Prepared remarks
Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by and welcome to the trivago Second Quarter Earnings Call. I must advise you the call is being recorded today, Wednesday, 08/05/2026. We are pleased to be joined on today's call by Johannes Thomas, trivago CEO and Managing Director, and Wolf Schmuhl, trivago CFO and Managing Director. The following discussion, including responses to your questions, reflects management's view as of Tuesday, 08/04/2026 only, unless expressly stated otherwise, in which case it reflects management's view as of today, Wednesday, 08/05/2026 only. trivago does not undertake any obligation to update or revise this information. As always, some of the statements made on today's call are forward-looking, typically preceded by words such as expect, we believe, we anticipate, or similar statements. Please refer to the second quarter 2026 operating and financial review and trivago's filings with the SEC for information about factors which could cause trivago's actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. You will find reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures discussed today in trivago's operating and financial review, which is posted on trivago's investor relations website at ir.trivago.com. You are encouraged to periodically visit trivago's investor relations website for important content. Finally, unless otherwise stated, all comparisons on this call will be against results for the comparable period of 2025. With that, let me turn the call over to Johannes.
Good morning, and thank you for joining our Q2 2026 earnings call. This quarter marked three years since Jasmine, Andrej and I returned to trivago with the ambition to turn around the company. At that time, trivago was not in a good place. We had come out of the pandemic weaker than other players in our space. Our product was no longer competitive, and our brand had suffered from years of underinvestment. We refocused the company on its core proposition: saving travelers time and money, and on bringing trivago back to the top of travelers' minds. That work keeps paying off. In Q2, we delivered our sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit year-over-year total revenue growth, exceeding our expectations on both top and bottom line. Total revenue grew 21% year-over-year, and we achieved a positive adjusted EBITDA, marking our first positive second quarter since 2023. To put this in context, the first half of the year is our investment period, while the second half is where we expect to earn the majority of our profits. Reaching profitability already in Q2 while substantially cutting our first half adjusted EBITDA loss shows how much our earnings profile has strengthened as we head into our strongest season. We achieved this and our continued growth despite foreign exchange headwinds and geopolitical pressures weighing on our Rest of the World segment. Let me share a few strategic highlights of the quarter. Branded traffic referral revenue growth once again substantially outpaced total referral revenue growth, demonstrating that we are growing through the channels that are strategically and financially most attractive to us. Our product converts significantly better with conversion rate up 64% since Q2 2023, improving our unit economics. Building on our member strategy and growing member base, CRM-related channels now give us new ways to engage travelers with no dedicated marketing investment required. Referral revenue from CRM channels has more than doubled compared to last year, exceeding our internal expectations in pace and relevance. Trivago Book and Go continues to scale in our marketplace, tripling compared to the previous year, and we are pleased to have onboarded Expedia as a supply partner on this part of our platform. These strong operational and strategic developments give us the confidence to raise our full-year guidance. For 2026, we now expect total revenue growth in the mid-teens percentage range and adjusted EBITDA of around €30 million. We are also narrowing our path to a target adjusted EBITDA margin of 10% by 2028. Our long-term strategy is playing out. In 2025, our theme was "turning the tide," reflecting our commitment to making our turnaround a reality. This year, under the theme "Optimize Momentum, Pushing Frontiers," we are building on that foundation. We aim to strike the right balance between growth and marketing discipline while continuing to innovate at the leading edge of our field. I am proud of how our teams drive this momentum, leveraging the best of AI in our product, in our marketing and in how we work, making us more impactful as an organization. We are confident that this, alongside our brand and product flywheel, can continue to drive growth and profitability. With that, let me walk you through the progress we made against each of our three strategic priorities this quarter. These priorities have been in place since 2023, and that consistency is deliberate. We set a clear strategy and we have executed against it quarter after quarter. For additional detailed illustrations, please also refer to our investor presentation on ir.trivago.com. Our first strategic priority is to drive growth through brand marketing. Our brand engine continues to compound. Branded traffic referral revenue growth once again substantially outpaced our total referral revenue growth, meaning our growth is coming disproportionately from the channel that matters most to us long term. We see branded traffic as more lasting—travelers who return to us directly rather than through paid channels—and this is where the