Expedia Trims Outlook on Slow Vrbo Performance

02.05.2024 - 22:39 / skift.com / Sean Oneill / Peter Kern / Ariane Gorin

Expedia Group trimmed its 2024 outlook for growth on Thursday mainly because of a slower-than-anticipated recovery at Vrbo, its vacation-rental booking brand.

The company lowered its full-year guidance to a range of mid-to-high single-digit top-line growth, with profit margins mostly in line with last year.

It was the last quarterly earnings call for Expedia Group CEO and Vice Chairman Peter Kern, who will step down as CEO and be replaced by Ariane Gorin on May 13.

Gorin and Kern said Vrbo’s rebound from a tech platform migration last year had been slower than they expected. Other issues: “Overall trends” in its consumer business through June and Hotels.com’s slower-than-hoped-for rebound, makes them expect Expedia Group growth to be lower than what they had anticipated for the full year.

“While it’s going to take somewhat longer than we’d anticipated to see the benefits come through in our numbers, the investments we’ve made rebuilding our consumer business will pay off,” said Gorin during a call about Expedia’s first-quarter earnings.

Gorin introduced herself to analysts on the call.

“My immediate priority as CEO is to work with our teams to accelerate our growth and to sharpen the longer-term strategy for our consumer business,” Gorin said.

“[The group’s consumer business has] undergone extreme transformation over the last few years, from technical migrations and changes in our loyalty program to changes in how our teams operate the business,” Gorin said. “So we’ve dealt with a lot of turbulence.”

“To get the acceleration we want from our consumer business, we need to focus on the basics: driving traffic, increasing conversion, and expanding our margins through higher attach [rates], take rates, and more efficient marketing,” Gorin said.

The backstory: Expedia Group wanted to streamline operations, so it fused the front-end tech stacks of its major brands — Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo — onto one platform. Finished late last year, this tech migration is supposed to make the company more nimble and quicker at innovating. But fine-tuning will take time.

“For example, a recommendation algorithm gets smarter faster because of our scale, but it has to be trained on the differences between a traveler shopping on Vrbo compared to one on Expedia,” Gorin said. “And tests that work on one brand may behave differently on another.”

Executives said the Hotels.com brand’s relatively sluggish performance was impacted by a number of things.

“Hotels.com was the most impacted by our migrations,” Gorin said. “It’s not where we want it to be. It’s not growing.”

The travel conglomerate also made a big change in Hotel.com’s loyalty program, replacing an old 10-stays-get-1-free model with a more nuanced, cross-brand