And we knew it would take some time for this to start to multiply on itself and get the benefit because people don’t always book travel 20 times a year. So I think this is the benefit of time of catching up and stacking up the base of members, this base of app users, improving the product. As we’ve gone, we’ve launched a bunch of great features around flight tracking and comparison shopping and smart shopping and collaborative shopping and a bunch of new products, all of which have been very engaging in their own right. We’re rolling those out to more places all the time. We just recently rolled out flight tracking to the rest of the world outside the US. So we’re seeing great benefits in those things. And I think they’re just starting to stack up now.
There’s no magic to January 1. So I can’t tell you exactly why January. But post all the disruptions of the storms, we’ve seen really strong, robust demand and rebound. And I think it’s a combination of a ton of hard work across our entire company.
Operator: Our final question today comes from Deepak Mathivanan with Wolfe Research.
Deepak Mathivanan: Maybe a couple of ones for Julie. So, first, the guidance on margin expansion was helpful, but curious if you can put any more specificity to it. Understand that, obviously, macro creates a lot of uncertainties. But is there a level that we can expect should macro trends kind of remain consistent with what you’ve seen in January and maybe recovery holds up through the year? Also another financial question, maybe on buybacks. What is the philosophy in terms of maintaining the velocity of buybacks? Is 4Q kind of a good proxy for us to think about, given the business is very cash flow generative and you have plenty of capacity?
Julie Whalen: On margin expansion, I think, first of all, it’s important to remember that we’re ending this year with record EBITDA levels and margins that are expanding 200 basis points, and we’re committed to expanding on top of that. So, we’re really proud of where our margins are. Certainly, we would love to give a target, but I think at that point €“ I think I even said this last time that when you give the target, then they want the higher target. So, we’re really pushing towards driving efficient growth and driving profitable growth. And we think as we’re starting to demonstrate when we’re getting these lifetime value customers that we can get more efficient, as we have started to do on the year with our marketing spend, and we’re deriving the top line to levels that we’re seeing has accelerated through the Q4 and coming in even stronger in 2023, all of that should be bode well for us to be able to drive profitability and EBITDA.
And so, that’s about where we’re going to commit to at this point, is margin expansion. But over time, we can update you on as we move through. From a buyback perspective, as I said earlier, we’re really committed to buying back our stock. We believe it’s the best use of capital to maximize shareholder returns at this time. Certainly, with that momentum we’re seeing in the business, our stock is still undervalued, we believe, and so therefore, we believe buying back our own stock is the best return. So we’re going to continue with that. We’re going to buy back opportunistically. Obviously, as you mentioned, and as we said earlier, we did buy it back on an accelerated basis, $350 million approximately in the fourth quarter. And that was on top of another $150 million that we had started sort of the end of September.
And so, we’re going to be continuing with these elevated levels and buying back opportunistically as we go throughout 2023.
Peter Kern: I think that was it. So thank you all for joining us. Appreciate your time and look forward to our next update. Take care. Thank you, operator.
Operator: That concludes today’s call. You may now disconnect your lines. Have a nice day.
