How we source: figures on this page come from the company’s own filings (SEC 10-K, 10-Q and earnings releases, or its annual report), with the period stated next to each number. Last refreshed October 2026. Our methodology.
In short
Tripadvisor makes money in two ways. It takes commissions on tours, activities and restaurant bookings, and it sells clicks and ads to hotels and travel agencies. In FY2025 its Experiences segment, which includes Viator, brought in $924M of $1.89B in revenue, more than the $750M from Hotels and Other. Hotels and Other still produced most of the profit, with $207M of segment Adjusted EBITDA against $91M from Experiences.
The Experiences segment covers Viator and the experiences sold through Tripadvisor’s own sites. Both run on one supply platform. The company says that platform lists more than 425,000 bookable experiences from 70,000 operators. Revenue comes mainly from commissions on completed bookings. In FY2025 the segment booked $4.7B of gross booking value across 22.9 million bookings and earned $924M in revenue.
Tripadvisor revenue by fiscal year, FY2021 to FY2025, from the company's filings. Chart: The Business Engineer.
Hotels and Other is the older Tripadvisor guidance and metasearch business. Hotels and travel agencies pay per click or per acquisition, and advertisers buy display space. Hotels earned $550M in FY2025, media and advertising $132M and other lines $68M. Booking and Expedia together made up about 21% of consolidated revenue, nearly all of it in this segment.
TheFork is a restaurant reservations platform in Europe. Restaurants pay a fee for each seated diner and a subscription for its booking software. It earned $221M in FY2025.
How Tripadvisor compares
Within the group, revenue and profit point in different directions. Experiences grew 10% and Hotels and Other fell 8%, but Hotels and Other still ran at a 27.6% segment Adjusted EBITDA margin, compared with 9.9% for Experiences and 9.2% for TheFork.
The company says its marketplaces, Experiences and TheFork, made up about 60% of revenue and 35% of Adjusted EBITDA in FY2025, up from about 50% and 6% in FY2023. Revenue has roughly doubled from $902M in FY2021, but growth slowed to 3% in both FY2024 and FY2025.
In the fourth quarter Tripadvisor merged its Viator and Brand Tripadvisor experiences operations into a single Experiences segment and renamed the rest Hotels and Other. In November it launched a restructuring that it says will save at least $85M a year. Restructuring costs for the year were $43M.
Tripadvisor revenue by line, prior year against FY2025, as reported. Chart: The Business Engineer.
Net income rose to $39.8M from $4.9M, mainly because the tax charge fell to $4.9M from $81.8M. Operating income fell 13% to $79.5M as marketing rose to 41.8% of revenue. In April Tripadvisor completed its $437M merger with Liberty TripAdvisor, which removed its controlling shareholder.
What to watch
The company says AI overviews and changes to search results will keep weighing on Hotels and Other, its most profitable segment. Media revenue fell 12% in FY2025 as traffic declined over the last three quarters.
In August 2026 Tripadvisor agreed to sell TheFork to American Express for $700M in cash. The deal needs regulatory approval and is expected to close by the end of 2026. Once it closes, Experiences and Hotels and Other will make up the remaining business.
Frequently asked questions
How does Tripadvisor make money?
Mainly through commissions on experiences booked via Viator and Tripadvisor ($924M in FY2025), click-based and display advertising from hotels, OTAs and other advertisers ($750M in Hotels and Other), and restaurant booking fees and software subscriptions at TheFork ($221M).
How much revenue did Tripadvisor make in 2025?
$1,891.3M in FY2025, up 3% from $1,834.6M in FY2024. Net income was $39.8M and Adjusted EBITDA was $318.7M.
How big is Viator?
Viator powers Tripadvisor’s Experiences segment. Its platform processed $4.7B of gross booking value and 22.9 million experience bookings in FY2025, both up from FY2024 (13% and 16%). Revenue for the segment was $924M. The company no longer reports Viator on its own.
Is Tripadvisor selling TheFork?
Yes. On 2 August 2026 it signed an agreement to sell TheFork to American Express for $700M in cash, subject to regulatory approvals. It expects the sale to close by the end of 2026. TheFork earned $221M in revenue and $20M in segment Adjusted EBITDA in FY2025.
