trivago Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

trivago (NASDAQ:TRVG) reported third-quarter financial results on Wednesday. The transcript from the company’s third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.

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Summary

trivago reported 16% year-over-year revenue growth in Q3 2026, marking its seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, with adjusted EBITDA of €18.7 million.

The company’s strategic focus for 2026, “Optimize Momentum, Pushing Frontiers,” emphasizes optimization over market expansion, concentrating on 25 key markets.

trivago confirmed its full-year 2026 guidance of mid-teens percentage revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA of around €30 million. The company expects 2027 to achieve double-digit revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA of €45 million.

Operational highlights include a 50% increase in conversion rates since Q3 2023 and significant growth in the trivago Book and Go platform, now a top five player in its marketplace.

AI integration is a key focus, with AI now writing over 80% of code in key repositories. The company aims to operate with the impact of 6,000 talents through AI-driven efficiencies.

Management expressed confidence in the company’s long-term earnings potential and plans to continue its share buyback program.

No significant impact from Google’s compliance changes with the EU Digital Markets Act was reported, though the company views the changes as beneficial for competitive positioning.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

4th November 2026. We’re pleased to be joined on the call today by Johannes Thomas, trivago CEO and Managing Director, and Wolf Schmoll, trivago CFO and Managing Director. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, reflect management’s view as of Tuesday, November 3, 2026 only unless expressly stated otherwise, in which case reflect management’s view as of today, Wednesday, November 4, 2026 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 third quarter 2026 Operating and Financial Review and 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 at ir.trivago.com.

You are encouraged to periodically 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 of 2025. With that, let me turn the call over to Johannes.

Johannes Thomas (Chief Executive Officer)

Good morning and thank you for joining our Q3 2026 earnings call. In the third quarter, total revenue grew 16% year over year, our seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Once again, we exceeded our expectations on both the top and bottom line. Our adjusted EBITDA was the highest of any quarter since Jasmine, Andre and I returned to trivago mid 2023. Americas and developed Europe each grew referral revenue by 15%. This more than offset currency effects and the situation in the Middle East, which weighed on Rest of World.

Let me share a few highlights of the quarter. Branded traffic referral revenue again grew faster than total referral revenue. Our conversion rate is up 50% since the third quarter of 2023 and tangibly up compared to last year before inter-segment eliminations. Logged-in members now generate more than 35% of referral revenue. Our all-other advertisers accounted for 35% of referral revenue this quarter, up from 26% in Q3 last year. trivago Book and Go more than doubles its share of our referral revenue year over year and has become a top five player in our marketplace.

Our theme of 2026 is Optimize Momentum, Pushing Frontiers. This year, we stayed focused on the markets we have built up since mid 2023, emphasizing optimization over market expansion. By concentrating on our around 25 key markets, we benefit from the compounding effects of our brand investments and product enhancements, which drive our profitability. We are confirming our full-year 2026 guidance of mid-teens percentage year-over-year total revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA of around 30 million.

For 2027, we expect double-digit total revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA of around 45 million. We continue to aim for an adjusted EBITDA margin of 10% by 2028. Our three strategic priorities have been in place since 2023, and that consistency is deliberate. Let me walk you through the progress we have made on each of them. For more detail, please see our investor presentation on ir.trivago.com. Our first strategic priority is to drive growth through brand marketing. In recent quarters, more and more travelers have chosen to come to trivago directly and in the third quarter branded traffic again grew faster than our referral revenue overall. We also broadened the mix of channels we use for brand marketing in North America. The response to our campaigns gave us confidence to step up our brand investment in the third quarter. We also tested new creatives and developed an optimized pipeline of TV ads, which we expect to perform well in our upcoming winter campaign.

We remain excited about our partnership with Jurgen Klopp, the iconic soccer coach and now head of the German national team. His association with trivago resonates strongly with our audiences. Our AI-powered TV campaigns with him run in markets around the world, combining global appeal with local relevance. Performance marketing remains disciplined. We steer each paid channel by its marginal contribution, based on incrementality and elasticity testing. Referral revenue from non-branded SEO traffic sources remains a low single-digit share of total referral revenue, which limits our exposure to changes in organic search.

