Tripadvisor Names Appointees to Fill Out Reorganization of Its Core Business

Tripadvisor filled in the blanks, naming two executive appointments to flesh out a reorganization of its core business that the company disclosed during its fourth quarter earnings call a week ago.

Sanjay Raman, who had previous stints at Airbnb, Greylock and Google, starting working in January as chief product officer, a new position within Tripadvisor’s core business segment.

Likewise, Kristen Dalton, who has served in Tripadvisor roles since 2019 as vice president of financial planning and analysis and interim head of the company’s business to consumer group, started serving in January as chief operating officer of the company’s core business. That is a new position, as well.

Core Business Is Distinct From Viator and TheFork

What is Tripadvisor’s core business? Tripadvisor defines it as “Tripadvisor branded hotels, Tripadvisor branded display and platform, Tripadvisor experiences and dining revenue, and other revenue,” including cruise. Tripadvisor recently de-emphasized vacation rentals, flights, car rentals within its “other revenue” category.

Although Tripadvisor experiences and dining revenue are part of the core segment, the separately branded Viator experiences and TheFork dining revenue don’t fall within the core business. That means the January appointees won’t be responsible for Viator and TheFork, which have separate teams.

With the appointments and the reorganization of Tripadvisor’s core segment, Tripadvisor now had functionally led teams in operations (led by Dalton), marketing (John Boris), product (Raman) and engineering (Sugata Mukhopadhyay).

Under the prior structure, the teams were organized along business to consumer and business to business lines.

While Viator reached 171 percent of 2019 revenue levels in 2022, TheFork hit 99 percent, and Tripadvisor’s core business generated only 79 percent of 2019 revenue.