Improved profitability and strong fundamentals set the stage for trivago’s continued Momentum in 2026
- trivago (NASDAQ: TRVG) compounds momentum, delivering 15% revenue growth and improved profitability—marking fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.
- trivago raises Adjusted EBITDA guidance to around €25 million for 2026, up from at least €20 million.
- Region Americas grew 17%, Developed Europe 14% in Referral Revenue, both substantially exceeding expectations despite tangible FX-related headwinds and geopolitical pressures in Rest of World.
- Core hotel search product continues to advance rapidly. trivago’s conversion rate has increased by 58% since Q1 2023, significantly strengthening its unit economics.
- Logged-in members now account for more than 30% of Referral Revenue, while trivago Book & Go has doubled its share of revenue compared to last year.
- trivago announces €20 million share buyback program, supported by a cash position of approximately €136 million and zero long-term debt.
“We are off to a strong start to 2026, delivering 15% year-over-year total revenue growth and our fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, while improving profitability against the prior year. Branded traffic channel revenue once again outpaced our total revenue growth, reflecting the compounding effects of our brand strategy and a more diversified, resilient marketing mix. Our product is converting better, up 58% since Q1 2023, our logged-in member base now drives more than 30% of Referral Revenue, and trivago Book & Go has increased significantly compared to last year. While we are facing challenging year-over-year comparables across the first half of 2026, the strength of our Q1 performance and the momentum we are carrying into the rest of the year give us the confidence to raise our profitability guidance. We now expect Adjusted EBITDA of around €25 million for 2026, up from at least €20 million previously, alongside our reaffirmed outlook of double-digit percentage total revenue growth.”– Johannes Thomas, trivago CEO and Managing Director
“The first quarter reflects our balanced approach to growth and profitability, with cost discipline and the compounding effects of prior brand investments translating into improved profitability year-over-year. Americas with 17% and Developed Europe with 14% year-over-year growth in Referral Revenue 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 121%, reflecting the effectiveness of our marketing strategy and the quality of traffic we are delivering to partners. Supported by a cash position of €136.1 million and zero long-term debt, we are announcing an up to €20 million share buyback program. The details are to be finalized and execution is planned to start at the end of May, reflecting our confidence in trivago’s long-term value creation potential.” – Wolf Schmuhl, trivago Chief Financial Officer
Optimizing Momentum, Pushing Frontiers
Our organizational theme for 2026 is “Optimizing Momentum, Pushing Frontiers.” Under this banner, trivago aims to strike a balance between sustainable growth and strategic discipline while continuing to innovate at the forefront of our industry. We are proud to demonstrate that our first-quarter results bring this theme to life and show that we are starting 2026 strong.
The following is an update on how we have progressed on our key strategic priorities. For more information, please refer to our investor presentation available here Q1’26 Investor Presentation.
Brand Marketing Continues to Outperform
trivago’s first strategic priority is to drive growth through brand marketing. We’re proud to see that the flywheel we’ve been building since mid-2023 continues to grow stronger. In Q1, branded channel traffic revenue grew faster than our overall topline, demonstrating that our brand spending produces returns that extend well beyond the period in which it is incurred. Our successful winter 2025 campaigns, combined with our deliberate diversification into owned and direct channels, positioned us well this quarter and reduced our reliance on search-related channels. Before inter-company eliminations the share of Referral Revenue from Google is down 34% compared to Q1 2023, and our non-branded SEO exposure remains at low single-digit levels. We believe the business is structurally less exposed to search volatility as a result.
Traffic referred from GenAI sources today remains below 1% of our revenue, and we believe context is important. We see these channels as an emerging marketing opportunity, still small today but gradually growing in relevance. We are actively integrating and testing formats that show promise, and we believe our strong brand and vertical focus position us well to leverage these new channels to our advantage.
