AI is giving Trivago and its CEO Johannes Thomas a new playbook on how to beat back disruption

Good morning. Trivago is a platform that should arguably be gone by now. Having suffered a near-death experience during the pandemic, this hotel search site would seem ripe for disruption in an age of AI. It’s smaller and narrower than Booking Holdings (check out CEO Glenn Fogel’s recent interview with my colleague Kamal Ahmed) or majority owner Expedia. It performs a search function that Google, Kayak and others seem to do well. And yet the mid-sized Dusseldorf-based site is profitable and grew almost 20% last year to about $633 million in revenue. More recently, it reported second-quarter revenue growth of 21%, reaching 168.4 million euros ($196.4 million). CEO Johannes Thomas credits AI. When Trivago’s supervisory board met late last year, Thomas told me the debate came down to a choice