TripAdvisor 2013 Annual Report Download - page 18

•Technology and Innovation. We focus heavily on speed-to-market and product innovation in order to
create a richer experience for travelers, and our team deploys weekly engineering releases with new
products and features. Some recent examples of this product innovation include: our development and
launch of hotel metasearch functionality, which makes it even easier for users to research and plan their
perfect trip on TripAdvisor; TripConnect, a platform that enables independent hoteliers to purchase
leads from TripAdvisor; the release of new native mobile apps on iOS and Android; and a roll out of a
major iPad app refresh. We are also continuing to invest heavily in the rapidly growing mobile channel
by providing 80 mobile city guides of the most popular cities globally, adding menus to restaurant
pages, displaying bookable tickets to attractions pages, releasing hotel pricing and availability
improvements, and integrating Facebook login into our industry-leading mobile websites as well as
tablet and smartphone applications that are currently available in 21 languages. Our ongoing
commitment to innovation also extends to content syndication and review collection partnerships, as
we leverage our technology and content for the benefit of other websites. In addition, we expend
significant effort with respect to manual and electronic fraud detection in order to maintain the quality
and authenticity of user reviews, and have clear posting guidelines for user content submission.
•Global Reach. We are a global company, both through the reach of our portfolio of branded websites
and through our in-market staffing in fifteen countries. As of December 31, 2013, we had TripAdvisor
branded websites in 34 countries and 21 languages, including a local language website in China under
the brand daodao.com. We have over 300 million review translations, and are committed to continuing
to improve the in-country user experience and the local content coverage for all of our points-of-sale.
As of December 31, 2013, we had approximately 871 employees based outside of the United States.
We believe that the universally-relevant content and community of our core TripAdvisor platform and
other brands uniquely position us to appeal to travelers throughout the world.
Our Strategy
To expand our global reach, we leverage significant investments in technology, operations, brand-building,
and relationships with advertisers and other partners. These investments have enabled us to, among other things,
aggregate a large base of consumer reviews, in a variety of languages, across our global platform of TripAdvisor-
branded websites. We plan to continue leveraging these investments through the following:
•Investing in Technology. We believe that our ability to continue to innovate by providing additional
functionality to our main Internet sites, while at the same time continuing to extend that functionality to
additional platforms such as smartphones and tablets, will enable us to continue providing an industry-
leading user experience. We have a strong culture of speed-to-market with our innovations. By
innovating and releasing updates quickly, we believe that we can continue to grow our site visitors,
reviews and opinions, increase revenue and effectively compete with our competitors.
•Expanding Our Social and Personalization Platform. In addition to member acquisition efforts on
social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter and other social sharing platforms, we intend to
continue to expand our social integration and personalization efforts. We believe these initiatives will
enable us to continue to grow and maintain engagement with our user base and increase our content. To
date, we have leveraged Facebook Connect to allow users to share their reviews and ratings with their
friends and publish their travel activity to their timelines on Facebook. We are increasingly able to
offer personalized recommendations to users based on friend’s reviews and ratings as well as
information collected about a user’s preferences in selecting hotels.
•Improving the Hotel Shopper Experience. We continue to invest in user experience enhancements that
improve the hotel shopping experience. We have offered a flight metasearch product that displays
availability and pricing information from multiple sources since 2009, expanding internationally to
19 points of sale in 2012 and increasing to 29 points of sale as of December 31, 2013. In 2012, we
introduced hotel metasearch to our global smartphone traffic and in June 2013, we completed the process
of fully implementing hotel metasearch functionality onto our desktop and tablet platforms. In addition to
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