Our partnership with Jürgen Klopp continues to be a meaningful asset, and his association with the trivago brand resonates strongly across our audiences. Ahead of the summer travel season, we have produced new creative spots, including dedicated TV spots that combine Klopp with the major sporting event taking place this summer. We are pleased to be heading into the year’s most important travel period with a strong creative pipeline. (Uncomfortable Truths , You Have to Check , Expert Analysis with Jürgen Klopp )
We now operate in 30 active markets, though our brand investment remains meaningfully below 2019 levels, and our market share in these markets is still small. We believe significant growth potential lies ahead.
Smarter Search, Confident Choices
trivago’s second strategic priority is to enhance our core Hotel Search experience so travelers can book with confidence, saving time and money.
Our testing velocity remained high in Q1, and we have increased our product conversion rate by 58% since Q1 of 2023, which is significant. It reflects how much better the product has become, which directly impacts our unit economics and marketing efficiency. We expect this increase in the conversion rate to meaningfully impact user satisfaction and retention over time. For our partners, it means more qualified travelers will land on their sites.
Our member strategy is advancing faster than we expected. Logged-in members now account for more than 30% of Referral Revenue before inter-segment eliminations. Members unlock access to exclusive partner deals, creating a compelling reason to log in and return to trivago. This deepens our understanding of users, gives us more touch-points to extend the user lifecycle, and we expect this to drive long-term retention. As more data accumulates within the member experience, we expect to unlock further opportunities around loyalty features and re-engagement through CRM activities.
Personalization is becoming an increasingly important lever for trivago. We continue to refine our ranking logic based on user behavior, and this quarter we expanded our explicit preference settings, allowing trivago users to indicate what matters to them most across dimensions like hotel style, quality, star rating, location, and budget. The combination of real-time behavioral signals and stated preferences gives us a much richer picture of what each user is looking for, and the first-party data we collect compounds over time. This lays the foundation for increasingly accurate recommendations and a more tailored search experience at scale, and we believe personalization can become a true differentiator for us.
We also rolled out two significant product enhancements in the first quarter. We launched Nova Vista, our new desktop architecture, which gives us a stronger foundation for the more structural experimentation required to rethink the user experience for a conversational, AI-native era. At trivago we are experimenting with conversational experiences that keep our core search and rich user interface at the center, combining the familiar with the new capabilities GenAI-based technology unlocks. We also introduced AI-synthesized Top 10 badges by theme, surfacing each hotel’s standout qualities at a glance across attributes like pool, breakfast, location, and family-friendliness, a simple but effective way to reduce decision fatigue and help users move from search to booking with more confidence.
The progress across these fronts is mutually reinforcing. Better conversion makes us a stronger channel for partners, members deepen our personalization, and personalization improves conversion. We are building a flywheel inside the product itself, and we are still in the early stages of what it can deliver.
Empowering Partners and Driving Marketplace Value
trivago’s third strategic priority is to help our partners realize their full potential on our platform. Our marketplace is healthier than it has been in years, and the numbers reflect it. The share of Referral Revenue before inter-company eliminations from “all others” advertisers has grown from 20% in Q1 2023 to 35% in Q1 2026. Partners increasingly recognize the quality of traffic we deliver, and this is showing up across the board.
Over the past three years, we have made deliberate investments to rebalance our marketplace and reduce advertiser concentration. Initiatives like our CPA model, our second-price auction, trivago Book & Go, and our Property Details Pages share a common goal, making it easier for smaller and mid-sized partners to compete effectively in our marketplace. We believe all of these have contributed to this shift and drove advertiser engagement.
Our Property Details Page has now been rolled out globally after being qualified over the course of the past year. It addresses a structural disadvantage independent hotels and chains have long faced. Previously, when users clicked through from trivago to a partner site, they would land on a room selection page, far further into the journey than they actually were. By qualifying our Property Details Page as an intermediary referral destination, we now hand users off to partners at the right moment. We have seen this meaningfully improve conversion for our direct partners.
trivago Book & Go continues to scale rapidly. Since Q1 2023, referral revenue before inter-company eliminations generated through this funnel has grown by 530%, and it has doubled its share compared to last year. Globally trivago Book & Go has become a top 5 player in our marketplace. By combining our trusted brand with a seamless, trivago-branded booking experience, we are creating value for users and partners alike.
