TripAdvisor sees Australia as springboard into Asia

TripAdvisor's Stephen Kaufer says 'the more we know about you, the better we can do'. Picture: BloombergSource: Bloomberg

The world's largest travel review company, TripAdvisor, wants to roll out its much-vaunted instant hotel booking platform over mobile devices in Australia and use its purchase of the nation's largest online restaurant booking group to help it expand in Asia.

The US-based company's chief executive, Stephen Kaufer, said the acquisition this year of Dimmi, the online restaurant reservation company backed by Telstra and Village Roadshow, meant Trip­Advisor had a new base to drive its restaurant reservations offerings in the region.

"We certainly hope to use Australia as a bit of a base to further expand into Asia,'' Mr Kaufer told The Australian in an interview from the group's Boston headquarters. "We think consumers around the world will be making their restaurant reservations online in the not too distant future.''

Dimmi has a network of more than 2500 bookable restaurants across Australia and has been integrated into TripAdvisor's restaurant division, which operates under the brand name TheFork in Europe. TheFork is already the leading restaurant booking ­platform in Europe, with more than 24,000 restaurant partners across 10 markets.

The launch of TheFork came after TripAdvisor last year bought LaFourchette, a restaurant reservation site covering France, Spain and Switzerland.

It also bought three other European sites, giving it 20,000 new restaurant listings across Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark and The Netherlands.

It now has two million restaurants worldwide on its database.

The relationship between Trip­Advisor and Dimmi began three years ago, when the two signed a partnership agreement.

Dimmi management, led by CEO Stevan Premutico, continues to operate out of it home base of Sydney. TripAdvisor has an Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore and a team in Sydney and Brisbane.

"Asia is a terrific growth market in general ... Each market has a different opportunity,'' Mr Kaufer said.

An increasing feature of Trip­Advisor's core hotel booking and review applications, which have made it the most popular travel website in Australia, has been its personalised offerings.

"We have some pretty sophisticated targeting capabilities,'' Mr Kaufer said.

"We are better than others at showing a better advertisement to the right user. The ads are almost always relevant to what brought you to TripAdvisor. Then we use big data for our personalisation engine, for example on the hotel side of things. The more we know about you, the better we can do.''

He said the group would look to move the personalisation engine to other categories, notably restaurants.

In July, TripAdvisor, which is listed on the Nasdaq, reported revenue growth of 25 per cent for the June quarter.

Its Instant Booking Platform, launched last year, now has partnerships with six out of the top 10 global hotel chains.

"One of the bigger shifts of Trip­Advisor as a company was when we launched our own hotel transactions business. It is now fully rolled out in the US on mobile. We will look to roll that out in Australia and the rest of the world," Mr Kaufer said.

"We feel it is the new model for what customers want in vacation planning. TripAdvisor has the most reviews and photos, we have a terrific price comparison engine, and then (customers are) able to actually book it on TripAdvisor. So in a single app or desktop experience, I can do everything."

But he said the group had no plans to ditch its relationships with other online travel agents. Its partners in Australia include Wotif, Hotel Club, lastminute.com.au and quickbeds.com.

"We already partner with the Wotifs as a client of our price comparison engine. We drive a lot of bookings for them as well as the likes of booking.com and Agoda. That is not going away. Our consumers want that. They want to see the prices from everywhere.

"One of those booking decisions might be on TripAdvisor but if they want to book on Wotif, super. Wotif is a winner, I am a winner. We all win.''

During the June quarter, Trip­Advisor launched mobile applications for Apple Watch, Samsung Gear and Pebble devices.

Mr Kaufer said there had already been 200 million downloads of the TripAdvisor app on mobile devices globally and a "huge percentage'' of its traffic was now coming on phones.

Second-quarter revenue was $US405 million ($583m). Adjusted EBITDA grew 5 per cent to $US123m as the core hotel business grew about 13 per cent and the attractions, vacation rental, and restaurant business grew 210 per cent, bolstered by ­acquisitions.

The strong US dollar forced the group to lower full-year revenue guidance to about 20 per cent and EBITDA growth forecast to the low to mid-single digits.

TripAdvisor has also been the subject of controversy for allowing unsubstantiated anonymous reviews to be posted.

But Mr Kaufer said the issue "doesn't keep me up at night at all any more'' and claimed 98 per cent of travellers believed the reviews on the TripAdvisor site were an "accurate representation of what they found".

Source: TripAdvisor sees Australia as springboard into Asia