Tripadvisor brings in Booking.com veteran as president of Viator

Tripadvisor Group has appointed former Booking.com executive Pepijn Rijvers as president of Viator, PhocusWire can exclusively reveal.

It has been nearly a year since former Viator president Ben Drew announced he was stepping down after four years in the role and 12 at Tripadvisor. Rijvers will take up the position from April 1.

Rijvers spent more than 12 years at Booking.com in various roles including managing director of hotels and accommodations and chief marketing officer. He left the company four years ago and soon after joined the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

The announcement comes as Tripadvisor Group focuses on experiences as they become “the strategic and financial center of the group.”

During the company’s recent fourth quarter and full-year 2024 recent earnings call, CEO Matt Goldberg said Viator accounted for 46% of total revenue.

“I’ve talked about our vision to be the most trusted source for travel and experiences. And now experiences is positioned to be the largest revenue contributor relative to Tripadvisor. We will surpass that this year, that’s our expectation. And it's also growing very healthy, both in terms of top line and bottom line,” Goldberg told PhocusWire in an interview.

Viator reported almost $4.2 billion in gross booking value in 2024, up nearly 12% compared to 2023, and $840 million in revenue, a 14% increase year over year.

Goldberg said the experiences category has huge and untapped potential to grow further, with the numbers it is reporting only representing a fraction of what is possible, especially as the segment increasingly migrates online. 

“That is just a huge opportunity with real tailwinds in consumer behavior, awareness for the category, what people want to do when they travel,” he said.

“So, when we look at that opportunity, we think about our group and we think we have really unique competitive advantages that position us not only to maintain our position, but to grow our lead.”

Supply, demand, distribution, data

Goldberg said the company has multiple strengths fueling its growth: the combination of its tours and activities supply with the demand that comes through the Tripadvisor and Viator brands, where consumers are increasingly starting their search with experiences; its third-party distribution network, which includes large online travel players such as Booking.com and Uber; and its data.

He said he landed on Rijvers as the best person to lead Viator following a global search and that he initially joined as an advisor for six months. 

Goldberg went on to highlight Rijvers’ experience of helping to scale Booking, understanding of marketplaces and background in product, supply, marketing and data.

“I just can't think of a better person anywhere in the world to lead Viator and help us scale experiences in the next phase of our growth,” Goldberg said.

Commenting on the experiences segment and his decision to join Viator, Rijvers described it as a fairly immature category in terms of how consumers search and book experiences as well as the amount of reservations technology that providers use to make a sale. He said he sees opportunity in building a “global marketplace for experiences, which is really an unclaimed space still.”

Tripadvisor is also promoting Kristin Dorsett, Viator’s chief product officer to chief operating officer of the experiences brand. Rijvers praised the quality of the existing Viator team and said its “low on ego, customer-centric and data-driven view” was inspiring.

He also said the partnership with Dorsett is "crucial" because of her experience within the Tripadvisor/Viator business.

"She has performed really deeply on product and data in particular and those elements of the partnership will be crucial to allow me to really contribute to the team and to the success of the business,” he said.

That is just a huge opportunity with real tailwinds in consumer behavior, awareness for the category, what people want to do when they travel.

Matt Goldberg, Tripadvisor

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Goldberg said plans for growing the experiences business include ensuring consumers know the category exists and that it is providing the breadth of content so that consumers find what they want quickly on Tripadvisor and Viator ultimately return, download the app and book more.

He also said experiences are a “high priority area of investment” for the group across talent, marketing, product, technology and data as well as in bringing on additional supply.

“We grew our supply in our operator base 15% last year and we continue to think about what second and third tier regions do we want to add supply in?” Goldberg said.

“How do we want to add supply in our core first-tier destinations? And [how do] we think about different categories of supply and niche supply.”

And, what might Viator look like in six months time?

“Executing for incremental growth is not something where you can do one thing and then suddenly you have 10% more growth,” Pepijn said. “That's not the way it works. But there are real opportunities to follow customer demand with way more precision and in a faster and more immediate way, in order to drive how the marketplace performs.”

He said personalization, ensuring the right content is being served and that the supply quality matches demand are part of the strategy along with the potential for AI and data to accelerate growth.

“As we disclosed, app bookings are now the fastest growing category for Viator and in-app behaviors tend to be more skewed towards in destination, last-minute behaviors and that is an example of an opportunity where, again, an immature space like experiences could respond to way more in a digital fashion,” he said.

And, growth in “international points of sale” in also on the cards but not something that will happen in six months.