Our transaction-based CPA model continues to grow, with over 30% of Referral Revenue before inter-company eliminations now processed through the model, up from 25% just one quarter ago. CPA is particularly valuable for smaller and mid-sized partners, who often do not have the resources to optimize bids and manage exposure effectively. By removing that complexity, we believe we are helping them compete more effectively, which is good for partners and for the long-term health of our marketplace.
Our AI Transformation, Unlocking the Power of 6,000
The pace of AI is accelerating, and driving its diffusion across the organization is a key focus for trivago’s leadership team. In recent months, new impactful AI capabilities have become available, and we have further elevated AI’s role inside trivago. Our AI transformation is being led actively from the top, with a clear ambition: for our 600 core talents to operate with the impact of 6,000.
Importantly, we are not starting from zero. trivago has run AI in production for over a decade in our marketplace, search ranking, coding, and advertising infrastructure. A majority of our workforce already thinks in systems, acts as builders, and operates in feedback loops, giving us a strong foundation to build on. From here, we envision our teams evolving through four stages: from AI-assisted work, to automated workflows, to agent-first systems, and ultimately self-improving systems. There is broad consensus that AI will absorb a meaningful share of execution work, and we view this as a great efficiency gain. It expands our capacity and lets the same number of people deliver more. This has become a base expectation for us. But we believe the real upside is much bigger. trivago reaching the impact of 6,000 will come from human craft being amplified by AI leverage. As execution work is absorbed, our people do not just gain time, they become meaningfully better at what they do. Sharper decision makers, faster and more ambitious builders, capable of governing greater complexity, and with real capacity to deepen the relationships that move the business. This is where the real leverage lies, and it is what makes us excited about the path ahead.
In March, we expanded our leadership team with further C-level appointments to execute on this opportunity with sharper focus and clearer accountability. Alexander Volkmann was appointed as Chief Intelligence Officer, overseeing machine learning and AI data strategy. Sherin Hegazy was appointed Chief Commercial Officer, and will strengthen our partner ecosystem. And Ioannis Papadopoulos, Chief Technology Officer, who joined us in late 2025, leads our technology agenda and AI enablement efforts. The rapid advancement of AI is reshaping what is possible in travel search, how we build products, and the expectations of travelers and partners. These three individuals have helped build what trivago is today, and the institutional depth and judgment they bring is exactly what this next chapter requires. I am excited to have them on board and to shape the future of trivago together.
We are excited about the path ahead of us, and we are doubling down as a company to maximize the potential that has emerged. What gives us more confidence is how our people are rising to meet this transformation. They are curious, quick learners, who are deeply committed to making the most of this moment. That mindset, more than any single technology or strategy, is what can set us apart. Thank you, team trivago for your hard work and dedication.
trivago Files Antitrust Claim against Google
On May 5 2025, we filed an antitrust damages claim against Google before the Regional Court of Hamburg in Germany, seeking compensation for damages trivago has suffered as a result of Google’s self-preferencing in general search results. For more than a decade, we have raised concerns that Google has systematically steered travelers away from competing hotel metasearch platforms and toward its own service. We believe the claim rests on a strong legal foundation. The EU Commission’s 2017 Google Shopping decision, upheld by the European Court of Justice in September 2024, established the legal framework for follow-on damages actions of this nature, and two first-instance awards have already been granted in a comparable case before the Regional Court of Berlin in November 2025. The claim covers the period from January 2014 through December 2025 and seeks substantial monetary damages based on an independent expert analysis. We expect this to be a multi-year effort, and the outcome of litigation is inherently uncertain. That said, the size of the potential claim is meaningful, and we believe pursuing it is in the best interest of our shareholders and of a travel ecosystem that benefits from competition based on merit.
For details, please refer to our separate press release published here Investor Relations
About trivago:
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.
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