Our second strategic priority is to enhance our cohort search experience so travelers can book with confidence, saving time and money. This quarter, we focused on a simpler search experience that works the same way on every device. A big step was unifying our iOS and Android code bases into one. We rebuilt our apps from the ground up in a shared design system. This simplifies our technology and speeds up our learning. I’m particularly proud of how we did it because it shows how quickly our teams embrace AI.

We took a fully AI-driven approach, and AI wrote nearly 100% of the new code base. Under traditional engineering conditions, we estimate this would have taken 12 to 18 months. Our team completed the rebuild in four months and needed two more months to qualify it in production. Since mid October, one trivago app has been live for travelers across the globe on iOS and Android alike. This has been an exemplary achievement by our engineering team. Most of our recent conversion gains came from our algorithms in how we rank hotels and how we expose prices. We launched a new generation of personalization that makes hotels in our search results more relevant. It takes travelers’ preferences, behavioral patterns and location into account in more meaningful ways. Our member experience has improved most from these enhancements. We also changed how we pick and present deals so rates travelers often value most, such as free cancellation and breakfast included, might come first.

Simpler page architecture, better hotel content and new filters added further to our conversion rate gains. AI-generated content has become a core part of how travelers choose a hotel on trivago. AI highlights and AI review summaries have been upgraded with newer models to improve quality and freshness. We also rebuilt the back end of our smart AI search, which was first of its kind back in 2024 when travelers described the ideal stay in their own words.

Our LLM-powered path now handles the request with more accuracy and speed. Travelers get more relevant results, and the content we expose for our hotels makes clearer why each hotel fits. Our member base is growing, and the more we know about our members from their history with us and from what they tell us about their preferences, the better we can personalize what they see. A growing number of hotel chains and major booking sites now share loyalty and member-only rates with trivago members. That gives our core users a clearer reason to sign in and come back. Every signup gives us a direct line to our users throughout planning and booking.

Through our CRM activities, such as email and notifications, we reach members on channels we own at no dedicated marketing cost. CRM revenue grew at a high pace again this quarter, and CRM is becoming a relevant profit contributor. Together, the path from brand new to member to CRM drives higher retention and revenue at structurally better margins. It is an important building block on our path to higher profitability. Our third strategic priority is to help our partners realize their full potential on our platform. Today, our marketplace is more balanced than 2023, and in recent years hotel direct sites, alternative accommodation sites and mid-sized advertisers gained share on our platform. Our transaction-based CPA model has been a driver of this shift, taking the complexity of CPC bidding off our partners. It helps advertisers of every size compete more effectively in our marketplace. trivago Book and Go is our branded, partner-powered booking funnel where travelers book without leaving trivago. As we onboarded more partners and launched more markets, Book and Go continued to scale. Before inter-segment eliminations, its share of our referral revenue more than doubled compared to last year. We reached key milestones in integrating trivago Book and Go, formerly Holisto, more natively into our platform, which made the user experience from searching to booking more seamless.

Beyond our three strategic priorities, I want to give you a short update on AI. At trivago, our ambition remains for roughly 600 core talents to operate with the impact of 6,000. We believe our size puts us in a sweet spot for AI, and it gives us a unique opportunity to grow in a vast market. We are big enough to build our own infrastructure and small enough to move fast with a culture built on curiosity and speed. Adoption is broad-based across the company.

As we shared last quarter, 93% of our talents use AI daily, and 86% say it makes a measurable difference to their output. Engineering is where the change runs deepest. Our developers work in a cutting-edge AI ecosystem, with code repositories and a development environment that is being made AI-ready. A dedicated engineering AI playbook sets clear expectations and ambitious targets for what we aim to achieve with AI. The results are tangible. According to our AI coding tools, AI now writes more than 80% of the code in our key repositories. Output per developer rose 44% in the last six months compared to the six months before, and in September alone each developer shipped 60% more code changes than a year earlier.

Quality helped, with fewer changes rolled back and improvements reaching our users faster. We are moving beyond AI-augmented coding on our own agent platform. Autonomous agents already ship complete code changes from start to finish, and the human craft is shifting from writing code to directing agents, judging outcomes and quality at scale. We are also changing how every talent works with knowledge and context windows. In recent months, almost half of our talents built personal AI brains that connect and distill context across key information sources. They give people and the agents a more comprehensive and situationally relevant context window so complex tasks get done better and agents work more reliably. Our internal agentic marketplace now offers more than 500 qualified agents, skills and other AI components so talents reuse proven and verified solutions instead of building their own.

