Trivago: Squeezed by Google

Part of the Portfolio since 2018...

Trivago was a real Düsseldorf success story, and you already know it, because you have seen the advert roughly four thousand times: the hotel metasearch with the catchy jingle and the perpetually rumpled pitchman. Founded in 2005 by Rolf Schrömgens, Malte Siewert, Peter Vinnemeier and Stephan Stubner, it became for a while Germany’s favourite consumer-internet export. Then it taught a generation of investors a quiet lesson about where, exactly, the money goes.

The travel giant Expedia agreed in December 2012 to buy a majority of Trivago for $632 million, closing the deal in 2013. In December 2016 Trivago floated on NASDAQ at $11 a share – below the indicated range of $13 to $15, the first small tell that the public was less enthusiastic than the bankers. The shares climbed on debut and roughly doubled by the summer of 2017 – and that, essentially, was the summit.

The structural problem is elegant and fatal. Trivago is a thin layer of arbitrage: it buys traffic (overwhelmingly from Google) and sells clicks (to online travel agencies and hotels). On one side sits Google, steadily raising the price of the traffic and occasionally deciding to show its own hotel results. On the other side sits the OTA industry – dominated by Expedia and Booking – which happens to include Trivago’s own controlling shareholder. Trivago’s own annual report says as much, in the flat prose of risk factors: search engines deliver a substantial share of its traffic, brands of Booking Holdings and Expedia Group generate a very significant portion of its revenue, and Expedia controls the company. Squeezed between a supplier that can raise your costs at will and a customer that owns you, there is not much room left for a moat.

So the economics behaved exactly as the position dictated.

Marketing spend devoured the revenue; profitability flickered and faded; the much-vaunted “platform” turned out to be, in large part, a very efficient way of moving money from advertisers to Google. Even the cheerful price comparison came with a footnote: in Australia the competition regulator took Trivago to court over how its ads presented hotel rates, and in April 2022 the Federal Court ordered it to pay A$44.7 million in penalties for misleading consumers – the “best deal” having had a habit of favouring whoever paid the most per click.

Then 2020 stopped travel altogether, and the shares sank into the low single digits, where they have largely remained. In 2023 Trivago changed its ADS ratio so that one depositary share now represents five ordinary shares – the reverse split’s more discreet cousin, which keeps a quote looking presentable without anybody having to say the words. The same year brought a management reshuffle that saw co-founder Schrömgens return as an adviser and Johannes Thomas take over as CEO.

To be fair to the patient: the business is still alive and still busy. In 2025 revenue rose 19% to about €549 million and Trivago reported a net profit of €11 million – on advertising spend of €418 million. Read those two numbers side by side and you have the whole exhibit in one line of the income statement.

There is no villain here and no fraud – which is precisely why the museum finds it instructive. Trivago is the specimen of the “platform” that is really someone else’s distribution channel wearing a tech-company valuation. It performed a genuine service for travellers and almost no value capture for its own shareholders, because everything it earned was owed, upstream, to the ad giant it depended on.

Museum note: the jingle promised to find you the ideal hotel. It never promised to find the shareholders one.

trivago – share price, monthly close in USD, adjusted for splits and capital measures. 2017–2026. Source: Yahoo Finance, as of Oct 2026.

Trivago: Squeezed by Google

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