TripAdvisor's Curious Strategy of Buying Smaller Startups
Skift Take
How long can Tripadvisor stick to its core of media and lead generation and how much growth is still left in there? That would answer the question of whether the company wants to spend material money in doing bigger acquisitions than it has done so far, and move into actual transactions and booking space in travel.
As large travel booking giants like Priceline and Expedia continue to do big-ticket digital acquisitions, the hotel reviews giant -- and now-trying-to-become-hotel-metasearch company -- TripAdvisor continues with its curious strategy of picking up tiny travel companies that have little apparent effect on its topline, and surely nothing on its bottomline.
According to its latest quarterly SEC 10-Q filing, TripAdvisor acquired five companies in the first six months of this year for a total cash price of $31.6 million. These five startups were: TinyPost, Jetsetter, CruiseWise, Niumba, and GateGuru.
Out of these five companies, CruiseWise and TinyPost together cost a little over $1 million, more of the acqhire variety, and the rest -- Jetsetter, Niumba, and GateGuru -- had $30 million spread between them. Our estimate is Jetsetter took the largest chunk of that, which means the sale price of GateGuru and Niumba were likely in the single digit millions.
The table below shows how stingy TripAdvisor has been over the years with money on hand, spending these amounts on a total of about 20 companies since 2009. In fact its spend decreased drastically over the last two years, though it has picked up the pace this year.
TripAdvisor
2013 (fir
