Operator: One more. With travel seemingly shifting back towards areas where you guys are incredibly strong, urban, international and the like, can you give us an update on how you think US hotel share progressed in the quarter and what your expectations are here for the rest of the year, particularly with Hcom accelerating at this point?
Peter Kern: Yeah, I think, broadly, we feel like, from a share perspective in hotels in North America, we essentially held share, maybe slightly better. We’re not over investing the problem. Again, it’s a balance. This journey is a balance of how you spend versus how the technology comes online. We could have spent a lot more on hotels.com last year, but it wouldn’t have been as effective. As hotel.com gets better, we can spend more. So all of these capabilities give us more weapons to fight better in the fight. And so, we feel like we’ve held maybe slightly better, and we should see acceleration from that. And equally importantly, we did pull back, as you know, in the past few years from some international spots where we were not as effective and as efficient.
But as we now feel like the products improved, we have a marketing model that we believe in. We feel like we’ll be in a position to start rolling out more aggressively. Not a North America story. It has been for a while. But this is really how do we grow beyond that as we get past these technical hurdles and are in a position to roll more quickly across the world.
Operator: Our next question comes from Kevin Kopelman with Cowen.
Jacob Seed: This is Jacob Seed in for Kevin Kopelman. Just a question on One Key launch. So with the launch in July, how are you thinking about some of the smaller brands that are not going to be included in the launch? And how are you thinking about managing them going forward?
Peter Kern: I think we’ve talked about a couple of times before. But by and large, we have somewhat deemphasized and not invested as strongly in the smaller brands as we continue to put more heft behind the big three brands. One Key will envelop the big three. And we certainly aren’t going to take our brands away from people right away or anything, but we do believe that, over time, people will migrate to our big three brands where the latest product features are, where One Key is, et cetera. So, essentially, the way to think about it, and that’s why we’ve talked about how brand Expedia is doing, how hotels.com is accelerating, is we’ve got a drag on the business, which is sort of our other brands going sideways to slightly down as against the businesses that are growing more quickly, where we’re investing and where the product is accelerating faster.
So it’s essentially – there’s a little bit of the big brands have to eat the sideways or slightly slow degradation of the other brands, but that’s something we’ve planned for in terms of the guidance we’ve given this year, and certainly something we plan for long term.
Operator: Our next question comes from Anthony Post (sic) with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please go ahead Anthony.
Justin Post: I guess a couple of things. When I see the B2B growth outpacing the core retail, how do you think about that business as a margin versus your core business? And should we expect to see more the retail accelerate as you kind of fix the platforms, so Expedia and hotels.com? And then secondly, as you think about the overall use of cash, anything to stop you from deploying cash flow to buybacks? Anything on the debt side we should be thinking about
Peter Kern: I’ll take the first part and then leave the capital side to Julie. I think the B2B business has been growing terrifically, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks. We haven’t had to do any big technical migrations. In fact, we’ve added to the capabilities over the last couple of years. And we’ve seen the benefits of that in many of our business lines. That business saw great growth, in part because it is more exposed to some of the geographies that came back last quarter. So the opening of Asia is more impactful for our B2B business, Latin America, et cetera. So some of it is geographical mix that you’re seeing there. But definitely, we expect our B2B business to continue to grow. I think I said a few years ago, this was an area where we saw lots of opportunity that we were going to push into.
So we expect and we’ll be driving as much growth there as we can, again, to fill in the pockets of demand that we would not otherwise reach through our B2C business. But absolutely, we expect our B2C business to accelerate as we get through this major surgery we’ve done over the last few years, which has taken a long time and is painful. But as we get across, we are in a better and better position every day to accelerate. We’ve got a few of these last lifts to get through for sure. But hopefully, we’re on the bat 9 and we’re close to the end of that. And we can put all our resource, technical product design resource against accelerating growth once we are across these things. I’m not going to say I expect B2B to slow down to B2C. I expect B2C to accelerate.
And I expect both businesses to grow well in the coming period.
