
I just came back from two weeks in Italy and will be spending a couple more in Belgium and Hungary soon, so naturally, I've been hopping between Airbnb, Expedia, Agoda, Kayak, and Booking.com. Turns out three of those (Agoda, Kayak, and Booking.com) fall under the Booking Holdings stable, a $184 billion online travel empire.
If you remember Priceline's "Name Your Price" gimmick with Star Trek actor William Shatner, you'll be pleased to know that its smartest move wasn't the ads, it was buying Booking.com in the early 2000s for just $294 million. A steal, in hindsight.
Booking.com's story begins in 1996 with a Dutch grad named Geert-Jan Bruinsma, who scrappily stitched together a travel site with a bit of borrowed Hilton code and a lot of hustle. The company bet on a key differentiator: the agency model. Unlike Expedia, which collects cash upfront, Booking lets you pay at the hotel, a subtle shift that converted more window-shoppers into actual guests.
Their flywheel is that more bookings generate more cash that can be spent on more Google ads, leading to even more bookings. They also have a culture of tinkering, called A/B testing, running more than 1 000 of these live at any given time, tweaking everything from button shades to discount banners, all in the name of bumping conversions by a few basis points. When you're processing 1.5 million bookings a day across 31 million listings in 200+ countries, every decimal counts.
That relentless obsession with optimisation, paired with timely acquisitions and a flexible business model, is what's made Booking the kingpin of the $1.5 trillion travel industry. Booking is bigger than Airbnb, Marriott, Hilton, and Expedia put together.
We are currently adding Booking shares to client portfolios, if they are able to add fresh cash to their accounts.