compounding effects of our brand investment show up. Through this, we also aim to further diversify our channel mix and improve the resilience of our business. We remain disciplined in how we deploy performance marketing investment. We continuously optimize our paid channels for their marginal contribution and adjust our attribution strategy accordingly. In recent months, we have further leveled up how we measure and think about these investments, sharpening our incrementality and elasticity testing. Referral revenue from SEO traffic sources only accounts for a low-single-digit share of our referral revenue. One topic we have not touched on much before is how our growth funnel is compounding: our brand investments bring a growing base of travelers to trivago; our member initiatives turn a meaningful share of them into signed-up profile members; and every single signup gives us a direct line to travelers throughout their planning and booking journey. From there, our CRM activities such as email and push notifications let us reach them through channels we own, at no dedicated marketing cost. CRM is still rather small in terms of revenue, but it is becoming a relevant profit contributor, with revenue more than doubling compared to last year. Together, this funnel drives higher retention and revenue at structurally better margins—a meaningful building block on our path to greater profitability. Our second strategic priority is to enhance our core hotel search experience so travelers can book with confidence, saving time and money. Our product teams have maintained a high test velocity, improving the user journey, lifting conversion and strengthening our unit economics. Since Q2 2023, our product conversion rate has increased by 64%, demonstrating how much better our product experience and marketing mix have become. This also makes trivago a more attractive channel for our partners, who we believe gain access to more incremental and higher-intent travelers. This quarter, we enhanced the hotel search experience even further to better align with what we know travelers actually expect—less friction and more reason to trust what they see. We aligned our desktop and mobile experience more closely, surfaced more relevant listings on every screen, and simplified the path from search to booking. This is the foundation on which our entire product roadmap is built. AI highlights and AI review summaries are now a core part of how travelers compare hotels on trivago, and we have continuously advanced both further. New per-paragraph formats with key elements highlighted and paired with the most relevant images make our AI-generated review summaries easier to scan and more visually appealing. We have also improved the quality and ranking of our hotel highlights for more than 500 thousand hotels. They are now context-aware, giving travelers a more personalized experience based on what they are looking for. These are just a few examples of how we aim to help people search and decide with more confidence on trivago. Our member proposition continues to strengthen and our member base keeps growing. We are turning more and more anonymous visitors into profiled members who have a better reason to return. Our three-month retention rate of new members is up 24% since Q1 2023. Before intercompany eliminations, logged-in members generate more than 30% of referral revenue. The more we know our users, the more we can do for them, and the more we can engage with them. Trivago Book and Go continues to scale rapidly, and its share of bookings on our platform has roughly tripled compared to last year, making it one of the top players in our marketplace. In recent months, we onboarded several new advertisers to Book and Go, including Expedia as a supply partner. Most importantly, we integrated Book and Go more natively into our platform to achieve a more seamless user experience and higher downstream conversion, building on the technology we gained through the Holisto acquisition last year. We continue to bring teams and technologies closer together to maximize the value we create for our users and partners. Our third strategic priority is to help our partners realize that potential on our platform. Our partner mix has become structurally more resilient. Before intercompany eliminations, the share of referral revenue from all other advertisers grew from 20% in Q2 2023 to 35% in Q2 2026, reflecting a broader and more diverse base of advertisers succeeding on our platform. Our transaction-based CPA model has been a key driver of this shift, exceeding our expectations in both adoption and performance. By shifting the complexity of bid optimization and risk exposure away from our partners, we believe we are helping advertisers compete more effectively, which strengthens the long-term health of our marketplace. Beyond our three strategic priorities, I want to share the strong progress we are making on AI adoption at trivago. Last time I described our ambition for our roughly 600 core talents to operate with the impact of 6,000. That ambition is showing up in our internal AI adoption numbers. Our latest internal AI survey found 93% of our talents now use AI daily, up from 63% a year ago, and 86% say it makes a real measurable difference in output. On average, our talents are saving 55 minutes a day, up from 36 minutes last year. Our investment reflects the same trend. In the first seven months of 2026, we spent more than five times as much on AI tooling and tokens for our teams as we did across all of 2025. We believe our size also puts us in a sweet spot. Recent research looking at more than 21,000 