What we think about Booking Holdings
Booking Holdings in Three Words: Global Travel Agent
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Background
Booking Holdings is the world’s largest online travel agency. Its mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.
In 2023, $150 billion dollars of gross bookings took place on its platform – for hotel accommodations, airfare flights, and local experience. It generated $21 billion in revenue, primarily from commissions.
Booking runs six different platforms: booking.com and priceline.com (both of which are big in the US and Europe), Kayak (global; metasearch), Agoda (India and Asia), Rentalcars.com (autos), and Open Table (restaurant reservations). It works with 475,000 hotel partners and 3.4 million alternative properties – which are individual homes or rentals. It is available in 40 languages and in 220 countries.
The company was originally founded in 1996 as “Booking.nl” – a Netherlands-based website that gave local hotels a way to list their available rooms on the world wide web – for a 5% commission. Other sites like ActiveHotels and Priceline were doing similar things.
A few years later, Priceline’s M&A guru Glenn Fogel saw a unique opportunity to consolidate several of these travel sites. Priceline acquired ActiveHotels for $161 million in 2004, Booking.com for $133 million in 2005, and then Singapore-based Agoda for $158 million in 2007. It went on to acquire KAYAK for $1.8 billion in 2013 and then OpenTable for $2.6 billion in 2014.
The $133 million acquisition of Booking is praised by many as being one of the best acquisitions of the internet age.
From its very foundation, Booking has given smaller hotels who don’t have a significant marketing budget a way to fill their otherwise-vacant rooms on any given night. Today, it has partnership relationships with 475,000 hotels and another 2.9 million individually-owned alternative locations (peoples’ homes or rental properties). The $21 billion it generated in revenue represents an average 14% commission on properties that are booked on its site.
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