“Zuora was selected as our solution for several reasons. It was an established player in the market with a global solution that integrated seamlessly with Adyen. Zuora supported all our pricing models, including fixed-price subscriptions, usage-based subscriptions, and single-time payments.”
— Dr. Wolf Schmuhl, CFO, trivago
About
As a global hotel search and price-comparison platform, trivago connects travelers with hotel offers and advertisers around the world. Its business includes referral revenue, direct hotel-booking services, and B2B offerings for independent hotels.
Industry:
Software and technology
01
The Challenge
As trivago expanded into new markets and diversified its subscription business, manual billing processes and disconnected systems couldn’t keep pace, leaving finance without the visibility or scalability the business needed.
02
The Solution
trivago implemented Zuora Billing as a single billing platform built to support multiple pricing models and integrate cleanly with its existing payment infrastructure, including Adyen.
03
The Benefits
- Automated invoicing and customer communications for its independent-hotel subscription business.
- Reduced the manual workload associated with billing operations.
- Supported flat-rate, usage-based, and one-time payment models.
- Connected billing to payment, tax, internal-data, checkout, and financial processes.
“trivago is leveraging Zuora to achieve our organizational targets. The features and integrations we are currently using are vital for our product setup, checkout, and financial processes.”
Behind trivago’s hotel search marketplace is a commercial operation that has to support different pricing models, payment flows, and financial processes. For years, its billing operations weren’t keeping pace with business growth and expansion.
As Dr. Wolf Schmuhl, CFO of trivago, recounts: “Before partnering with Zuora, trivago encountered various billing and revenue challenges while entering new markets and adapting our subscription product.”
The team relied on manual updates to payment statuses and struggled to produce financial reports or resolve errors. “We also lacked key subscription metrics like MRR and faced time-consuming processes for market expansion,” Schmuhl says. “The multiple payment funnels and invoicing systems made tool integration difficult, implementing and maintaining features was costly, and testing recurring payments was not feasible.”
Choosing a platform built for multiple models
For a marketplace business running on referral revenue, hotel-booking services, and subscription offerings for independent hotels, that patchwork wasn’t sustainable. trivago needed one platform that could handle its different pricing approaches, rather than maintaining separate logic for each.
“Zuora was selected as our solution for several reasons,” says Schmuhl. “It was an established player in the market with a global solution that integrated seamlessly with Adyen. Zuora supported all our pricing models, including fixed-price subscriptions, usage-based subscriptions, and single-time payments.”
That flexibility mattered as trivago built out invoicing for its independent-hotel business. Instead of treating each pricing model or payment flow as a separate operational problem, the company could manage its commercial processes in one environment.
Automating the work behind every invoice
The implementation covers invoicing for trivago’s independent-hotel subscription business on both flat-rate and usage-based models, and connects billing to the processes a subscription business depends on: payment-method handling, payment gateways, tax, internal data, invoices, reminders, refunds, and other customer communications.
“This setup was implemented once and has been running stably since then,” says Schmuhl. “Utilizing the invoicing and communication service has automated the process and significantly reduced the manual workload.”
A foundation built to scale
For trivago, billing isn’t an isolated back-office function, it’s tied directly to how they serve customers. “trivago is leveraging Zuora to achieve our organizational targets,” Schmuhl says. “The features and integrations we are currently using are vital for our product setup, checkout, and financial processes.”
Schmuhl and his team aren’t finished evolving either. “The invoicing setup is functioning smoothly, and we trust Zuora to continue providing excellent service,” he says. “We look forward to achieving more milestones together.”
