How To Make A Marketplace Transition Or Shift Successfully

How would you advise founders and teams maybe a little bit earlier stages, you know, thinking about, you know, making a shift in their marketplace today?

Definitely. I think it's really important to go through that framework as a way to sort of bulletproof the thinking. For TripAdvisor, moving into a hotel marketplace hasn't gone as well as the company wanted, but moving into more of an attraction marketplace has. And that framework can help to illustrate why. So like, you know, if we look at, TripAdvisor through the lens of that framework. The first one is having a price advantage, and TripAdvisor as a hotel booking platform doesn't really have a price advantage. It was getting a lot of its supply through networks like Expedia affiliate network or Booking.com, and so pretty much had price parity rather than any sort of price advantage. So booking on TripAdvisor didn't really offer customers a better price. Secondly, most of the supply that was on TripAdvisor, the hotel supply, was also on Booking and Expedia. Hotels have every incentive to list their hotel rooms everywhere that they could book. And so TripAdvisor, unlike Airbnb, for example, didn't really have any sort of exclusive supply for hotels. It was easier to find really good hotels on TripAdvisor. So there was some advantage there to coming to TripAdvisor to find a hotel. But it's also really easy to cross-shop a hotel on TripAdvisor against other sites. And so there's sort of like a medium discovery advantage, but it wasn't really significant. And then in terms of trust advantage, TripAdvisor had some trust advantage because people trusted the reviews. But if people had never booked before on TripAdvisor, there was also some trust headwinds. The biggest anxiety that a person has when they're booking travel, especially vacation travel, is this the hotel going to have my reservation when I show up? And that's a nightmare scenario that you show up at a hotel, you thought you were good to go, you thought your vacation was all set, and they've lost your reservation. And so people trust booking directly with the hotel or they trust booking with a marketplace like Booking.com that they've booked before that has some guarantees. And then lastly, the question of like a fulfillment advantage. Does TripAdvisor make purchasing and staying at a hotel better? Than purchasing with Booking or Expedia or others. And that was, again, you know, there wasn't a significant advantage there. So TripAdvisor over the years has had a harder time sort of moving into hotel booking, but on the other hand, has been able to build a strong and fast-growing business around attractions. And, you know, for some of the reasons that we just talked about, there's more of an advantage there. TripAdvisor would often have the best price on attractions. TripAdvisor had a lot of exclusive supply of attractions and tour guides. Guides and things of that sort. It's easier to discover attractions on TripAdvisor using the power of traveler reviews. You can find the good things really easily. It's also hard to cross-shop attractions and tours against other sites. There's a trust advantage because of the reviews, and there's a fulfillment advantage. Most of the attractions and tours that TripAdvisor has relationships with are direct relationships. And so TripAdvisor can do things like digital passes, skip-the-line passes, booking, being able to provide critical information like what you need to bring with you, where you go to pick up the bus, that sort of thing. And so if we use that framework, we can kind of see like TripAdvisor didn't have much of an advantage in terms of being a hotel marketplace, but had some really distinct advantages in terms of being an attraction marketplace.