Outstanding growth and positive profitability signal the next chapter in trivago’s momentum.
-
trivago (NASDAQ: TRVG) delivered 21% year-over-year Total Revenue growth in Q2 2026, reaching €168.4 million, and returned to positive Adjusted EBITDA.
-
trivago is raising its full-year guidance to a mid-teen percentage increase in revenue and an adjusted EBITDA of around €30 million.
-
Branded traffic revenue once again substantially outpaced total Referral Revenue growth, and product conversion is up 64% since Q2 2023.
-
Americas and Developed Europe delivered strong double-digit Referral Revenue growth of 16% and 14% respectively, again exceeding our expectations.
-
trivago Book & Go and trivago’s transaction-based CPA model continue to diversify and strengthen its partner marketplace.
“The second quarter marked three years since Andrej, Jasmine, and I returned to trivago with the ambition to turn the company around. Our results show how far we have come. We delivered our sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth, with total revenue up 21% year-over-year, and reached positive Adjusted EBITDA for the first time in a second quarter since 2023, even though the first half of the year is typically our investment period. This is a clear sign of how much our earnings profile has strengthened heading into what is typically our strongest season. Referral revenue was once again fueled by growth in our branded channel traffic, and our conversion rate is up 64% since second quarter of 2023, proof that our brand and product flywheels are reinforcing each other. I’m 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,” said Chief Executive Officer Johannes Thomas.
“The second quarter demonstrated continued execution of our strategy, combining cost discipline, improved unit economics and compounding effects of prior brand investments, translating into total revenue growth as well as improved profitability. Referral Revenue growth year-over-year of 16% in Americas and 14% in Developed Europe both exceeded our expectations, more than offsetting foreign exchange headwinds and geopolitical pressures in Rest of World. Global ROAS improved by three percentage points to 122% year-over-year, reflecting the effectiveness of our marketing strategy and the quality of traffic we deliver to our partners. These results strengthen our confidence in trivago’s trajectory, which is reflected in the revised outlook of mid-teens percentage year-over-year total revenue growth and an increased full-year Adjusted EBITDA target of around €30 million in 2026 as well as our goal to achieve a 10% Adjusted EBITDA margin by 2028.” said Chief Financial Officer Dr. Wolf Schmuhl.
Click here to access our investor presentation and take a closer look at our performance
Our financial performance
Three years ago, trivago embarked on an ambitious turnaround. Determined to rebuild our business after the pandemic left it weaker than competitors, and years of underinvestment had taken a toll on both product and brand. We refocused on our core proposition: saving travelers time and money, while bringing trivago back to the top of their minds. That strategy keeps paying off. Q2 of 2026 marks trivago’s sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth, with Total Revenue up 21% year-over-year to €168.4 million. And we’ve achieved a positive Adjusted EBITDA of €1.1 million, marking our first positive second quarter since 2023. The first half of the year is historically when trivago makes investments, while the second half is when we expect to earn most of our profits. Substantially cutting our first-half loss is a meaningful signal of how much our earnings profile has strengthened as we head into the strongest part of the year. We are also pleased with our performance in the Americas and Developed Europe markets. Both delivered strong double-digit Referral Revenue growth, up 16% and 14% respectively, once again exceeding expectations, despite foreign exchange headwinds and geopolitical pressures continued to weigh on the Rest of World segment.
On the back of this performance, trivago is raising its full-year 2026 guidance to mid-teens percentage Total Revenue growth and Adjusted EBITDA of around €30 million, while narrowing its path to a 10% Adjusted EBITDA margin by 2028.
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 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 investments. We continuously optimise our paid channels for their marginal contribution and adjust our attribution and investment strategy accordingly. In recent months, we have further levelled up how we measure and think about these investments, sharpening our incrementality and elasticity testing. Referral Revenue from SEO Traffic Sources is only accounting for a low single-digit share of our Referral Revenue.
One topic we haven’t 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, profiled members, and every signup gives us a direct line to that traveler throughout their planning and booking journey. From there, our CRM activities such as email and app 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.
Enhancing Core Search and the Price Comparison Experience
Our product teams have maintained a high testing 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 sharpened 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 experiences 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 on.
AI Highlights and AI Review Summaries are now a core part of how travelers compare hotels on trivago. We have continuously advanced both further. A new per-paragraph format, with key elements highlighted and paired with the most relevant images, makes 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 500,000 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 consenting, profiled members who have a reason to return, and our three-month retention rate of new members demonstrates this progress, 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 them.
trivago Book & 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 the recent months, we onboarded several new advertisers to Book & Go, including Expedia as a supply partner. Most importantly, we integrated Book & 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 closely together to maximize the value we create for our users and partners.
Empowering Partners and Driving Marketplace Value
Our partner mix has become structurally more resilient. Before intercompany eliminations, the share of Referral Revenue from ‘all others’ advertisers has grown 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.
trivago’s AI Ambition Gain Ground
trivago’s ambition is for its roughly 600 core talents to execute with the impact of 6,000, and that ambition is showing up in the numbers. Our latest internal AI survey found that 93% of talents now use AI daily, up from 63% a year ago, and 86% say it makes a real, measurable difference in their output. On average, talents are saving 55 minutes a day, up from 36 minutes last year. Investment reflects the same trend: in the first seven months of 2026, trivago spent more than five times as much on AI tooling and tokens for its teams as it did across all of 2025.
We believe that trivago’s size also puts us in a sweet spot, and recent research from Ramp supports this. Looking at more than 21,000 US companies, Ramp’s economists found that AI adoption peaks at companies around trivago’s size and with a similar technical talent composition. trivago sees a real advantage here: 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 valuable, but the real leverage lies elsewhere. Talents are becoming dramatically more capable, making better decisions, building products, and scaling reliable systems faster. trivago’s ambition is to become an AI-native company, where agentic systems take on more of the execution and its people focus on direction, judgment, and craft.
trivago remains disciplined about where its growing investment in this technology creates real value: educating talents, developing mission-focused AI playbooks for its teams, and building its own infrastructure, drawing on open-source models wherever they allow it to move just as fast at a lower cost. With clear direction, sustained momentum, and talents eager to learn and execute quickly, trivago is well positioned to compete from here
Looking Ahead
Over the past three years, we’ve 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, with our brand and product flywheels continuing to reinforce one another. That’s what trivago’s 2026 theme, “Optimizing Momentum, Pushing Frontiers,” is about: striking the right balance between growth and marketing discipline while innovating at the leading edge of our category. From here, we remain focused on steering toward continued growth at higher profitability.
None of this would be possible without the team behind the work. The incredible trivago talent driving this momentum. Well done to you all. And thank you also to our partners and investors for the trust and support.
About trivago N.V.
trivago N.V. (NASDAQ: TRVG) is a leading global hotel search and price comparison platform, and one of the most recognized travel brands in the world. When travelers search for a hotel, we want trivago to be the obvious choice. We help them find the best place to stay and deliver the best deal to book, saving them time and money – so every traveler feels smart and confident about their booking. Powered by AI, we personalize and simplify hotel search for millions of travelers, connecting them with more than 7.0 million hotels and other accommodations across more than 190 countries.