Summary

• Booking Holdings Inc. is an American travel technology company that owns and operates several travel fare aggregators and travel fare metasearch engines.
• The company's brands include Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, Rentalcars.com, Momondo, OpenTable and more.

Booking Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: BKNG, LSE: 0W2Y) is an American travel technology company that owns and operates several travel fare aggregators and travel fare metasearch engines. The company's brands include Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, Rentalcars.com, Momondo, and OpenTable.

Booking Holdings is a major player in the online travel industry, and its brands are used by millions of travelers around the world. The company is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, and it has offices in over 200 countries.

Recent Developments

06/27/2023; Booking.com, one of the world's leading digital travel platforms, has announced its new AI Trip Planner, which will launch in beta to a selection of US travelers in the company's app on June 28. Built upon the foundation of Booking.com's existing machine learning models that recommend destination and accommodation options to millions of travelers on the platform every day, the AI Trip Planner is also partially powered by large language model (LLM) technology from OpenAI's ChatGPT API to create a new conversational experience for people to start their trip planning process.¹

Financial Highlights

2nd Quarter 2023 Results

August 3, 2023; Booking Holdings Inc. reported its second quarter 2023 financial results.²

• Gross travel bookings, which refers to the total dollar value, generally inclusive of taxes and fees, of all travel services booked by its customers, net of cancellations, were $39.7 billion, an increase of 15% from the prior-year quarter.
• Room nights booked increased 9% from the prior-year quarter.
• Total revenues were $5.5 billion, an increase of 27% from the prior-year quarter.
• Net income was $1.3 billion, an increase of 51% from the prior-year quarter.
• Net income per diluted common share was $34.89, an increase of 66% from the prior-year quarter.
• Non-GAAP net income was $1.4 billion, an increase of 79% from the prior-year quarter.
• Non-GAAP net income per diluted common share was $37.62, an increase of 97% from the prior-year quarter.
• Adjusted EBITDA was $1.8 billion, an increase of 64% from the prior-year quarter.

Q2 gross bookings increased 15% year-over-year, or 16% on a constant currency basis. The 15% increase in gross bookings was 6 percentage points higher than the 9% room night increase due to 5% higher accommodation constant currency ADRs and also due to a couple points from flight bookings, partially offset by the 1 percentage point of negative impact from FX movements.

Airline tickets booked in the second quarter were up about 58% year-over-year driven by the continued expansion of Booking.com’s Flight offering. Revenue for the second quarter came in nicely ahead of its expectations, increasing 27% year-over-year, or about 28% on a constant currency basis. Q2 revenue as a percentage of gross bookings was about 130 basis points above last year, which was about in line with its expectations. The company's underlying accommodation take rates continue to be in line with 2019 levels.

Sales and other expenses as a percentage of gross bookings were up about 30 basis points compared with last year, a bit better than its expectation. About 48% of Booking.com’s gross bookings were processed through its payments platform in Q2, up from about 38% in Q2 2022.

Adjusted EBITDA was $1.8 billion in the second quarter, which was up 64% year-over-year, and would have been up 70% on a constant currency basis. Adjusted EBITDA was well above its expectation due to the stronger topline, the efficiencies in marketing and merchandising, and lower than expected IT expenses. The company's Adjusted EBITDA margins increased by about 7 percentage points versus Q2 2022.

Non-GAAP Net Income of $1.4 billion in the second quarter resulted in Non-GAAP EPS of $37.62 per share, which was up 97% year-over-year. The company's average share count in the second quarter was 9% below Q2 2022 and 15% below Q2 2019. n a GAAP basis, the company had Net Income of $1.3 billion in the quarter.

Company Overview

Booking Holdings Inc. is an American travel technology company that owns and operates several travel fare aggregators and travel fare metasearch engines. The company's brands include Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, Rentalcars.com, Momondo, and OpenTable.

Booking Holdings is a major player in the online travel industry, and its brands are used by millions of travelers around the world. The company is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, and it has offices in over 200 countries.

At December 31, 2022, the company employed approximately 21,600 employees, of which approximately 3,100 were based in the United States, and approximately 18,500 were based outside the United States. Approximately 99% of its employees are full-time employees.³

Brands and Services

Booking.com and Rentalcars.com. Booking.com is the world's leading brand for booking online accommodation reservations, based on room nights booked, with operations worldwide and headquarters in the Netherlands. At December 31, 2022, Booking.com offered accommodation reservation services for approximately 2.7 million properties in over 220 countries and territories and in over 40 languages, consisting of over 400,000 hotels, motels, and resorts and 2.3 million homes, apartments, and other unique places to stay.

