Owned brands
Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: BKNG) is the world's largest online travel company by market capitalization and gross bookings. Headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, the group operates a portfolio of leading consumer travel brands serving customers and partners in more than 220 countries and territories.
The group's principal brands are:
Booking Holdings primarily operates an agency (commission) model on accommodations, with growing exposure to merchant model transactions through its payments platform. Revenue is generated by commissions on bookings, advertising on Kayak and Booking.com, and ancillary travel products including flights, attractions and ground transport.
The group reported gross bookings exceeding 165 billion dollars in 2024 and consistently delivers industry-leading EBITDA margins. Its scale advantage in supply (millions of properties), brand recognition and performance-marketing efficiency have made it the benchmark competitor across the global OTA landscape.
Recent strategic focus areas include the connected trip vision (bundling flights, accommodation, transport and experiences in one transaction), expansion of the merchant payments platform, growth in alternative accommodations (apartments, vacation rentals) to compete with Airbnb and Vrbo, and AI-driven trip planning assistants embedded across Booking.com and Kayak.
Events
Delayed 15 min. Adjusted closes. Not financial advice.
Lola, built by Kayak co-founders Steve Hafner and Paul English, runs on memberships rather than commissions.
At Skift Global Forum, Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel played down AI booking agents, said LLM traffic is "significantly below 1%" of room nights, and pitched Airbnb's hotel push as a possible win for Booking.
Booking Holdings is running five consumer AI projects, including two stealth internal startups and a soon-to-launch Agoda planner, while Expedia scrapped its single chatbot for a multi-agent architecture.
Europe's General Court dismissed Booking Holdings' appeal against the 2023 prohibition of its €1.63bn Etraveli acquisition, endorsing a "reverse leveraging" theory of harm that applies to dominant firms only — leaving Expedia free to keep buying in adjacent categories.
The EU's General Court has rejected Booking Holdings' appeal against the blocked €1.6 billion Etraveli acquisition, endorsing the Commission's view that the deal would have entrenched Booking's dominance in hotel distribution.