U.S. companies found that AI adoption peaks at companies around our size with a technical talent composition similar to ours. We see a real advantage in this: we are big enough to build cutting-edge infrastructure and small enough to keep a culture built on curiosity and speed. Saving time and becoming more efficient is great, but we believe the real leverage lies elsewhere. Each of us is becoming dramatically more capable—making better decisions, building products, and scaling reliable systems faster. Our ambition is to become an AI-native company where generic systems take on more of the execution and our people focus on direction, judgment and craft. While we are excited about this progress, we remain disciplined about where our growing investment in this technology creates real value. We are educating our talents, developing mission-focused AI playbooks for our teams, and building our own infrastructure drawing on open-source models wherever they let us move just as fast at lower costs. I am confident in how trivago can compete from here. We have the direction, the momentum and talents who are eager to learn and move faster than anyone else in our space. With that, I will hand over to our CFO, Wolf, for a more detailed financial review.
Thank you, Johannes. Good morning, everyone. Q2 marked another strong quarter for trivago, and we are delighted that we exceeded our internal year-over-year expectations for both total revenue growth and profitability. We achieved a 21% year-over-year increase in total revenue while shifting more towards profitability despite tough prior-year comparables. Our brand strategy, together with significantly improved unit economics driven by conversion uplift, underpins our balanced approach of driving top-line growth while improving profitability. These developments reinforce our confidence in targeting a 10% adjusted EBITDA margin by 2028. In our view, the current share price continues to understate trivago's long-term earnings potential, and we will continue our buyback program as we see it as a disciplined and high-return use of capital. As of 07/31/2026, we have repurchased around 700 thousand ADS for $3.5 million. Let's review our second quarter results as well as our full-year 2026 and midterm outlook. Unless otherwise indicated, all comparisons for 2026 are on a year-over-year basis. In the second quarter, total revenue reached €168.4 million, representing year-over-year growth of 21%. Americas grew 16% and developed Europe grew 14% in referral revenue year-over-year, both exceeding our expectations. This was driven by growth in branded channel traffic, compounding brand effects and improved marketing efficiency. Rest of World referral revenue declined 11% year-over-year, impacted by FX headwinds of approximately 7% and geopolitical pressures in the Middle East, including airspace restrictions and elevated oil prices. Throughout the quarter, we took a tactical approach in these markets, adjusting bidding spend and targets locally. The situation in the Middle East remains fluid and creates near-term uncertainty, and we will manage our exposure dynamically as it evolves. That said, Rest of World represented just 18% of our Q2 referral revenue, so the impact on total referral revenue was limited. Our revenue base is well diversified, which makes us structurally more resilient to localized macro pressures. For the second quarter, we reported a net loss of €5.2 million. At the same time, we delivered a positive adjusted EBITDA of €1.1 million, ahead of our internal expectations and marking the first time since 2023 we have achieved this milestone already in the second quarter. Operational expenses increased by €26.9 million year-over-year, totaling €174.2 million for the second quarter. This was mainly due to a €14.3 million increase in selling and marketing, resulting from higher investment in both brand and performance marketing channels made over the course of the quarter, and incremental expenses resulting from the consolidation of trivago deals. Advertising spend increased by €8.3 million, or 18% in developed Europe, €6.2 million or 14% in Americas, and decreased by €2.3 million or 9% in Rest of World. Despite further scaling of our marketing investments this quarter, global ROAS rose from 119.0% in Q2 last year to 121.8% in Q2 this year. Americas delivered a notable ROAS improvement, climbing from 116.9% in Q2 2025 to 125.3% in Q2 2026, while developed Europe experienced a slight decline from 122.1% to 121.0% due to strong brand investments, and Rest of World softened from 117.1% to 115.9% by the end of Q2 2026. We held €114.5 million in cash and cash equivalents and had no long-term debt, underscoring our exceptional financial position. Our third quarter is off to an encouraging start. We will continue scaling our brand marketing investments, though at a more moderated pace than in prior years, leveraging compounding brand effects to sustain the momentum of increased profitability in 2026. In addition, we are now consolidating trivago deals without the previous one-month reporting lag, eliminating the timing differences which impacted our consolidated financial statements since the third quarter of 2025 until the first quarter of 2026. We anticipate sustaining our growth trajectory with steadily improving profitability, targeting a 10% adjusted EBITDA margin by 2028. For 2026, we are increasing our full-year guidance to mid-teens percentage year-over-year total revenue growth and an adjusted EBITDA of around €30 million. With that, let's open the line for questions. Operator, we are now ready to take the first question.