TripAdvisor business model matches the demand for people looking for a travel experience with supply from travel partners around the world providing travel accommodations and experiences. When this match is created TripAdvisor collects commission from partners on a CPC and CPM basis. The non-hotel revenue comprises experiences, restaurants, and rentals.
Pivoting and initial traction
Chris Dixon had what seemed to be a brilliant idea. He wanted to create a vertical search engine covering the travel industry.
That’s how TripAdvisor started and how it built its business plan.ย
It could be summarized as a vertical search engine for the travel industry, selling users to larger customers, like Expedia, Travelocity, AOL, and Yahoo.
So when Chris Dixon built the business plan, he got funding for that idea. A year and a half later, TripAdvisor had no revenues or clients.
The first site was gaining some traction through PR, but no revenue model existed.
Therefore, they started to monetize the site via banner ads, which seemed a smart idea – on paper – at the time, as the founding team figured if they were going to make a 3% click-through rate on those banners, the company would be highly profitable.
However, things didn’t look right when they started to roll this out in the real world.
As those banners had 0.1% clicks barely, which meant the company would be profitable only with billion of page views.
The traditional CPM (cost per mille) model and the banner ads didn’t make much sense.
Chris Dixon and the rest of the team stumbled upon a new monetization model called CPC (cost per click). In other words, the site had hotel pages; on those pages, a simple call to action that said “book this hotel” would be paid on a click-through basis.
While this model is given for granted now, it was the early 2000s when Google neither had figured that out.
Indeed, only one player – GoTo.com, later Overture – made money by syndicating its links.
Thus, when TripAdvisor figured out the CPC revenue model, it went from no revenue in November 2001 to breaking even in March 2002, with $70K per month in revenues. The company has become profitable ever since.
One other key element of TripAdvisor’s initial traction and success was the user-generated content.
The site allowed users to write reviews – at the time something completely new, as most people relied on experts’ reviews – and to sell the leads generated by the site to travel agencies.
The turning point happened when TripAdvisor figured out that people were skipping experts’ reviews and going straight to the users’ reviews.
Today this seems trivial and a proven concept, but it was neither granted nor supposed to work at the time.
But when TripAdvisor understood that the user-generated content was so effective and the CPC revenue model worked so well, they pushed on the gas pedal to gain even more traction.
Fast forward to 2019, TripAdvisor gained over six billion dollars in market cap!
TripAdvisor’s mission statement analyzedย
our mission is to help people around the world to plan, book and experience the perfect trip.
TripAdvisor achieves its mission by providing consumers and travel partners with several pieces to “experience the perfect trip:”
A global platform.
The rich consumer-generated content.
A set of price comparison tools.
Online reservation.
Related services for destinations, accommodations, travel activities.
Experiences.
And restaurants.
Breaking down TripAdvisor Two-Sided Business model
TripAdvisor business model matches the demand for people looking for a travel experience with supply from travel partners around the world providing travel accommodations and experiences.
Consumers looking for the perfect travel experience
Travel partners willing to pay TripAdvisor to be discovered by their potential customers. Those travel partners include hotel chains, independent hoteliers, online travel agencies, or OTAs and more
TripAdvisor enables media advertising opportunities, and it facilitates transactions between consumers and travel partners by:
Sending referrals to travel partnersโ websites,
Facilitating bookings on behalf of travel partners,
Serving as the merchant of record (in particular for Experiences and Rentals offerings)
And with advertising placements on its websites and mobile apps.
And non-Hotel revenues (Experiences, Restaurants, and Rentals)
The Hotel segment explained
The Hotel segment accounted for 72%, 77%, and 80%, of TripAdvisor revenue in 2018, 2017 and 2016, coming from the following sources:
TripAdvisor-branded Click-based and Transaction Revenue. Click-based advertising comprises of contextually-relevant links to travel partnersโ sites. Click-based travel partners are primary OTAs and direct suppliers in the hotel category. The revenuemodel is on a cost-per-click, or โCPCโ basis, with payments determined by the number of travelers who click on a link multiplied by the CPC rate for each specific click.
TripAdvisor-branded Display-based Advertising and Subscription Revenue. Comprising display-based advertising placements on TripAdvisor websites. The display-based advertising clients are predominantly direct suppliers of hotels, air travel, and cruises, as well as destination marketing organizations. Display-based advertising is sold primarily on a cost per thousand impressions, or CPM, basis. TripAdvisor also offers subscription-based advertising to hoteliers, owners of B&Bs and other lodging properties. Subscription advertising services are predominantly sold for a flat fee for a contracted period of time of one year or less.
