Morningstar

Morningstar, Inc.

Equity Bottom-Up

We see wide-moat Amazon’s announcement that it is offering domestic flights within India as a potential precursor to the company developing a metasearch platform (not an online travel agency, or OTA, model approach), which could have negative long-term financial implications for narrow-moat TripAdvisor, with a more negligible financial impact on narrow-moat OTAs Booking Holdings and Expedia. Expedia shares appear attractive, trading at a meaningful discount to our $183 fair value estimate…

Despite intense competition, we expect TripAdvisor’s network advantage to remain in place over the next decade, supported by a solid global position, low penetration of travel advertising spending allocated online, and continued marketing spending. We expect TripAdvisor's sales growth to slightly exceed the high-single-digit annual booking rate we forecast on average for the industry over the next 10 years.The company has built a leading network of user-generated reviews and travel content…

We see two key takeaways from narrow-moat TripAdvisor's first quarter that included new segment disclosures. First, branded hotel platform (57% of total sales) revenue was down 0.5%, a bit below our prior segment branded click platform (which included flight and excluded sponsor ads) estimate of 2% growth. We attribute this to softer international demand, as auction pricing was stable, and lower marketing expense of 47.3% as a percent of sales versus our 49.5% estimate and 52.4% last year, which…

United States

TripAdvisor Inc. is an online travel research company. The Company's travel research platform aggregates reviews and opinions of members about destinations, accommodations (including hotels, bed and breakfasts ("B&Bs"), specialty lodging and vacation rentals), restaurants and activities throughout the world.