Questions and answers
We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press *1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press *1 again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Naved Khan with B. Riley Securities. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Great. Thank you very much. A couple of questions for me, and great execution here, guys. I like the fact you guys now are guiding to 10% and put a date on that—so 2028. How should we be thinking about your ability to grow the top line as you kind of march towards a 10% target by 2028? Give us your thoughts on that. And then the second question I have is, in terms of the trivago Book and Go, it is now around 35% in terms of share. How high do you think the share can go? Also, curious why Expedia opted to participate in that—they have their own brand and I'm trying to understand why they would opt towards the first page in Book and Go. Thank you.
Thanks for your question.
So let me take the first one. How do we think about the top-line development combined with the 10% adjusted EBITDA margin that we call out for 2028? First of all, we were comfortable setting this target because the sum of trends that we already observe independently contributed to this new target. We see the compounding effects from our brand flywheel. We see an improved product which led to conversion rate improvements of around 64%. All these factors gave us confidence to call this out. In terms of top line, we still plan to grow above market, and this is how we look at it at the moment. I cannot comment more on Book and Go right now. Maybe later in the year we will give further guidance on top line, but that is what we feel confident sharing right now. I think it will be very interesting how our member strategy turns out, how we create stickiness with users, and we are in the second year of this. We see encouraging results, and we want to see how this unfolds before we give more top-line guidance as well.
On the Book and Go side, I think what is important is that we continue expanding it across markets—it is 16 markets now where we have launched the product. The question on Expedia is that they want additional visibility. When you join our Book and Go product, they are visible with their own brand and with their inventory; they are also visible in our branded channels. It basically gives them incrementality, which is the belief. They get the benefit of incremental visibility, and we have the benefit of offering this on a broader scale as we believe this can be more attractive for members in the long term to book more consistently through the Book and Go channel for a convenient experience. This grows quickly—it tripled its share over the course of the year. I am not sure if you mentioned a specific percentage number, so we are not sharing an absolute percentage number of size. It is a relevant part of the All Other segment, but not the majority. This is one of several drivers of the All Other segment. The All Other segment has been growing because of a combination of things: alternative accommodation players being more active in our space, the direct segment becoming more competitive, and changes we have made around our hotel detail pages, which we shared last quarter and the previous quarter, where we make them more competitive in our marketplace. They do not have a search results list like Booking or Expedia, and we basically improve the experience and make them more competitive, so the direct players have leaned in more and also enjoy a bigger share in our market. That sits around Book and Go and the dynamics with the All Other segment. Does that answer your question?
Yeah. So I want to correct: I think the 35% is the All Other segment and not just Book and Go, which is a part of it. But do you think this 35% can continue to climb higher? Where do you see it over the medium term? That is a follow-up question. And then the second part of this is, are you also seeing Google implement changes in Europe? I think they have been required to do that. Is that a tailwind for you, or are they still not implementing those changes?
