Irem joined TripAdvisor when hotel bookings had plateaued and helped expand the marketplace into restaurants, tours, and museums to increase customer lifetime value. The biggest challenge was getting enough supply for these new bookable experiences. The team built a playbook to decide whether to buy external capabilities or build them in-house.
Chapters
bit more about what led you to join TripAdvisor, then, you know, kind of overview of it as a marketplace and maybe even breaking it down more specifically.
Yeah. So I'll give you the context around the time I joined and then talk a little bit about the strategy that we chose to pursue. So TripAdvisor at the time was known for, you know, hotel reviews as well as we had reviews for all sorts of sites, but you could book hotels on the site and that's how we made money. And we'd gotten great at, it was kind of our Achilles heel. We'd optimized the core business to a great extent. We've kind of saturated growth and we were, you know, seeing growth slow down. So what we did there to, you know, to expedite growth and improve our unit economics, 'cause we had incredible demand, incredible volume of travelers visiting the site every month. was to think of it, take this infrequent nature, the infrequent marketplace, and then try to add new use cases to improve the lifetime value of a traveler. So these, those new use cases became, you know, the, those that were very adjacent to travel. So you book a hotel, you go eat out many times when you're traveling, or you book a tour or a museum. So that, that became kind of the new marketplace that we, that we founded. So at the initial phases of that, our focus was on, you know, how do you kickstart supply? Because we had review sites of like review pages of all the properties and we had a lot of demand from travelers, but we didn't have bookable properties. So that was one big theme that's common to many other marketplaces. And then we also thought about, you know, as you're expanding into this new product and use cases, how do you do that? And we built this playbook around when do you buy versus build, you really understanding the capabilities that we had on both sides.
