TripAdvisor 2012 Annual Report Download - page 3

May 2013
To our shareholders:
The year 2012 was significant for TripAdvisor, Inc., as it was our first full year as an independent, publicly
traded company. While our spin-off from Expedia, Inc. in December 2011 was a significant event for our
company, two fundamentals of TripAdvisor stayed the same: our Speed Wins culture and our unrelenting focus
on customer-centric, long-term decision-making.
Speed Wins. For the past 13 years, I’ve had a handwritten sign on my office door that reads “Speed Wins.” It is a
mantra well-known to every employee. Our users’ time – like their vacation time – is precious. We aim to make
travel planning as simple and delightful as actually being on vacation. It’s our job to provide quick, easy access
to the information travelers need, wherever they are. The online travel industry is large and growing, and it’s
increasingly competitive. So, to us, rapid innovation is vital to attracting and retaining travelers.
At TripAdvisor we release new functionality to the site, across all points of sale, every week. This extremely fast
development cycle keeps us nimble, creative, and fearless. Inevitably, some things don’t work as planned, and
some of our tests fail – and that’s okay. An engineer put up a sign in the office that says “Fail harder.” I applaud
that. With each failure, we learn. And with constant iteration and innovation, we give ourselves the best chance
to succeed.
Where we succeeded in 2012
We have built an online travel community that, through a deep, rich base of user-generated content, endeavors to
fulfill our mission: to help all travelers around the world plan and have the perfect trip. Here are some 2012 key
initiatives that reinforced that goal:
•We got even more social. TripAdvisor is well known for providing the unbiased wisdom of the crowds.
Since 2007, we have leveraged Facebook’s growing user network to connect TripAdvisor users with the
travel wisdom of their friends. In 2012, our Social team introduced the “Friend of a Friend” feature,
which allows Facebook-connected TripAdvisor users to see travel advice from not only their Facebook
friends but also from the friends of their Facebook friends. Social reinforcement provides a very
compelling and differentiated user experience on TripAdvisor.
As the Facebook network continues to grow, so too does our marketable member count, which doubled
in 2012 to more than 44 million and provides a solid foundation for our robust email marketing
campaigns. Our social initiatives are wonderful ways to increase brand awareness, acquire TripAdvisor
members, and make our travel content richer, more helpful and more personalized.
•We are mobile. We know that travel research extends well beyond the desktop computer as
smartphones and tablets have become essential tools both for trip-planning and trip-taking.
Correspondingly, our mobile offerings saw great traction during 2012. Downloads of our TripAdvisor,
City Guides and SeatGuru apps more than doubled to 31 million. We averaged 45 million average
monthly unique users on smartphones and tablets at the end of the year, up 190% year-over-year
according to our traffic log files.
We aim to deliver the best user experience to every user, on every device, in every geography. At the
end of 2012, we greatly improved our smartphone product offering by introducing metasearch
capabilities – inline hotel pricing and availability – to all smartphone traffic. More recently, we
announced an exciting partnership with Samsung, which will mean the TripAdvisor app and our rich,