This lets us scale AI safely, quickly and cost efficiently. We keep investing in leading AI tools and we run them on infrastructure we control. Our AI gateway allows us to govern AI traffic to the right model, giving us visibility and cost control. Our on-premise GPUs run open-source models in house for scaled, repetitive and privacy-sensitive tasks at lower cost, and we are expanding that capacity. We are progressing well on our path to becoming an AI-native company. Since our new CTO and CIO began leading this transformation, we have seen even stronger traction. I’m proud of the excitement, curiosity and execution I see across our teams. It lets us make the most of the unique opportunity in front of us: to get more done at higher quality, to deliver a better experience for travelers and to create more long-term value for our shareholders.

With that, I’ll hand over to our CFO, Wolf, for a more detailed financial review.

Dr. Wolf Schmuhl (Chief Financial Officer)

Thank you, Johannes, and good morning everyone. The third quarter marked another strong quarter for trivago, and again we exceeded our internal year-over-year expectations for both total revenue growth and profitability. We delivered 16% year-over-year total revenue growth while shifting the balance further towards profitability. Our brand strategy, combined with significantly improved unit economics from conversion uplifts and stronger customer retention, allows us to drive top line and improve profitability.

This strengthens our confidence in delivering a 10% adjusted EBITDA margin by 2028. We continue to believe that our current share price understates trivago’s long-term earnings potential, and we will continue our buyback program as we see it as a higher-return use of capital. Let’s review our third quarter results as well as our 2027 outlook. Unless otherwise indicated, all comparisons for 2026 are on a year-over-year basis. In the third quarter, total revenue reached 192.5 million euro, representing year-over-year growth of 16%. Americas and developed Europe grew both 15% in referral revenue year over year, driven by growth in branded channel traffic, compounding brand effects, improved marketing efficiency and booking conversion.

Rest of World referral revenue declined 10% year over year, impacted by FX headwinds of approximately 4% and the Middle East conflict; we remained disciplined and took a tactical approach by adjusting bidding spend and targets. Locally, Rest of World represented only 17% of our third quarter referral revenue, thus limiting the impact to total referral revenue. Our well-diversified revenue base gives us structural resilience against local macro pressures.

For the third quarter, we reported a net income of 5.4 million euro. At the same time, we delivered an adjusted EBITDA of 18.7 million euro, ahead of our internal expectations. This marks the highest quarterly adjusted EBITDA since mid 2023. Total expenses increased by 29 million euro year over year, totaling 182.4 million euro for the third quarter. This was mainly due to a 17.3 million euro increase in selling and marketing, resulting primarily from higher investments in brand marketing made over the course of the quarter and incremental expenses resulting from the consolidation of trivago Deals. trivago core advertising spend increased by 10.3 million euro, or 23%, in Americas, 8.2 million euro, or 16%, in developed Europe, and decreased by 3.3 million euro, or 12%, in Rest of World. In the third quarter, we saw strong investment opportunity in brand marketing and accelerated our spend accordingly. Despite the step-up, our global trivago core ROAS held broadly stable at 133.2% compared with 134.1% in the third quarter of 2025, as compounding returns from brand investments made in prior quarters continued to lift performance.

Americas reflected the bulk of the increased investment and further diversification of our marketing channels, with ROAS moving from 135.4% to 129%. This was largely offset by developed Europe, where prior brand investments compounded into a higher ROAS of 142% versus 141.2%, and by Rest of World, which improved from 119.2% to 122.1% on lower advertising spend in line with our disciplined, profitability-focused approach despite continued foreign exchange headwinds.

By the end of this quarter, we held 139.9 million euro in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, without any long-term debt, reinforcing our strong and flexible capital position. The fourth quarter of 2025 was exceptionally strong, so we are up against tough comparables for this upcoming quarter. That said, the fourth quarter started in line with our expectations. We plan to continue scaling our brand marketing investments, though at a more moderated pace than in prior years, leveraging compounding brand effects to sustain a momentum of increased profitability.

