positioned in a big market. We have heavily invested into brand, which we see returning and returning growth, sustainable growth. We are seeing much better product that we think will deliver a higher retention and satisfaction with our users. That is the general direction we will continue. We see a lot of room to further invest and develop our product in that direction. With that, we're happy to take questions, I assume.
Yeah. Thank you so much for the insightful presentation and to dive into your numbers and strategy. Ladies and gentlemen, we have around 15 minutes left for the Q&A session. If you would like to speak directly to Johannes and Robin, just raise up your virtual hand.
If you're dialed in by phone, you can do this by pressing star nine to answer the queue and followed by pressing star six to unmute yourself. You also have the opportunity to place your questions in our chat box. We have already a first virtual hand from Tom. Please go ahead with your question.
Great. Good morning and thanks for doing this, guys. I guess just two for me. One, the chart on conversion rates showed a pretty dramatic kind of improvement there. I would just be curious to hear your view on, I guess, are you sort of topped out on conversion rate improvements? Any sense kind of maybe where you stand versus some of the other kind of best converting sites in the category?
A second one on Book and Go, maybe just talk a little bit about the relative unit economics or profitability of traffic that kind of goes through that funnel versus the core meta auction and how big a focus it is. I mean, is Book and Go a big kind of increasing focus for you guys, or is it always going to, I guess, maybe be secondary to kind of the core marketplace? Thanks.
Maybe on the conversion rate, we do not think we max out on conversion rate at all. I think it shows you, we are just one and a half years in, and to show you a conversion trajectory like this is, we have taken low-hanging fruits. I think easy, quick wins we have taken, but we continue to run dozens of tests at the same time.
You can see core feature improvements still being part of our strategy map. We think that about half of our effort will continue to go into core feature improvements. We see on a weekly basis accepting new tests with indication of conversion improvements. This is not tapped out. It's very hard to understand where we are compared to peers, but we think there's a lot of value to be unlocked in terms of conversion rate and that making our product more sticky as well. I think what this is closely connected to is Trivago Book and Go. We can see if our partners and rather the websites that have a less known brand, they often have a better deal. They have the better prices. If we put on the less known brands, we put our brand, Trivago Book and Go, on top of them.
We have a good deal plus a brand that has a strong trust. This is a strong combination to bring up conversion rates even more. This will be a strong focus. We have last year invested into Holisto. We acquired a 30% stake. Holisto is powering Book and Go, and Holisto is basically first an OTA themselves. You can book on Holisto, they are merchant of record, and they are a tech provider that other players can integrate into their booking engine. We can basically make all of our partners bookable through the Trivago Book and Go brand. This would be the vision for our members in particular where we will do that. We have a call option for Holisto, so we will consider in the course of the year to fully acquire them. Then we would scale the product with strong emphasis.
The economics you are asking for, we are in the process of figuring that out. What we can see is that conversion rates have a strong indication to go up. I think that improves economics. One, it creates competition in the marketplace. If competition is higher in the marketplace, if other players want to keep their share, they need to bid more competitively. There is a first-order effect, how attractive is a booking through Trivago Book and Go. That is similarly attractive. There is a second-order effect. If your auction has more competition because more players are competing in that, it has a second-order effect of being a chance to increase monetization.
Interesting. Thank you.
Thank you so much for your questions, Tom. By now, there are no further questions.
Dear participants, if you would like to take the opportunity to ask your questions to Johannes and Robin. Let's wait a couple of seconds. It seems everything is clear by now. Therefore, we come to the end of today's call. Thank you, everyone, for joining and your shown interest in Trivago. Should further questions arise at a later time, please feel free to contact Martin from Investor Relations. A big thank you also to you, Johannes and Robin, for your time and the presentation today. I wish you all a lovely remaining week. I hand back to Johannes and Robin for some final remarks, which concludes our call for today.
Greatly appreciate your time and interest. We are available for conversations anytime.
I hope we outlined that Trivago has a lot of value to be unlocked in terms of company value, in terms of business value, in terms of user value. We are excited to continue on that path. We will be laser-focused on doing a few things right and scale the business across the globe.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot for your time.