TripAdvisor Inc. (NASDAQ: TRIP) was supposed to be one of the greatest things for the travel industry in years. People love the reviews, and the company has even become better about getting its user-generated content and its own content out there.

It turns out that the caution in the stock market and more moderate growth rates seem to have played a role in taming some of the TripAdvisor bulls. This stock had already been lower since its 2014 peak, but now the post-earnings report has shares down right at 30% since the end of 2015.

What is interesting here is that Wall Street is guiding its price target expectations lower despite solid earnings this week. Have we entered the climate in which even the winners get punished? It seems so, as TripAdvisor was closer to $54.00 before earnings and went as high as $64.00 after earnings before settling in this past week.

TripAdvisor posted earnings of $0.45 per share, higher than the $0.33 per share consensus analyst estimate. The company also expects to see margin expansion in 2017 when revenue growth recovers and as it rolls out more instant bookings this year.

TripAdvisor said that it is seeing signs of repeat usage by travelers making bookings. Its subscription revenue gained 23%, and display advertising revenue rose by 17%. Click-based advertising revenue was down 1% due to a strong dollar.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has had one of the more cautious ratings on TripAdvisor. The firm carries an Underperform rating, and it slashed its price objective to $47.00 from $63.00 after the report. Merrill Lynch notes that TripAdvisor is an investment in global online travel advertising and should benefit from a growing percentage of travel migrating online on mobile and desktop platforms. Still, it said:

As the front-end of the travel funnel, we expect TripAdvisor to grow 15-20% in normalized travel markets. However, we are cautious on TripAdvisor’s decelerating hotel shopper growth, increased operating expense spend, and lower margins.

Some of the analyst report summaries we have seen covering TripAdvisor were seen as follows:

• Ascendiant Capital has a Buy rating but lowered its price target to $77 from $90.
• Barclays has an Equal Weight rating but still lowered its price target to $74 from $78.
• Credit Suisse maintained an Outperform rating but lowered its price target to $80 from $88.
• Deutsche Bank also maintained its Buy rating while lowering its price target from $88 to $72.
  Goldman Sachs has a Sell rating and lowered its price target to $55 from $59.
• Jefferies kept its Hold rating in place but lowered its price target to $70 from $80.
• JPMorgan maintained a Neutral rating but lowered its price target to $66 from $69.
• SunTrust Robinson Humphrey kept its Neutral rating and lowered its price target from $80 to $75.
• UBS has a Neutral rating but cut its target price to $68 from $80.

TripAdvisor shares closed out 2015 at $85.25, just six weeks ago. Now the stock is down at $59.90, with a 52-week range of $53.48 to $94.00. TripAdvisor does still have a market cap of $8.6 billion.

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