Within the Hotel Segment in 2018, 2017 and 2016 TripAdvisor two most significant travel partners were Expedia (and its subsidiaries) and Booking (and its subsidiaries) which combined accounted for approximately 37%, 43% and 46% of its revenues.
Non-Hotel offerings (Experiences, Restaurants, and Rentals)
Experiences, Restaurants, and Rentals accounted for 28%, 23%, and 20% of TripAdvisor revenue in 2018, 2017 and 2016, respectively. That revenue comes from:
Experiences: in popular travel destinations both through Viator, a dedicated Experiences offering, and on TripAdvisor website and app. TripAdvisor connects with local tour or travel activities/experiences operators (on the supplying side) to provide consumers with access to tours, activities, and experiences by generating commissions for each booking transaction.
Restaurants: Through the dedicated restaurant reservations offering, TheFork, an on TripAdvisor websites and mobile apps the company primarily generates transaction fees (or per seated diner fees) paid by restaurants for diners seated primarily from bookings through TheForkโs online reservation system.
Rentals: It provides information and services for consumers to research and to book a vacation and short-term rental properties, including full home rentals, condominiums, villas, beach rentals, cabins, and cottages. And it generates revenue primarily by offering individual property owners and managers the ability to list their properties on TripAdvisor websites and mobile apps thereby connecting homeowners with travelers through a free-to-list, commission-based option.
Breaking down marketing and distribution channels
TripAdvisor generates demand by tapping mainly into three principal distribution channels:
Indeed, if we look at the primary channels of the acquisition on TripAdvisor websites, search engines, paid advertising, and social media marketing represent the majority of its traffic:
Traffic from search engines, in particular (SEO) represents the majority of traffic for TripAdvisor.com.
We can also see the importance of both SEO and SEM on TripAdvisor top organic keywords and paid keywords:
And another good chunk of traffic and distribution happens via TripAdvisor’s mobile apps:
During 2018, TripAdvisor total advertising expense was approximately $544 million, primarily driven by online search engines, and to a lesser extent, investments in offline marketing channels (primarily television advertising).
Online travel: how the connected businesses make money
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
Booking Holdings →Booking Holdings earned $26.9B in FY2025: 66% merchant revenue (Booking collects the traveller's payment), 30% agency commissions and 4% advertising and other, which includes KAYAK and OpenTable. Marketing cost $8.2B, 30% of revenue.Source: Booking Holdings Form 10-K FY2025
Expedia →Expedia earned $14.7B in FY2025 on $119.6B of gross bookings, a 12.3% revenue margin. Its B2B arm, which powers other companies' travel sales, grew 18% to $4.8B while the consumer brands grew 2%.Source: Expedia Group Form 10-K FY2025
trivago →trivago earns referral fees when travellers click through to a booking site: โฌ532.9M of its โฌ548.9M FY2025 revenue. Expedia Group alone supplied 33% of revenue.Source: trivago Form 20-F FY2025KAYAK →KAYAK is a travel meta-search site: online travel companies and travel providers pay it for referrals and advertising placements. Booking Holdings does not report KAYAK's revenue; in FY2025 it wrote KAYAK down by $457 million, citing expected rises in customer acquisition costs.Source: Booking Holdings Form 10-K FY2025OpenTable →Restaurants pay OpenTable a fee for each diner seated through its reservation service, plus subscription fees for restaurant management services. Booking Holdings reports it inside advertising and other revenues, $1,194 million in FY2025, which grew partly on OpenTable; no standalone figure is given.Source: Booking Holdings Form 10-K FY2025
OYO →OYO's parent PRISM earns a cut of hotel and holiday-home stays booked through its platform: it either sells the room night itself or takes a commission. Revenue from operations was โน93,579.84 million (about โน9,358 crore) in the year to March 2026.Source: PRISM Annual Report 2025-26Google (travel search) →Google makes money from travel searches through ads, including hotel ads in Search and Maps. Alphabet does not report travel revenue separately; Google advertising as a whole brought in $294.7B in FY2025.Source: Alphabet Form 10-K FY2025
