Tripadvisor Reorganizes Operations Management to Address Its Lagging Core Business

25.08.2023 - 14:08 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal / Matthew Goldberg

Tripadvisor is overturning the management structure of its operational teams to address a lack of execution and product deficiencies in its core business, which includes click-based hotel advertising, subscriptions and display ads, experiences and dining.

That core segment, which doesn’t include the much healthier Viator experiences brand and to a lesser degree dining reservations platform TheFork, saw 2022 revenue of $966 million, and that was still only 79 percent of pre-Covid 2019 levels. The comparison to 2019 isn’t apples to apples because the 2022 figure doesn’t include 4 percent of segment revenue from the divested Smarter Travel and China businesses.

In the company’s fourth quarter and full-year 2022 financial results call with analysts, CEO Matthew Goldberg discussed a new operating model that replaces the pandemic-era structure that had Lindsay Nelson as chief experience and brand officer running the business-to-consumer teams, and Chief Commercial Officer Kanika Soni managing the partner-facing business-to-business teams. Nelson left the company a year ago.

“We’ve introduced an updated operating model that balances the autonomy and empowerment of P&L ownership with strong functional alignment and collaboration,” Goldberg said. “We’ve added critical new leadership roles and aligned our teams around product, marketing, technology and data, sales and operations. This breaks down silos, and already, we’re seeing improved efficiency and productivity and increased capacity in areas like engineering to reallocate resources to our top strategic priorities.”

Goldberg provided few details about the changes other than to say that the company brought in a new chief product officer, whom a spokesperson later declined to name.

The Tripadvisor spokesperson did note that Tripadvisor hired John Boris, who worked with Goldberg at Lonely Planet and is a former chief marketing officer at Shutterfly, as chief marketing officer in November, and he oversees both consumer-facing and partner marketing.

The global engineering team is functionally led, the spokesperson added.

In other changes to a small portion of Tripadvisor’s core segment, the company de-emphasized car rentals, vacation rentals, and flights while retaining cruises. Cruises closed out 2022 at close to 2019 levels, the company said.

Tripadvisor’s Viator business reached 171 percent of 2019 levels in 2022 with $493 million in revenue. Meanwhile, TheFork, which primarily runs dining reservations for consumers and restaurants in Europe, where it has a leading position, reached 99 percent of 2019 revenue in 2022 with $126 million revenue despite foreign exchange headwinds.

But Goldberg said much of his focus will be on Tripadvisor’s core business,