Booking Holdings Investor Relations Material

If you’ve ever booked hotels, rental cars, or airplane tickets, chances are you have used some of the Booking Holdings platforms. With customers and partners in more than 220 countries, Booking is the world’s leading provider of online travel bookings and related services.

Booking was originally founded in 1997 by Jay Walker as The Priceline Group, with the online travel site Priceline.com and its famous Name Your Own Price bidding model. From 2005 through 2007, Priceline struck gold by making a number of acquisitions in the European and Asian markets, adding Booking.com, Active Hotels, and Agoda to its brand portfolio, and seizing the then fragmented online travel agency (OTA) market. Some of Booking’s main competitors are Airbnb, Expedia Group, and Trip.com Group.

The Booking universe is spread over six primary consumer-facing brands: Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Rentalcars.com, KAYAK, and OpenTable, as well as several subsidiary brands. Consisting of more than 28 million hotels, homes, apartments, and other unique places to stay, its gross travel bookings are growing rapidly despite taking a heavy hit during COVID-19.

Booking.com is the main revenue driver in the business, hence the company name, and earns its money through the room rates and referral fees for each reservation through the platform. These are different business models, and they are structured in two legs: The merchant leg, where prices and allocations are negotiated with the property owners and then distributed on the Booking platform. And then there is the simplified agency leg, where Booking serves as the agent and collects commission fees for passing the reservations to hotels.