Yes. Very good questions. On the All Other segment, how this develops, we are kind of agnostic to that. If it is around 35%, we think our marketplace is more balanced. We see it is very elastic if different players are acting on our marketplace, so that is what we see as much healthier than it used to be. It depends on what the different market participants decide and where this goes. We do not control this. It would be unhealthy if this goes below 30%. Everything between 30–40% we perceive as a healthy distribution. So where it is, we feel quite good about that.
And then your question on Google, that is a very good one.
We have not seen Google implement a compliant solution into their general search results yet. You are pointing to the July 2026 decision, where the commission found Google noncompliant and fined them €890 million because of self-preferencing in search, among other things. They also explicitly named hotels among the verticals that Google favored. Overall, we have been quite vocal about this case and this validated the claim we filed. This directionally supports the case of the claim we filed in May against Google. What we expect is that Google will react because the commission also emphasized that if Google is not reacting in 30 days, they face daily penalties up to 5% of global turnover. So we expect Google to react; we have seen Google testing new versions that appear to be compliant. We will see how this goes. Will this be a tailwind? We always said changes in search results are complex and it is very hard to predict what is a tailwind and what is a headwind; it is generally volatile. I think it is a structural tailwind—strategically, long-term. If they are not self-preferencing their own product anymore, we have a more level playing field where we can compete on eye level. That is good for us because we believe we have a better product for consumers. I think that is generally positive. We will continue to monitor compliance and are keen to see how this develops.
Great. Appreciate the color. Thank you, guys.
Your next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for taking the questions. This is calling in for Doug. First one, on your 10% adjusted EBITDA margin target being brought forward—what are the key building blocks that give you confidence to get there? Is it more commercial lift or marketing discipline that is giving you the confidence? And then secondly, could you talk about some of the primary drivers behind Book and Go's strong growth that you are seeing right now? Do you feel like, or do you have a preference, whether a user goes down that Book and Go funnel or the metasearch funnel? Thank you.
Thank you for the question. Maybe I'll repeat what Wolf said to make it clear. One thing is brand marketing: we bring more people onto our platform, and we see branded users are more sticky and have a higher probability to return than people coming from performance marketing channels. As we lean into that, over time you have the compounding effect—last year we stepped up brand marketing spend significantly, and this year ad spend in the first half went up around 10%. We continue to expect to increase brand spend but at a lower magnitude than in prior years. From the compounding effects of brand, we expect profitability to flow through to the bottom line. Additionally, conversion improvement is a direct lever: if you improve conversion rate, it has a big impact on the bottom line. That is a second major building block. The third is our member strategy: members are more sticky, and we have a better member proposition which increases the probability of users coming back. One more element we mentioned for the first time this time is CRM revenue, which has become much more relevant for us. We now have logged-in members that make more than 30% of our referral revenue, and through email and app notifications we can engage users within a roughly two-week window where booking decisions are commonly made. If we can reach them directly, we do not have to rebuy users through costly paid channels—those are lower direct marketing costs, which lifts profitability. So, the three building blocks are increased brand, increased conversion and more stickiness from members, plus CRM as an efficiency lever. Regarding Book and Go, travel booking is often chaotic with different touch points—some users have a preference for Book and Go because of convenience, others prefer the meta proposition. Our meta offering is our differentiation and we will not weaken it. We expect to be multi-option and to serve different user preferences. We might see roughly 10–20% of users in the future using Book and Go, but it is hard to predict precisely given the chaotic user journey and varying user preferences.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press *1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press *1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Johannes for closing remarks.
Yes. Thank you. Over the past three years, we have deliberately diversified our marketing mix and rebalanced our marketplace. The result is a structurally more resilient business now delivering its sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. From here, we remain focused on steering towards continued growth at higher profitability. None of this would be possible without the team behind it. What stands out to me is the discipline and pace at which our talents are executing and learning—that is our greatest competitive advantage. I want to thank everyone for their commitment and dedication. To our partners and investors, thank you for your continued trust. And thank you all for joining today.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.