We are maintaining our full-year guidance for 2026 of mid-teens percentage year-over-year total revenue growth and an adjusted EBITDA of around 30 million euro. Looking forward to 2027, we aim to achieve an increased adjusted EBITDA of around 45 million euro while continuing our growth trajectory and maintaining double-digit percentage revenue growth. With that, let’s open the line for questions. Operator, we are now ready to take the first question.

OPERATOR

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Naved Khan with B. Riley Securities. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Naved Khan (Analyst at B. Riley Securities)

Thank you so much. Couple of questions from me, maybe just on the outlook that you’re providing for 2027. I’m wondering what you see the confidence in this preliminary outlook for double-digit growth on the top line and your ability to deliver against that. So that’s my first question. And then, secondarily, I had a question about Google’s changes to be compliant with the DMA in the EU, and how do you see it affecting trivago? Does it help or does it really have no impact? Let’s talk about that a little bit. Thank you.

Johannes Thomas (Chief Executive Officer)

Yeah, Naved, thank you for your question. Maybe to re-emphasize, what gives us confidence is nothing else than the flywheel we have been building in the last couple of years. And maybe you can think about it in a four-step process. One, we get people coming to us directly. What we have mentioned many times is that brand has outperformed branded traffic growth, that revenue has outperformed total referral revenue. So this has become a more and more important part of our business.

We reduce reliance on third-party channels. So brand driving that is important, and we see room to step up brand further in the coming years, and that’s maybe an element to understand as well. If you look at 2025, the step up from 2024 was quite significant in terms of ad spend. This year we will increase ad spend further, but less than what we did in 2025. And then in 2027 we expect to step up ad spend, but less than 2026. So the further step up will deliver growth, and that we get more people. Direct is great for retention. And then, so you have brand, then you have conversion improvement, then you have member, and then you have CRM.

So if we get more people coming to us direct, we deliver a better product experience. Bringing up conversion rates since 2023 and also compared to last year substantially gives a better user experience. So people are more happy with our product, come back. Plus, members, we are seeing—and we have shared that in our investor presentation as well—users, our members, are more sticky than they have been in the last years. So you see the stickiness of members, and also conversion rates of members are much higher.

And then when we have these members, we can also communicate with them directly through CRM, and that makes us deliver more revenue at very attractive costs because there’s no marketing cost behind it. So the step from brand to product conversion to member to CRM, this flywheel is working. You’re seeing it in our numbers today. If we project that, we are fairly confident that we can achieve double-digit next year. There is some uncertainty in Rest of World and how the Middle East will affect and evolve. Our expectation is that this will not be—Rest of World will not be—a major growth driver for us, and that’s maybe the uncertainty, but it’s also only 70% of our business, so it will not have a huge impact. So if we look at Americas, Europe, the dynamics we are seeing, the compounding effects we are seeing, we are fairly confident to give this outlook and that we can deliver against it, and the potential to step up in brand in massive markets is giving us this confidence.

Then on the Google part, I would bottom-line say there are no major impacts on the business that we could measure. So far Google has done relevant changes in Europe in September and has launched this broadly, from what we can observe, to comply with the Digital Markets Act. They’ve introduced a new organic ad format where they show hotel booking sites, aggregators, kind of next to each other, and that has been an improvement from our perspective in offering a more leveled playing field where we can compete.

And Google is not anymore showing ads—GHA product—inside the generic search results, but rather linking out to the product from an ad where you are eye to eye. But at the same time, we don’t think Google is yet compliant because they still have components on their search results which, from our perspective, are not compliant, like a hotel carousel on top which is a mini hotel search results in the generic results, and those are things that we would like to see continue to change.

But overall it has moved in the right direction, and key impact on the business short term we have not seen. What we certainly believe is that this is a structural advantage on competing with our product more on eye level. So we think we have the better product and can win more customers to our platform.

Naved Khan (Analyst at B. Riley Securities)

Thank you for the detailed answer, Johannes.

OPERATOR

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. Your next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth with JP Morgan. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Dr. Wolf Schmuhl (Chief Financial Officer)

Hi Dave, thanks a lot for your question. Happy to answer the first one. So in Americas, in our segment Americas, in this quarter we saw a very, very favorable market—very favorable. Our ads in the market resonated very well there. We experienced a strong quarter with very favorable marketing elasticities, and we decided to take advantage of these favorable conditions and increase our brand spend in our Americas segment by 23%. And as a consequence of this brand investment, the return on ad spend decreased accordingly.

