In March 2020 trivago's sales dropped about 95% from a year earlier. Hotels were shut, borders closed, and a company built on clicks from people planning holidays watched the clicks stop. For a founder who had built the thing from nothing, it was the harshest test since the first day.
Rolf Schrömgens was born in 1976 and took a management diploma at the HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management. What is easy to miss is that he was already a founder by the time trivago existed. From 1999 to 2001 he was founder and vice president at ciao.com, a consumer review site. He had learned early that people trust other people's opinions more than ads, and that a website can be a marketplace for trust.
The company lived on traffic from Google and on the goodwill of booking sites that paid for clicks.
In January 2005 he and three partners, Stephan Stubner, Peter Vinnemeier and Malte Siewert, started trivago in Düsseldorf. Stubner resigned as managing director soon after launch, a quiet casualty of the early days. The product compared hotel prices across booking sites and charged them for the clicks it sent.
Money came in steps. In 2007 it raised $1.14m from HOWZAT Media. In 2010 Insight Venture Partners bought about a quarter of the company for roughly $52.9m. And in December 2012 Expedia announced a deal to buy a majority stake for about $632m, completed in 2013. By 2015 revenue passed $500m, and in December 2016 trivago listed on the Nasdaq.
The cost of that scale was dependence. The company lived on traffic from Google and on the goodwill of booking sites that paid for clicks. In 2019 Schrömgens stepped back from the chief executive role after about fifteen years, and in 2023 Johannes Thomas took over. In April 2022 an Australian court fined the company AUD 44.7m for misleading consumers, a reminder that a comparison site is judged on whether it compares honestly.
The recovery has been slow but real. For 2025 revenue grew 19%, net income reached €11.2m and the company held €130.9m in cash. Expedia still holds the majority.
The lesson is in the order of things. Schrömgens had spent years in an earlier startup learning how users think before he built the company that made him known. The overnight success was a decade of preparation, and the crash of 2020 was survived by the habits that preparation built.