In 2022, Booking.com significantly expanded its flight offering to 54 markets and in-destination tours and activities to more than 1,200 cities around the world. Rentalcars.com operates as part of Booking.com and offers online rental car reservation services in over 52,000 locations throughout the world, with customer support in over 40 languages. Booking.com and Rentalcars.com also offer pre-booked taxi and black car services at over 1,600 airports throughout the world.

Priceline - Priceline is a leader in the discount travel reservation business, offering online travel reservation services primarily in North America, with headquarters in Norwalk, Connecticut. Priceline offers consumers hotel, flight, activity, and rental car reservation services, as well as vacation packages, cruises, and hotel distribution services for partners and affiliates.

Agoda - Agoda is a leading online accommodation reservation service catering primarily to consumers in the Asia-Pacific region, with headquarters in Singapore and operations in Bangkok, Thailand, and elsewhere. Agoda also offers flight, ground transportation, and activities reservation services.

 KAYAK - KAYAK, headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, provides online meta-search services that allow consumers to easily search and compare travel itineraries and prices, including airline ticket, accommodation reservation, and rental car reservation information from hundreds of online travel platforms at once. KAYAK offers its services in over 60 countries, with its largest market in the United States, through various websites including momondo, Cheapflights, and HotelsCombined.

OpenTable - OpenTable is a leading brand for booking online restaurant reservations. With significant operations in San Francisco, California, OpenTable provides online restaurant reservation services to consumers and reservation management services to restaurants, primarily in the United States.

Business Overview

The company derive substantially all of its revenues from enabling consumers to make travel service reservations. The company also earn revenues from advertising services, restaurant reservations and restaurant management services, and various other services, such as travel-related insurance revenues.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting implementation of travel restrictions by governments around the world resulted in a significant decline in travel activities and consumer demand for related services. Accommodation room nights, which include the impact of cancellations, declined rapidly as the COVID-19 pandemic spread in 2020. Since the beginning of the second quarter of 2020 and through 2022, changes in accommodation room nights versus the comparable period in 2019 have generally improved as government-imposed travel restrictions have eased, vaccines and other medical interventions have become more widespread, and consumer demand for travel has generally rebounded. In 2021, room nights were 66% higher than in 2020 but still 30% lower than in 2019. On a regional basis, considering where the traveler is booking from, North America was the only region in 2021 to have room nights increase versus 2019. In 2022, global room nights were 52% higher than in 2021 and 6% higher than in 2019. The year-over-year growth in room nights in 2022 was driven primarily by the continued recovery in Europe, Asia, and Rest of World, as well as by continued growth in North America.

In early March 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the company suspended the booking of travel services in Russia and Belarus. This led to the loss of new bookings from bookers in these countries. Excluding room nights from bookers in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in both 2022 and 2019, its overall room nights in 2022 were up about 10% versus 2019.

Booking Holdings has observed an improvement in cancellation rates since the high in April 2020, though Booking Holdings has seen periods of elevated cancellation rates typically coinciding with significant increases in COVID-19 cases and newly imposed travel restrictions. The cancellation rate in 2022 improved compared to the cancellation rates in 2021 and 2019. In 2022, a higher share of its room nights were booked with flexible cancellation policies, as compared to 2019 and 2021, which could result in higher cancellation rates in future periods.

The company's businesses outside of the U.S. represent a substantial majority of its financial results, but because the company report its results in U.S. Dollars, the company face exposure to movements in foreign currency exchange rates as the financial results and the financial condition of its businesses outside of the U.S. are translated from local currency (principally Euros and British Pounds Sterling) into U.S. Dollars. For example, the U.S. Dollar strengthened in 2022 versus both the Euro and British Pound Sterling by 11% and 10%, respectively, as compared to 2021.

Company History

Booking Holdings was initially started as PriceLine⁴

1. ^ https://ir.bookingholdings.com/news/news-details/2023/Booking.com-Launches-New-AI-Trip-Planner-to-Enhance-Travel-Planning-Experience/default.aspx
2. ^ https://s201.q4cdn.com/865305287/files/doc_financials/2023/q2/BKNG-Q2-2023-Earnings-Release.pdf
3. ^ https://fintel.io/doc/sec-booking-holdings-inc-1075531-10k-2023-february-23-19412-516
4. ^ https://www.bookingholdings.com/about/history/