This is always the case when you invest into brand and the return of these investments then come at later stages. This return on ad spend development has always to be seen in the context of the ad spend development, and we steer our return on ad spend globally, and this one we kept stable. So the general strategy remains the same. Our brand investment—we will invest into brand at a more moderated pace compared to previous years and, together with compounding effects, this will make us more profitable over time.

Johannes Thomas (Chief Executive Officer)

Good. Maybe one comment on this. If you see in one quarter ROAS coming down in the segment, this is not a negative signal in most cases because we see opportunities, we lean in, and this has a return over several years and even into the next quarter. So we expect this to recover under normal circumstances. But when we see opportunities, we will lean into brand marketing and double down when we see good elasticity. On AI, I think here we have shared in the past it’s significantly below 1% in referral revenue, and that is what we also broadly see across players we talk to in the market. And what we have seen in Q3—maybe compared to Q1, Q2 where the AI referral revenue was rather plateauing, even declining a little bit in Q1 and Q2—in Q3 we have seen a step up. So we have seen growth again. What we saw in 2025, we saw growth, then we saw plateauing, and now we see in Q3 it was growing again, but yet significantly below 1%.

So our interpretation of this is two things: we more and more understand how we optimize organically in LLMs. And then the second is the major AI lab has done changes to their algorithms, and our read is that there are more citations and that they are looking more and more at who are trusted players. So maybe linking less to Reddit or so on and taking these social sources with less weight, and then rather looking at sources with more credibility where our brand plays a big role.

What you see traditionally from marketing channels: when you have a brand, you see a much higher click-through rate. And if an algorithm sees that you have high click-through rates in ad formats, then you are seen as more trusted, more relevant, and then algorithms naturally pick you up more than others. And this for us is a reconfirmation that having a strong brand is not just important for users on our side, but it’s also improving unit economics and visibility in algorithms.

So we’re excited about that. We’re collaborating with all major AI labs and we embrace formats we think are relevant. We are not jumping on every wagon. We also like to watch where things are going so we are not wasting resources unreasonably, and we are wise where we invest. But we have joined the OpenAI paid ads program, which is very exciting to see. It has been growing quickly, their product is improving substantially, and this is promising and an opportunity to reach consumers in the future and win them into our product.

So that’s exciting to see. And then if we look at AI assistants more broadly, I think our fundamental view has not changed. Travelers use it for inspiration; they use it to navigate in destination. And when we talk to AI labs, that’s what they also see. So information searches and discovery is an important part. But when it comes to planning to booking, that’s where it’s a lot of complexity. It’s not an easy conversion funnel to optimize. Users use dozens of sites. And that’s where AI assistants are complementary.

But we play a big role with a richer product which has a ton more features and abilities to refine and look at what you want and then light prices whenever you get into aggregating hundreds of sites, chains, add quality, add comparable measures, and then picking what’s relevant to the user. That’s a very complex task which took Google a decade to build. So we believe there’s quite some edge we have. And whatever we are building out around our own AI search, which we have revamped this year, which we think is a very competitive product in giving you free-text search results, is making us competitive so consumers come to us to do AI search. Then with Book and Go, which makes most of our hotels bookable through agents—so you do transactions on trivago if needed—it’s important. And then also we are logging in members on trivago to make sure we retain them to us so they don’t go out to other search engines or gen AI players.

So I think our view fundamentally has not changed. I think most important is, let’s look at the facts: it’s significantly below 1%, and I think we use it where we can, and it is complementary in the process. But our relevance remains very important in the process.

OPERATOR

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Johannes for closing remarks.

Johannes Thomas (Chief Executive Officer)

Thank you. Since ’23 we have diversified our marketing mix and rebalanced our marketplace. Our brand is stronger in travelers’ minds and our product has significantly improved. We believe trivago has become a more resilient business, and it has grown at a double-digit rate for seven quarters in a row. We see plenty of room to grow in a vast market, and AI helps us capture it. Thank you to our team for making this happen, to our partners and investors for their trust, and to all of you for joining today.

OPERATOR

This concludes today’s call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company’s SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants’ and analysts’ statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.